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 taxes, conscription, rents, and also the
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
