Anna Karenina (Literature Classics Series). Leo Tolstoy

see… . There is need of a medical centre after all. Did we not send for the district doctor for Agatha Mikhaylovna?’

      ‘But I think her hand will remain crooked all the same.’

      ‘That’s very questionable… . And then a peasant who can read and write is more useful to you and worth more.’

      ‘Oh no! Ask anyone you like,’ said Constantine, decidedly. ‘A peasant who can read and write is far worse as a labourer. They can’t mend the roads, and when they build a bridge they steal.’

      ‘However, all that is not to the point,’ said Koznyshev, frowning; he did not like to be contradicted, especially when he was met with arguments that incessantly shifted their ground, introducing new considerations without sequence so that it was difficult to know which of them to answer first. ‘Wait a bit. Do you admit that education is a good thing for the people?’

      ‘I do,’ replied Levin unguardedly, and at once realized that he had not said what he really thought. He felt that, since he admitted this much, it would be proved to him that he was talking meaningless twaddle. How it would be proved to him he did not know; but he knew that it certainly would be proved logically, and waited for that proof.

      The proof turned out to be far simpler than Constantine anticipated.

      ‘If you admit it to be good,’ said Koznyshev, ‘then, as an honest man, you cannot help loving and sympathizing with such movements and wishing to work for them.’

      ‘But I am not yet prepared to say that such work is desirable,’ returned Levin.

      ‘What? Why, you said just now …’

      ‘I mean I consider it neither desirable nor possible.’

      ‘You can’t tell without having tried it.’

      ‘Well, let’s grant it is so,’ said Levin, though he did not grant it at all. ‘Still, I don’t see why I should be bothered with it.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘No: since we have started on the topic, perhaps you had better explain it to me from a philosophical point of view,’ said Levin.

      ‘I don’t see what philosophy has to do with it,’ replied Koznyshev in a tone that made it seem — at least Levin thought so — that he did not consider his brother had a right to argue on philosophical questions. This irritated Levin.

      ‘This is what it has to do with it,’ he said, getting heated. ‘I believe that in any case the motive power of all our actions is our personal happiness. At present I, a nobleman, see nothing in our Zemstvo that could conduce to my welfare. The roads are not better and cannot be made better, and my horses do manage to pull me over the bad ones, I don’t require doctors and medical centres; I don’t need the magistrate; I never apply to him and never will. I not only do not require schools, but they would even do me harm, as I have already told you. To me the Zemstvo means nothing but a tax of two kopecks per desyatina, my having to go to the town, sharing a bed with bugs, and listening to all sorts of nonsense and nastiness; and my personal interests do not prompt me to do it!’

      ‘Come,’ smilingly interrupted Koznyshev, ‘it was not our personal interest which induced us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, and yet we did it.’

      ‘No, no!’ Constantine interrupted, growing more and more heated. ‘The emancipation of the serfs was quite a different matter. There was a personal interest in that: we wanted to throw off a yoke that was oppressing us all — all good men. But to be a member of a Council, to discuss how many scavengers are required and how the drains should be laid in a town in which I am not living, to be on the jury and try a peasant who has stolen a horse, to sit for six hours on end listening to all sorts of rubbish jabbered by the counsel and prosecutor, and to the President asking our idiot Aleshka:

      ‘ “Prisoner at the bar, do you plead guilty to the indictment of having stolen a horse?”

      ‘ “Eh-h-h?” ’

      Constantine Levin was being carried away, and was impersonating the judge and the idiot Aleshka; it seemed to him that all this was relevant to the case in point. But Koznyshev shrugged his shoulders.

      ‘Well, what do you want to prove by that?’

      ‘I only want to prove that I will always stand up with all my power for the rights which touch me and my personal interests. When they searched us students, and gendarmes read our letters, I was ready to defend with all my power my right to education and liberty. I understand conscription which touches the fate of my children, of my brothers and myself and I am ready to discuss what concerns me; but how to dispose of forty thousand roubles of Zemstvo money, or how to try the idiot Aleshka, I neither understand nor can take part in.’

      Constantine Levin spoke as if the dam of his flood of words had been broken. Koznyshev smiled.

      ‘And to-morrow you may be going to law. Would you rather be tried in the old Criminal Court?’

      ‘I won’t go to law. I am not going to cut anybody’s throat, so I shall never be in need of that sort of thing. All those Zemstvo institutions of ours,’ he said, again jumping off to a subject that had no bearing on the case in point, ‘are like those little birches that are cut down for decorations at Whitsuntide, and we Russians stick them up to imitate the woods that have grown up naturally in Western Europe. I cannot water these birches or believe in them from my soul.’

      Koznyshev only shrugged his shoulders to express his wonder at this sudden introduction of little birches into their discussion, though he had at once grasped his brother’s meaning.

      ‘Wait a moment! One can’t reason that way, you know,’ he remarked; but Constantine, wishing to justify the failing of which he was aware in himself (his indifference to the general welfare), continued:

      ‘I think that no activity can endure if it is not based on personal interest. That is the common and philosophical truth,’ said he, emphasizing the word philosophical, as if he wanted to show that he might talk about philosophy as much as anyone else.

      Koznyshev smiled again. ‘He too has some philosophy or other to serve his inclinations,’ he thought.

      ‘You’d better leave philosophy alone,’ said he. ‘The principal task of philosophy has always, in all ages, been to find the necessary connection existing between personal and general interests. But that is not the point. I need only correct your illustration to get at the point. The birches are not stuck in: some of them are planted, and others are sown and have to be tended carefully. Only those peoples have a future, only those peoples can be called historic, that have a sense of what is important and great in their institutions, and value them.’

      And to prove the inaccuracy of Levin’s views, Koznyshev carried the conversation into the realm of philosophy and history, which was beyond Constantine’s reach.

      ‘As to your not liking it, pardon me, but that only comes of our Russian laziness and seigneurial habits, and I am sure that in your case it is a temporary error and will pass.’

      Constantine was silent. He felt himself beaten at every point, yet was sure that his brother had not understood what he had been trying to say, only he did not know why this was so: whether it was because he could not express himself clearly, or because his brother either could not or did not wish to understand him. But he did not go deeply into these questions, and without replying to his brother began reflecting on a totally different and personal matter.

      Koznyshev wound up his last line, untied the horse, and they started on their homeward way.

      Chapter 4

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      THE personal matter that occupied Levin while he was talking with his brother was this. The year before, when visiting a field that was being mown, he had lost his temper with his steward,