[Foyer of the Public Library, St. Petersburg, January 1895. The lamp-smoke mingles with frost drifting through the opened door. Two men—one in an American sack-coat, the other in a threadbare student’s cloak—step aside from the departing crowd.]
George: Mr. Fyodorov, at last. The snow keeps even exiles honest.
Fyodorov: The blizzard is impartial; that is its virtue. I have read your Progress and Poverty on the train from Tambov. You speak of land as mother, yet allow her to keep her dead buried beneath her.
George: Because the living must breathe before they can dig. While rent devours wages, no spade can be raised for resurrection. Lift the tax from labor and capital, place it on ground-rent alone—the earth will become common property, and surplus will flow to every man and woman. Then, with want abolished, we may—if you insist—dig.
Fyodorov: You tax the surface and believe the root thereby heals. Yet the root is mortality itself. Men quarrel over land because they fear the grave more than hunger. Give them the common task of raising the fathers, and rivalry dissolves in the shared spade.
George: But a task without bread breeds priests, not resurrectionists. Your vision is magnificent, yet if one child tonight sleeps hungry while philosophers dream of raising Julius Caesar, what have we gained? The single tax first loosens the grip of the landlord; with that grip gone, mankind turns voluntarily to any grand enterprise you name.
Fyodorov: And if the grip of death is tighter still? Picture Moscow’s zemstvo freed from rent: they congratulate themselves on well-fed infants, who yet grow old and perish. You have fine wheels, Mr. George, but no railway wide enough for the chariot of universal resurrection.
George: Permit me a parable. A village stands on fertile delta land; the silt is life. Yet one absentee landlord exacts half the produce. Villagers cannot repair the seawall; each flood carries coffins seaward before their time. Common rent—returned to the community—builds the wall, saves the living, and postpones the necropolis. Death is delayed by justice.
Fyodorov: Justice delayed is still partial. The wall postpones; the task transfigures. Your rent-reform may spare us a decade, but fraternity forged in digging at gravesites gifts us centuries, even eternity. Land belongs to all only when all belong to one another across centuries.
George: You underrate the practical magnetism of economic reform. The moment every citizen feels the rent-dividend in his pocket, he glimpses the brotherhood of man with the same clarity saints once felt in cathedrals—without waiting for trumpets at the cemetery gate.
Fyodorov: Feeling rent-dividends resembles feeling incense—its sweetness passes. Feeling obligation to the dead endures; it is the smoky fire inside the conscience. An economy can share soil; only a cultus can share time.
George: Then combine them. Distribute the rent, but decree that a tenth part of the surplus finances permanent cemeterial colleges—part-monastery, part-laboratory—devoted to resurrection science. Let the dividend become the tithe of immortality. Without the dividend, the tenth part is stolen by landlords; without the tithe, the dividend breeds mere comfort.
Fyodorov: You offer a treaty between earth-bound economist and heaven-seeking philosopher. I accept the clause, provided we inscribe across every deed: “Land is held in usufruct for the dead as much as for the living.” Your tax becomes a sacrament.
George: Then shake on it, Father Nikolai. The spade needs both bread and blessing.
[They clasp hands, damp with melting snow and ink stains. Outside, the storm relents; over the Neva, the first faint green of electric light dangles like a newly opened question.]