Nekhludoff's decision to give land to the peasants

Nekhludoff's decision to give land to the peasants is the most concrete and far-reaching of the practical resolutions that follow his spiritual awakening. It is not a sudden whim but the culmination of a long intellectual and moral struggle, rooted in his youthful reading of Henry George and Herbert Spencer, and forced to the surface by the stark contrast between his own luxury and the grinding poverty he witnesses on his estates after the trial. The decision is implemented in two distinct phases—first at Kousminski, then at Panovo—and each reveals a different facet of the difficulty of translating moral conviction into social reality.

Intellectual Roots and the Crisis of Conscience

The decision is born from a crisis that Nekhludoff faces when he inherits his mother's large estates. As a young man, he had been an enthusiastic admirer of Henry George and Herbert Spencer, and was especially struck by Spencer's argument in Social Statics that justice forbids private landholding. He had acted on this conviction by giving the small piece of land he inherited from his father to the peasants. Now, inheriting his mother's vast properties, he is forced to choose between two impossible alternatives: either give up the land, as he had done before, or silently confess that all his former ideas were mistaken. He cannot choose the first because he has no other means of support and has formed luxurious habits he cannot easily give up; he cannot choose the second because it would mean denying clear and unanswerable proofs of the injustice of landholding. This paralysis is broken by the trial and his encounter with Maslova, which forces him to confront the lies of his entire life. The decision to give up the land becomes inseparable from his broader project of moral regeneration.

The Kousminski Settlement: A Partial Step

Nekhludoff first visits Kousminski, the large black-earth estate from which he derives most of his income. There, he finds that two-thirds of the best cultivated land is tilled by hired laborers using improved machinery, while the other third is worked by peasants at rates that amount to exploitation: they pay in labor at a price four times the land's value if invested at five percent. The steward argues that letting the land to the peasants would mean selling agricultural implements for next to nothing and that the peasants would spoil the land, but these arguments only strengthen Nekhludoff's resolve. He decides to let the land to the peasants at a low rent, reducing his income by half, and calls a meeting to announce his intentions. The peasants, however, do not react with the gratitude he expects. They bargain over the price, and a violent dispute breaks out among themselves over who should be included in the rental agreement. Though the terms are finally fixed at thirty percent below the market rate, the peasants leave dissatisfied and disappointed, and Nekhludoff himself feels ashamed, sensing that he has not done what they truly expected. The steward, unable to understand a man who would give up his own profit, concludes that Nekhludoff is not quite normal.

The Panovo Revelation: A Deeper Understanding

At Panovo, the estate he inherited from his aunts where he first met Katusha, Nekhludoff's understanding of the land question deepens. Here the poverty is even more desperate than at Kousminski. He walks through the village and sees the peasants' huts, their meager food of bread and kvass, and the women working beyond their strength. He meets a woman whose husband is in prison for cutting down two birch trees in the landlord's forest—his forest. He sees a baby with a patchwork cap, smiling with suffering, dying of starvation. The connection between his ownership of the land and their misery becomes inescapable. He realizes that the chief cause of the people's great want is that the land which alone could feed them has been taken from them by the landlords. This is not an abstract theory but a visible, physical fact: the children and the aged die because they have no milk, and they have no milk because there is no pasture land. He now understands that his arrangement at Kousminski was a deception: he had given the peasants something he knew in his heart he had no right to give, because no man has a right to own land at all. He forms a new project: to let the land to the peasants and to acknowledge the rent they pay as their own property, to be used for communal purposes. This is not the single-tax system, but it is as near an approach to it as existing circumstances allow, and its chief merit is that he will no longer profit from the possession of landed property.

The Peasants' Refusal and the Old Man's Wisdom

When Nekhludoff presents his offer to the peasants of Panovo, they refuse it outright. They cannot understand why a landlord would give up his land, and their experience of generations has taught them that every offer from a landlord is a trick to swindle them more cunningly. The more he explains, the more suspicious they become. The ex-soldier, holding his cap as if at a funeral, repeats "Just so" without comprehension. The cross, toothless old man angrily mutters that they prefer to go on the old way. Only later, when some of the old men explain that the gentleman must be acting for the salvation of his soul, do the peasants begin to consider the offer seriously. That night, as Nekhludoff sits on the doorstep listening to the nightingales and the thunder, he feels a joy he has not known before. The peasants' refusal does not bother him; on the contrary, he feels contented and joyful because he is no longer thinking of what will result for himself, but only of what he must do. The old man he meets on the ferry later in the journey, who has given up everything—name, place, country—and lives as a free man, represents the logical extreme of this renunciation: "I have no name, no place, no country, nor anything. I am just myself."

Significance: The Limits of Individual Action

Nekhludoff's land reform is both a triumph and a failure. It is a triumph because it represents a genuine break with the system of privilege he was born into, and it gives him a peace and clarity he has never known. It is a failure because it cannot, by itself, change the conditions that produce the poverty he has seen. The peasants at Kousminski accept the land but remain suspicious; the peasants at Panovo refuse it outright. The steward, the foreman, and even Nekhludoff's own sister and brother-in-law cannot understand his motives. The decision reveals the enormous gap between individual moral conviction and the entrenched structures of power and property that shape society. Yet it is precisely this gap that the novel insists must be crossed, one step at a time. Nekhludoff's decision is not the solution to the land question, but it is the only action available to him, and it is the action that his conscience demands. In this sense, it is a microcosm of the novel's central argument: that the only way to begin to repair the world is to begin with oneself, however imperfectly.