In the moral sphere something occurs which is surprising and too little noticed.
If I tell a man who does not know it, anything I know of geology, astronomy, history, physics, or mathematics, he receives it as new information and never says to me: ‘But what is there new about it? Everyone knows that and I have long known it’; but impart to a man the loftiest moral truth, expressed in the clearest and briefest form, as it has never before been expressed, and every ordinary man, especially one not interested in moral questions, and especially one whom this moral truth strokes the wrong way, will certainly say: ‘But who does not know that? That was known and uttered long ago.’ It really seems to him that it was said long ago and in that very way. Only those to whom moral truths are serious and precious know how important and valuable they are, and by what prolonged efforts the simplification and elucidation of moral truth is reached-its transformation from dim, indefinitely conceived suppositions and wishes into firm and definite expressions inevitably demanding corresponding action.
We are all accustomed to think that moral teaching is a very empty and dull affair in which there can be nothing new or interesting, yet the whole life of man with all its complex and diverse activities-political, scientific, artistic, and commercial which seem to be independent of morality, have no other purpose than the ever greater elucidation, confirmation simplification and diffusion, of moral truth.
I remember walking along a street once in Moscow and seeing a man come out of a shop look attentively at the paving stones, select one of them, squat down over it and begin (as it seemed tome) to scrape or rub it with the greatest energy and ardour. ‘What is he doing to the pavement?’ thought I. Coming up to him I saw what he was doing. He was a lad out of a butcher’s shop, and was whetting his knife on a paving stone. He was not thinking at
1 The winter of 1885-1886-A. M
all about the stones when he examined them and was thinking still less about them while he was doing his job-he was simply whetting his knife. He has to sharpen his knife to cut meat with it, while it had seemed to me that he was doing something to the stones of the pavement. In just the same way, though It seems that mankind is occupied with commerce, treaties, wars, sciences, and arts, only one thing is important to humanity, and it is doing only that one thing: it is elucidating to itself the moral laws by which it lives. Moral laws exist; humanity merely elucidates them to itself, and this elucidation seems unimportant and insignificant to him who does not want moral law and does not wish to live by it. But this elucidation of the moral law is not only the chief, it is the sole business of humanity.
This elucidation is unobserved, just as the difference between a dull knife and a sharp one may be unobserved. A knife is a knife, and for him who does not want to cut anything with that knife the difference between a dull and a sharp one passes unobserved. But for a man who has understood that his whole life depends on the dullness or sharpness of his knife, every whetting of it is important and he knows that there is no end to this sharpening, and that a knife is a knife only when it is sharp and can cut what needs cutting.
This happened to me when I began to write the present article. I thought I knew all and understood all about the questions evoked in me by the impressions received at Lyapin House and during the Census, but when I tried to realize and express them it turned out that the knife would not cut and had to be sharpened. And only now after three years do I feel that my knife has been sufficiently sharpened to enable me to cut what I want to. I have learnt very little that is new. My thoughts are the same, but they were duller, they dispersed easily and did not converge: they had no sting in them, and they did not unite into the one simplest and clearest conclusion, as they now do.
CHAPTER XIII
I REMEMBER that during the whole period of my fruitless attempt to aid the unfortunates in the town population I appeared to myself like one who wishes to draw another out of a bog but is himself standing in just such a bog. Each effort I made obliged me to realize the instability of the ground I stood on. I felt that I was myself in a bog, but this consciousness did not then cause me to examine more carefully beneath my feet to discover what I was standing on; I was all the time seeking external means of curing the evil around me.
I then felt that my life was bad and that it would not do to live so. But from the fact that my life was bad and that one must not live so, I did not draw the clear and simple conclusion that I must improve my way of life and live better, but drew the strange conclusion that to enable me to live better it was necessary to correct other people’s lives; and so I began to correct them. I was living in town and wished to correct the life of other people living in the town, but I soon became convinced that I could not possibly do this, and I began to reflect on the nature of town-life and town-poverty.
‘What is this town-life and town-poverty? Why, living in town, can I not help the town poor?’ I asked myself. And I replied that I could do nothing for them, first, because there
were too many there in one place, and secondly, because they were quite different from the poor in the villages. Why are there so many of them here, and in what do they differ from the poor of the villages? The reply to both questions was one and the same. There are many of them here because all who are unable to feed themselves in the villages collect here, around the rich, and their peculiarity is that they are people who have come from their village to feed themselves in the town.1 (If there are any town poor who were born here and whose fathers and grandfathers were born here, those fathers and grandfathers came here to feed themselves.)
What is meant by ‘feed oneself in town’? In the words ‘to feed oneself in town’ there is something strange, something resembling joke, when one comes to consider it. How can people come from the country, that is, from where there are woods and meadows, and grain, and cattle-all the wealth of the earth-to feed themselves in a place where trees, and grass, and even soil, are wanting, and where there are only stones and dust? What is meant by those words: ‘feed oneself in the town’, which are constantly used as though they were quite clear and comprehensible, both by those who are fed and by those who feed them.
I recall all the hundreds and thousands of town dwellers-some well off and some in poverty with whom I talked about why they came there, and they all without exception said that
‘Moscow neither sows nor reaps,
But always has its wealth in heaps’;
that there is plenty of everything in Moscow, and that therefore only in Moscow could they earn the money they needed in the country for grain, a cottage, a horse, and for articles of prime necessity. But yet the village is the source of all wealth and it is only there that real wealth is to be found: grain, and timber, and horses, and everything. Why come to town to obtain what is in the country? And why, above all, carry from the village to town what is needed by the villagers: flour, oats, horses, and cattle?
Hundreds of times have I talked of this with peasants who were living in town, and from my talks with them and from my observation I have understood that the crowding of country folk into the towns is partly compulsory, because they cannot feed themselves otherwise, and partly voluntary, since the temptations of the town attract them. It is true that the condition of the peasant is such that to satisfy the demands made on him in the village he cannot avoid selling the grain and the cattle which he knows he will himself need, and so he is obliged, whether he likes it or not, to go to town to get his grain back again. But it is also true that the comparative ease with which money can be earned and the luxury of town-life attracts him thither, and that on the pretext of feeding himself in town he goes there to get easier work and to be better fed, to drink tea three times a day, to dress up, and even to get drunk and live dissolutely. The cause of both is the same: the passing of wealth from the producers into the hands of non-producers and its accumulation in towns. And really when autumn comes all the wealth is collected in the village. And immediately come demands for
