The profound complexities of medicine and hygiene for people of our class are such as a mechanician might devise in order, when he has heated a boiler and screwed down all the valves, to prevent the boiler from bursting.
And when I clearly understood all this, it seemed to me ludicrous. By a long series of doubts, searchings, and reflection, I have reached the extraordinary truth that man has eyes in order to see with them, ears in order to hear with them, legs in order to walk with them, and hands and a back to work with, and that if he does not use them for their natural purpose it will be the worse for him.
I came to the conclusion that with us privileged people the same thing happens as occurred with the stallions of an acquaintance of mine.
His steward, who did not care for horses and did not understand them, having received his master’s orders to take the best stallions to the horse-market, chose them out of the herd and put them in the stalls; he fed them on oats and watered them, but wishing to be careful with such expensive horses, he did not allow anyone to ride them or drive them or even exercise them. The horses all went wrong in the legs and became worthless.
The same has happened with us, only with this difference, that it is impossible in any way to cheat the horses, and in order that they should not get out they had to be kept tied up, whereas we are kept in a similarly unnatural and ruinous condition by the temptations which enmesh us and bind us as with chains. We have arranged for ourselves a life contrary both to man’s moral and physical nature, and we direct all the strength of our minds to persuading men that this is just what life should be.
All that we call ‘culture’, our sciences and arts and the improvements of life’s comforts, are attempts to cheat man’s moral and natural demands; all that we call hygiene and medicine is an attempt to cheat the natural physical demands of human nature. But these deceptions have their limits and we have nearly reached them.
If such is man’s true life it is better not to live at all, says the prevalent most fashionable philosophy of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. If such is life it is better not to live, say an increasing number of suicides among the privileged classes. If life is such, it is better for the coming generation not to live, says medical practice in collusion with science: and the devices invented by it for the destruction of woman’s fecundity.
In the Bible it is said that it is a law for human beings to eat bread in the sweat of their brow, and in sorrow to bring forth children.
A peasant, Bondarev, who wrote an article about this, lit up for me the wisdom of that saying. (In my whole life two Russian thinkers have had a great moral influence on me, enriched my thought, and cleared up my outlook on life. These men were not Russian poets, or learned men, or preachers-they were two remarkable men who are still living, both of them peasants: Sutaev and Bondarev.)
But nous avons change tout ca, as a character in Moliere said after having blundered on medical matters and said that the liver was on the left side. Nous avons change tout ca: men need not work to feed themselves, it will all be done by machines, and women need not bear children. Science will teach us various methods and there are too many people as it is.
In the Krapivenski district1 there is a ragged peasant who wanders about. During the war2 he was employed by a commissariat officer in the purchase of grain. Having attached himself to this official, the peasant, it seems, went out of his mind with the idea that he, like the gentlefolk, need not work but would receive the maintenance due to him from his Majesty the Emperor. He now calls himself the Most-Serene-Military Prince Blokhin, Contractor for military provisions of all ranks. He says he has ‘completed all grades of the service’, and having ‘finished the military profession’ he is to receive from the Emperor ‘an open Bank, clothes, uniforms, horses, carriages, tea, peas, servants, and all supplies’.
To the question: Does he not want some work? he always proudly replies: ‘Much obliged-that will all be performed by the peasants.’
If one tells him that the peasants also may not want to work, he replies: ‘For the peasants the performance of labour presents no difficulty’ (he always prefers grandiloquent language). ‘There is now the invention of machinery for the facilitation of the peasants,’ he says. ‘For them it is not irksome.’ When one asks him what he lives for, he replies: ‘To pass the time.’
I always look at this man as into a mirror. In him I see myself and our whole class.
To finish with a rank enabling one to live ‘to pass the time’, and to receive an ‘open Bank’, while the peasants, as the invention of machinery makes work no longer irksome for them, do all the labour, is a complete formulation of the insensate creed of our circle.
1 The district in which Yasnaya Polyana is situated.-A.M.
2 The Russo-Turkish war of 1887-8.-A. M.
When we ask: What then must we do?-we do not really ask anything, but merely affirm-only not with the frankness of the Most-Serene-Military-Prince Blokhin, who has completed all the grades and has lost his reason-that we do not want to do anything.
He who comes to his senses cannot put the question, because on the one side all that he uses has been made and is made by man’s hands and on the other side, as soon as a healthy man takes up and eats something he feels a need to work with his legs, hands, and brain. To find work and to do it he needs only not to hold himself back; only he who considers it a shame to work-like a lady who asks her guests not to trouble to open the door, but to wait till she calls a servant to do so-only he can put to himself the question, what he is to do.
What is necessary is, not to invent work to do-you can’t overtake all the work needed for yourself and for others-but what is needed is to get rid of the criminal view of life, that I eat and sleep for my pleasure, and to acquire the simple and true view which the peasants grow up with and hold, that man is primarily a machine which has to be stoked with food, and that it is therefore shameful and uncomfortable and impossible to go on eating and not to work; that to eat and not to work is a most dangerous condition, resembling a conflagration. If one only has that consciousness, plenty of work will always be at hand and it will be joyous and satisfying for the needs of one’s body and soul. The case presented itself to me like this: our food divides our day into four ‘spells’, as the peasants term it: (1) till breakfast, (2) from breakfast till dinner, (3) from dinner till evening meal, (4) and the evening. Man’s natural activity is also divided into four kinds: (1) muscular activity-work of hands, feet, shoulders, and back-heavy work which makes one sweat; (2) the activity of the fingers and wrists-that of craftsmanship; (3) activity of the mind and imagination; (4) and the activity of social intercourse. And the blessings men make use of can also be divided into four classes.
First, the products of heavy labour-grain, cattle, buildings, & c.; secondly, the products of craftsmanship clothes, boots, utensils and so forth; thirdly, the products of mental activity-the sciences and arts; and fourthly, the arrangements for intercourse with people-acquaintanceships, &c. And it seemed to me that best of all would be so to vary the day’s occupations as to exercise all four human faculties and re-create all four kinds of produce we consume, in such a way that the four spells should be devoted: the first, to heavy labour; the second, to mental labour; the third, to craftsmanship; and the fourth, to intercourse with one’s fellows. It would be well if one could arrange one’s work so, but if not, the one important thing is to retain consciousness of one’s duty to work-of the duty of employing each spell usefully.
It seemed to me that only then would the false division of labour that exists in our society be abolished, and a just division established which would not infringe man’s happiness.
I, for instance, have occupied myself all my life long with mental work. I said to myself that I
