Anna Karenina

The carrying out of Levin's plan "presented many difficulties; but he struggled on, doing his utmost, and attained a result which, though not what he desired, was enough to enable him, without self-deception, to believe that the attempt was worth the trouble." Implementation is harder than theory, but not totally unsuccessful. "One of the chief difficulties was that the process of cultivating the land was in full swing, that it was impossible to stop everything and begin it all again from the beginning, and the machine had to be mended while in motion." He can't stop farming to reorganize - he must reform while work continues. "When on the evening that he arrived home he informed the bailiff of his plans, the latter with visible pleasure agreed with what he said so long as he was pointing out that all that had been done up to that time was stupid and useless. The bailiff said that he had said so a long while ago, but no heed had been" paid to him. The bailiff pretends agreement while actually being obstructive. Levin faces resistance from workers and practical complications. But he persists and develops his theoretical framework: "produce is small, and that this simply arises from the fact that the laborers want to work and work well only in their own peculiar way, and that this antagonism is not incidental but invariable, and has its roots in the national spirit." Low productivity isn't due to peasant laziness but to fundamental conflict between landowners' methods and peasants' "own peculiar way" of working. "He thought that the Russian people whose task it was to colonize and cultivate vast tracts of unoccupied land, consciously adhered, till all their land was occupied, to the methods suitable to their purpose, and that their methods were by no means so bad as was generally supposed. And he wanted to prove this theoretically in his book and practically on his land." Russian peasants developed methods appropriate to their historical task of colonizing vast spaces. Their "methods were by no means so bad as was generally supposed" - Western agricultural theory misunderstands Russian conditions. Levin wants to prove this through his book and his estate.