“I don’t know the riddle,” answered Levin wearily.
Chapter 3
“Do you know, I’ve been thinking about you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“It’s beyond everything what’s being done in the district, according to what
this doctor tells me. He’s a very intelligent fellow. And as I’ve told you
before, I tell you again: it’s not right for you not to go to the meetings, and
altogether to keep out of the district business. If decent people won’t go into
it, of course it’s bound to go all wrong. We pay the money, and it all goes in
salaries, and there are no schools, nor district nurses, nor midwives, nor
drugstores—nothing.”
“Well, I did try, you know,” Levin said slowly and unwillingly. “I can’t!
and so there’s no help for it.”
“But why can’t you? I must own I can’t make it out. Indifference,
incapacity—I won’t admit; surely it’s not simply laziness?”
“None of those things. I’ve tried, and I see I can do nothing,” said Levin.
He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying. Looking towards the
plough land across the river, he made out something black, but he could not
distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on horseback.
“Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt and didn’t succeed,
as you think, and you give in. How can you have so little self-respect?”
“Self-respect!” said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother’s words; “I
don’t understand. If they’d told me at college that other people understood
the integral calculus, and I didn’t, then pride would have come in. But in
this case one wants first to be convinced that one has certain qualifications
for this sort of business, and especially that all this business is of great
importance.”
“What! do you mean to say it’s not of importance?” said Sergey
Ivanovitch, stung to the quick too at his brother’s considering anything of
no importance that interested him, and still more at his obviously paying
little attention to what he was saying.
“I don’t think it important; it does not take hold of me, I can’t help it,”
answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff, and that the
bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the ploughed land. They
were turning the plough over. “Can they have finished ploughing?” he
wondered.
“Come, really though,” said the elder brother, with a frown on his
handsome, clever face, “there’s a limit to everything. It’s very well to be
original and genuine, and to dislike everything conventional—I know all
about that; but really, what you’re saying either has no meaning, or it has a
very wrong meaning. How can you think it a matter of no importance
whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert….”
“I never did assert it,” thought Konstantin Levin.
“…dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the children,
and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every
village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and
don’t help them because to your mind it’s of no importance.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so
undeveloped that you can’t see all that you can do, or you won’t sacrifice
your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.
Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to submit,
or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And this mortified him
and hurt his feelings.
“It’s both,” he said resolutely: “I don’t see that it was possible….”
“What! was it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to provide
medical aid?”
“Impossible, as it seems to me…. For the three thousand square miles of
our district, what with our thaws, and the storms, and the work in the fields,
I don’t see how it is possible to provide medical aid all over. And besides, I
don’t believe in medicine.”
“Oh, well, that’s unfair … I can quote to you thousands of instances….
But the schools, anyway.”
“Why have schools?”
“What do you mean? Can there be two opinions of the advantage of
education? If it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for everyone.”
Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and so he
got hot, and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause of his indifference to
public business.
“Perhaps it may all be very good; but why should I worry myself about
establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and schools to
which I shall never send my children, to which even the peasants don’t want
to send their children, and to which I’ve no very firm faith that they ought
to send them?” said he.
Sergey Ivanovitch was for a minute surprised at this unexpected view of
the subject; but he promptly made a new plan of attack. He was silent for a
little, drew out a hook, threw it in again, and turned to his brother smiling.
“Come, now…. In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We ourselves
sent for the district doctor for Agafea Mihalovna.”
“Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again.”
“That remains to be proved…. Next, the peasant who can read and write
is as a workman of more use and value to you.”
“No, you can ask anyone you like,” Konstantin Levin answered with
decision, “the man that can read and write is much inferior as a workman.
And mending the highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as they put up
bridges they’re stolen.”
“Still, that’s not the point,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning. He disliked
contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from
one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there
was no knowing to which to reply. “Do you admit that education is a benefit
for the people?”
“Yes, I admit it,” said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious
immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he
admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless
rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that this
would inevitably be logically proved to him, and he awaited the proofs.
The argument turned out to be far simpler than he had expected.
“If you admit that it is a benefit,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “then, as an
honest man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathizing with the
movement, and so wishing to work for it.”
“But I still do not admit this movement to be just,” said Konstantin
Levin, reddening a little.
“What! But you said just now….”
“That’s to say, I don’t admit it’s being either good or possible.”
“That you can’t tell without making the trial.”
“Well, supposing that’s so,” said Levin, though he did not suppose so at
all, “supposing that is so, still I don’t see, all the same, what I’m to worry
myself about it for.”
“How so?”
“No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical point
of view,” said Levin.
“I can’t see where philosophy comes in,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, in a
tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother’s right to talk
about philosophy. And that irritated Levin.
“I’ll tell you, then,” he said with heat, “I imagine the mainspring of all
our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the local institutions I, as a
nobleman, see nothing that could conduce to my prosperity, and the roads
are not better and could not be better; my horses carry me well enough over
bad ones. Doctors and dispensaries are no use to me. An arbitrator of
disputes is no use to me. I never appeal to him, and never shall appeal to
him. The schools are no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you.
For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence
halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and
listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self-interest offers me no
inducement.”
“Excuse me,” Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile, “self-interest
did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work
for it.”
“No!” Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; “the
emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There self-interest did
come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that crushed us, all decent
people among us. But to be a town councilor and discuss how many
dustmen are needed, and how chimneys shall be constructed in the town in
which I don’t live—to serve on a jury and try a peasant who’s stolen a flitch
of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the
counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-
examining my old half-witted Alioshka, ‘Do you admit, prisoner in the
dock, the fact of the removal of the bacon?’ ‘Eh?’”
Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the
president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was all to
the point.
But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, what do you mean to say, then?”
“I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me … my interest, I
shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when they made raids on
us students, and the police read our letters, I was ready to defend those
rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to education and freedom. I can
understand compulsory military service, which affects my children, my
brothers, and myself, I am ready to deliberate on what concerns me; but
deliberating on how to spend forty thousand roubles of district council
money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka—I don’t understand, and I can’t
do it.”
Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had burst
open. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.
“But tomorrow it’ll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited your
tastes better to be tried in the old criminal tribunal?”
“I’m not going to be tried. I shan’t murder anybody, and I’ve no need of
it. Well, I tell you what,” he went on, flying off again to a subject quite
beside the point, “our district self-government and all the rest of it—it’s just
like the birch branches we stick in the ground on Trinity Day, for instance,
to look like a copse which has grown up of itself in Europe, and I can’t gush
over these birch branches and believe in them.”
Sergey Ivanovitch merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to express
his wonder how the birch branches had come into their argument at that
point, though he did really understand at once what his brother meant.
“Excuse me, but you know one really can’t argue in that way,” he
observed.
But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of which
he was conscious, of lack of zeal for the public welfare, and he went on.
“I imagine,” he said, “that no sort of activity is likely to be lasting if it is
not founded on self-interest, that’s a universal principle, a philosophical
principle,” he said, repeating the word “philosophical” with determination,
as though wishing to show that he had as much right as anyone else to talk
of philosophy.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled. “He too has a philosophy of his own at the
service of his natural tendencies,” he thought.
“Come, you’d better let philosophy alone,” he said. “The chief problem
of the philosophy of all ages consists just in finding the indispensable
connection which exists between individual and social interests. But that’s
not to the point; what is to the point is a correction I must make in your
comparison. The birches are not simply stuck in, but some are sown and
some are planted, and one must deal carefully with them. It’s only those
peoples that have an intuitive sense of what’s of importance and
significance in their institutions, and know how to value them, that have a
future before them—it’s only those peoples that one can truly call
historical.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch carried the subject into the regions of
philosophical history where Konstantin Levin could not follow him, and
showed him all the incorrectness of his view.
“As for your dislike of it, excuse my saying so, that’s simply our Russian
sloth and old serf-owner’s ways, and I’m convinced that in you it’s a
temporary error and will pass.”
Konstantin was silent. He felt himself vanquished on all sides, but he felt
at the same time that what he wanted to say was unintelligible to his
brother. Only he could not make up his mind whether it was unintelligible
because he was not capable of expressing his meaning clearly, or because
his brother would not or could not understand him. But he did not pursue
the speculation, and without replying, he fell to musing on a quite different
and personal matter.
Sergey Ivanovitch wound up the last line, untied the horse, and they
drove off.
