eather sofa which had always stood
in the study in Levin's father's and grandfather's days. She was
sewing at _broderie anglaise_. He thought and wrote, never losing
the happy consciousness of her presence. His work, both on the
land and on the book, in which the principles of the new land
system were to be laid down, had not been abandoned; but just as
formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed to him petty and
trivial in comparison with the darkness that overspread all life,
now they seemed as unimportant and petty in comparison with the
life that lay before him suffused with the brilliant light of
happiness. He went on with his work, but he felt now that the
center of gravity of his attention had passed to something else,
and that consequently he looked at his work quite differently and
more clearly. Formerly this work had been for him an 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 country ought to increase proportionally, and
especially in such a way that other sources of wealth should not
outstrip agriculture; that in harmony with a certain stage of
agriculture there should be means of communication corresponding
to it, and that in our unsett