“It is?”
“Yes, it is. In my opinion there’s no need at all for a dispensary in Malozyomovo.”
My annoyance communicated itself to her; she looked at me, narrowing her eyes, and asked:
“What do they need? Landscapes?”
“No need for landscapes either. They don’t need anything.”
She finished taking off her gloves and opened a newspaper that had just been brought from the post office; after a minute she said softly, obviously restraining herself:
“Last week Anna died in childbirth. If there had been a dispensary nearby, she would still be alive. And it seems to me that gentleman landscape painters ought to have some sort of convictions in that regard.”
“I have very definite convictions in that regard, I assure you,” I replied, but she shielded herself from me with the newspaper as if she did not wish to listen. “In my opinion, dispensaries, schools, libraries, first-aid kits, under the existing conditions, only serve enslavement. The people are fettered with a great chain, and you don’t cut the chain, you merely add new links to it—there’s my conviction for you.”
She raised her eyes to me and smiled derisively, while I went on trying to grasp my main thought:
“What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all these Annas, Mavras, Pelageyas bend their backs from early morning till dark, get sick from overwork, tremble all their lives for their hungry and sick children, fear death and sickness all their lives, get treated all their lives, fade early, age early, and die in dirt and stench; their children grow up and start the same tune, and so hundreds of years go by, and billions of people live worse than animals—only for the sake of a crust of bread, knowing constant fear. The whole horror of their situation is that they have no time to think of their souls, no time to remember their image and likeness;6hunger, cold, animal fear, a mass of work, like a snowslide, bar all the paths to spiritual activity, to what precisely distinguishes man from animal and is the only thing worth living for. You come to their aid with hospitals and schools, but that doesn’t free them from bondage, but, on the contrary, enslaves them still more, because, by introducing new prejudices in their life, you increase the number of their needs, not to mention that they must pay the zemstvo for their little pills and primers, and that means bending their backs even more.”
“I won’t argue with you,” said Lida, lowering the newspaper. “I’ve already heard it all. I’ll tell you just one thing: it’s impossible to sit with folded arms. True, we’re not saving mankind, and maybe we’re mistaken in many ways, but we do what we can, and we’re right. The highest and holiest task for a cultured person is to serve his neighbor, and we try to serve as we can. You don’t like it, but one can’t please everyone.”
“True, Lida, true,” said the mother.
She was always timid in Lida’s presence, and kept glancing at her anxiously when she spoke, afraid of saying something unnecessary or inappropriate, and she never contradicted her, but always agreed—true, Lida, true.
“Dispensaries, peasant literacy, books with pathetic precepts and jokes cannot diminish either ignorance or mortality, any more than the light from your windows can illuminate this huge garden,” I said. “You give nothing with your interference in these people’s lives, you only create new needs, new pretexts for work.”
“Ah, my God, but something must be done!” Lida said with vexation, and from her tone it was clear that she considered my arguments worthless and despised them.
“The people must be freed from heavy physical labor,” I said. “Their yoke must be lightened, they must be given a respite, so that they don’t spend their whole lives at the stove, the washtub, and in the fields, but also have time to think about their souls, about God, to give wider scope to their spiritual capacities. Every man’s calling lies in spiritual activity—in a constant search for truth and the meaning of life. Make it so that crude, brutish labor is not necessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you’ll see what a mockery these books and first-aid kits essentially are. Once a man is conscious of his true calling, he can be satisfied only by religion, the sciences, the arts, and not these trifles.”
“Free them from labor!” Lida grinned. “Is that really possible?”
“Yes. Take a share of their work on yourself. If all of us, city and country dwellers, all of us without exception, agreed to divide up the work expended by mankind in general to satisfy its physical needs, the portion for each of us might be no more than two or three hours a day. Imagine that all of us, rich and poor, work only three hours a day, and the rest of our time is left free. Imagine, too, that in order to depend still less on our bodies and to work less, we invent machines to work for us, and try to reduce the number of our needs to the minimum. We train ourselves and our children not to fear hunger and cold, so that we don’t constantly tremble for their health as Anna, Mavra, and Pelageya do. Imagine that we don’t get treated, don’t keep pharmacies, tobacco factories, distilleries—what a lot of free time we’d have in the end! All of us together would devote this leisure to the arts and sciences. As peasants sometimes get together to mend a road, so all of us together would seek truth and the meaning of life, and—I’m certain of it—the truth would be discovered very soon, man would be delivered from this constant, tormenting, oppressive fear, and even from death itself.”
“You contradict yourself, however,” said Lida. “You say science, science, yet you reject literacy.”
“Literacy, when a man can only use it to read pothouse signboards and occasional books that he doesn’t understand—such literacy has been with us since the time of Rurik, Gogol’s Petrushka7has been reading for a long time, and yet the village remains to this day what it was under Rurik. What we need is not literacy, but the freedom to give wide scope to our spiritual capacities. We need not schools but universities.”
“You reject medicine as well.”
“Yes. It would be needed only for the study of illnesses as phenomena of nature, not for their treatment. If we’re to treat something, it should be not illnesses but their causes. Remove the main cause—physical work—and there will be no illnesses. I don’t recognize the science of treatment,” I went on excitedly. “The arts and sciences, when genuine, aspire not to temporary, not to specific purposes, but to the eternal and the general—they seek truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the soul, and when they’re harnessed to the needs and evils of the day, to first-aid kits and libraries, they only complicate and clutter life. We have lots of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, there are lots of literate people, but no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. All our intelligence, all our inner energies have gone to satisfying temporary, passing needs … Among scientists, writers, and artists, work is at the boil, the comforts of life increase every day thanks to them, bodily needs multiply, and yet the truth is still far off, and man still remains the most predatory and slovenly of animals, and the tendency in the majority of mankind is towards degeneration and the permanent loss of all vitality. In such conditions an artist’s life has no meaning, and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his role, since it turns out that, in reality, he is working for the amusement of a predatory, slovenly animal and supporting the existing order of things. But I don’t want to work and will not … Nothing’s any use, let the earth go to hell and gone!”
“Missyuska, leave us,” Lida said to her sister, obviously finding my words harmful for such a young girl.
Zhenya looked sadly at her sister and mother and left.