Often, too, talking to the peasants and explaining to them all
the advantages of the plan, Levin felt that the peasants heard
nothing but the sound of his voice, and were firmly resolved,
whatever he might say, not to let themselves be taken in. He
felt this especially when he talked to the cleverest of the
peasants, Ryezunov, and detected the gleam in Ryezunov's eyes
which showed so plainly both ironical amusement at Levin, and the
firm conviction that, if any one were to be taken in, it would
not be he, Ryezunov. But in spite of all this Levin thought the
system worked, and that by keeping accounts strictly and
insisting on his own way, he would prove to them in the future
the advantages of the arrangement, and then the system would go
of itself.
These matters, together with the management of the land still
left on his hands, and the indoor work over his book, so
engrossed Levin the whole summer that he scarcely ever went out
shooting. At the end of August he heard that the Oblonskys had
gone away to Moscow, from their servant who brought back the
side-saddle. He felt that in not answering Darya Alexandrovna's
letter he had by his rudeness, of which he could not think
without a flush of shame, burned his ships, and that he would
never go and see them again. He had been just as rude with the
Sviazhskys, leaving them without saying good-bye. But he would
never go to see them again either. He did not care about that
now. The business of reorganizing the farming of his land
absorbed him as completely as though there would never be
anything else in his life. He read the books lent him by
Sviazhsky, and copying out what he had not got, he read both the
economic and socialistic books on the subject, but, as he had
anticipated, found nothing bearing on the scheme he had
undertaken. In the books on political economy--in Mill, for
instance, whom he studied first with great ardor, hoping every
minute to find an answer to the questions that were engrossing
him--he found laws deduced from the condition of land culture in
Europe; but he did not see why these laws, which did not apply in
Russia, must be general. He saw just the same thing in the
socialistic books: either they were the beautiful but
impracticable fantasies which had fascinated him when he was a
student, or they were attempts at improving, rectifying the
economic position in which Europe was placed, with which the
system of land tenure in Russia had nothing in common. Political
economy told him that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had
been developed, and was developing, were universal and unvarying.
Socialism told him that development along these lines leads to
ruin. And neither of them gave an answer, or even a hint, in
reply to the question what he, Levin, and all the Russian
peasants and landowners, were to do with their millions of hands
and millions of acres, to make them as productive as possible for
the common weal.