Page 1052 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

escape from life. Formerly he had felt that without this
work his life would be too gloomy. Now these pursuits
were necessary for him that life might not be too
uniformly bright. Taking up his manuscript, reading

through what he had written, he found with pleasure that
the work was worth his working at. Many of his old ideas
seemed to him superfluous and extreme, but many blanks
became distinct to him when he reviewed the whole thing
in his memory. He was writing now a new chapter on the
causes of the present disastrous condition of agriculture in
Russia. He maintained that the poverty of Russia arises
not merely from the anomalous distribution of landed
property and misdirected reforms, but that what had
contributed of late years to this result was the civilization
from without abnormally grafted upon Russia, especially
facilities of communication, as railways, leading to
centralization in towns, the development of luxury, and
the consequent development of manufactures, credit and
its accompaniment of speculation—all to the detriment of
agriculture. It seemed to him that in a normal
development of wealth in a state all these phenomena
would arise only when a considerable amount of labor had
been put into agriculture, when it had come under
regular, or at least definite, conditions; that the wealth of a

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