Page 736 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 28

Levin was insufferably bored that evening with the
ladies; he was stirred as he had never been before by the
idea that the dissatisfaction he was feeling with his system
of managing his land was not an exceptional case, but the
general condition of things in Russia; that the organization
of some relation of the laborers to the soil in which they
would work, as with the peasant he had met half-way to
the Sviazhskys’, was not a dream, but a problem which
must be solved. And it seemed to him that the problem
could be solved, and that he ought to try and solve it.
After saying good-night to the ladies, and promising to
stay the whole of the next day, so as to make an
expedition on horseback with them to see an interesting
ruin in the crown forest, Levin went, before going to bed,
into his host’s study to get the books on the labor question
that Sviazhsky had offered him. Sviazhsky’s study was a
huge room, surrounded by bookcases and with two tables
in it—one a massive writing table, standing in the middle
of the room, and the other a round table, covered with
recent numbers of reviews and journals in different
languages, ranged like the rays of a star round the lamp.

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