June / Reading 28

Must It Be So?

Neuzheli tak nado?

Leo Tolstoy | Vol. 41, pp. 388-390

In the middle of the fields stands an iron foundry surrounded by a wall, with enormous chimneys ceaselessly smoking, with clanking chains, blast furnaces, an access railway, and scattered houses for the managers and workers. At this factory and in its mines, workers toil like ants: some a hundred arshin underground, in dark, narrow, stifling, damp passages constantly threatening death, from morning to night or from night to morning, breaking up ore; others in the darkness, stooped over, haul this ore or clay to the shaft and carry back empty carts and fill them again, and so they work for twelve or fourteen hours a day all week long.

So they work in the mines. At the blast furnace itself some work at the furnaces in suffocating heat, others at the discharge of molten ore and slag. Still others—machinists, stokers, locksmiths, brickmakers, carpenters—work in the workshops, also for twelve or fourteen hours the whole week through.

On Sundays all these people receive their wages, wash themselves—and sometimes unwashed—get drunk in the taverns and pubs that surround the factory from all sides, luring in the workers, and from early Monday morning they again take up the same work.

Right there near the factory, peasants plow a neighbor’s field on exhausted, worn-out horses. These peasants rose at dawn—if they did not spend the night out in the pasture, that is, if they did not sleep by the marsh, the only place where they can feed their horse—they rose at dawn, came home, harnessed the horse, grabbed a crust of bread, and rode off to plow someone else’s field.

Other peasants, also right there not far from the factory, sit on the highway, having rigged up a shelter of matting for themselves, and break highway stone. The feet of these people are battered, their hands are calloused, their whole body is dirty, and not only their face, hair, and beard, but also their lungs are saturated with limestone dust.

Taking a large unbroken stone from the unbroken pile, these people, placing it between their feet—shod in bast shoes and wrapped in rags—strike the stone with a heavy hammer until it splits; and when it splits, they take the broken pieces and strike them until these too break into fine gravel; and again they take whole stones and again from the beginning… And so these people work from the summer dawn to night—fifteen, sixteen hours—resting only about two hours after dinner, and twice, at breakfast and at noon, they sustain themselves with bread and water.

And so live all these people—in the mines, at the factory, the plowmen, and the stone-breakers—from their young years to old age; and so also live their wives and mothers in unbearable toil, developing uterine diseases; and so also live their fathers and children, poorly fed, poorly clothed, in work beyond their strength that ruins their health, from morning to evening, from youth to old age.

And now past the factory, past the stone-breakers, past the plowing peasants, meeting and overtaking ragged men and women with bundles who wander from place to place begging in Christ’s name, a carriage rolls along, jingling its bells, drawn by a matched team of four bay horses five vershok tall, the worst of which is worth the entire farmstead of each of the peasants admiring this team. In the carriage sit two young ladies, gleaming with the bright colors of parasols and ribbons and feathers of hats, each costing more than the horse on which the peasant plows his field; on the front seat sits an officer glittering in the sun with his galloons and buttons, in a freshly washed tunic; on the box sits a corpulent coachman in silk blue sleeves and a velvet coat. He nearly ran over the pilgrims and nearly knocked into the ditch a peasant riding by empty, in his ore-stained shirt, jolting along in his cart.

“Don’t you see?” says the coachman, brandishing his whip at the peasant who did not turn aside quickly enough, and the peasant with one hand jerks the reins while with the other he timidly removes his cap from his head.

Behind the carriage, silently speeding along, glinting in the sun with the nickel-plated parts of their machines, ride two male cyclists and one female cyclist, laughing merrily as they overtake and frighten the pilgrims who cross themselves.

To the side of the highway ride two people on horseback: a man on an English stallion and a woman on a pacer. Not to mention the price of the horses and saddles, her black hat alone with its purple veil costs two months’ work of the stone-breakers, and for the riding crop—a fashionable English whip—was paid as much as the lad who is walking along, pleased that he has hired on at the mines, will receive for a week of underground work, and he steps aside, admiring the sleek figures of the horses and riders and the fat, foreign, enormous dog in its expensive collar, running with its tongue hanging out behind them.

Not far behind this company, a smiling, curly-haired, elegantly dressed girl in a white apron and a stout, ruddy man with combed-out side-whiskers and a cigarette in his teeth, whispering something to the girl, ride in a cart. In the cart can be seen a samovar, bundles in napkins, an ice cream maker.

These are the servants of the people riding in the carriage, on horseback, and on bicycles. Today is nothing exceptional for them. They live this way all summer and nearly every day go on outings, and sometimes, as today, with tea, drinks, and sweets, so as to eat and drink not in the same place but in a new one.

These masters are three families living in the country and at a dacha. One is a landowner’s family—owner of two thousand desyatin of land, another is a civil servant receiving three thousand rubles in salary, the third—the wealthiest family—are the children of a factory owner.

All these people are not in the least surprised or touched by the sight of all that poverty and convict labor surrounding them. They consider that it is all as it should be. Something quite different occupies them.

“No, this is impossible,” says the lady on horseback, looking back at the dog. “I cannot bear to see this.” And she stops the carriage. Everyone speaks at once in French, they laugh and put the dog in the carriage, and they ride on, covering the stone-breakers and passersby on the road with clouds of limestone dust.

And the carriage, the riders, and the cyclists flashed by like creatures from another world; while the factory workers, stone-breakers, and peasant plowmen continue their heavy, monotonous labor for others—labor that will end only with their lives.

“Some people live well,” they think, watching the departed riders. And their miserable existence seems still more miserable to them.