Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (feel good books TXT) 📕

“But I still do not admit this movement to be just,” said Konstantin Levin, reddening a little.

“What! But you said just now.⁠ ⁠…”

“That’s to say, I don’t admit it’s being either good or possible.”

“That you can’t tell without making the trial.”

“Well, supposing that’s so,” said Levin, though he did not suppose so at all, “supposing that is so, still I don’t see, all the same, what I’m to worry myself about it for.”

“How so?”

“No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical point of view,” said Levin.

“I can’t see where philosophy comes in,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, in a tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother’s right to talk about philosophy. And that irritated Levin.

“I’ll tell you, then,” he said with heat, “I imagine the mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the local institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that could conduce to my prosperity, and the roads are not better and could not be better; my horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and dispensaries are no use to me. An arbitrator of disputes is no use to me. I never appeal to him, and never shall appeal to him. The schools are no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you. For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self-interest offers me no inducement.”

“Excuse me,” Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile, “self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work for it.”

“No!” Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; “the emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that crushed us, all decent people among us. But to be a town councilor and discuss how many dustmen are needed, and how chimneys shall be constructed in the town in which I don’t live⁠—to serve on a jury and try a peasant who’s stolen a flitch of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-examining my old half-witted Alioshka, ‘Do you admit, prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal of the bacon?’ ‘Eh?’ ”

Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was all to the point.

But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, what do you mean to say, then?”

“I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me⁠ ⁠… my interest, I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when they made raids on us students, and the police read our letters, I was ready to defend those rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to education and freedom. I can understand compulsory military service, which affects my children, my brothers, and myself, I am ready to deliberate on what concerns me; but deliberating on how to spend forty thousand roubles of district council money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka⁠—I don’t understand, and I can’t do it.”

Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had burst open. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.

“But tomorrow it’ll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited your tastes better to be tried in the old criminal tribunal?”

“I’m not going to be tried. I shan’t murder anybody, and I’ve no need of it. Well, I tell you what,” he went on, flying off again to a subject quite beside the point, “our district self-government and all the rest of it⁠—it’s just like the birch branches we stick in the ground on Trinity Day, for instance, to look like a copse which has grown up of itself in Europe, and I can’t gush over these birch branches and believe in them.”

Sergey Ivanovitch merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to express his wonder how the birch branches had come into their argument at that point, though he did really understand at once what his brother meant.

“Excuse me, but you know one really can’t argue in that way,” he observed.

But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of which he was conscious, of lack of zeal for the public welfare, and he went on.

“I imagine,” he said, “that no sort of activity is likely to be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest, that’s a universal principle, a philosophical principle,” he said, repeating the word “philosophical” with determination, as though wishing to show that he had as much right as anyone else to talk of philosophy.

Sergey Ivanovitch smiled. “He too has a philosophy of his own at the service of his natural tendencies,” he thought.

“Come, you’d better let philosophy alone,” he said. “The chief problem of the philosophy of all ages consists just in finding the indispensable connection which exists between individual and social interests. But that’s not to the point; what is to the point is a correction I must make in your comparison. The birches are not simply stuck in, but some are sown and some are planted, and one must deal carefully with them. It’s only those peoples that have an intuitive sense of what’s of importance and significance in their institutions, and know how to value them, that have a future before them⁠—it’s only those peoples that one can truly call historical.”

And Sergey Ivanovitch carried the subject into the regions of philosophical history where Konstantin Levin could not follow him, and showed him all the incorrectness of his view.

“As for your dislike of it, excuse my saying so, that’s simply our Russian sloth and old serf-owner’s ways, and I’m convinced that in you it’s a temporary error and will pass.”

Konstantin was silent. He felt himself vanquished