tisfied with these forms."

"Dissatisfied, and seeking new ones. And will find them, in all
probability."

"That's just what I was meaning," answered Levin. "Why
shouldn't we seek them for ourselves?"

"Because it would be just like inventing afresh the means for
constructing railways. They are ready, invented."

"But if they don't do for us, if they're stupid?" said Levin.

And again he detected the expression of alarm in the eyes of
Sviazhsky.

"Oh, yes; we'll bury the world under our caps! We've found the
secret Europe was seeking for! I've heard all that; but, excuse
me, do you know all that's been done in Europe on the question of
the organization of labor?"

"No, very little."

"That question is now absorbing the best minds in Europe. The
Schulze-Delitsch movement.... And then all this enormous
literature of the labor question, the most liberal Lassalle
movement...the Mulhausen experiment? That's a fact by now, as
you're probably aware."

"I have some idea of it, but very vague."

"No, you only say that; no doubt you know all about it as well as
I do. I'm not a professor of sociology, of course, but it
interested me, and really, if it interests you, you ought to
study it."

"But what conclusion have they come to?"

"Excuse me..."

The two neighbors had risen, and Sviazhsky, once more checking
Levin in his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond
the outer chambers of his mind, went to see his guests out.

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