Page 752 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

confronted with what so often met him on various
subjects. Often, just as he was beginning to understand the
idea in the mind of anyone he was talking to, and was
beginning to explain his own, he would suddenly be told:

‘But Kauffmann, but Jones, but Dubois, but Michelli? You
haven’t read them: they’ve thrashed that question out
thoroughly.’
He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli
had nothing to tell him. He knew what he wanted. He
saw that Russia has splendid land, splendid laborers, and
that in certain cases, as at the peasant’s on the way to
Sviazhsky’s, the produce raised by the laborers and the
land is great—in the majority of cases when capital is
applied in the European way the produce is small, and that
this simply arises from the fact that the laborers want to
work and work well only in their own peculiar way, and
that this antagonism is not incidental but invariable, and
has its roots in the national spirit. He thought that the
Russian people whose task it was to colonize and cultivate
vast tracts of unoccupied land, consciously adhered, till all
their land was occupied, to the methods suitable to their
purpose, and that their methods were by no means so bad
as was generally supposed. And he wanted to prove this
theoretically in his book and practically on his land.

751 of 1759