Page 751 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

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.
Having once taken the subject up, he read
conscientiously everything bearing on it, and intended in
the autumn to go abroad to study land systems on the
spot, in order that he might not on this question be

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