‘Self-esteem,’ said Levin, cut to the quick by his brother’s words, ‘is something I do not understand. If I had been told at the university that others understood integral calculus and I did not - there you have self-esteem. But here one should first be convinced that one needs to have a certain ability in these matters and, chiefly, that they are all very important.’
‘And what, then? Aren’t they important?’ said Sergei Ivanovich, also cut to the quick that his brother should find what interested him unimportant, and especially that he was obviously hardly listening to him.
‘It doesn’t seem important to me, I’m not taken with it, what do you want? ...’ answered Levin, having made out that what he saw was the steward, and that the steward had probably allowed the muzhiks to quit ploughing. They were turning their ploughs over. ‘Can it be they’re already done ploughing?’ he thought.
‘But listen,’ the elder brother said, his handsome, intelligent face scowling, ‘there are limits to everything. It’s all very well to be an eccentric and to be sincere and to dislike falseness - I know all that; but what you’re saying either has no meaning or has a very bad meaning. When you find it unimportant that the peasantry, whom you love, as you assure me ...’
‘I never assured him,’ thought Konstantin Levin.
‘... dies without help? Crude midwives kill off babies, and the peasantry rot in ignorance and remain in the power of every scrivener, and you are given the means to help them, but you don’t help them, because in your opinion it’s not important.’
And Sergei Ivanovich confronted him with a dilemma:
‘Either you’re so undeveloped that you cannot see all that you could do, or you cannot give up your peace, your vanity, whatever, in order to do it.’
Konstantin Levin felt that it only remained for him to submit or to confess to a lack of love for the common cause. And this offended and upset him.
‘Both the one and the other,’ he said resolutely. ‘I don’t see how it’s possible...’
‘What? Impossible to give medical help, if money is placed in the right way?’
‘Impossible, it seems to me ... In our district, with its three thousand square miles, with our slush, blizzards, seasonal field work, I see no possibility of providing medical help everywhere. Besides, I generally don’t believe in medicine.’
‘Well, excuse me, but that’s not fair ... I can give you a thousand examples ... Well, and schools?’
‘Why schools?’
‘What are you saying? Can there be any doubt of the usefulness of education? If it’s good for you, it’s good for everyone.’
Konstantin Levin felt himself morally driven into a corner and therefore got excited and involuntarily let out the main reason for his indifference to the common cause.
‘Maybe all that is good, but why should I worry about setting up medical centres that I’ll never use and schools that I won’t send my children to, that the peasants don’t want to send their children to either, and that I have no firm belief that they ought to send them to?’ he said.
Sergei Ivanovich was momentarily surprised by this unexpected view of things, but he at once devised a new plan of attack.
He paused, raised one rod, dropped the line in again, and turned to his brother with a smile.
‘Well, excuse me ... First, there’s a need for medical centres. Here we just summoned the district doctor for Agafya Mikhailovna.’
‘Well, I think her arm will stay crooked.’
‘That’s still a question ... And then, a literate muzhik or worker is more needful and valuable to you.’
‘No, ask anybody you like,’ Konstantin Levin replied resolutely, ‘a literate peasant is much worse as a worker. And the roads can’t be repaired, and bridges are no sooner put up than they steal them.’
‘However,’ said the frowning Sergei Ivanovich, who did not like contradictions, especially the sort that kept jumping from one thing to another and introduced new arguments without any connection, so that it was impossible to know which to answer, ‘however, that’s not the point. Excuse me. Do you acknowledge that education is good for the peasantry?’
‘I do,’ Levin said inadvertently, and immediately thought that he had not said what he thought. He sensed that, once he acknowledged that, it would be proved to him that he was speaking rubbish that did not make any sense. How it would be proved to him he did not know, but he knew that it would doubtless be proved to him logically, and he waited for this proof.
The argument turned out to be much simpler than he expected.
‘If you acknowledge it as a good,’ said Sergei Ivanovich, ‘then, being an honest man, you can’t help liking and sympathizing with such a cause and therefore working for it.’
‘But I have not yet acknowledged it as a good,’ said Konstantin Levin, blushing.
‘How’s that? You just said ...’
‘That is, I do not acknowledge it either as good or as possible.’
‘You can’t know that without having tried.’
‘Well, suppose,’ said Levin, though he did not suppose it at all, ‘suppose it’s so; but all the same I don’t see why I should worry about it.’
