Short Fiction by Anton Chekhov (libby ebook reader .txt) 📕

thing which makes life worth living. You go to their help with hospitals and schools, but you don’t free them from their fetters by that; on the contrary, you bind them in closer bonds, as, by introducing new prejudices, you increase the number of their wants, to say nothing of the fact that they’ve got to pay the Zemstvo for drugs and books, and so toil harder than ever.”

“I am not going to argue with you,” said Lida, putting down the paper. “I’ve heard all that before. I will only say one thing: one cannot sit with one’s hands in one’s lap. It’s true that we are not saving humanity, and perhaps we make a great many mistakes; but we do what we can, and we are right. The highest and holiest task for a civilised being is to serve his neighbours, and we try to serve them as best we can. You don’t like it, but one can’t please everyone.”

“That’s true, Lida,” said her mother⁠—“that’s true.”

In Lida’s presence she was always a little timid, and looked at her nervously as she talked, afraid of saying something superfluous or inopportune. And she never contradicted her, but always assented: “That’s true, Lida⁠—that’s true.”

“Teaching the peasants to read and write, books of wretched precepts and rhymes, and medical relief centres, cannot diminish either ignorance or the death-rate, just as the light from your windows cannot light up this huge garden,” said I. “You give nothing. By meddling in these people’s lives you only create new wants in them, and new demands on their labour.”

“Ach! Good heavens! But one must do something!” said Lida with vexation, and from her tone one could see that she thought my arguments worthless and despised them.

“The people must be freed from hard physical labour,” said I. “We must lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they may not spend all their lives at the stove, at the washtub, and in the fields, but may also have time to think of their souls, of God⁠—may have time to develop their spiritual capacities. The highest vocation of man is spiritual activity⁠—the perpetual search for truth and the meaning of life. Make coarse animal labour unnecessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery these dispensaries and books are. Once a man recognises his true vocation, he can only be satisfied by religion, science, and art, and not by these trifles.”

“Free them from labour?” laughed Lida. “But is that possible?”

“Yes. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us, townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree to divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need to work only for two or three hours a day. Imagine that we all, rich and poor, work only for three hours a day, and the rest of our time is free. Imagine further that in order to depend even less upon our bodies and to labour less, we invent machines to replace our work, we try to cut down our needs to the minimum. We would harden ourselves and our children that they should not be afraid of hunger and cold, and that we shouldn’t be continually trembling for their health like Anna, Mavra, and Pelagea. Imagine that we don’t doctor ourselves, don’t keep dispensaries, tobacco factories, distilleries⁠—what a lot of free time would be left us after all! All of us together would devote our leisure to science and art. Just as the peasants sometimes work, the whole community together mending the roads, so all of us, as a community, would search for truth and the meaning of life, and I am convinced that the truth would be discovered very quickly; man would escape from this continual, agonising, oppressive dread of death, and even from death itself.”

“You contradict yourself, though,” said Lida. “You talk about science, and are yourself opposed to elementary education.”

“Elementary education when a man has nothing to read but the signs on public houses and sometimes books which he cannot understand⁠—such education has existed among us since the times of Rurik; Gogol’s Petrushka has been reading for ever so long, yet as the village was in the days of Rurik so it has remained. What is needed is not elementary education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual capacities. What are wanted are not schools, but universities.”

“You are opposed to medicine, too.”

“Yes. It would be necessary only for the study of diseases as natural phenomena, and not for the cure of them. If one must cure, it should not be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause⁠—physical labour, and then there will be no disease. I don’t believe in a science that cures disease,” I went on excitedly. “When science and art are real, they aim not at temporary private ends, but at eternal and universal⁠—they seek for truth and the meaning of life, they seek for God, for the soul, and when they are tied down to the needs and evils of the day, to dispensaries and libraries, they only complicate and hamper life. We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can read and write, but we are quite without biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. The whole of our intelligence, the whole of our spiritual energy, is spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs. Scientific men, writers, artists, are hard at work; thanks to them, the conveniences of life are multiplied from day to day. Our physical demands increase, yet truth is still a long way off, and man still remains the most rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to the degeneration of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all fitness for life. In such conditions an artist’s work has no meaning, and the more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is his position, as when one looks into