on his new book, so filled his time during the summer that he scarcely ever went out, even to hunt.
Toward the end of August he learned through the man that brought back the saddle that the Oblonskys had returned to Moscow. By not having replied to Darya Aleksandrovna's letter, by his rudeness which he could not remember without a flush of shame, he felt that he had burnt his ships and he never again could go to them. In exactly the same way he owed apologies to Sviazhsky for having left his house without bidding him good-by. Neither would he again dare to go to Sviazhsky's. But now all this was a matter of indifference to him. He was more interested and absorbed in his new scheme of managing his estate than in anything that he had ever attempted.
He finished the books which Sviazhsky had lent him, and others on political economy and socialism, which he had sent for. In the books on political economy, in Mill, for example, which he studied first with eagerness, hoping every minute to find a solution of the questions which occupied him, he found laws deduced from the position of European husbandry; but he could not see how these laws could be profitably applied to Russian conditions. He found a similar lack in the books of the socialist writers. Either they were beautiful but impracticable fancies, such as he dreamed when he was a student, or modifications of that situation of things applicable to Europe, but offering no solution for the agrarian question in Russia.
Political economy said that the laws by which the wealth of Europe was developed and would develop were universal and fixed; socialistic teachings said that progress according to these laws would lead to destruction; but neither school gave him any answer or as much as a hint on the means of leading him and all the Russian muzhiks and agriculturists, with their millions of hands and of desyatins, to more successful methods of reaching prosperity.
As he was already involved in this enterprise, he conscientiously read through everything that bore on the
