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

“I’ll tell you what interests me very much,” said Levin. “He’s right that our system, that’s to say of rational farming, doesn’t answer, that the only thing that answers is the moneylender system, like that meek-looking gentleman’s, or else the very simplest.⁠ ⁠… Whose fault is it?”

“Our own, of course. Besides, it’s not true that it doesn’t answer. It answers with Vassiltchikov.”

“A factory.⁠ ⁠…”

“But I really don’t know what it is you are surprised at. The people are at such a low stage of rational and moral development, that it’s obvious they’re bound to oppose everything that’s strange to them. In Europe, a rational system answers because the people are educated; it follows that we must educate the people⁠—that’s all.”

“But how are we to educate the people?”

“To educate the people three things are needed: schools, and schools, and schools.”

“But you said yourself the people are at such a low stage of material development: what help are schools for that?”

“Do you know, you remind me of the story of the advice given to the sick man⁠—You should try purgative medicine. Taken: worse. Try leeches. Tried them: worse. Well, then, there’s nothing left but to pray to God. Tried it: worse. That’s just how it is with us. I say political economy; you say⁠—worse. I say socialism: worse. Education: worse.”

“But how do schools help matters?”

“They give the peasant fresh wants.”

“Well, that’s a thing I’ve never understood,” Levin replied with heat. “In what way are schools going to help the people to improve their material position? You say schools, education, will give them fresh wants. So much the worse, since they won’t be capable of satisfying them. And in what way a knowledge of addition and subtraction and the catechism is going to improve their material condition, I never could make out. The day before yesterday, I met a peasant woman in the evening with a little baby, and asked her where she was going. She said she was going to the wise woman; her boy had screaming fits, so she was taking him to be doctored. I asked, ‘Why, how does the wise woman cure screaming fits?’ ‘She puts the child on the hen-roost and repeats some charm.⁠ ⁠…’ ”

“Well, you’re saying it yourself! What’s wanted to prevent her taking her child to the hen-roost to cure it of screaming fits is just.⁠ ⁠…” Sviazhsky said, smiling good-humoredly.

“Oh, no!” said Levin with annoyance; “that method of doctoring I merely meant as a simile for doctoring the people with schools. The people are poor and ignorant⁠—that we see as surely as the peasant woman sees the baby is ill because it screams. But in what way this trouble of poverty and ignorance is to be cured by schools is as incomprehensible as how the hen-roost affects the screaming. What has to be cured is what makes him poor.”

“Well, in that, at least, you’re in agreement with Spencer, whom you dislike so much. He says, too, that education may be the consequence of greater prosperity and comfort, of more frequent washing, as he says, but not of being able to read and write.⁠ ⁠…”

“Well, then, I’m very glad⁠—or the contrary, very sorry, that I’m in agreement with Spencer; only I’ve known it a long while. Schools can do no good; what will do good is an economic organization in which the people will become richer, will have more leisure⁠—and then there will be schools.”

“Still, all over Europe now schools are obligatory.”

“And how far do you agree with Spencer yourself about it?” asked Levin.

But there was a gleam of alarm in Sviazhsky’s eyes, and he said smiling:

“No; that screaming story is positively capital! Did you really hear it yourself?”

Levin saw that he was not to discover the connection between this man’s life and his thoughts. Obviously he did not care in the least what his reasoning led him to; all he wanted was the process of reasoning. And he did not like it when the process of reasoning brought him into a blind alley. That was the only thing he disliked, and avoided by changing the conversation to something agreeable and amusing.

All the impressions of the day, beginning with the impression made by the old peasant, which served, as it were, as the fundamental basis of all the conceptions and ideas of the day, threw Levin into violent excitement. This dear good Sviazhsky, keeping a stock of ideas simply for social purposes, and obviously having some other principles hidden from Levin, while with the crowd, whose name is legion, he guided public opinion by ideas he did not share; that irascible country gentleman, perfectly correct in the conclusions that he had been worried into by life, but wrong in his exasperation against a whole class, and that the best class in Russia; his own dissatisfaction with the work he had been doing, and the vague hope of finding a remedy for all this⁠—all was blended in a sense of inward turmoil, and anticipation of some solution near at hand.

Left alone in the room assigned him, lying on a spring mattress that yielded unexpectedly at every movement of his arm or his leg, Levin did not fall asleep for a long while. Not one conversation with Sviazhsky, though he had said a great deal that was clever, had interested Levin; but the conclusions of the irascible landowner required consideration. Levin could not help recalling every word he had said, and in imagination amending his own replies.

“Yes, I ought to have said to him: You say that our husbandry does not answer because the peasant hates improvements, and that they must be forced on him by authority. If no system of husbandry answered at all without these improvements, you would be quite right. But the only system that does answer is where laborer is working in accordance with his habits, just as on the old peasant’s land halfway here. Your and our general dissatisfaction with the system shows that either we are to blame or the