Anna Karenina eBook





“I don’t understand you,” said Levin, sitting up in the hay; “how is it such people don’t disgust you?  I can understand a lunch with Lafitte is all very pleasant, but don’t you dislike just that very sumptuousness?  All these people, just like our spirit monopolists in old days, get their money in a way that gains them the contempt of everyone.  They don’t care for their contempt, and then they use their dishonest gains to buy off the contempt they have deserved.”

“Perfectly true!” chimed in Vassenka Veslovsky.  “Perfectly!  Oblonsky, of course, goes out of bonhomie, but other people say:  ’Well, Oblonsky stays with them.’...”

“Not a bit of it.”  Levin could hear that Oblonsky was smiling as he spoke.  “I simply don’t consider him more dishonest than any other wealthy merchant or nobleman.  They’ve all made their money alike—­by their work and their intelligence.”



“But that’s not work, like the work of a peasant or a learned profession.”

“Granted, but it’s work in the sense that his activity produces a result—­the railways.  But of course you think the railways useless.”


“But who is to define what is proportionate?”

“Making profit by dishonest means, by trickery,” said Levin, conscious that he could not draw a distinct line between honesty and dishonesty.  “Such as banking, for instance,” he went on.  “It’s an evil—­the amassing of huge fortunes without labor, just the same thing as with the spirit monopolies, it’s only the form that’s changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi.  No sooner were the spirit monopolies abolished than the railways came up, and banking companies; that, too, is profit without work.”

Project Gutenberg
Anna Karenina from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
Follow Us on Facebook