Page 732 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘How no rent? It’s a law.’
‘Then we’re outside the law; rent explains nothing for
us, but simply muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a
theory of rent?..’

‘Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some
junket or raspberries.’ He turned to his wife.
‘Extraordinarily late the raspberries are lasting this year.’
And in the happiest frame of mind Sviazhsky got up
and walked off, apparently supposing the conversation to
have ended at the very point when to Levin it seemed that
it was only just beginning.
Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the
conversation with the gray-whiskered landowner, trying
to prove to him that all the difficulty arises from the fact
that we don’t find out the peculiarities and habits of our
laborer; but the landowner, like all men who think
independently and in isolation, was slow in taking in any
other person’s idea, and particularly partial to his own. He
stuck to it that the Russian peasant is a swine and likes
swinishness, and that to get him out of his swinishness one
must have authority, and there is none; one must have the
stick, and we have become so liberal that we have all of a
sudden replaced the stick that served us for a thousand
years by lawyers and model prisons, where the worthless,

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