1 In English one would naturally say ‘to get a living in the town’, but it is here more convenient to use the Russian expression ‘to feed themselves’ because of what follows.-A. M.
temptations of vodka, weddings, fetes, itinerant pedlars, and other things; and in one way or another that wealth in its diverse forms-sheep, calves, cows, horses, pigs, fowls, eggs, butter, hemp, flax, rye, oats, buckwheat, peas, and hemp-seed and linseed-passes into the hands of other people and is carried to the towns and from the towns to the cities. The villager, obliged to part with all this to satisfy the demands and temptations presented to him, having given up his wealth remains in want and has to go to the place to which his wealth has been carried, and there he tries partly to secure the money he needs to get what is of prime necessity in the country, and partly, carried away by the temptations of the town, he himself with others indulges in what the town has to offer.
Everywhere in Russia, and I think not in Russia only but throughout the world, this goes on. The wealth of the country producers passes into the hands of dealers, landowners, officials, and manufacturers, and those who receive this wealth wish to enjoy it. And they can only enjoy it fully in town. In the village, on account of the distance at which people live, it is difficult, in the first place, to satisfy all the requirements of the rich; there are not all the workshops, stores, banks, restaurants, theatres, and all kinds of social amusements. Secondly, one of the chief pleasures furnished by riches-vanity, the desire to surprise and outshine others-is also difficult to secure in the country, again on account of the sparseness of the population.
In the village connoisseurs of luxury are lacking-and there is no one to astonish. No matter what adornments of the house, what pictures or bronzes a dweller in the village may procure, or what carriages or toilets-there is no one to admire them or envy them-for the peasants do not understand anything about it. Thirdly, luxury in the country is even disagreeable and dangerous to a man who has a conscience and fear. It is uncomfortable and uncanny in the country to have a milk bath or to feed puppies on milk, when near by there are children who need it; it is uncomfortable and uncanny to build pavilions and layout gardens among people who live in huts surrounded by manure, and who lack fuel. In the village there is no one to keep the stupid peasants in order, who in their ignorance may destroy all this.
And so the rich people gather together in the towns and settle near other rich people who have similar tastes: where the gratification of every luxurious taste is carefully guarded by numerous police. The core of such town-dwellers are the government officials; around them all sorts of workmen and traders have settled down, and they are joined by the. rich. There a rich man only wishes for anything and it will be supplied. There too it is pleasanter for a wealthy man to live because there he can satisfy his vanity there is someone to vie with in luxury, someone to astonish and to outshine.
Above all, it is better for a rich man in town because formerly, in the village, he was uncomfortable and felt ill at ease on account of his wealth, but now on the contrary. It would be uncomfortable not to live luxuriously as all the people around him do. What seemed frightening and awkward in the country, here seems to him quite proper. The rich assemble in town and there, under the protection of the authorities, calmly demand all that has been brought thither from the country. The villager is partly obliged to go where this continual holiday of the rich is going on and where what has been taken from him is being used up, in order to feed on the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table, and partly-seeing the easy and luxurious life of the rich which is approved and defended by everybody-he wants to arrange his own life so as to work less and enjoy the labour of others more.
So he makes his way to town and looks round where the rich people are, and tries by all means to get back from them what he needs, submitting to all the conditions they impose on him. He assists in the satisfaction of all their whims; and he or she attends on the rich in the baths, in the restaurants, as cabman, or as prostitute, and makes carriages, and toys, and fashionable dresses, and gradually learns from the rich man to live like him not by work but by obtaining from others by various expedients the riches they have accumulated-and so he becomes perverted and perishes. And it was this population perverted by city-wealth which forms the town-poverty I wished to aid but was unable to deal with.
And indeed one need but consider the position of those country folk who come to town to earn money for bread or for taxes, when they see everywhere around them the insanely squandered thousands and the easily acquired hundreds, while they themselves have to earn kopeks by heavy toil, to be surprised that any of them remain working people, and that they do not all turn to the easier, ways of obtaining money, by trading, cattle-dealing, mendicancy, vice, fraud, or even robbery.
You know it is only we who share in the unceasing orgy that goes on in the towns, who can be so accustomed to it that it seems to us natural for one person to live in five enormous rooms heated by fuel enough to cook the food and warm the lodgings of twenty families; to employ two horses and two attendants to carry us half a mile; to cover our parquet-floors with rugs, and to spend, I will not say five or ten thousand rubles on a ball, but say twenty-five rubles on a Christmas Tree, and so on.
But a man who needs ten rubles for bread for his family, or whose last sheep is being taken to pay a seven-ruble tax and who cannot obtain the money even by heavy toil, cannot get accustomed to it. We think it all seems natural to the poor. There are even people naive enough to say that the poor are very grateful to us for feeding them by our luxury. But being poor does not deprive men of reason, and they reason as we do.
When we hear of a man losing or squandering ten or twenty thousand rubles, we immediately think, ‘What a foolish and good-for-nothing fellow he is to squander so much money uselessly, and how well I could have used that money for a building I have long wanted, or to improve my farm,’ and so forth; and the poor reason just in the same way when they see wealth senselessly wasted, and they do it the more insistently since they need the money not to satisfy some caprice but to supply things they urgently need. We are much mistaken when we think that the poor c fail to see this, and can calmly look at the luxury surrounding them.
They never have admitted and never will admit that it is right for some to have a continual holiday while others must always fast and work. At first it astonishes and angers them to see it. Then they grow accustomed to it; and seeing that such arrangements are considered legitimate, they themselves try to avoid work and to share in the perpetual holiday. Some succeed and become such ever-feasting folk, others gradually insinuate themselves into an approach to that position, others again break down without having attained their aim, and having lost the habit of working, fill the brothels and doss-houses.
Two years ago we took a peasant lad from the village as a manservant. He did not get on with the footman and was dismissed. He found a place with a merchant, satisfied his master, and now goes about in showy boots and wearing a chain across his waistcoat. In his place we engaged a married peasant. He took to drink and lost some money. We
engaged a third man. He was intemperate, and having drunk all his clothes, loafed for a long time about the doss-houses. An old man-cook took to drink in town and fell ill. A footman who used to drink desperately, but who in the country had avoided vodka for five years, took to drink again last year while living in Moscow without his wife who used to restrain him, and he ruined his whole life.
A lad from our village is living with my brother as manservant. His grandfather, a blind old man, came to me while I was staying in the country and asked me to shame his grandson into sending ten rubles towards the payment of the taxes, as otherwise he would have to sell his cow. ‘He always says: one has to dress properly,’ said the old man; ‘well he has got himself boots and that is enough, or else what is it he wants?
Does he want to have a watch?’ said the grandfather, expressing by those words the insanest proposition he could think of. The proposition was indeed senseless if one knew that the old man had gone through the whole of Lent without being able to afford any oil with his food, and that he was losing the
