Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 3
he could not tell, but he knew that this would inevitably be logically proved to him,
and he awaited the proofs.
The argument turned out to be far simpler than he had expected.
“If you admit that it is a benefit,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “then, as an honest
man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathizing with the movement, and
so wishing to work for it.”
“But I still do not admit this movement to be just,” said Konstantin Levin, reddening
a little.
“What! But you said just now...”
“That’s to say, I don’t admit it’s being either good or possible.”
“That you can’t tell without making the trial.”
“Well, supposing that’s so,” said Levin, though he did not suppose so at all, “supposing
that is so, still I don’t see, all the same, what I’m to worry myself about it
for.”
“How so?”
“No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical point of view,”
said Levin.
“I can’t see where philosophy comes in,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, in a tone, Levin
fancied, as though he did not admit his brother’s right to talk about philosophy. And
that irritated Levin.
“I’ll tell you, then,” he said with heat, “I imagine the mainspring of all our actions
is, after all, self-interest. Now in the local institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing
that could conduce to my prosperity, and the roads are not better and could not be
better; my horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and dispensaries are
no use to me. An arbitrator of disputes is no use to me. I never appeal to him, and
never shall appeal to him. The schools are no good to me, but positively harmful, as
I told you. For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence
halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to
all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self-interest offers me no inducement.”
“Excuse me,” Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile, “self-interest did not induce
us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work for it.”
“No!” Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; “the emancipation of the
serfs was a different matter. There self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off
that yoke that crushed us, all decent people among us. But to be a town councilor
and discuss how many dustmen are needed, and how chimneys shall be constructed
in the town in which I don’t live–to serve on a jury and try a peasant who’s stolen
a flitch of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the
counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-examining my
old half-witted Alioshka, ‘Do you admit, prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal
of the bacon?’ ‘Eh?”’
Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the president
and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was all to the point.
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