Читать книгу Anna Karenina - 2 Classic Unabridged Translations in one eBook (Garnett and Maude translations) - Leo Tolstoy - Страница 80

‘DO you know, I’ve been thinking about you,’ said Koznyshev. ‘From what the doctor told me — and he is by no means a stupid young fellow — the things going on in your district are simply disgraceful. I have already told you, and I say it again, it is not right to stop away from the Zemstvo meetings, and in general to take no part in its activities! If all the better sort stand aside, of course heaven only knows what will happen. We expend money for salaries, but there are no schools, no medical assistance, no midwives, no chemists, no anything!’

‘You know I have tried,’ Levin replied slowly and reluctantly, ‘but I can’t! So what am I to do?’

‘Why can’t you? I confess I don’t understand. I can’t admit it to be indifference or inaptitude; is it possible that it is mere laziness?’

‘Neither the one nor the other — nor the last. I have tried and seen that I can do nothing,’ said Levin.

He did not pay much attention to what his brother was saying. Peering into the distance across the river, he made out something black in the cornfield, and could not see whether it was only a horse or the steward on horseback.

‘Why can you do nothing? You have made an attempt, and because according to your judgment it was a failure, you gave it up. Fancy having so little ambition!’

‘Ambition?’ reiterated Levin, stung by his brother’s words. ‘I do not understand it. If at college they had told me that others understood the integral calculus and I did not, that would have been a case for ambition; but in these matters the first requisite is a conviction that one has the necessary ability, and above all that it is all very important.’

‘Well, and is it not very important?’ said Koznyshev, stirred by the perception that his occupations were regarded as unimportant and especially by his brother’s evident inattention to what he was saying.

‘They don’t appear important to me. Do what you will, they don’t grip me,’ replied Levin, having made out that what he saw was the steward, who was probably dismissing the peasants from their ploughing too soon, for they were turning the ploughs over. ‘Is it possible they have finished ploughing?’ thought he.

‘Come now! After all,’ continued the elder brother with a frown on his handsome, intelligent face, ‘there are limits to everything! It is all very well to be a crank, to be sincere and dislike hypocrisy — I know that very well — but what you are saying has either no meaning at all or a very bad meaning. How can you consider it unimportant that the people, whom you love, as you maintain …’

‘I never maintained it,’ thought Levin… .

‘… are dying without help? Ignorant midwives murder the babies, and the people remain steeped in ignorance, at the mercy of every village clerk; while you have in your power the means of helping them, and yet are not helping because you do not consider it important!’

And Koznyshev confronted his brother with this dilemma: ‘Either you are so undeveloped that you don’t see all that you might do, or you don’t want to sacrifice your peace of mind or your vanity — I don’t know which — in order to do it.’ Constantine felt that there was nothing for him but to submit or else to own to a lack of love for the common cause, and he felt wounded and grieved.

‘Both the one and the other,’ said he resolutely. ‘I can’t see how it is to be done …’

‘What? Don’t see how medical help can be given, by distributing the money in a proper way …’

‘Well, it seems impossible to me… . To give medical help over the whole three thousand square miles of our district, with our deep snow, impassable when it begins melting, our snowdrifts, and the pressure of work at harvest time, is impossible. Besides, I have no faith in medicine generally …’

‘Come now! That is unjust… . I could cite thousands of cases to you… . And how about schools?’

‘Schools? What for?’

‘What do you mean? Is it possible to doubt the utility of education? If it is good for you, why not for everybody?’

Constantine felt himself morally cornered, and in consequence became excited and involuntarily betrayed the chief cause of his indifference to social questions.

‘All this may be very good, but why should I trouble about medical centres which I should never use or schools to which I should never send my children, and to which the peasants would not wish to send theirs either? — and to which I am not fully convinced they ought to send them?’ said he.

This unexpected view of the question took Koznyshev by surprise, but he immediately formed a new plan of attack.

He remained silent awhile, lifted his rod and threw the line again, and then turned to his brother with a smile.

‘Now let’s see… . There is need of a medical centre after all. Did we not send for the district doctor for Agatha Mikhaylovna?’

‘But I think her hand will remain crooked all the same.’

‘That’s very questionable… . And then a peasant who can read and write is more useful to you and worth more.’

‘Oh no! Ask anyone you like,’ said Constantine, decidedly. ‘A peasant who can read and write is far worse as a labourer. They can’t mend the roads, and when they build a bridge they steal.’

‘However, all that is not to the point,’ said Koznyshev, frowning; he did not like to be contradicted, especially when he was met with arguments that incessantly shifted their ground, introducing new considerations without sequence so that it was difficult to know which of them to answer first. ‘Wait a bit. Do you admit that education is a good thing for the people?’

‘I do,’ replied Levin unguardedly, and at once realized that he had not said what he really thought. He felt that, since he admitted this much, it would be proved to him that he was talking meaningless twaddle. How it would be proved to him he did not know; but he knew that it certainly would be proved logically, and waited for that proof.

The proof turned out to be far simpler than Constantine anticipated.

‘If you admit it to be good,’ said Koznyshev, ‘then, as an honest man, you cannot help loving and sympathizing with such movements and wishing to work for them.’

‘But I am not yet prepared to say that such work is desirable,’ returned Levin.

‘What? Why, you said just now …’

‘I mean I consider it neither desirable nor possible.’

‘You can’t tell without having tried it.’

‘Well, let’s grant it is so,’ said Levin, though he did not grant it at all. ‘Still, I don’t see why I should be bothered with it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No: since we have started on the topic, perhaps you had better explain it to me from a philosophical point of view,’ said Levin.

‘I don’t see what philosophy has to do with it,’ replied Koznyshev in a tone that made it seem — at least Levin thought so — that he did not consider his brother had a right to argue on philosophical questions. This irritated Levin.

‘This is what it has to do with it,’ he said, getting heated. ‘I believe that in any case the motive power of all our actions is our personal happiness. At present I, a nobleman, see nothing in our Zemstvo that could conduce to my welfare. The roads are not better and cannot be made better, and my horses do manage to pull me over the bad ones, I don’t require doctors and medical centres; I don’t need the magistrate; I never apply to him and never will. I not only do not require schools, but they would even do me harm, as I have already told you. To me the Zemstvo means nothing but a tax of two kopecks per desyatina, my having to go to the town, sharing a bed with bugs, and listening to all sorts of nonsense and nastiness; and my personal interests do not prompt me to do it!’

‘Come,’ smilingly interrupted Koznyshev, ‘it was not our personal interest which induced us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, and yet we did it.’

‘No, no!’ Constantine interrupted, growing more and more heated. ‘The emancipation of the serfs was quite a different matter. There was a personal interest in that: we wanted to throw off a yoke that was oppressing us all — all good men. But to be a member of a Council, to discuss how many scavengers are required and how the drains should be laid in a town in which I am not living, to be on the jury and try a peasant who has stolen a horse, to sit for six hours on end listening to all sorts of rubbish jabbered by the counsel and prosecutor, and to the President asking our idiot Aleshka:

‘ “Prisoner at the bar, do you plead guilty to the indictment of having stolen a horse?”

‘ “Eh-h-h?” ’

Constantine Levin was being carried away, and was impersonating the judge and the idiot Aleshka; it seemed to him that all this was relevant to the case in point. But Koznyshev shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, what do you want to prove by that?’

‘I only want to prove that I will always stand up with all my power for the rights which touch me and my personal interests. When they searched us students, and gendarmes read our letters, I was ready to defend with all my power my right to education and liberty. I understand conscription which touches the fate of my children, of my brothers and myself and I am ready to discuss what concerns me; but how to dispose of forty thousand roubles of Zemstvo money, or how to try the idiot Aleshka, I neither understand nor can take part in.’

Constantine Levin spoke as if the dam of his flood of words had been broken. Koznyshev smiled.

‘And to-morrow you may be going to law. Would you rather be tried in the old Criminal Court?’

‘I won’t go to law. I am not going to cut anybody’s throat, so I shall never be in need of that sort of thing. All those Zemstvo institutions of ours,’ he said, again jumping off to a subject that had no bearing on the case in point, ‘are like those little birches that are cut down for decorations at Whitsuntide, and we Russians stick them up to imitate the woods that have grown up naturally in Western Europe. I cannot water these birches or believe in them from my soul.’

Koznyshev only shrugged his shoulders to express his wonder at this sudden introduction of little birches into their discussion, though he had at once grasped his brother’s meaning.

‘Wait a moment! One can’t reason that way, you know,’ he remarked; but Constantine, wishing to justify the failing of which he was aware in himself (his indifference to the general welfare), continued:

‘I think that no activity can endure if it is not based on personal interest. That is the common and philosophical truth,’ said he, emphasizing the word philosophical, as if he wanted to show that he might talk about philosophy as much as anyone else.

Koznyshev smiled again. ‘He too has some philosophy or other to serve his inclinations,’ he thought.

‘You’d better leave philosophy alone,’ said he. ‘The principal task of philosophy has always, in all ages, been to find the necessary connection existing between personal and general interests. But that is not the point. I need only correct your illustration to get at the point. The birches are not stuck in: some of them are planted, and others are sown and have to be tended carefully. Only those peoples have a future, only those peoples can be called historic, that have a sense of what is important and great in their institutions, and value them.’

And to prove the inaccuracy of Levin’s views, Koznyshev carried the conversation into the realm of philosophy and history, which was beyond Constantine’s reach.

‘As to your not liking it, pardon me, but that only comes of our Russian laziness and seigneurial habits, and I am sure that in your case it is a temporary error and will pass.’

Constantine was silent. He felt himself beaten at every point, yet was sure that his brother had not understood what he had been trying to say, only he did not know why this was so: whether it was because he could not express himself clearly, or because his brother either could not or did not wish to understand him. But he did not go deeply into these questions, and without replying to his brother began reflecting on a totally different and personal matter.

Koznyshev wound up his last line, untied the horse, and they started on their homeward way.