Alexander Vitberg.
§1
IN the midst of all this ugliness and squalor, these petty and repulsive
persons and scenes, in this world of chicanery and red tape, I recall
the sad and noble figure of a great artist.
I lived at his side for two years and a half and saw this strong man
breaking up under the pressure of persecution and misfortune.
Nor can it be said that he succumbed without a protest; for ten long
years he struggled desperately. When he went into exile, he still hoped
to conquer his enemies and right himself; in fact, he was still eager
for the conflict, still full of projects and expedients. But at Vyatka
he saw that all was over.
He might have accepted this discovery but for the wife and children at
his side, and the prospect of long years of exile, poverty, and
privation; he grew greyer and older, not day by day, but hour by hour. I
was two years at Vyatka, and when I left, he was ten years older than
when I came.
Let me tell the story of this long martyrdom.
§2
The Emperor Alexander could not believe in his victory over Napoleon.
Glory was a burden to him, and he quite sincerely gave it to God’s name
instead. Always inclined to mysticism and despondency, he was more than
ever haunted by these feelings after his repeated victories over
Napoleon.
When the last soldier of the French army had retreated over the
frontier, Alexander published a manifesto, in which he took a vow to
erect a great cathedral at Moscow, dedicated to the Saviour.
Plans for this church were invited from all quarters, and there was a
great competition of artists.
Alexander Vitberg was then a young man; he had been trained in the art
schools at Petersburg and had gained the gold medal for painting. Of
Swedish descent, he was born in Russia and received his early education
in the School of Mines. He was a passionate lover of art, with a
tendency to eccentricity and mysticism. He read the Emperor’s manifesto
and the invitation for designs, and at once gave up all his former
occupations. Day and night he wandered about the streets of Petersburg,
tormented by a fixed idea which he was powerless to banish. He shut
himself up in his room, took his pencil, and began to work.
The artist took no one into his confidence. After working for several
months, he travelled to Moscow, where he studied the city and its
surroundings. Then he set to work again, hiding himself from all eyes
for months at a time, and hiding his drawings also.
The time came for the competition. Many plans were sent in, plans from
Italy and from Germany, and our own academicians sent in theirs. The
design of this unknown youth took its place among the rest. Some weeks
passed before the Emperor examined the plans, and these weeks were the
Forty Days in the Wilderness, days of temptation and doubt and painful
anxiety.
The Emperor was struck by Vitberg’s design, which was on a colossal
scale and remarkable for religious and artistic feeling. He stopped
first in front of it and asked who had sent it in. The envelope was
opened; the name inside was that of an unknown student of the Academy.
Alexander sent for Vitberg and had a long conversation with him. He was
impressed by the artist’s confident and animated speech, the real
inspiration which filled him, and the mystical turn of his convictions.
“You speak in stone,” the Emperor said, as he looked through the plans
again.
The plans were approved that very day; Vitberg was appointed architect
of the cathedral and president of the building committee. Alexander was
not aware that there were thorns beneath the crown of laurels which he
placed on the artist’s head.
§3
There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture. Abstract,
geometrical, musical and yet dumb, passionless, it depends entirely upon
symbolism, form, suggestion. Simple lines, and the harmonious
combination and numerical relations between these, present something
mysterious and at the same time incomplete. A building, a temple, does
not comprise its object within itself; it differs in this respect from a
statue or a picture, a poem or a symphony. The building needs an
inhabitant; in itself it is a prepared space, a setting, like the shell
of a tortoise or marine creature; and the essential thing is just this,
that the outer case should fit the spirit and the inhabitant, as closely
as the shell fits the tortoise. The walls of the temple, its vaults and
pillars, its main entrance, its foundations and cupola, should all
reflect the deity that dwells within, just as the bones of the skull
correspond exactly to the convolutions of the brain.
To the Egyptians their temples were sacred books, their obelisks were
sermons by the high road.
Solomon’s temple is the Bible in stone; and so St. Peter’s at Rome is
the transition, in stone, from Catholicism to a kingdom of this world,
the first stage of our liberation from monastic fetters.
The mere construction of temples was at all times accompanied by so many
mystical rites, allegoric ceremonies, and solemn consecrations, that the
medieval builders ranked themselves as a kind of religious order, as
successors to the builders of Solomon’s temple; and they formed
themselves into secret companies, of which freemasonry was a later
development.
The Renaissance robbed architecture of this essentially mystical note.
The Christian faith began to contend with scepticism, the Gothic spire
with the Greek façade, religious sanctity with worldly beauty. This is
why St. Peter’s at Rome is so significant; in that colossal erection
Christianity is struggling to come alive, the Church turns pagan, and
Michael Angelo uses the walls of the Sistine Chapel to depict Jesus
Christ as a brawny athlete, a Hercules in the flower of youth and
strength.
After this date church architecture fell into utter decadence, till it
became a mere reproduction, in varying proportions, either of St.
Peter’s or of ancient Greek temples. There is one Parthenon at Paris
which is called the Church of the Madeleine, and another at New York,
which is used as the Exchange.
Without faith and without special circumstances, it was hard to build
anything with life about it. All modern churches are misfits and
pretentious anachronisms, like those angular Gothic churches with which
the English ornament their towns and offend every artistic eye.
§4
But the circumstances in which Vitberg drew his plans, his own
personality, and the Emperor’s temperament, all these were quite
exceptional.
The war of 1812 had a profound effect upon men’s minds in Russia, and it
was long after the liberation of Moscow before the general emotion and
excitement subsided. Then foreign events, the taking of Paris, the
history of the Hundred Days, expectations and rumours, Waterloo,
Napoleon on board the _Bellerophon_, mourning for the dead and anxiety
for the living, the returning armies, the warriors restored to their
homes,—all this had a strong effect upon the least susceptible natures.
Now imagine a young man, an artist and a mystic, endowed with creative
power, and also an enthusiast spurred on by current events, by the
Tsar’s challenge, and by his own genius.
Near Moscow, between the Mozhaisk and Kaluga roads, a modest eminence
dominates the whole city. Those are the Sparrow Hills of which I spoke
in my early recollections. They command one of the finest views of all
Moscow. Here it was that Ivan the Terrible, still young and unhardened,
shed tears at the sight of his capital on fire; and here that the priest
Silvester met him and by his stern rebuke changed for twenty years to
come the nature of that monster and man of genius.
Napoleon and his army marched round these hills. There his strength was
broken, and there his retreat began. What better site for a temple in
memory of 1812 than the farthest point reached by the enemy?
But this was not enough. It was Vitberg’s intention to convert the hill
itself into the lowest part of the cathedral, to build a colonnade to
the river, and then, on a foundation laid on three sides by nature
herself, to erect a second and a third church. But all the three
churches made one; for Vitberg’s cathedral, like the chief dogma of
Christianity, was both triple and indivisible.
The lowest of the three churches, hewn in the rock, was a parallelogram
in the shape of a coffin or dead body. All that was visible was a
massive entrance supported on columns of almost Egyptian size; the
church itself was hidden in the primitive unworked rock. It was lighted
by lamps in high Etruscan candelabra; a feeble ray of daylight from the
second church passed into it through a transparent picture of the
Nativity. All the heroes who fell in 1812 were to rest in this crypt; a
perpetual mass was to be said there for those who had fallen on the
field of battle; and the names of them all, from the chief commanders to
the private soldiers, were to be engraved on the walls.
On the top of this coffin or cemetery rose the second church, in the
form of a Greek cross with limbs of equal length spreading to the four
quarters, a temple of life, of suffering, of labour. The colonnade which
led up to it was adorned with statues of the Patriarchs and Judges. At
the entrance were the Prophets; they stood outside the church, pointing
out the way which they could not tread themselves. Inside this temple
the Gospel story and the Acts of the Apostles were represented on the
walls.
Above this building, crowning it, completing it, and including it, the
third church was to be built in the shape of the Pantheon. It was
brightly lighted, as the home of the Spirit, of unbroken peace, of
eternity; and eternity was represented by its shape. Here there were no
pictures or sculpture; but there was an exterior frieze representing the
archangels, and the whole was surmounted by a colossal dome.
Sad is my present recollection of Vitberg’s main idea; he had worked it
out in every detail, in complete accordance at every point with
Christian theology and architectural beauty.
This astonishing man spent a whole lifetime over his conception. It was
his sole occupation during the ten years that his trial lasted; in
poverty and exile, he devoted several hours of each day to his
cathedral. He lived in it; he could not believe that it would never be
built; his whole life—his memories, his consolations, his fame—was
wrapped up in that portfolio.
It may be that in the future, when the martyr is dead, some later artist
may shake the dust from those leaves and piously give to the world that
record of suffering, those plans over which the strong man, after his
brief hour of glory had gone out, spent a life of darkness and pain.
His plan was full of genius, and startling in its extravagance; for this
reason Alexander chose it, and for this reason it should have been
carried out. It is said that the hill could never have supported such a
building; but I do not believe it, especially in view of all the modern
triumphs of engineering in America and England, those suspension-bridges
and tunnels which a train takes eight minutes to pass through.
Milorádovitch advised Vitberg to have granite monoliths for the great
pillars of the lowest church. Someone pointed out that the process of
bringing these from Finland would be very costly. “That is the very
reason why we should get them,” answered Milorádovitch; “if there were
granite quarries on the Moscow River, where would be the wonder in
erecting the pillars?”
Milorádovitch was a soldier, but he understood the element of romance in
war and in other things. Magnificent ends are gained by magnificent
means. Nature alone attains to greatness without effort.
The chief accusation brought against Vitberg, even by those who never
doubted his honesty, was this, that he had accepted the post of director
of the works. As an artist without experience, and a young man ignorant
of finance, he should have been content with his position as architect.
This is true.
It is easy to sit in one’s chair and condemn Vitberg for this. But he
accepted the post just because he was young and inexperienced, because
nothing seemed hard when once his plans had been accepted, because the
Tsar himself offered him the post, encouraged him, and supported him.
Whose head would not have been turned? Where are these sober, sensible,
self-controlled people? If they exist, they are not capable of
constructing colossal plans, they cannot make stones speak.
§5
As a matter of course, Vitberg was soon surrounded by a swarm of
rascals, men who look on state employment merely as a lucky chance to
line their own pockets. It is easy to understand that such men would
undermine Vitberg and set traps for him; yet he might have climbed out
of these but for something else—had not envy in some quarters, and
injured dignity in others, been added to general dishonesty.
There were three other members of the commission as well as Vitberg—the
Archbishop Philaret, the Governor of Moscow, and Kushnikov, a Judge of
the Supreme Court; and all three resented from the first the presence of
this “whipper-snapper,” who actually ventured to state his objections
and insist on his own opinions.
They helped others to entangle and defame him, and then they destroyed
him without a qualm.
Two events contributed to this catastrophe, the fall of the Minister,
Prince A. N. Golitsyn, and then the death of Alexander.
The Minister’s fall dragged Vitberg down with it. He felt the full
weight of that disaster: the Commission complained, the Archbishop was
offended, the Governor was dissatisfied. His replies were called
insolent—insolence was one of the main charges brought against him on
his trial—and it was said that his subordinates stole—as if there was a
single person in the public service in Russia who refrains from
stealing! It is possible, indeed, that his agents stole more than usual;
for he was quite inexperienced in the management of reformatories or the
detection of highly placed thieves.
Alexander ordered Arakchéyev to investigate the affair. He himself was
sorry for Vitberg and sent a message to say that he was convinced of the
architect’s honesty.
But Alexander died and Arakchéyev fell. Under Nicholas, Vitberg’s affair
at once assumed a more threatening aspect. It dragged on for ten years,
and the absurdity of the proceedings is incredible. The Supreme Court
dismissed charges taken as proved by the Criminal Court, and charged him
with guilt of which he had been acquitted; the committee of ministers
found him guilty on all the charges; and the Emperor Nicholas added to
the original sentence banishment to Vyatka.
So Vitberg was banished, having been discharged from the public service
“for abusing the confidence of the Emperor Alexander and for squandering
the revenues of the Crown.” A claim was brought against him for a
million _roubles_—I think that was the sum; all his property was seized
and sold by auction, and a report was spread that he had transferred an
immense sum of money to America.
I lived for two years in the same house with Vitberg and kept up
constant relations with him till I left Vyatka. He had not saved even
enough for his daily bread, and his family lived in the direst poverty.
§6
In order to throw light on this trial and all similar trials in Russia,
I shall add two trifling details.
Vitberg bought a forest for building material from a merchant named
Lobanov, but, before the trees were felled, offered to take another
forest instead which was nearer the river and belonged to the same
owner. Lobanov agreed; the trees were felled and the timber floated down
the river. More timber was needed at a later date, and Vitberg bought
the first forest over again. Hence arose the famous charge that he had
paid twice over for the same timber. The unfortunate Lobanov was put in
prison on this charge and died there.
§7
Of the second affair I was myself an eye-witness.
Vitberg bought up land with a view to his cathedral. His idea was that
the serfs, when transferred with the land he had bought, should bind
themselves to supply a fixed number of workmen to be employed on the
cathedral; in this way they acquired complete freedom from all other
burdens for themselves and their community. It is amusing to note that
our judges, being also landowners, objected to this measure as a form of
slavery!
One estate which Vitberg wished to buy belonged to my father. It lay on
the bank of the Moscow River; stone had been found there, and Vitberg
got leave from my father to make a geological inspection, in order to
determine how much stone there was. After obtaining leave, Vitberg had
to go off to Petersburg.
Three months later my father learned that the quarrying operations were
being carried out on a great scale, and that the peasants’ cornfields
were buried under blocks of stone. His protests were not listened to,
and he went to law. There was a stubborn contest. The defendants tried
at first to throw all the blame on Vitberg, but, unfortunately for them,
it turned out that he had given no orders whatever, and that the
Commission had done the whole thing during his absence.
The case was referred to the Supreme Court, which surprised everyone by
coming to a fairly reasonable decision. The stone which had been
quarried was to belong to the landowner, as compensation for the injury
to his fields; the Crown funds spent on the work were to be repaid, to
the amount of 100,000 _roubles_, by those who had signed the contract
for the work. The signatories were Prince Golitsyn, the Archbishop, and
Kushnikov. Of course there was a great outcry, and the matter was
referred to the Tsar.
The Tsar ordered that the payment should not be exacted, because—as he
wrote with his own hand—“the members of the Commission did not know what
they were signing”! This is actually printed in the journals of the
Supreme Court. Even if the Archbishop was bound by his cloth to display
humility, what are we to think of the other two magnates who accepted
the Tsar’s generosity under such conditions?
But where was the money to be found? Crown property, we are told, can
neither be burnt by fire nor drowned in water—it can only be stolen, we
might add. Without hesitation a general of the Staff was sent in haste
to Moscow to clear matters up.
He did so, restored order, and settled everything in the course of a few
days. The stone was to be taken from the landowner, to defray the
expenses of the quarry, though, if the landowner wished to keep the
stone, he might do so on payment of 100,000 _roubles_. The landowner was
not to receive special compensation, because the value of his property
had been increased by the discovery of a new source of wealth (that is
really a noble touch!)—but a certain law of Peter the Great’s sanctioned
the payment of so many _kopecks_ an acre for the damage done to the
peasants’ fields.
The real sufferer was my father. It is hardly necessary to add that this
business of the stone quarry figured after all among the charges brought
against Vitberg at his trial.
§8
Vitberg had been living in exile at Vyatka for two years when the
merchants of the town determined to build a new church.
Their plans surprised the Tsar Nicholas when they were submitted to him.
He confirmed them and gave orders to the local authorities that the
builders were not to mar the architect’s design.
“Who made these plans?” he asked of the minister.
“Vitberg, Your Majesty.”
“Do you mean the same Vitberg?”
“The same man, Your Majesty.”
And so it happened that Vitberg, most unexpectedly, got permission to
return to Moscow or Petersburg. When he asked leave to clear his
character, it was refused; but when he made skilful plans for a church,
the Tsar ordered his restoration—as if there had ever been a doubt of
his artistic capacity!
In Petersburg, where he was starving for bread, he made a last attempt
to defend his honour. It was a complete failure. He applied to Prince A.
N. Golitsyn; but the Prince thought it impossible to open the question
again, and advised Vitberg to address a humble petition for pecuniary
assistance to the Crown Prince. He said that Zhukovski and himself would
interest themselves in the matter, and held out hopes of a gift of 1,000
_roubles_.
Vitberg refused.
I visited Petersburg for the last time at the beginning of winter in
1846, and there I saw Vitberg. He was quite a wreck; even his wrath
against his enemies, which I had admired so much in former days, had
begun to cool down; he had ceased to hope and was making no endeavour to
escape from his position; a calm despair was making an end of him; he
was breaking up altogether and only waiting for death.
Whether the sufferer is still living, I do not know, but I doubt it.
“But for my children,” he said to me at parting, “I would tear myself
away from Russia and beg my bread over the world; wearing my Cross of
Vladímir, I would hold out calmly to the passer-by that hand which the
Tsar Alexander grasped, and tell him of my great design and the fate of
an artist in Russia.”
“Poor martyr,” thought I, “Europe shall learn your fate—I promise you
that.”
§9
My intimacy with Vitberg was a great relief to me at Vyatka. His serious
simplicity and a certain solemnity of manner suggested the churchman to
some extent. Strict in his principles, he tended in general to austerity
rather than enjoyment; but this strictness took nothing from the
luxuriance and richness of his artistic fancy. He could invest his
mystical views with such lively forms and such beautiful colouring that
objections died on your lips, and you felt reluctant to examine and pull
to pieces the glimmering forms and shadowy pictures of his imagination.
His mysticism was partly due to his Scandinavian blood. It was the same
play of fancy combined with cool reflection which we see in
Swedenborg;[106] and that in its turn resembles the fiery reflection of
the sun’s rays when they fall on the ice-covered mountains and snows of
Norway.
Footnote 106:
Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish mystic and founder of a
sect.
Though I was shaken for a time by Vitberg’s influence, my positive turn
of mind held its own nevertheless. It was not my destiny to be carried
up to the third heaven; I was born to inhabit earth alone. Tables never
turn at my touch, rings never quiver when I look at them. The daylight
of thought is my element, not the moonlight of imagination.
But I was more inclined to the mystical standpoint when I lived with
Vitberg than at any other period of my life.
There was much to support Vitberg’s influence—the loneliness of exile,
the strained and pietistic tone of the letters I received from home, the
love which was mastering my whole being with ever increasing power, and
an oppressive feeling of remorse for my own misconduct.[107]
Footnote 107:
He refers to an intrigue he was carrying on at Vyatka.
Two years later I was again influenced by ideas partly religious and
partly socialistic, which I took from the Gospel and from Rousseau; my
position was that of some French thinkers, such as Pierre Leroux.[108]
Footnote 108:
A French publicist and disciple of Saint Simon, 1797-1871.
My friend Ogaryóv plunged even before I did into the waves of mysticism.
In 1833 he began to write a libretto for Gebel’s oratorio of _Paradise
Lost_; and he wrote to me that the whole history of humanity was
included in that poem! It appears therefore that he then considered the
paradise of his aspirations to have existed already and disappeared from
view.
In 1838 I wrote from this point of view some historical scenes which I
supposed at the time to be dramatic. They were in verse. In one I
represented the strife between Christianity and the ancient world, and
told how St. Paul, when entering Rome, raised a young man from the dead
to enter on a new life. Another described the contest of the Quakers
against the Church of England, and the departure of William Penn for
America.
The mysticism of the Gospel soon gave way in my mind to the mysticism of
science; but I was fortunate enough to escape from the latter as well in
course of time.
§10
But now I must go back to the modest little town which was called
Chlynov until Catherine II changed its name to Vyatka; what her motive
was, I do not know, unless it was her Finnish patriotism.
In that dreary distant backwater of exile, separated from all I loved,
surrounded by the unclean horde of officials, and exposed without
defence to the tyranny of the Governor, I met nevertheless with many
warm hearts and friendly hands, and there I spent many happy hours which
are sacred in recollection.
Where are you now, and how are you, my snowbound friends? It is twenty
years since we met. I suppose you have grown old, as I have; you are
thinking about marrying your daughters, and have given up drinking
champagne by the bottle and tossing off bumpers of vodka. Which of you
has made a fortune, and which has lost it? Which has risen high in the
official world, and which is laid low by the palsy? Above all, do you
still keep alive the memory of our free discussions? Do those chords
still resound that were struck so vigorously by our common friendship
and our common resentment?
I am unchanged, as you know, for I suspect that rumour flies from the
banks of the Thames as far as you. I think of you sometimes, and always
with affection. I have kept some letters of those former days, and some
of them I regard as treasures and love to read over again.
“I am not ashamed to confess to you,” writes one young friend on January
26, 1838, “that my heart is full of bitterness. Help me for the sake of
that life to which you summoned me; help me with your advice. I want to
learn; make me a list of books, lay down any programme you like; I will
work my hardest, if you will point the way. It would be sinful of you to
discourage me.”
“I bless you,” another wrote to me just after I had left Vyatka, “as the
husbandman blesses the rain which gives life to his unfertilized field.”
I copy out these lines, not from vanity, but because they are very
precious to me. This appeal to young hearts and their generous reply,
and the unrest I was able to awaken in them—this is my compensation for
nine months spent in prison and three years at Vyatka.
§11
There is one thing more. Twice a week the post from Moscow came to
Vyatka. With what excitement I waited near the post-office while the
letters were sorted! How my heart beat as I broke the seal of my letter
from home and searched inside for a little enclosure, written on thin
paper in a wonderfully small and beautiful hand!
I did not read that in the post-office. I walked slowly home, putting
off the happy moment and feasting on the thought that the letter was
there.
These letters have all been preserved. I left them at Moscow when I
quitted Russia. Though I longed to read them over, I was afraid to touch
them.
Letters are more than recollections, the very life blood of the past is
stored up in them; they _are_ the past, exactly as it was, preserved
from destruction and decay.
Is it really necessary once again to know, to see, to touch with hands
which age has covered with wrinkles, what once you wore on your
wedding-day?[109]
Footnote 109:
These letters were from Herzen’s cousin, Natálya Zakhárin, who became
his wife in 1838.
------------------------------------------------------------------------