Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [144]
‘I don’t know that riddle,’ Levin replied glumly.
III
‘You know, I’ve been thinking about you,’ said Sergei Ivanovich. ‘What’s happening in your district is unheard-of, from what this doctor tells me - he’s quite an intelligent fellow. I’ve said to you before and I’ll say it again: it’s not good that you don’t go to the meetings and have generally withdrawn from zemstvo affairs. Of course, if decent people start withdrawing, God knows how things will go. We pay money, it goes to pay salaries, and there are no schools, no medical aid, no midwives, no dispensaries, nothing.’
‘But I tried,’ Levin answered softly and reluctantly, ‘I just can’t! There’s no help for it!’
‘Why can’t you? I confess, I don’t understand. Indifference, inability, I don’t accept; can it be simple laziness?’
‘Neither the one, nor the other, nor the third. I tried and I see that I can’t do anything,’ said Levin.
He hardly entered into what his brother was saying. Peering across the river at the ploughed field, he made out something black, but could not tell whether it was a horse or the mounted steward.
‘Why can’t you do anything? You made an attempt, it didn’t succeed as you wanted, and you gave up. Where’s your self-esteem?’
‘Self-esteem,’ said Levin, cut to the quick by his brother’s words, ‘is something I do not understand. If I had been told at the university that others understood integral calculus and I did not - there you have self-esteem. But here one should first be convinced that one needs to have a certain ability in these matters and, chiefly, that they are all very important.’
‘And what, then? Aren’t they important?’ said Sergei Ivanovich, also cut to the quick that his brother should find what interested him unimportant, and especially that he was obviously hardly listening to him.
‘It doesn’t seem important to me, I’m not taken with it, what do you want? ...’ answered Levin, having made out that what he saw was the steward, and that the steward had probably allowed the muzhiks to quit ploughing. They were turning their ploughs over. ‘Can it be they’re already done ploughing?’ he thought.
‘But listen,’ the elder brother said, his handsome, intelligent face scowling, ‘there are limits to everything. It’s all very well to be an eccentric and to be sincere and to dislike falseness - I know all that; but what you’re saying either has no meaning or has a very bad meaning. When you find it unimportant that the peasantry, whom you love, as you assure me ...’
‘I never assured him,’ thought Konstantin Levin.
‘... dies without help? Crude midwives kill off babies, and the peasantry rot in ignorance and remain in the power of every scrivener, and you are given the means to help them, but you don’t help them, because in your opinion it’s not important.’
And Sergei Ivanovich confronted him with a dilemma:
‘Either you’re so undeveloped that you cannot see all that you could do, or you cannot give up your peace, your vanity, whatever, in order to do it.’
Konstantin Levin felt that it only remained for him to submit or to confess to a lack of love for the common cause. And this offended and upset him.
‘Both the one and the other,’ he said resolutely. ‘I don’t see how it’s possible...’
‘What? Impossible to give medical help, if money is placed in the right way?’
‘Impossible, it seems to me ... In our district, with its three thousand square miles, with our slush, blizzards, seasonal field work, I see no possibility of providing medical help everywhere. Besides, I generally don’t believe in medicine.’
‘Well, excuse me, but that’s not fair ... I can give you a thousand examples ... Well, and schools?’
‘Why schools?’
‘What are you saying? Can there be any doubt of the usefulness of education? If it’s good for you, it’s good for everyone.’
Konstantin Levin felt himself morally driven into a corner and therefore got excited and involuntarily