These matters, together with the management of the land still left on his hands, and the indoor work over his book, so engrossed Levin the whole summer that he scarcely ever went out shooting.  At the end of August he heard that the Oblonskys had gone away to Moscow, from their servant who brought back the side-saddle.  He felt that in not answering Darya Alexandrovna’s letter he had by his rudeness, of which he could not think without a flush of shame, burned his ships, and that he would never go and see them again.  He had been just as rude with the Sviazhskys, leaving them without saying good-bye.  But he would never go to see them again either.  He did not care about that now.  The business of reorganizing the farming of his land absorbed him as completely as though there would never be anything else in his life.  He read the books lent him by Sviazhsky, and copying out what he had not got, he read both the economic and socialistic books on the subject, but, as he had anticipated, found nothing bearing on the scheme he had undertaken.  In the books on political economy—­in Mill, for instance, 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 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.”