Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [196]
‘But why so? If it’s rational, you can carry it on with hired help,’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘There’s no authority. Who will I carry it on with, may I ask?’
‘There it is - the work force, the chief element in farming,’ thought Levin.
‘With paid workers.’
‘Workers don’t want to do good work or to do good work with tools. Our worker knows one thing only - how to get drunk as a pig, and while drunk to break everything you give him. He’ll overwater the horses, snap good harness, dismount a wheel with a tyre and sell it for drink, put a pintle into the thresher so as to break it. He loathes the sight of things that aren’t to his liking. That causes the whole level of the farming to sink. Plots are abandoned, overgrown with wormwood or given up to muzhiks, and where millions of bushels used to be produced, now it’s a few hundred thousand - the common wealth is diminished. If the same thing was done, only with calculation ...’
And he began developing his own plan of liberation, which would have eliminated these inconveniences.
That did not interest Levin, but when he finished, Levin went back to his first proposition and said, addressing Sviyazhsky and trying to provoke him to voice his serious opinion:
‘That the level of farming is sinking and that, given our relation to the workers, it is impossible to engage in rational farming profitably, is perfectly correct,’ he said.
‘I don’t find it so,’ Sviyazhsky retorted, seriously now. ‘I only see that we don’t know how to go about farming and that, on the contrary, the level of farming we carried on under serfdom was in fact not too high but too low. We have neither machines, nor good working stock, nor real management, nor do we know how to count. Ask any farm owner - he won’t know what’s profitable for him and what isn’t.’
‘Italian bookkeeping,’ the landowner said ironically. ‘No matter how you count, once they break everything, there won’t be any profit.’
‘Why break? A worthless thresher, that Russian treadle of yours, they will break, but not my steam thresher. A Russian horse - what’s that breed? the Tosscan, good for tossing cans at - they’ll spoil for you, but introduce Percherons, or at least our Bitiugs,26 and they won’t spoil them. And so with everything. We must raise our farming higher.’
‘If only we could, Nikolai Ivanych! It’s all very well for you, but I have a son at the university, the younger ones are in boarding school - I can’t go buying Percherons.’
‘That’s what banks are for.’
‘So that the last thing I have falls under the hammer? No, thank you!’
‘I don’t agree that the level of farming must and can be raised higher,’ said Levin. ‘I’m engaged in it, and I have the means, and I’ve been unable to do anything. I don’t know what use the banks are. With me, at least, whatever I’ve spent money on in farming has all been a loss - the livestock were a loss, the machinery a loss.’
‘That’s true,’ the landowner with the grey moustache confirmed, even laughing with pleasure.
‘And I’m not the only one,’ Levin went on. ‘I can refer to all the farmers who conduct their business rationally; every one of them, with rare exceptions, operates at a loss. Tell me, now, is your farming profitable?’ said Levin, and he immediately noticed in Sviyazhsky’s eyes that momentary look of fear that he noticed whenever he wanted to penetrate beyond the reception rooms of Sviyazhsky’s mind.
Besides, on Levin’s part the question had not been asked in good conscience. Over tea the hostess had just told him that they had invited a German from Moscow that summer, an expert in bookkeeping, who for a fee of five hundred roubles had done the accounts of their farm and discovered that