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‘Maybe all that is good, but why should I worry about setting up medical centres that I’ll never use and schools that I won’t send my children to, that the peasants don’t want to send their children to either, and that I have no firm belief that they ought to send them to?’ he said.

Sergei Ivanovich was momentarily surprised by this unexpected view of things, but he at once devised a new plan of attack.

He paused, raised one rod, dropped the line in again, and turned to his brother with a smile.

‘Well, excuse me ... First, there’s a need for medical centres. Here we just summoned the district doctor for Agafya Mikhailovna.’

‘Well, I think her arm will stay crooked.’

‘That’s still a question ... And then, a literate muzhik or worker is more needful and valuable to you.’

‘No, ask anybody you like,’ Konstantin Levin replied resolutely, ‘a literate peasant is much worse as a worker. And the roads can’t be repaired, and bridges are no sooner put up than they steal them.’

‘However,’ said the frowning Sergei Ivanovich, who did not like contradictions, especially the sort that kept jumping from one thing to another and introduced new arguments without any connection, so that it was impossible to know which to answer, ‘however, that’s not the point. Excuse me. Do you acknowledge that education is good for the peasantry?’

‘I do,’ Levin said inadvertently, and immediately thought that he had not said what he thought. He sensed that, once he acknowledged that, it would be proved to him that he was speaking rubbish that did not make any sense. How it would be proved to him he did not know, but he knew that it would doubtless be proved to him logically, and he waited for this proof.

The argument turned out to be much simpler than he expected.

‘If you acknowledge it as a good,’ said Sergei Ivanovich, ‘then, being an honest man, you can’t help liking and sympathizing with such a cause and therefore working for it.’

‘But I have not yet acknowledged it as a good,’ said Konstantin Levin, blushing.

‘How’s that? You just said ...’

‘That is, I do not acknowledge it either as good or as possible.’

‘You can’t know that without having tried.’

‘Well, suppose,’ said Levin, though he did not suppose it at all, ‘suppose it’s so; but all the same I don’t see why I should worry about it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘No, since we’re talking, explain it to me from a philosophical point of view,’ said Levin.

‘I don’t understand what philosophy has got to do with it,’ said Sergei Ivanovich, in such a tone, it seemed to Levin, as if he did not recognize his brother’s right to discuss philosophy. And that vexed Levin.

‘It’s got this to do with it!’ he began hotly. ‘I think that the motive force of all our actions is, after all, personal happiness. In our present-day zemstvo institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that contributes to my well-being. The roads are no better and cannot be better; my horses carry me over the bad ones as well. I have no need of doctors and centres, I have no need of any justice of the peace - I’ve never turned to one and never will. Schools I not only do not need but also find harmful, as I told you. For me the zemstvo institutions are simply an obligation to pay six kopecks an acre, go to town, sleep with bedbugs, and listen to all sorts of nonsense and vileness, and personal interest does not move me to do that.’

‘Excuse me,’ Sergei Ivanovich interrupted with a smile, ‘but personal interest did not move us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, and yet we did.’

‘No!’ Konstantin interrupted, growing more heated. ‘The emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There was a personal interest. We wanted to throw off the yoke that oppressed us and all good people. But to be a council member,2 arguing about how many privy cleaners are needed and how the sewer pipes should be installed in a town I don’t live in; to be a juror and judge a muzhik who has stolen a ham, and listen for six hours to defence lawyers and prosecutors pouring out all sorts