The doctor is in a still worse position. His pseudo-science is all so arranged that he can only cure those who do nothing and can command the labour of others. He needs an endless number of expensive appliances, instruments, medicaments, and hygienically arranged rooms, food, and water-closets, to enable him to act scientifically; besides his own salary he needs such expenses that to cure one patient he has to starve hundreds of others who bear those expenses. He has studied in the capitals under celebrities who only take patients who can be treated in hospitals, or who while being treated can purchase the apparatus needed for the treatment, and can even travel immediately from the north to the south, or to such and such watering-places.
Their science is of such a kind that every Zemstvo-1doctor, complains of not having the means to treat the labourers-that they are so poor that it is impossible to place the patients in hygienic conditions; and at the same time that doctor complains that there are no hospitals, that he cannot manage all the work, and that he needs more assistants, doctors, and trained helpers. What does this mean? It means that the chief calamity of the people, causing illnesses to arise and spread and remain untreated, is the insufficiency of their means of livelihood.
And science, under the banner of a division of labour, calls its combatants to help these people. Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.
1 The Zemstvos resembled our County Councils, and had charge of the medical service in country districts.-A. M.
But the means are lacking, and therefore they must be taken from the peasants who fall ill and become infected and are not cured from lack of means.
The defenders of medicine for the people are always saying that, as yet, this business is but little developed.
Evidently it is little developed, for if-which God forbid-it should be developed, and on the people’s backs instead of two doctors, midwives and trained female assistants to a District, there were twenty such-as is proposed-there would soon be no one left to heal. Scientific assistance for the people, of which the defenders of science talk, should be of quite a different kind. And the kind of assistance that should be given has not yet been begun.
It will begin when the man of science, the technician, or the doctor, will not consider permissible the division-which is to say, the seizure-of the labour of other people which now exists; will not consider himself to have a right to take from people, I will not say hundreds of thousands, but even a modest one thousand or five hundred rubles for the aid he renders them, but will live among the labouring people under the same conditions as they do and as they do, and will then apply his knowledge to the labouring people’s problems of mechanics, engineering, hygiene, and medicine. But now science, fed by the labour of the working folk, has completely forgotten the conditions of those people’s lives, ignores those conditions, and is seriously offended because its pseudo-knowledge finds no application among them.
The sphere of medicine, like that of engineering, lies as yet untouched. All the questions of how best to divide the work time, how best to nourish oneself, on what and in what form, when and how it is best to clothe oneself, to cover one’s feet, to resist dampness and cold, how best to wash and feed the children, swaddle them, and so forth, in the actual circumstances in which the working people live-all these questions have not yet been put. So it is, too, with the scientific, pedagogic, teachers’ activity. Science has, in just the same way, so managed that, in accord with pedagogic science, only rich people can be taught, and the teachers, like the engineers and doctors, involuntarily pay court to money and among us especially to the government
And this cannot be otherwise, for a school with model arrangements (as a general rule the more scientifically arranged a school the more expensive it is), with adjustable benches, globes and maps, and libraries, and methodics for teachers and for pupils, is such as would involve the doubling of the rates in each village. Such is the demand of science.
The people need their children for work, and the poorer the people the more they need them. The defenders of science say: pedagogy even now benefits the people, but when it is developed things will be still better. But if it develops and instead of twenty schools to a district there are a hundred and all of them scientific, and the people have to pay for those schools, they will be more and more impoverished and will be yet more in need of their children’s work.
What, then, is to be done? say people in reply to this.
The government will establish schools and make education compulsory as is done in Europe; but the money will again be taken from the people, who will be worked yet harder and will have yet less leisure, and compulsory education will not act. Again the only salvation is for the teacher to live the life of a labourer and teach for such remuneration as may be freely and willingly given him.
Such is the false tendency of science, which deprives it of the possibility of fulfilling its duty, which is to serve the people. But this false tendency of our intellectuals is yet more evident in the activity of art, which by its very nature should be accessible to the people.
Science may fall back on its stupid excuse that science works for science, and that when it has been developed by the scientists it will become accessible to the people also; but art, if it be art, should be accessible to all, and particularly to those for whom it is produced. And the position of our art strikingly arraigns the producers of art for not wishing, not knowing how, and being unable, to serve the people.
For the preparation of his great works, an artist who is a painter must have a studio in which an association of at least forty carpenters or boot makers could work who now freeze or stifle in a slum. Nor is that enough; he needs nature, costumes, travel. The Academy of Arts has expended millions of rubles, collected from the people, on the encouragement of art, and the productions of this art are to be found in palaces and are not understood or wanted by the masses.
To express their great ideas musicians have to collect some two hundred men in white neckties or in costumes, and to expend hundreds of thousands of rubles on producing an opera. And the productions of this art could produce nothing but perplexity and weariness among the people, were they ever able to hear them.
Authors and writers of stories, one would think, do not need special surroundings, studios, nature, orchestras, and actors; but here, too, it appears that for the preparation of his great works a writer besides comfortable lodgings and all the pleasures of life, needs travel, palaces, studies, the pleasures of art, and visits to theatres, concerts, watering places, &c. If he does not himself earn money he is given a pension to enable him to write better. And again these writings, so much esteemed by us, remain rubbish for the people, who do not want them at all.
What if, as the men engaged on science and art desire, yet more of these producers of spiritual food are reared and it becomes necessary in each village to build a studio and introduce an orchestra and maintain an author in such conditions as artists consider essential?
I imagine that the working people would sooner pledge themselves never to see a picture, or hear a symphony, or read any poem or story, than be obliged to feed all those drones.
But why, one would ask, should artists not serve the people? In every hut there are icons and pictures; every peasant and every peasant woman sings; many of them have musical instruments, and they all tell stories and recite verses, while many of them read. How is it that these two things-made for one another like lock and key-have gone so far apart that there seems no possibility of bringing them together?
Tell a painter that without studios, nude models, and costumes, he should paint penny pictures, and he will tell you that this would be to abandon art as he understands it: tell a musician that he should play on a balalayka, a concertina, or a guitar, and should teach the peasant women to sing songs: tell a poet or an author that he should abandon his poems, his novels, his satires, and should compose songs, books, stories and fairy tales, which unlettered folk could understand-and they will tell you that you
