The Demands of LoveТребования любви

Let us imagine people, a man and a woman (husband and wife, brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son), of the wealthy class, who have vividly understood the sins of a life of luxury and idleness amid the poverty of the people, crushed by labor, and who have left the city, given away their surplus to someone, or got rid of it one way or another, keeping for themselves in securities, let us say, 150 rubles a year for the two of them, or even keeping nothing, but earning that much by some craft (painting on china, say, or translating good books), and who live in the country, in the middle of a Russian village, having rented or bought themselves a peasant hut and working their own vegetable patch and orchard with their own hands, keeping bees, and at the same time giving the villagers help, medical as far as they know how, and educational: they teach the children, write letters and petitions and the like.

What life could be better, one would think? But this life will very soon cease to be joyful, if these people do not play the hypocrite, do not lie, if they are sincere. For if these people have given up all the advantages and joys, the ornaments of life, that the city and money gave them, they have done it only because they recognize people as brothers, equal before the Father: not equal in abilities or merits, if you like, but equal in their right to life and to all that life can give them.

If there can be doubt about the equality of people when we look at them as grown-ups, each with a separate past, there can be no such doubt when we see children. Why should this child have every care, all the help of knowledge for its physical and mental growth, while that lovely child, with the same gifts or better, becomes rickety, degenerate, a half-dwarf for want of milk, and stays illiterate, wild, a human being bound by superstitions: nothing but crude labor power?

For if these people have left the city and settled to live as they live in the village, it is only because they believe in the brotherhood of people not in word but in deed, and want, if not to realize it, then to be realizing it in their own lives. And this very attempt at realizing it must, provided only that they are sincere, must bring them into a terrible situation with no way out.

With their habits of order and comfort, and above all of cleanliness, acquired since childhood, they have moved to the village and, having rented or bought a hut, cleared it of vermin, perhaps even papered it themselves, brought the rest of their furniture, not luxurious but necessary: an iron bed, a cupboard, a little writing table. And so they live. At first the people are shy of them: they expect from them, as from all the rich, that they will guard their privileges by force, and so they do not approach them with requests and demands. But little by little the new residents’ disposition becomes clear: they themselves offer to serve without payment, and the boldest and most importunate of the people learn by experience that these new people do not refuse, and that there is something to be had from them.

And so begin demands of every kind, which grow greater and greater.

There begins not only begging but natural demands that they share whatever they have over and above what others have; and not only demands: the people who have settled in the village, always in close contact with the people, themselves feel the inescapable need to give their surplus where there is dire want. But that is not all. They feel the need to give away their surplus until they are left with what everyone should have, that is, the average; but there is no definition at all of this average, of what everyone should have; and they cannot stop, because around them there is always crying want, and they have a surplus against that want. It would seem one could keep a glass of milk; but Matryona has two children: a baby at the breast who finds no milk in its mother’s breast, and a two-year-old who is beginning to waste away. It would seem one could keep a pillow and a blanket, to fall asleep in one’s accustomed way after a day of labor; but a sick man lies on a lice-ridden coat and is cold at night, covering himself with a bit of sacking. It would seem one could keep tea and food; but it had to be given to pilgrims, old and weak. It would seem one could keep at least the cleanliness of the house; but beggar boys came, and they were allowed to spend the night, and they brought in lice.

One cannot stop; and where would one stop?

Only those who do not know at all that feeling of the consciousness of human brotherhood for whose sake these people came to the village, or who are so used to lying that they do not notice the difference between a lie and the truth, will say there is a limit at which one can and must stop. That is just the point: there is no such limit; the feeling in whose name this work is done is such that it has no limit; and if it has a limit, that only means the feeling was never there at all, and there was only hypocrisy.

I go on imagining these people. They have worked all day, they have come home; they no longer have a bed, they have no pillow, they sleep on straw they have got hold of; and now, having eaten some bread, they have lain down to sleep. It is autumn, sleet is falling. Someone knocks. Can they refuse to open? In comes a man, wet and in a fever. What is to be done? Put him on the dry straw? There is no more dry straw. And so they must either drive the sick man away, or lay him, wet, on the floor, or give up their own straw and, since they must sleep somewhere, lie down with him. But even that is not all: there comes a man you know for a drunkard and a profligate, whom you have helped several times and who each time drank away what you gave him; he comes now with trembling jaws and asks you to give him 3 rubles, which he stole and drank away, and for which, if he does not pay them back, he will be put in prison. You say you have only 4 rubles and you need them tomorrow to pay a debt. Then the man says: “Yes, so it is only talk; but when it comes to the point, you are like everyone else: let the one we call our brother in words perish, so long as we are safe.”

What is one to do here? What is to be done? Lay the feverish sick man on the damp floor and lie down yourself on the dry: worse still, you will not sleep. Put him in your own bed and lie down with him: you will catch lice and typhus. Give the man who asks your last three rubles: that means being left tomorrow without bread. Not give them: that means, as he says, renouncing that for whose sake you live. If one can stop here, why not stop earlier? Why help people at all? Why give away your fortune, why leave the city? Where is the limit? If there is a limit to the work you are doing, then the whole work has no meaning, or has only one terrible meaning: hypocrisy.

What, then, is one to do? What is to be done? Not to stop means to ruin your life, to become lousy, to waste away, to die, and, as it seems, to no use. To stop means to renounce everything for whose sake what was done was done, for whose sake anything good was done. And one cannot renounce it, for it was not invented by me or by Christ that we are brothers and must serve one another; it is so, and once this consciousness has entered the human heart it cannot be torn out. What, then, are we to do? Is there not some other way out?

And now let us imagine that these people, not frightened by the situation in which the need for a sacrifice leading to inevitable death had placed them, decided that their situation came from the fact that the means with which they had come to the people’s help were too small, and that this would not have happened, and they would have done much more good, if they had had a great deal of money. Let us imagine that these people found sources of help, gathered large, enormous sums of money and began to help. And not a week would pass before the same thing would happen. Very soon all the means, however large, would spill into the hollows that poverty had made, and the situation would remain the same.

But perhaps there is still a third way out? And there are people who say there is, and that it lies in furthering the enlightenment of the people, and then this inequality will be done away with.

But this way out is all too plainly hypocritical: one cannot enlighten a population that is at every moment on the brink of perishing from hunger. And above all, the insincerity of those who preach this way out is clear already from this: those who strive to establish equality, even through science, cannot uphold this inequality with their whole lives.

But there is still a fourth way out: to further the abolition of the causes that produce inequality, to further the abolition of the violence that produces it.

And this way out cannot fail to occur to those sincere people who try to realize in their lives their consciousness of human brotherhood.

“If we cannot live here, among these people, in the village,” the people I am imagining will have to say, “if we are placed in so terrible a situation that we must inevitably waste away, become lousy and die a slow death, or else renounce the one moral foundation of our life, this comes from the fact that some are rich and others are beggars; and this inequality comes from violence; and so, since the foundation of everything is violence, we must fight against it.” Only the abolition of this violence, and of the slavery that flows from it, can make possible such a service to people as would not make the sacrifice of one’s life inevitable.

But how is this violence to be abolished? Where is it? It is in the soldier, in the policeman, in the village elder, in the lock that locks my door. How, then, am I to fight this violence? Where, in what?

As people fight who live by violence and fight violence with violence?

But for anyone sincere this is impossible. To fight violence with violence is to put a new violence in place of the old. To help by an enlightenment based on violence is to do the same thing. To gather money acquired by violence and use it to help people robbed by violence is to heal with violence the wounds that violence has made.

And if one fights violence not with violence but by preaching nonviolence, by exposing violence and, above all, by the example of nonviolence and sacrifice, still, for those who live a Christian life amid a life of violence, there is no other way out than sacrifice, and sacrifice to the end.

We may not find in ourselves the strength to throw ourselves into this abyss; but those who are sincere, who wish to fulfill the law of God they have become conscious of, cannot fail to see their duty. One is free not to make this sacrifice; but if you wish to follow the demands of love, then you must know it so and say so, and count yourself guilty if you have not given everything and your whole life, and not deceive yourself.

And is the sacrifice to the end as terrible as it seems? For the bottom of want is not deep, and we are often like that boy who, in terror, hung all night by his hands in a well he had fallen into, afraid of an imagined depth, while half an arshin beneath him was the dry bottom.