What gaves Pahom the opportunity to own his first piece of land in "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"

A lady living close to the village where Pahom and his
family lived was a landowner with a small estate. She decided to sell her estate, and
the peasants went to her on behalf of the village council or Commune to see if they
could buy it. We are told that the Devil sowed disageement amongst them so they couldn´t
agree to buy it together, so each peasant was left to buy bits of the landowner´s land
as they could afford.

Pahom decides to buy land because he
is becoming jealous of a neighbour who is buying land. He is also driven by frustration
because of how the steward of the land where they currently worked was crushing them
with fines. So he and his wife go through quite a risky process of raising
funds:

They
had one hundred rubles laid by. They sold a colt and one half of their bees, hired out
one of their sons as a labourer, and took his wages in advance; borrowed the rest from a
brother-in-law, and so scraped together half the purchase
money.

With this they were
able to buy land, with the understanding that they paid the remainder within two
years.