"Why not interesting to me?" I said, shrugging my shoulders. "You
do not care to know my opinion, but I assure you the question has
great interest for me."
"Yes?"
"Yes. In my opinion a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo is quite
unnecessary."
My irritation infected her; she looked at me, screwing up her eyes,
and asked:
"What is necessary? Landscapes?"
"Landscapes are not, either. Nothing is."
She finished taking off her gloves, and opened the newspaper, which
had just been brought from the post. A minute later she said quietly,
evidently restraining herself:
"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if there had been a medical
relief centre near, she would have lived. And I think even
landscape-painters ought to have some opinions on the subject."
"I have a very definite opinion on that subject, I assure you," I
answered; and she screened herself with the newspaper, as though
unwilling to listen to me. "To my mind, all these schools, dispensaries,
libraries, medical relief centres, under present conditions, only
serve to aggravate the bondage of the people. The peasants are
fettered by a great chain, and you do not break the chain, but only
add fresh links to it--that's my view of it."
She raised her eyes to me and smiled ironically, and I went on
trying to formulate my leading idea.
"What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all
these Annas, Mavras, Pelageas, toil from early morning till dark,
fall ill from working beyond their strength, all their lives tremble
for their sick and hungry children, all their lives are being
doctored, and in dread of death and disease, fade and grow old
early, and die in filth and stench. Their children begin the same
story over again as soon as they grow up, and so it goes on for
hundreds of years and milliards of men live worse than beasts--
in continual terror, for a mere crust of bread. The whole horror
of their position lies in their never having time to think of their
souls, of their image and semblance. Cold, hunger, animal terror,
a burden of toil, like avalanches of snow, block for them every way
to spiritual activity--that is, to what distinguishes man from
the brutes and what is the only thing which makes life worth living.
You go to their help with hospitals and schools, but you don't free
them from their fetters by that; on the contrary, you bind them in
closer bonds, as, by introducing new prejudices, you increase the
number of their wants, to say nothing of the fact that they've got
to pay the Zemstvo for drugs and books, and so toil harder than
ever."
"I am not going to argue with you," said Lida, putting down the
paper. "I've heard all that before. I will only say one thing: one
cannot sit with one's hands in one's lap. It's true that we are not
saving humanity, and perhaps we make a great many mistakes; but we
do what we can, and we are right. The highest and holiest task for
a civilised being is to serve his neighbours, and we try to serve
them as best we can. You don't like it, but one can't please every
one."
"That's true, Lida," said her mother--"that's true."
In Lida's presence she was always a little timid, and looked at her
nervously as she talked, afraid of saying something superfluous or
inopportune. And she never contradicted her, but always assented:
"That's true, Lida--that's true."
"Teaching the peasants to read and write, books of wretched precepts
and rhymes, and medical relief centres, cannot diminish either
ignorance or the death-rate, just as the light from your windows
cannot light up this huge garden," said I. "You give nothing. By
meddling in these people's lives you only create new wants in them,
and new demands on their labour."
"Ach! Good heavens! But one must do something!" said Lida with
vexation, and from her tone one could see that she thought my
arguments worthless and despised them.
"The people must be freed from hard physical labour," said I. "We
must lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they
may not spend all their lives at the stove, at the wash-tub, and
in the fields, but may also have time to think of their souls, of
God--may have time to develop their spiritual capacities. The
highest vocation of man is spiritual activity--the perpetual
search for truth and the meaning of life. Make coarse animal labour
unnecessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you
will see what a mockery these dispensaries and books are. Once a
man recognises his true vocation, he can only be satisfied by
religion, science, and art, and not by these trifles."
"Free them from labour?" laughed Lida. "But is that possible?"
"Yes. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us,
townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree
to divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the
satisfaction of their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need
to work only for two or three hours a day. Imagine that we all,
rich and poor, work only for three hours a day, and the rest of our
time is free. Imagine further that in order to depend even less
upon our bodies and to labour less, we invent machines to replace
our work, we try to cut down our needs to the minimum. We would
harden ourselves and our children that they should not be afraid
of hunger and cold, and that we shouldn't be continually trembling
for their health like Anna, Mavra, and Pelagea. Imagine that we
don't doctor ourselves, don't keep dispensaries, tobacco factories,
distilleries--what a lot of free time would be left us after all!
All of us together would devote our leisure to science and art.
Just as the peasants sometimes work, the whole community together
mending the roads, so all of us, as a community, would search for
truth and the meaning of life, and I am convinced that the truth
would be discovered very quickly; man would escape from this
continual, agonising, oppressive dread of death, and even from death
itself."
"You contradict yourself, though," said Lida. "You talk about
science, and are yourself opposed to elementary education."
"Elementary education when a man has nothing to read but the signs
on public houses and sometimes books which he cannot understand--
such education has existed among us since the times of Rurik; Gogol's
Petrushka has been reading for ever so long, yet as the village was
in the days of Rurik so it has remained. What is needed is not
elementary education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual
capacities. What are wanted are not schools, but universities."
"You are opposed to medicine, too."
"Yes. It would be necessary only for the study of diseases as natural
phenomena, and not for the cure of them. If one must cure, it should
not be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause
--physical labour, and then there will be no disease. I don't
believe in a science that cures disease," I went on excitedly. "When
science and art are real, they aim not at temporary private ends,
but at eternal and universal--they seek for truth and the meaning
of life, they seek for God, for the soul, and when they are tied
down to the needs and evils of the day, to dispensaries and libraries,
they only complicate and hamper life. We have plenty of doctors,
chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can read and write, but we are
quite without biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. The
whole of our intelligence, the whole of our spiritual energy, is
spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs. Scientific men,
writers, artists, are hard at work; thanks to them, the conveniences
of life are multiplied from day to day. Our physical demands increase,
yet truth is still a long way off, and man still remains the most
rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to the degeneration
of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all fitness for
life. In such conditions an artist's work has no meaning, and the
more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is
his position, as when one looks into it, it is evident that he is
working for the amusement of a rapacious and unclean animal, and
is supporting the existing order. And I don't care to work and I
won't work. . . . Nothing is any use; let the earth sink to perdition!"
"Misuce, go out of the room!" said Lida to her sister, apparently
thinking my words pernicious to the young girl.
Genya looked mournfully at her mother and sister, and went out of
the room.
"These are the charming things people say when they want to justify
their indifference," said Lida. "It is easier to disapprove of
schools and hospitals, than to teach or heal."
"That's true, Lida--that's true," the mother assented.
"You threaten to give up working," said Lida. "You evidently set a
high value on your work. Let us give up arguing; we shall never
agree, since I put the most imperfect dispensary or library of which
you have just spoken so contemptuously on a higher level than any
landscape." And turning at once to her mother, she began speaking
in quite a different tone: "The prince is very much changed, and
much thinner than when he was with us last. He is being sent to
Vichy."
She told her mother about the prince in order to avoid talking to
me. Her face glowed, and to hide her feeling she bent low over the
table as though she were short-sighted, and made a show of reading
the newspaper. My presence was disagreeable to her. I said good-bye
and went home.