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Chekhov -
An Artist's Story
I II
III IV
III "The prince is staying at Malozyomovo, and he asks to be
remembered to you," said Lida to her mother. She had just come
in, and was taking off her gloves. "He gave me a great deal of
interesting news. . . . He promised to raise the question of a
medical relief centre at Malozyomovo again at the provincial
assembly, but he says there is very little hope of it." And
turning to me, she said: "Excuse me, I always forget that this
cannot be interesting to you."
I felt irritated.
"Why not interesting to me?" I said, shrugging my shoulders.
"You do not care to know my opinion, but I assure you the
question has great interest for me."
"Yes?"
"Yes. In my opinion a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo is
quite unnecessary."
My irritation infected her; she looked at me, screwing up her
eyes, and asked:
"What is necessary? Landscapes?"
"Landscapes are not, either. Nothing is."
She finished taking off her gloves, and opened the newspaper,
which had just been brought from the post. A minute later she
said quietly, evidently restraining herself:
"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if there had been a
medical relief centre near, she would have lived. And I think
even landscape-painters ought to have some opinions on the
subject."
"I have a very definite opinion on that subject, I assure you,"
I answered; and she screened herself with the newspaper, as
though unwilling to listen to me. "To my mind, all these
schools, dispensaries, libraries, medical relief centres, under
present conditions, only serve to aggravate the bondage of the
people. The peasants are fettered by a great chain, and you do
not break the chain, but only add fresh links to it -- that's my
view of it."
She raised her eyes to me and smiled ironically, and I went on
trying to formulate my leading idea.
"What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all
these Annas, Mavras, Pelageas, toil from early morning till
dark, fall ill from working beyond their strength, all their
lives tremble for their sick and hungry children, all their
lives are being doctored, and in dread of death and disease,
fade and grow old early, and die in filth and stench. Their
children begin the same story over again as soon as they grow
up, and so it goes on for hundreds of years and milliards of men
live worse than beasts -- in continual terror, for a mere crust
of bread. The whole horror of their position lies in their never
having time to think of their souls, of their image and
semblance. Cold, hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like
avalanches of snow, block for them every way to spiritual
activity -- that is, to what distinguishes man from the brutes
and what is the only 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 every one."
"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
wash-tub, 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 it, it is evident that he is working for the
amusement of a rapacious and unclean animal, and is supporting
the existing order. And I don't care to work and I won't work. .
. . Nothing is any use; let the earth sink to perdition!"
"Misuce, go out of the room!" said Lida to her sister,
apparently thinking my words pernicious to the young girl.
Genya looked mournfully at her mother and sister, and went out
of the room.
"These are the charming things people say when they want to
justify their indifference," said Lida. "It is easier to
disapprove of schools and hospitals, than to teach or heal."
"That's true, Lida -- that's true," the mother assented.
"You threaten to give up working," said Lida. "You evidently set
a high value on your work. Let us give up arguing; we shall
never agree, since I put the most imperfect dispensary or
library of which you have just spoken so contemptuously on a
higher level than any landscape." And turning at once to her
mother, she began speaking in quite a different tone: "The
prince is very much changed, and much thinner than when he was
with us last. He is being sent to Vichy."
She told her mother about the prince in order to avoid talking
to me. Her face glowed, and to hide her feeling she bent low
over the table as though she were short-sighted, and made a show
of reading the newspaper. My presence was disagreeable to her. I
said good-bye and went home.
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