I could not find any unfortunates-sick, cold, or hungry-whom one could help at once, except the one starving woman Agafya. And I became convinced that cut off as I was from the life of the people I wished to help, it would be almost impossible for me to find such unfortunates, for every case of real want was met by the very people among whom these unfortunates live, and above all, I became convinced that money would not enable me to alter the wretched life these people lead. I became convinced of all this, but from false shame at abandoning what I had begun, from self-deception as to my own beneficence, I continued for some time to go on with it till of itself it came to nothing, so that with much difficulty I managed somehow, with Ivan Fedotych’s aid, in the tavern in Rzhanov House, to get rid of those thirty-seven rubles which I did not consider belonged to me.
Of course I could have continued the affair and made of it a semblance of philanthropy. I could by persistency with those who had promised me money have obliged them to hand it over to me and could have collected still more and could have distributed that money and consoled myself with my benevolent activity; but I saw on the one hand, that we rich people neither wish, nor are able, to set aside for the poor a part of our abundance (we have so many needs of our own), and that there is no one to give money to, If we wish only to do good and not merely to give away haphazard as I had done in the Rzhanov tavern. And I threw up the whole thing and with a feeling of despair left for the country.
There I wished to write an article about my experience and to explain why my undertaking had not succeeded. I wished to justify myself against the reproaches addressed to me concerning my article on the Census, and to indict society for its indifference and to state the causes which produce this urban poverty, and the need to counteract it, and also the means I saw for doing so.
I then began the article and thought it would contain much of value.
But try as I would, in spite of an abundance and superabundance of material since I wrote under the influence of irritation, and had then not yet got rid of all that hindered my seeing the matter in a right light, and above all because I was not yet simply and clearly conscious of the cause of the whole matter (a very simple cause rooted in myself), I could not manage the article, and I did not finish it till the present year.1
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
