Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [122]
“True, Leda, true,” said her mother.
Her mother’s courage always failed her in Leda’s presence, and while she was talking she would look timidly at her daughter, afraid of saying anything superfluous or inappropriate, and she never contradicted her, but would always agree with her: “True, Leda, true!”
“Teaching the peasants to read and write, giving them books full of wretched moralizings and quaint adages, and building medical centers can no more diminish their ignorance or decrease the death rate than the lamp in your window can light up the whole of your vast garden,” I said. “You are not giving them anything by interfering in their lives. You only create new wants, and make them have to work more.”
“Good heavens, something has to be done!” Leda said angrily, and I could tell from her voice that she thought my arguments completely worthless, and despised them.
“You must free people from hard physical labor,” I said. “Their yoke must be lifted from them, they must be given a breathing space so that they don’t have to spend their whole lives at the stove and the washtub and in the fields. They should have time to think about their souls and about God, and time to develop their spiritual faculties. The salvation of every human being lies in spiritual activity—in the continual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make it unnecessary for them to work at rough physical labor, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery all these books and dispensaries really are! Once a man is aware of his true vocation, he can only be satisfied with religion, science, and art—not with those other trifles!”
“Free them from work?” Leda gave a smile. “Is that possible?”
“Yes, if we take upon ourselves a share of the work. If all of us, townspeople and country people alike, all without exception, agreed to share the work which is expended to satisfy the physical needs of mankind, then perhaps none of us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us, rich and poor, worked only three hours a day, then the rest of our time would be free. And then, in order to be still less dependent upon our bodies and upon physical labor, imagine that we invent machines which will take the place of labor, and imagine that we make an effort to reduce our requirements to the minimum. We should harden ourselves and our children, so that they would no longer fear hunger and cold, and then we wouldn’t be perpetually worrying about health, as the Annas, Mouras, and Pelageyas of the world worry! If we didn’t take medicines and maintain dispensaries, tobacco factories, and distilleries—what a lot of free time we would have after all! We would all—all of us together—devote our leisure to science and art. Just as the peasants sometimes work communally to repair and mend the roads, so all of us together, the whole community, would search together for truth and the meaning of life, and—I am sure of it—the truth would be very soon discovered, and man would be delivered from his continual, agonizing, oppressive fear of death, and even death itself might be conquered.”
“But you are contradicting yourself,” Leda said. “You keep talking about science while denying the need for literacy.”
“What is the good of literacy when men have nothing to read but the signs on public houses and occasional books which they don’t understand? We have had that kind of literacy since the days of Rurik.2 Gogol’s Petrushka has been reading for a long time now, but the villages haven’t changed since the time of Rurik. What is needed is not literacy, but freedom for the full development of men’s spiritual faculties. What we need is not schools, but universities.”
“So you are opposed