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jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the
president cross-examining my old half-witted Alioshka, ‘Do you ad-
mit, prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal of the
bacon?’ ‘Eh?’”
Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimick-
ing the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that
it was all to the point.
But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, what do you mean to say, then?”
“I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me...my interest,
I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when they made
raids on us students, and the police read our letters, I was ready to
defend those rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to education
and freedom. I can understand compulsory military service, which
affects my children, my brothers, and myself, I am ready to deliberate
on what concerns me; but deliberating on how to spend forty thousand
roubles of district council money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka—
I don’t understand, and I can’t do it.”
Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech
had burst open. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.
“But tomorrow it’ll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited
your tastes better to be tried in the old criminal tribunal?”
“I’m not going to be tried. I shan’t murder anybody, and I’ve no
need of it. Well, I tell you what,” he went on, flying off again to a
subject quite beside the point, “our district self-government and all the
rest of it—it’s just like the birch branches we stick in the ground on
Trinity Day, for instance, to look like a copse which has grown up of
itself in Europe, and I can’t gush over these birch branches and believe
in them.”
Sergey Ivanovitch merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to
express his wonder how the birch branches had come into their argu-
ment at that point, though he did really understand at once what his
brother meant.
“Excuse me, but you know one really can’t argue in that way,” he
observed.
But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of
which he was conscious, of lack of zeal for the public welfare, and he
went on.
“I imagine,” he said, “that no sort of activity is likely to be lasting if
it is not founded on self-interest, that’s a universal principle, a philo-
sophical principle,” he said, repeating the word “philosophical” with
determination, as though wishing to show that he had as much right as
any one else to talk of philosophy.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled. “He too has a philosophy of his own at
the service of his natural tendencies,” he thought.
“Come, you’d better let philosophy alone,” he said. “The chief
problem of the philosophy of all ages consists just in finding the indis-
pensable connection which exists between individual and social inter-
ests. But that’s not to the point; what is to the point is a correction I
must make in your comparison. The birches are not simply stuck in,
but some are sown and some are planted, and one must deal carefully
with them. It’s only those peoples that have an intuitive sense of
what’s of importance and significance in their institutions, and know
how to value them, that have a future before them—it’s only those
peoples that one can truly call historical.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch carried the subject into the regions of philo-
sophical history where Konstantin Levin could not follow him, and
showed him all the incorrectness of his view.