Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Three/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
"Do you know, I was thinking about you," said Sergyeï Ivanovitch. "It is not well at all, what is going on in your district, if that doctor tells the truth; he is not a stupid fellow. And I have told you all along, and I say to-day, you are wrong in not going to the assembly-meetings and in generally holding aloof from the affairs of the commune. If men of standing don't take an interest in affairs, God knows how things will turn out. The taxes we pay will be spent in salaries, and not for schools, or hospitals, or midwives, or pharmacies, or anything."
"But I have tried it," replied Levin, faintly and unwillingly. "I can't do anything. What is to be done about it?"
"Now, why can't you do anything? I confess I don't understand it. I cannot admit that it is indifference or lack of intelligence; is n't it simply laziness?"
"It is not that, or the first or the second. I have tried it, and I see that I cannot do anything," said Levin.
"He was not paying great heed to what his brother said, but was looking intently across the fields on the other side of the river. He saw something black, but he could not make out whether it was only a horse, or his overseer on horseback.
"Why can't you do anything? You have made an experiment, and it does not turn out to your satisfaction, and you give up. Why not have a little pride about you?"
"Pride?" said Levin, touched to the quick by his brother's reproach. "I don't see what that has to do with it. If at the university they had told me that others understood the integral calculus, but I did not, that would have touched my pride; but here one must be convinced in advance that one needs special aptitude for these things, and first of all that these things are very important."
"What! do you mean to say that they are not important?" asked Sergyeï Ivanovitch, in his turn touched to the quick because his brother seemed to attach so little importance to what so deeply interested him, and more than all because he apparently gave him such poor attention.
"What you wish does not seem to me important, and I cannot feel interested in it," replied Levin, who now saw that the black speck was the overseer, and that the overseer was probably taking some muzhiks from their work. They had canted over their plows. "Can they have finished plowing?" he asked himself.
"Now, listen! nevertheless," said his brother, his handsome intellectual face growing a shade darker. "There are limits to everything. It is very fine to be an original and outspoken man, and to hate falsehood,—all that I know; but the fact is, what you say has no sense at all, or has a very bad sense. How can you think it unimportant that this people, which you love, as you assert...."
"I never asserted any such thing," said Konstantin Levin to himself.
"That this people should perish without aid? Coarse peasant women act as midwives, and the people remain in ignorance, and are at the mercy of every letter-writer. But the means is given into your hands to remedy all this; and you don't assist them, because, in your eyes, it is not important."
And Sergyeï Ivanovitch offered him the following dilemma:—
"Either you are not developed sufficiently to see all that you might do, or you do not care to give up your own comfort, or your vanity, I don't know which, in order to do this."
Konstantin Levin felt that he must make a defense, or be convicted of indifference for the public weal, and this was vexatious and offensive to him.
"Ah! but there is still another thing," he said resolutely. "I do not see how it is possible ...."
"What! impossible to give medical aid if the funds were watched more closely?"
"Impossible it seems to me. ... In the four thousand square versts of our district, with our floods, snow-storms, and busy seasons, I don't see the possibility of giving public medical aid. Besides, I don't much believe in medicine, anyway." ....
"Well now, what nonsense! you are unjust. .... I could name you a thousand cases .... well, but how about schools?"
"Why schools?"
"What do you say? Can you doubt the advantages of education? If it is good for you, then it is good for every one!"
Konstantin Levin felt that he was morally pushed to the wall; and so he grew irritated, and involuntarily revealed the chief reason for his indifference to the communal affairs.
"Maybe all this is a good thing," said he; "but why should I put myself out to have medical dispensaries located which I shall never make use of, or schools where I shall never send my children, and where the peasants won't want to send their children, and where I am not sure that it is wise to send them, anyway?"
Sergyeï Ivanovitch for a moment was disconcerted by this unexpected way of looking at the matter; but he immediately developed a new plan of attack. He was silent, pulled in one of his lines and wound it up; then with a smile he turned to his brother:—
"Now, excuse me. .... In the first place, the dispensary has proved necessary. Here, we ourselves have just sent for the communal doctor for Agafya Mikhaïlovna."
"Well, I still think her wrist was out of joint."
"That remains to be proved. .... In the next place, the muzhik who can read is a better workman, and more useful to you."
"Oh, no!" replied Konstantin Levin, resolutely. "Ask any one you please, they will tell you that the educated muzhik is far worse as a laborer. He will not repair the roads; and, when they build bridges, he will only steal the planks."
"Now, that is not the point," said Sergyeï, frowning because he did not like contradictions, and especially those that leaped from one subject to another, and kept bringing up new arguments without any apparent connection, so that it was impossible to know what to say in reply. "That is not the point. Excuse me. Do you admit that education is a benefit to the peasantry?"
"I do," said Levin, at haphazard, and instantly he saw that he had not said what he thought. He realized that, by making this admission, it would be easy to convict him of speaking nonsense. How it would be brought up against him he did not know; but he knew that he would surely be shown his logical inconsequence, and he awaited the demonstration. It came much sooner than he expected.
"If you admit its value," said Sergyef Ivanovitch, "then, as an honest man, you cannot refuse to delight in this work and sympathize with it, and give it your cooperation."
"But I still do not admit that this activity is good," said Konstantin Levin, his face flushing,
"What? But you just said ...."
"That is, I don't say that it is bad, but that it is not possible."
"But you can't know this, since you have not made any effort to try it."
"Well, let us admit that the education of the people is advantageous," said Levin, although he did not in the least admit it. "Let us admit that it is so; still I don't see why I should bother myself with it."
"Why not?"
"Well, if we are going to discuss the question, then explain it to me from your philosophical point of view."
"I don't see what philosophy has to do here," retorted Sergyeï Ivanovitch, in a tone which seemed to cast some doubt on his brother's right to discuss philosophy; and this nettled Levin.
"This is why," said he, warmly. "I think that the motive power in all our actions is forever personal happiness. Now, I see nothing in our provincial institutions that contributes to my well-being as a nobleman. The roads are not better, and cannot be made so. My horses carry me, even on bad roads. The doctor and the dispensary are no use to me. The justice of the peace does me no good; I never went to him, and never shall go to him. The schools seem to me not only useless, but, as I have said, are even harmful; and these communal institutions oblige me to pay eighteen kopeks a desyatin, to go to town, to sleep with bugs, and to hear all sorts of vulgar and obscene talk, but my personal interests are not helped."
"Excuse me," said Sergyeï Ivanovitch, with a smile. "Our personal interests did not compel us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, and yet we worked for it."
"No," replied Konstantin, with still more animation; "the emancipation of the serfs was quite another affair. It was for personal interest. We wanted to shake off this yoke that hung on the necks of all of us decent people. But to be a member of the council; to discuss how much the night workman should be paid, and how to lay sewer-pipes in streets where one does not live; to be a juryman, and sit in judgment on a muzhik who has stolen a ham; to listen for six hours to all sorts of rubbish which the defendant and the prosecutor may utter, and, as presiding officer, to ask my old friend, the half-idiotic Aloshka, 'Do you plead guilty, Mr. Accused, of having stolen this ham?'" ....
And Konstantin, carried away by his subject, enacted the scene between the president and the half-idiotic Aloshka. It seemed to him that this was in the line of the argument.
But Sergyei Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.
"Nu! what do you mean by this?"
"I only mean that I will always defend with all my powers those rights which touch me,—my interests; that when the policemen came to search us students, and read our letters, I was ready to defend these rights with all my might, to defend my rights to instruction, to liberty. I am interested in the military obligation which concerns the fate of my children, of my brothers, and of myself. I am willing to discuss this because it touches me; but to deliberate on the employment of forty thousand rubles of communal money, or to judge the crack-brained Aloshka, I won't do it, and I can't."
Konstantin Levin discoursed as if the fountains of his speech were unloosed. Sergyeï Ivanovitch smiled.
"Supposing to-morrow you. were arrested; would you prefer to be tried by the old 'criminal court'?"[1]
"But I am not going to be arrested. I am not going to cut any one's throat, and this is no use to me. Now, see here!" he continued, again jumping to a matter entirely foreign to their subject, "our provincial institutions, and all that, remind me of the little twigs which on Trinity day we stick into the ground, to imitate a forest. The forest has grown of itself in Europe; but I cannot on my soul have any faith in our birch sprouts, or water them."
Sergyeï Ivanovitch only shrugged his shoulders again, as a sign of astonishment that birch twigs should be mingled in their discussion, although he understood perfectly what his brother meant.
"Excuse me," said he. "That is no way to reason."
But Konstantin Levin was eager to explain his self-confessed lack of interest in matters of public concern, and he went on to say:—
"I think that there can be no durable activity if it is not founded in individual interest: this is a general, a philosophical truth," said he, laying special emphasis on the word "philosophical," as if he wished to show that he also had the right, as well as any one else, to speak of philosophy.
Again Sergyeï Ivanovitch smiled. "He also," thought he, "has his own special philosophy for the benefit of his inclinations."
"Well, have done with philosophy," he said. "Its chief problem has been in all times to grasp the indispensable bond which exists between the individual interest and the public interest. This is not to the point, however. But I can make your comparison fit the case. The little birch twigs have not been merely stuck in, but have been sowed, planted, and it is necessary to watch them carefully. The only nations which can have a future, the only nations which deserve the name of historic, are those which feel the importance and the value of their institutions, and prize them."
And Sergyeï Ivanovitch transferred the question over into the domain of the historico-philosophical, which Konstantin was by no means able to appreciate, and showed him all the erroneousness of his views.
"As to your distaste for affairs, excuse me if I refer it to our Russian indolence and gentility [2] and I trust that this temporary error of yours will pass away."
Konstantin was silent. He felt himself routed on every side, but he felt also that his brother had not understood what he wished to say. He did not know exactly whether it was because he did not know how to express himself clearly, or because his brother did not wish to understand him, or whether he could not understand him. He did not try to fathom this question; but, without replying to his brother, he became absorbed in entirely different thoughts, connected with his own work. Sergyeï Ivanovitch reeled in his last line, he unhitched the horse, and they drove away.