freedom, nothing of frank speech. They bore on their countenances deep
traces of a soul roughly handled and wounded. Every one of them had some
special neurosis, and apart from that special neurosis they all had one
in common, a sort of devouring, irritable, and distorted vanity. The
denial of every right, the insults, the humiliations they had endured
developed a secret craving for admiration; these undeveloped prodigies,
these unsuccessful geniuses, concealed themselves under a mask of
humility and modesty. All of them were hypochondriacs and physically ill,
did not drink wine, and were afraid of open windows; all looked with
studied despair at the present, and reminded one of monks who from love
for their neighbour came to hating all humanity, and cursed everything in
the world from desire to bless something.
One half of them were continually remorseful, the other half continually
damning and denouncing.
Yes, the iron had entered deeply into their souls. The Petersburg world
in which they had lived was imprinted on themselves; it was thence
they took their restless tone, their language—_saccadé_, yet suddenly
passing into bureaucratic vapidity—their elusive meekness and haughty
fault-finding, their intentional frigidity and readiness on any occasion
to break out into abuse, the insulting way in which they scorned to
justify themselves, and the uneasy intolerance of the director of a
department.
This tone of a director’s reprimand, uttered contemptuously with eyes
screwed up, is more hateful to us than the husky shout of the general,
like the deep bark of an old dog, who growls in deference to his social
position rather than from spite.
Tone is not a matter of no importance.
_Das war innen—das ist draussen!_
Extremely kind at heart and noble in theory, they, I mean our embittered
people, may drive an angel to fighting and a saint to cursing by their
tone. Moreover, they exaggerate everything in the world with such
_aplomb_—and not to amuse but to wound—that there is simply no bearing
it. To every criticism, to every censure, they are always ready to add
gloomier details. ‘Why do you defend these sluggards (an embittered
friend, _sehr ausgezeichnet in seinem Fache_, said to us lately), drones,
cumberers of the earth, white-handed laggards _à la Onyegin_?... They
were formed differently, if you please, and the world surrounding them
was too dirty for them, not polished enough; they will dirty their hands,
they will dirty their feet. It was much nicer to go on moaning over their
miserable position, at the same time eating and drinking in comfort.’
We put in a word for our classification of the superfluous people into
those of the Old Dispensation and those of the New. But our Daniel
would not hear of a distinction: he would have nothing to say to the
Oblomovs nor to the fact that Nicholas cast in bronze had been gathered
to his fathers, and just for that reason had been cast in bronze. On the
contrary, he attacked us for our defence and, shrugging his shoulders,
said that he looked upon us as on the fine skeleton of a mammoth, as at
an interesting bone that had been dug up and belonged to a different
world with a different sun and different trees.
‘Allow me on that ground and in the character of a _Homo Benkendorfii
testis_ to defend our contemporaries. Surely you do not really imagine
that these men did nothing, or did something silly of their own choice?’
‘Most certainly; they were romantics and aristocrats; they hated work,
they would have thought themselves degraded if they had taken up an axe
or an awl, and it is true they would not have known how to use them.’
‘In that case I will quote names: for instance, Tchaadayev. He did
not know how to use an axe, but he knew how to write an article which
thrilled all Russia, and was a turning-point in our understanding of
ourselves. That article was his first step in the literary career. You
know what came of it. The German Vigel took offence on behalf of Russia,
the Protestant and future Catholic Benkendorf took offence on behalf
of orthodoxy, and, by the falsehood of the Most High, Tchaadayev was
declared mad and forced to sign an undertaking not to write. Nadyezhdin,
who published the article in the _Telescope_, was sent to Ust Sysolsk;
the old rector Boldyryev was dismissed: Tchaadayev was turned into an
idle man. Granting that Ivan Kireyevsky could not make boots, yet he
could publish a magazine; he published two numbers, the magazine was
forbidden; he contributed an article to the _Dennitsa_, and the censor,
Glinka, was put in custody: Kireyevsky was turned into a superfluous
man. N. Polevoy cannot, of course, be charged with idleness; he was a
resourceful man, and yet the wings of the _Telegraph_ were clipped, and,
I confess in my weakness, when I read how Polevoy told Panayev that he,
as a married man, handicapped by a family, was afraid of the police, I
did not laugh, but almost cried.’
‘But Byelinsky could write and Granovsky could give lectures; they did
not sit idle.’
‘If there were men of such energy that they could write and give lectures
in sight of the police-chaise and the fortress, is it not clear that
there were many others of less strength, who were paralysed and suffered
deeply from it?’
‘Why did they not take to making boots or splitting logs—it would have
been better than nothing?’
‘Probably because they had money enough not to be obliged to do such
dull work; I have never heard of anyone taking to cobbling for pleasure.
Louis XVI. is the only example of a king by trade and a carpenter by
inclination. However, you are not the first to observe this lack of
practical work in these superfluous men; to correct it, our watchful
Government sent them to hard labour.’
‘My antediluvian friend, I see that you still look down upon work.’
‘As on a far from entertaining necessity.’
‘Why should they not have taken their share of the general necessity?’
‘No doubt they should, but in the first place they were born, not in
North America, but in Russia, and unluckily were not brought up to it.’
‘Why were they not brought up to it?’
‘Because they were born, not in the tax-paying classes of Russia, but
in the gentry; perhaps that really is reprehensible, but, being at that
period in the inexperienced position of unborn infants, they cannot,
owing to their tender years, be held responsible for their conduct. And
having once made this mistake in the choice of their parents, they were
bound to submit to the education of the day. And by the way, what right
have you to demand of men that they should do one thing or another? This
is some new compulsory organisation of labour; something in the style of
socialism adapted to the methods of the Ministry of Crown Estates.’
‘I don’t compel any one to work; I simply state the fact that they were
idle, worthless aristocrats, who led an easy and comfortable life, and I
see no reason for sympathising with them.’
‘Whether they deserve sympathy or not, let every one decide for himself.
Every human suffering, especially if it is inevitable, awakens our
sympathy. And there is no sort of suffering to which one could refuse it.
The martyrs of the early centuries of Christendom believed in redemption.
They believed in a future life. The Roman Muhanovs, Timashevs, and
Luzhins compelled the Christians to bow down in the dust before the
august image of the Caesar; the Christians would not make this trivial
concession, they were thrown to the beasts in the arena. They were mad,
the Romans were half-witted, there is no place here for sympathy or
admiration.... But if so, farewell, not only to Thermopylae and Golgotha,
but also to Sophocles and Shakespeare, and incidentally the whole long
and endless epic poem which is continually ending in frenzied tragedies
and continually going on again under the title of history.’
As is usual in argument, our Daniel did not give in. I began to be tired
of it and, taking advantage of my palaeontological importance, said to
him: ‘Have it your own way, but you know it is a silly business pitching
into people who are either dead or not far off dying, and to pitch into
them in a society where almost all the living—military and civilian,
landowners and priests—are worse than they are; I tell you what, if you
are so particularly attracted by _censura morum_, are so fond of the
harsh duty of a moralist, do pick out something original. If you like, I
can pick you out types more pernicious than any superfluous persons, dead
or living.’
‘What types?’
‘Well, the literary ruffian, for instance.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘In our pale literature, maltreated by the censorship, there have been
numbers of queer fishes of all sorts, but until lately they were for
the most part clean, honest men. If there were any of the mercenary,
the disingenuous, the dealers in false coin and genuine police reports,
they were either on the side of the Government, or they scuttled about
underground and never crawled into conspicuous places, like the London
black beetles, which confine themselves to the kitchen and do not appear
in the drawing-room. And so we have preserved a naïve faith in the poet
and the writer. We are not used to the thought that it is possible to lie
in the spirit and trade in talents, as prostitutes delude with the body
and sell their beauty. We are not used to the money-grubbers who make
profit out of their tears over the people’s sufferings, or the traders
who turn their sympathy for the proletariat into a well-paid article.
And there is a great deal that is good in this confidence, which has not
existed for years in Western Europe, and we ought all to try and maintain
it. Believe me, that the man who denounces duplicity, crying shame and
curses upon the disgrace and decay of to-day, and at the same time locks
up in his cash-box money evidently stolen from his friends, is in the
present ferment of ideas, with our looseness and impressionability, more
pernicious and contaminating than all the idle and superfluous people,
all the embittered and the lachrymose!’
I do not know whether my Daniel agreed.
PRINCESS EKATERINA ROMANOVNA DASHKOV
‘I very much wish,’ Miss Katharine Wilmot writes to her relations in
Ireland, from the Princess Dashkov’s country estate, ‘that you could see
the Princess herself. Everything about her—dress, language, everything—is
original; whatever she does, she is absolutely unlike any one else. It is
not only that I have never seen such a creature, I have never even heard
of one. She teaches the masons how to build walls, helps make the paths,
goes to feed the cows, composes music, writes articles for the Press,
knows the Church ritual perfectly and corrects the priest if he makes a
mistake in the prayers, understands the theatre perfectly and corrects
her serf-actors when they go wrong in their parts; she is a doctor, a
chemist, a sick-nurse, a blacksmith, a carpenter, a judge, a legislator;
every day she does the most opposite things in the world, and carries on
a correspondence with her brother, who holds one of the foremost posts
in the Empire, with savants, with literary men, with Jews, with her son,
and with all her relations. Her conversation, charming in its simplicity,
sometimes borders upon childlike _naïveté_. Without stopping to think
she speaks at once French, Italian, Russian, and English, mixing all the
languages together.
‘She was born to be a minister or a general, her place is at the head of
a State.’
All that is true, but Miss Wilmot forgets that, in addition to all that,
Princess Dashkov was born a woman, and remained a woman all her life. She
was exceptionally developed on the side of the heart, of tenderness, of
feeling, of devotion.
For us that is particularly important. In Princess Dashkov the Russian
woman, awakened by the revolution made by Peter the Great, emerges from
her seclusion, displays her capacity, demands her share in politics, in
science, in the civilisation of Russia, and boldly takes her stand beside
Catherine the Great.
In Princess Dashkov we are conscious of that force, still formless, which
was struggling into life and freedom from under the mildew of Moscow
stagnation, something powerful, many-sided, active, something of Peter
the Great and of Lomonossov, but softened by aristocratic breeding and
womanliness.
Catherine II., in making her President of the Academy, recognised the
political equality of the sexes, which is perfectly consistent in a
country which accepted the civic equality of woman before the law,
while in Western Europe they still remain bound to their husbands or in
perpetual tutelage.
The memoirs of a woman who took a foremost part in the _coup d’état_ of
1762, and who was a close witness of all the events from the death of
Elizabeth to the Peace of Tilsit, are exceedingly important in Russian
history, so poor in striking individualities; they are the more so as we
know very little of our eighteenth century. We like to go much further
back in history. We see the Varangians, the men of Novgorod, and the men
of Kiev, and they block out our view of yesterday; the turreted walls of
the Kremlin screen the flat lines of the Peter-Paul fortress from us.
Going carefully through the royal records, we know little of what was
being written in bad Russian in the Government offices of Petersburg,
while sedition and tumult were roaring under the windows of the Winter
Palace, menacing its inhabitants with Siberia and death, and the throne
had not yet the strength and security which it gained not more than
seventy-five years ago. To repeat the story of that period is very
profitable, both for the Government, that it may not forget, and for us,
that we may not despair.
I should like, however briefly, to explain what I mean.
All Europe and, what is far worse, all Russians accept the power of the
Tsar in its present form as an eternal and immutable element of Russian
life, which has the right to jeer at all rash assaults on it and boldly
withstands every onslaught, resting firmly and securely on roots that
spread far into the earth.
The power of the Tsar has, on the contrary, been firmly established
only very recently. Even to this day it carries the traces of its
revolutionary origin; in it, as in the strata of the earth, the granite
of ancient times, the alluvial sands, the fragments casually brought
down from above, or thrust up from below, in places tightly compressed
together, but not chemically united, are mingled chaotically to this day.
The Byzantine necklet of Monomah, the throne of the Tsar Ivan the
Terrible, the Uspensky Cathedral, lead us astray. Did not Napoleon array
himself in the mantle of Charlemagne and put the iron crown on his head
at Milan? That is all forgery in the style of Chatterton; the venerated
emblems of what is old and past are borrowed to invest the new with
respect, and to persuade us of its durability, of its eternity, so to
speak.
The Russian Imperial autocracy developed from the power of the Tsar
in response to the acute need for a different manner of life. It is
a military and civil dictatorship with far more resemblance to the
Caesarism of Rome than to a feudal monarchy. A dictatorship may be very
strong and may absorb every power, but it cannot be permanent. It exists
so long as the circumstances that have called it forth remain unaltered
and so long as it is true to its destiny.
Of course, when, on landing from a steamer, one meets a freshly
pipe-clayed, spick-and-span regiment of Guards, an unquestioning
bureaucracy, galloping couriers, motionless sentinels, Cossacks with
whips, policemen with fists, half the town in uniform, half the town
standing at attention, and the whole town hurriedly taking off its
hat, and when one reflects that they are all deprived of every kind of
independence, and simply acting as the fingers, teeth, and nails of
one man who combines in his own person every form of authority—that of
landowner, priest and executioner, mother and sergeant—one may turn
giddy, be terrified, perhaps feel moved to take off one’s hat oneself,
and to bow down while one’s head is still on one’s shoulders. And it may
even more forcibly make one wish to return to the steamer and sail away
elsewhere. All that is so, and all that (except the last item) was felt
by the worthy Westphalian baron, Haxthausen.
The Tsardom acquired this grimly gloomy, oppressive aspect of brute force
especially in the thirty years of the reign of Nicholas; terrorism was
with him a principle. But here we cannot avoid asking why Nicholas could
not, in the course of those thirty years, forget the ‘bad quarters of an
hour’ he spent during the defence of the Winter Palace on the 14th of
December 1825. Why was it that he remembered that day on his deathbed and
sent his thanks to the Guards for it?
It was because from the very beginning of his reign he grasped that his
throne was only strong through _force_. By force alone he maintained his
position, but he felt that there was no lasting security in bayonets
and physical oppression; and he was seeking other means of support. The
allies to which he turned his attention could be relied upon; beside
autocracy he set orthodoxy and nationalism. But this was a reaction
against the movement inaugurated by Peter the Great, the whole gist of
which lay in the secularisation of the Tsardom and the diffusion of
European culture. Nicholas stood in direct contradiction to the living
principle of the Tsardom as it had been from the time of Peter the
Great, and so there is nothing surprising in the fact that the immediate
result of his reign was a dumb breach between him and Russia. If he
had lived another ten years, his throne would have collapsed of itself;
everything was ceasing to work, everything had grown slack and begun to
wilt; the spirit had gone out of everything, the irregularities of the
administration had reached monstrous proportions. He understood that, had
he followed Alexander’s lead, he would inevitably have had to replace the
autocratic power by more humane forms of government, but this he would
not do, and he imagined that he was so far independent of the principles
of Peter the Great that he could be another Peter without them.
He would have succeeded perhaps if the revolution wrought by Peter had
really been, as Moscow Old Believers hold, the consequence of personal
will and the caprice of genius. But it was not at all a matter of chance,
it came in response to the instinctive craving of Russia to develop its
forces. How else can its success be explained?
The political development of Russia moved slowly and was very late in
coming. Russia lived from hand to mouth and, harried by Tatars, with
difficulty gathered herself together into the ikon-like Suzdal-Byzantine
kingdom of Muscovy; its political forms were clumsy and coarse,
everything moved awkwardly, apathetically. The power of the Tsar was
insufficient even for the defence of the country, and in 1612 Russia was
saved without the help of the Tsar. And meanwhile something, that speaks
to this day in the heart of every one of us, whispered that there was an
immense vigour and strength under the old-fashioned burdensome garments.
That something is youth, self-confidence, consciousness of strength.
The abrupt break with the old order wounded—yet pleased; the people liked
Peter the Great; they put him into their legends and their fairy tales.
It was as though the Russians divined that at all costs our sloth must
be broken up and our slackness be braced by a strong political order. The
inhuman discipline of Peter the Great, and of such of his successors as
Bühren, aroused, of course, horror and loathing, but all that was borne
with for the sake of the wide horizons of the new life. It was just as
the Terror was endured in France.
The period initiated by Peter the Great was from the first more national
than the period of the Muscovite Tsars. It has entered deeply into our
history, into our manners, into our flesh and blood; there is something
in it youthful and extraordinarily akin to us; the revolting mixture
of barrack-room insolence and Austrian red-tape is not its chief
characteristic. With that period the precious memories of our mighty
growth, our glory, and our misfortunes are bound up; it has kept its word
and created a powerful State. The people love success and strength.
One side of its ideal was accomplished when, in Paris, Alexander dictated
the laws for all Europe. What was the next step? To go back again to
the period before 1700, and combine a military despotism with a Tsardom
bereft of everything human. This was what was desired by Nicholas and a
dozen crazy Slavophils—and nobody else.
If the people hate the alien German Government, which fully deserves it,
it does not follow that it loved the Muscovite rule; it forgot it in one
generation and knows absolutely nothing about it.
After Peter the Great what hindered the return to the period that was
only just over? The whole Petersburg system was hanging on a thread.
Drunken and dissolute women, dull-witted princes who could scarcely speak
Russian, German women and children, ascended the throne, and descended
from it; the palace became the nearest way to Siberia and prison; the
Government was in the hands of a handful of intriguers and _condottieri_.
Yet through all this chaos we see no special desire to return to the
earlier period. On the contrary, what remains constant through all
these convulsive changes, what develops in spite of them and gives them
a striking unity, is precisely the fidelity to the ideas of Peter the
Great. One party overthrows another, taking advantage of the fact that
the new _régime_ is not yet in working order; but whoever gained the
day, no one touched the principles of Peter the Great, but all accepted
them—Menshikov and Bühren, Minih and even the Dolgorukys, who wanted to
limit the Imperial power, though not by the old Boyar Duma.[50] Elizabeth
and Catherine II. flatter orthodoxy, and flatter nationalism in order to
possess the throne, but, once securely seated on it, they keep to the
same way, Catherine II. more so than any one.
The only opposition to the new order of things after its cruel
installation we see in the unorthodox _raskolniks_ and the passive lack
of sympathy of the peasants. The obstinate grumblings of a few old men
meant nothing. The crushed submission of all the ‘Old Believers’ was
the admission of their impotence. If there had been anything living in
their outlook there would certainly have been attempts, unsuccessful,
impossible, impracticable perhaps, but they would have been made. All
the Anna Leopoldovnas, the Anna Ivanovnas, the Elizabeth Petrovnas and
Catherine Alexyevnas, found bold and devoted men ready to face the block
and prison for their sakes. The Cossacks, faced with ruin, and the
serfs, crushed under the heel of the nobility, had their Pugatchov, and
Pugatchov his two hundred thousand fighting men; the Kirghiz-Kaisaks
moved into China; the Crimean Tatars joined the Turks; Little Russia
murmured loudly; everything injured or crushed by the Autocracy made its
protest, but the Old Russian party in Russia never did. It had neither
voice nor devoted followers, neither a Polubotok nor a Mazeppa![51]
And it was not until one hundred and fifty years after Peter the Great
that it found a representative and a leader, and that representative and
leader was Nicholas. It would have been a calamity if he had, with the
support of Church intolerance and nationalistic sentiment, succeeded in
transforming the Autocracy, and changing it from a dictatorship into a
purely monarchical or imperial government; but that was impossible. As
soon as Nicholas was dead, Russia broke again into the path traced out by
Peter the Great—not in the conquering or martial direction he had given
it, but towards the development of its material and moral powers.
Peter the Great was one of the first of the leading figures of the great
eighteenth century, and he acted in its spirit, he was saturated through
and through with it, like Frederick II. of Prussia, like Joseph II. of
Austria. His revolutionary realism gets the upper hand of his royal
dignity—he is a despot, but not a monarch.