PART II

THE MEMOIRS OF

ALEXANDER

HERZEN

I

NOTE

This translation has been made by

arrangement from the sole complete

and copyright edition of _My Past

and Thoughts_, that published in the

original Russian at Berlin, 1921.

_MY PAST AND THOUGHTS_

THE MEMOIRS OF

ALEXANDER HERZEN

_THE AUTHORISED TRANSLATION_

_TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN

BY CONSTANCE GARNETT_

VOLUME I

[Illustration: [Logo]]

NEW YORK

ALFRED A. KNOPF

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

T. & A. CONSTABLE LTD. EDINBURGH

*

ALL RIGHTS

RESERVED

FIRST PUBLISHED 1924

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

A few words about Herzen’s parentage will make his narrative more

intelligible to the English reader. Herzen’s father, Ivan Yakovlyev, was

a very wealthy nobleman belonging to one of the most aristocratic

families of Russia. In 1811, at the age of forty-two, he married (so

Brückner tells us in his _History of Russian Literature_) at Stuttgart a

girl of sixteen, whose name was Henriette Haag, though she was always in

Russia called Luise Ivanovna, as easier to pronounce. As he neglected to

repeat the marriage ceremony in Russia, their son was there

illegitimate. Yakovlyev is said to have given him the surname Herzen,

because he was the ‘child of his heart.’

CONTENTS

PART I

NURSERY & UNIVERSITY

(1812–1835)

CHAPTER I:—My Nurse and the _Grande Armée_—The Fire of

Moscow—My Father with Napoleon—General Ilovaisky—Travelling

with the French Prisoners—The Patriotism of C. Calot—The

Common Management of the Property—Dividing it—The Senator _page 1_

CHAPTER II:—The Talk of Nurses and of Generals—False

Position—Russian Encyclopaedists—Boredom—The Maids’ Room and

the Servants’ Hall—Two Germans—Lessons and Reading—The

Catechism and the Gospel _page 24_

CHAPTER III:—The Death of Alexander I. and the Fourteenth of

December—Moral Awakening—The Terrorist Bouchot—My Kortcheva

Cousin _page 55_

CHAPTER IV:—Nick and the Sparrow Hills _page 82_

CHAPTER V:—Details of Home Life—Eighteenth-Century People in

Russia—A Day in our House—Visitors and

_Habitués_—Sonnenberg—The Valet and Others _page 93_

CHAPTER VI:—The Kremlin Department—Moscow University—Our

Set—The Chemist—The Malov Affair—The Cholera—Filaret—V.

Passek—General Lissovsky—The Sungurov Affair _page 117_

CHAPTER VII:—The End of My Studies—The Schiller Period—Early

Youth and Bohemianism—Saint-Simonism and N. Polevoy _page 174_

APPENDIX:—A. Polezhaev _page 193_

PART II

PRISON & EXILE

(1834–1838)

CHAPTER VIII:—A Prediction—Ogaryov’s Arrest—A Fire—A Moscow

Liberal—M. F. Orlov—The Graveyard _page 197_

CHAPTER IX:—Arrest—An Impartial Witness—The Office of the

Pretchistensky Police Station—A Patriarchal Judge _page 208_

CHAPTER X:—Under the Watch Tower—The Lisbon Policeman—The

Incendiaries _page 215_

CHAPTER XI:—Krutitsky Barracks—Gendarmes’ Tales—Officers _page 226_

CHAPTER XII:—The Investigation—Golitsyn Senior—Golitsyn

Junior—General Staal—Sokolovsky—Sentence _page 236_

CHAPTER XIII:—Exile—The Mayor at Pokrovo—The Volga—Perm _page 254_

CHAPTER XIV:—Vyatka—The Office and Dining-Room of His

Excellency—K. Y. Tyufyaev _page 273_

CHAPTER XV:—Officials—Siberian Governors-General—A Rapacious

Police-Master—An Accommodating Judge—A Roasted

Police-Captain—A Tatar Missionary—A Boy of the Female

Sex—The Potato Terror, etc. _page 295_

CHAPTER XVI:—Alexander Lavrentyevitch Vitberg _page 327_

CHAPTER XVII:—The Tsarevitch at Vyatka—The Fall of

Tyufyaev—I am transferred to Vladimir—The Police-Captain at

the Posting-Station _page 344_

CHAPTER XVIII:—The Beginning of my Life at Vladimir _page 356_

PART I

NURSERY & UNIVERSITY

(1812–1835)

‘_When memories of the past return

And the old road again we tread,

Slowly the passions of old days

Come back to life within the soul;

Old griefs and joys are here unchanged,

Again the once familiar thrill

Stirs echoes in the troubled heart;

And for remembered woes we sigh._’

OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.

Chapter 1

MY NURSE AND THE _GRANDE ARMÉE_—THE FIRE OF MOSCOW—MY FATHER WITH

NAPOLEON—GENERAL ILOVAISKY—TRAVELLING WITH THE FRENCH PRISONERS—THE

PATRIOTISM OF C. CALOT—THE COMMON MANAGEMENT OF THE PROPERTY—DIVIDING

IT—THE SENATOR

‘Vera Artamonovna, come tell me again how the French came to Moscow,’ I

used to say, rolling myself up in the quilt and stretching in my crib,

which was sewn round with linen that I might not fall out.

‘Oh! what’s the use of telling you, you’ve heard it so many times,

besides it’s time to go to sleep; you had better get up a little earlier

to-morrow,’ the old woman would usually answer, although she was as

eager to repeat her favourite story as I was to hear it.

‘But do tell me a little bit. How did you find out, how did it begin?’

‘This was how it began. You know what your papa is—he is always putting

things off; he was getting ready and getting ready, and much use it was!

Every one was saying “It’s time to set off; it’s time to go; what is

there to wait for, there’s no one left in the town.” But no, Pavel

Ivanovitch[1] and he kept talking of how they would go together, and

first one wasn’t ready and then the other. At last we were packed and

the carriage was ready; the family sat down to lunch, when all at once

our head cook ran into the dining-room as pale as a sheet, and

announced: “The enemy has marched in at the Dragomilovsky Gate.” Our

hearts did sink. “The power of the Cross be with us!” we cried.

Everything was upside down. While we were bustling about, sighing and

groaning, we looked and down the street came galloping dragoons in such

helmets with horses’ tails streaming behind. The gates had all been

closed, and here was your papa left behind for a treat and you with him;

your wet nurse Darya still had you at the breast, you were so weak and

delicate.’

And I smiled with pride, pleased that I had taken part in the war.

‘At the beginning we got along somehow, for the first few days, that is;

it was only that two or three soldiers would come in and ask by signs

whether there was something to drink; we would take them a glass each,

to be sure, and they would go away and touch their caps to us, too. But

then, you see, when fires began and kept getting worse and worse, there

was such disorder, plundering and all sorts of horrors. At that time we

were living in the lodge at the Princess Anna Borissovna’s and the house

caught fire; then Pavel Ivanovitch said, “Come to me, my house is built

of brick, it stands far back in the courtyard and the walls are thick.”

‘So we went, masters and servants all together, there was no difference

made; we went out into the Tverskoy Boulevard and the trees were

beginning to burn—we made our way at last to the Golohvastovs’ house and

it was simply blazing, flames from every window. Pavel Ivanovitch was

dumbfoundered, he could not believe his eyes. Behind the house there is

a big garden, you know; we went into it thinking we should be safe

there. We sat there on the seats grieving, when, all at once, a mob of

drunken soldiers were upon us; one fell on Pavel Ivanovitch, trying to

pull off his travelling coat; the old man would not give it up, the

soldier pulled out his sword and struck him on the face with it so that

he kept the scar to the end of his days; the others set upon us, one

soldier tore you from your nurse, opened your baby-clothes to see if

there were any money-notes or diamonds hidden among them, saw there was

nothing there, and so the scamp purposely tore your clothes and flung

them down. As soon as they had gone away, we were in trouble again. Do

you remember our Platon who was sent for a soldier? He was dreadfully

fond of drink and was very much exhilarated that day; he tied on a sabre

and walked about like that. The day before the enemy entered, Count

Rastoptchin[2] had distributed all sorts of weapons at the arsenal; so

that was how he had got hold of a sabre. Towards the evening he saw a

dragoon ride into the yard; there was a horse standing near the stable,

the dragoon wanted to take it, but Platon rushed headlong at him and,

catching hold of the bridle, said: “The horse is ours, I won’t give it

you.” The dragoon threatened him with a pistol, but we could see it was

not loaded; the master himself saw what was happening and shouted to

Platon: “Let the horse alone, it’s not your business.” But not a bit of

it! Platon pulled out his sabre and struck the man on the head, and he

staggered, and Platon struck him again and again. “Well,” thought we,

“now the hour of our death is come; when his comrades see him, it will

be the end of us.” But when the dragoon fell off, Platon seized him by

the feet and dragged him to a pit full of mortar and threw him in, poor

fellow, although he was still alive; his horse stood there and did not

stir from the place, but stamped its foot on the ground as though it

understood; our servants shut it in the stable; it must have been burnt

there. We all hurried out of the courtyard, the fire was more and more

dreadful; worn out and with nothing to eat, we got into a house that was

still untouched, and flung ourselves down to rest; in less than an hour,

our people were shouting from the street: “Come out, come out! Fire!

Fire!” Then I took a piece of green baize from the billiard table and

wrapped you in it to keep you from the night air; and so we made our way

as far as the Tverskoy Square. There the French were putting the fire

out, because some great man of theirs was living in the governor’s

house; we sat simply in the street; sentries were walking everywhere,

others were riding by on horseback. And you were screaming, straining

yourself with crying, your nurse had no more milk, no one had a bit of

bread. Natalya Konstantinovna was with us then, a wench of spirit, you

know; she saw that some soldiers were eating something in a corner, took

you and went straight to them, showed you and said “_mangé_ for the

little one”; at first they looked at her so sternly and said “_allez,

allez_,” but she fell to scolding them. “Ah, you cursed brutes,” said

she, “you this and that”; the soldiers did not understand a word, but

they burst out laughing and gave her some bread soaked in water for you

and a crust for herself. Early in the morning an officer came up and

gathered together all the men and your papa with them, leaving only the

women and Pavel Ivanovitch who was wounded, and took them to put out the

fire in the houses near by, so we remained alone till evening; we sat

and cried and that was all. When it was dusk, the master came back and

with him an officer....’

Allow me to take the old woman’s place and continue her narrative. When

my father had finished his duties as a fire-brigade man, he met by the

Strastny monastery a squadron of Italian cavalry; he went up to their

officer and told him in Italian the position in which his family was

placed. When the Italian heard _la sua dolce favella_ he promised to

speak to the duc de Trévise,[3] and as a preliminary measure to put a

sentry to guard us and prevent barbarous scenes such as had taken place

in the Golohvastovs’ garden. He sent an officer to accompany my father

with these instructions. Hearing that the whole party had eaten nothing

for two days, the officer led us all to a shop that had been broken

into; the choicest tea and Levant coffee had been thrown about on the

floor, together with a great number of dates, figs, and almonds; our

servants stuffed their pockets full, and had plenty of dessert anyway.

The sentry turned out to be of the greatest use to us: a dozen times

gangs of soldiers began molesting the luckless group of women and

servants encamped in the corner of Tverskoy Square, but they moved off

immediately at his command.

Mortier remembered that he had known my father in Paris and informed

Napoleon; Napoleon ordered him to present himself next morning. In a

shabby, dark blue, short coat with bronze buttons, intended for sporting

wear, without his wig, in high boots that had not been cleaned for

several days, with dirty linen and unshaven chin, my father—who

worshipped decorum and strict etiquette—made his appearance in the

throne room of the Kremlin Palace at the summons of the Emperor of the

French.

Their conversation which I have heard many times is fairly

correctly given in Baron Fain’s[4] _History_ and in that of

Mihailovsky-Danilevsky.

After the usual phrases, abrupt words and laconic remarks, to which a

deep meaning was ascribed for thirty-five years, till men realised that

their meaning was often quite trivial, Napoleon blamed Rastoptchin for

the fire, said that it was Vandalism, declared as usual his invincible

love of peace, maintained that his war was against England and not

against Russia, boasted that he had set a guard on the Foundling

Hospital and the Uspensky Cathedral, complained of Alexander, said that

he was surrounded by bad advisers and that his (Napoleon’s) peaceful

dispositions were not made known to the Emperor.

My father observed that it was rather for a conqueror to make offers of

peace.

‘I have done what I could; I have sent to Kutuzov,[5] he will not enter

into any negotiations and does not bring my offer to the cognizance of

the Tsar. If they want war, it is not my fault—they shall have war.’

After all this comedy, my father asked him for a pass to leave Moscow.

‘I have ordered no passes to be given to any one; why are you going?

What are you afraid of? I have ordered the markets to be opened.’

The Emperor of the French apparently forgot at that moment that, in

addition to open markets, it is as well to have a closed house, and that

life in the Tverskoy Square in the midst of enemy soldiers is anything

but agreeable. My father pointed this out to him; Napoleon thought a

moment and suddenly asked:

‘Will you undertake to convey a letter from me to the Emperor? On that

condition I will command them to give you a permit to leave the town

with all your household.’

‘I would accept your Majesty’s offer,’ my father observed, ‘but it is

difficult for me to guarantee that it will reach him.’

‘Will you give me your word of honour that you will make every effort to

deliver the letter in person?’

‘_Je m’engage sur mon honneur, Sire._’

‘That suffices. I will send for you. Are you in need of anything?’

‘Of a roof for my family while I am here. Nothing else.’

‘The duc de Trévise will do what he can.’

Mortier did, in fact, give us a room in the governor-general’s house,

and gave orders that we should be furnished with provisions; his _maître

d’hôtel_ even sent us wine. A few days passed in this way, after which

Mortier sent an adjutant, at four o’clock one morning, to summon my

father to the Kremlin.

The fire had attained terrific proportions during those days; the

scorched air, murky with smoke, was insufferably hot. Napoleon was

dressed and was walking about the room, looking careworn and out of

temper; he was beginning to feel that his singed laurels would before

long be frozen, and that there would be no escaping here with a jest, as

in Egypt. The plan of the campaign was absurd; except Napoleon,

everybody knew it: Ney, Narbonne, Berthier, and officers of lower rank;

to all objections he had replied with the cabalistic word ‘Moscow’; in

Moscow even he guessed the truth.

When my father went in, Napoleon took a sealed letter that was lying on

the table, handed it to him and said, bowing him out: ‘I rely on your

word of honour.’

On the envelope was written: ‘_A mon frère l’Empereur Alexandre_.’

The permit given to my father was still valid; it was signed by the duc

de Trévise and countersigned by the head police-master Lesseps. A few

outsiders, hearing of our permit, joined us, begging my father to take

them in the guise of servants or relations. An open wagonette was given

us for the wounded old man, my mother and my nurse; the others walked. A

few Uhlans escorted us, on horseback, as far as the Russian rearguard,

on sight of which they wished us a good journey and galloped back.

A minute later the Cossacks surrounded their strange visitors and led

them to the headquarters of the rearguard. There Wintzengerode and

Ilovaisky the Fourth were in command. Wintzengerode, hearing of the

letter, told my father that he would send him on immediately, with two

dragoons, to the Tsar in Petersburg.

‘What’s to be done with your people?’ asked the Cossack general,

Ilovaisky, ‘it is impossible for them to stay here. They are not out of

range of the guns, and something serious may be expected any day.’

My father begged that we should, if possible, be taken to his Yaroslav

estate, but incidentally observed that he had not a kopeck with him.

‘We will settle up afterwards,’ said Ilovaisky, ‘and do not worry

yourself, I give you my word to send them.’

My father was taken by couriers along a road made by laying faggots on

the ground. For us Ilovaisky procured some sort of an old conveyance and

sent us to the nearest town with a party of French prisoners and an

escort of Cossacks; he provided us with money for our expenses until we

reached Yaroslav, and altogether did everything he possibly could in the

turmoil of wartime. Such was my first journey in Russia; my second was

unaccompanied by French Uhlans, Cossacks from the Ural and prisoners of

war—I was alone but for a drunken gendarme sitting by my side.

My father was taken straight to Count Araktcheyev[6] and detained in his

house. The Count asked for the letter, my father told him he had given

his word of honour to deliver it in person; Araktcheyev promised to ask

the Tsar, and, next day, informed him by letter that the Tsar had

charged him to take the letter and to deliver it immediately. He gave a

receipt for the letter (which is still preserved). For a month my father

remained under arrest in Araktcheyev’s house; no one was allowed to see

him except S. S. Shishkov,[7] who came at the Tsar’s command to question

him concerning the details of the fire, of the enemy’s entry into

Moscow, and his interview with Napoleon; he was the first eye-witness to

arrive in Petersburg. At last Araktcheyev informed my father that the

Tsar had ordered his release, and did not hold him to blame for

accepting a permit from the enemy in consideration of the extremity in

which he was placed. On setting him free, Araktcheyev commanded him to

leave Petersburg immediately without seeing anybody except his elder

brother, to whom he was allowed to say good-bye.

On reaching at nightfall the little Yaroslav village my father found us

in a peasants’ hut (he had no house on that estate). I was asleep on a

bench under the window; the window did not close properly, the snow

drifting through the crack, covered part of the bench and lay, not

thawing, on the window-sill.

Every one was in great perturbation, especially my mother. A few days

before my father’s arrival, the village elder and some of the

house-serfs had run hastily in the morning into the hut where she was

living, trying to explain something by gestures and insisting on her

following them. At that time my mother did not speak a word of Russian;

all she could make out was that the matter concerned Pavel Ivanovitch;

she did not know what to think; the idea occurred to her that they had

killed him, or that they meant to kill him and afterwards her. She took

me in her arms, and trembling all over, more dead than alive, followed

the elder. Golohvastov was in another hut, they went into it; the old

man really was lying dead beside the table at which he had been about to

shave; a sudden stroke of paralysis had cut short his life

instantaneously.

My mother’s position may well be imagined (she was then seventeen),

living in a little grimy hut, in the midst of these half-savage bearded

men, dressed in bare sheepskins, and talking in a completely unknown

language; and all this in November of the terrible winter of 1812. Her

one support had been Golohvastov; she wept day and night after his

death. And meanwhile these savages were pitying her from the bottom of

their hearts, showing her all their warm hospitality and good-natured

simplicity; and the village elder sent his son several times to the town

to get raisins, cakes, apples, and bread rings for her.

Fifteen years later the elder was still living and used sometimes, grey

as a kestrel and somewhat bald, to come to us in Moscow. My mother used

specially to regale him with tea and to talk to him about the winter of

1812, saying how she had been so afraid of him and how, without

understanding each other, they had made the arrangements for the funeral

of Pavel Ivanovitch. The old man used still to call my mother—as he had

then—Yuliza Ivanovna, instead of Luise, and used to tell how I was not

at all afraid of his beard and would readily let him take me into his

arms.

From the province of Yaroslav we moved to that of Tver, and at last, a

year later, made our way back to Moscow. By that time my father’s

brother, who had been ambassador to Westphalia and had afterwards gone

on some commission to Bernadotte, had returned from Sweden; he settled

in the same house with us.

I still remember, as in a dream, the traces of the fire, which remained

until early in the ’twenties: great burnt-out houses without window

frames or roofs, tumbledown walls, empty spaces fenced in, with remains

of stoves and chimneys on them.

Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the battle of Borodino, of Beresina, of

the taking of Paris were my cradle-songs, my nursery stories, my Iliad

and my Odyssey. My mother and our servants, my father and Vera

Artamonovna were continually going back to the terrible time which had

impressed them so recently, so intimately, and so acutely. Then the

returning generals and officers began to arrive in Moscow. My father’s

old comrades of the Izmailovsky regiment, now the heroes of a bloody war

scarcely ended, were often at our house. They found relief from their

toils and anxieties in describing them. This was in reality the most

brilliant moment of the Petersburg period; the consciousness of strength

gave new life, all practical affairs and troubles seemed to be put off

till the morrow when work would begin again, now all that was wanted was

to revel in the joys of victory.

From these gentlemen I heard a great deal more about the war than from

Vera Artamonovna. I was particularly fond of the stories told by Count

Miloradovitch[8]; he spoke with the greatest vivacity, with lively

mimicry, with roars of laughter, and more than once I fell asleep, on

the sofa behind him, to the sounds of them.

Of course, in such surroundings, I was a desperate patriot and intended

to go into the army; but an exclusive sentiment of nationality never

leads to any good; it led me to the following incident. Among others who

used to visit us was the Comte de Quinsonas, a French _émigré_ and

lieutenant-general in the Russian service. A desperate royalist, he took

part in the celebrated fête of Versailles, at which the King’s minions

trampled underfoot the revolutionary cockade and at which Marie

Antoinette drank to the destruction of the revolution. This French

count, a tall, thin, graceful old man with grey hair, was the very model

of politeness and elegant manners. There was a peerage awaiting him in

Paris, where he had already been to congratulate Louis XVIII. on getting

his berth. He had returned to Russia to dispose of his estate. Unluckily

for me this most courteous of generals of all the Russian armies began

speaking of the war in my presence.

‘But surely you must have been fighting against us?’ I remarked with

extreme naïveté.

‘_Non, mon petit, non; j’étais dans l’armée russe._’

‘What?’ said I, ‘you, a Frenchman, and fighting in our army!’

My father glanced sternly at me and changed the conversation. The Count

heroically set things right by saying to my father that ‘he liked such

patriotic sentiments.’

My father did not like them, and after the Count had gone away he gave

me a terrible scolding.

‘This is what comes of rushing headlong into conversation about all

sorts of things you don’t understand and can’t understand; it was out of

fidelity to _his_ king that the Count served under _our_ emperor.’

I certainly did not understand that.

My father had spent twelve years abroad and his brother still longer;

they tried to arrange their life in the foreign style while avoiding

great expense and retaining all Russian comforts. Their life never was

so arranged, either because they did not know how to manage or because

the nature of a Russian landowner was stronger in them than their

foreign habits. The management of their land and house was in common,

the estate was undivided, an immense crowd of house-serfs peopled the

lower storeys, and consequently all the conditions conducive to disorder

were present.

Two nurses looked after me, one Russian and one German. Vera Artamonovna

and Madame Proveau were very kind women, but it bored me to watch them

all day long knitting stockings and bickering together, and so on every

favourable opportunity I ran away to the half of the house occupied by

my uncle, the Senator (the one who had been an ambassador), to see my

one friend, his valet Calot.

I have rarely met a kinder, gentler, milder man; utterly alone in

Russia, parted from all his own people, with difficulty speaking broken

Russian, his devotion to me was like a woman’s. I spent whole hours in

his room, worried him, got in his way, did mischief, and he bore it all

with a good-natured smile; cut all sorts of marvels out of cardboard for

me and carved various trifles out of wood (and how I loved him for it!).

In the evenings he used to bring me up picture-books from the

library—the Travels of Gmelin[9] and of Pallas,[10] and a fat book of

_The World in Pictures_, which I liked so much that I looked at it until

the binding, although of leather, gave way; for a couple of hours at a

time, Calot would show me the same pictures, repeating the same

explanation for the thousandth time.

Before my birthday and my name-day Calot would lock himself up in his

room, from which came the sounds of a hammer and other tools; often he

would pass along the corridor with rapid steps, every time locking his

door after him, sometimes carrying a little saucepan of glue, sometimes

a parcel with things wrapped up. It may well be imagined how much I

longed to know what he was making; I used to send the house-serf boys to

try and find out, but Calot kept a sharp look out. We somehow

discovered, on the staircase, a little crack which looked straight into

his room, but it was of no help to us; all we could see was the upper

part of the window and the portrait of Frederick II. with a huge nose

and huge star, and the expression of an emaciated vulture. Two days

before the event the noise would cease and the room would be

opened—everything in it was as usual, except for scraps of coloured and

gold paper here and there; I would flush crimson, devoured with

curiosity, but Calot, with an air of strained gravity, refused to

approach the delicate subject.

I lived in agonies until the momentous day; at five o’clock in the

morning I was awake and thinking of Calot’s preparations; at eight

o’clock he would himself appear in a white cravat, a white waistcoat,

and a dark-blue tail coat—with empty hands. When would it end? Had he

spoiled it? And time passed and the ordinary presents came, and

Elizaveta Alexeyevna Golobvastov’s footman had already appeared with a

costly toy, wrapped up in a napkin, and the Senator had already brought

me some marvel, but the uneasy expectation of the surprise troubled my

joy.

All at once, as it were casually, after dinner or after tea, Nurse would

say to me: ‘Go downstairs just a minute; there is somebody asking for

you.’ At last, I thought, and went down, sliding on my hands down the

banisters of the staircase. The doors into the hall were thrown open

noisily, music was playing. A transparency with my monogram was lighted

up, serf boys dressed up as Turks offered me sweetmeats, then followed a

puppet show or indoor fireworks. Calot, perspiring with his efforts, was

with his own hands setting everything in motion.

What presents could be compared with such an entertainment! I have never

been fond of things, the bump of ownership and acquisitiveness has never

been developed in me at any age, and now, after the prolonged suspense,

the numbers of candles, the tinsel and the smell of gunpowder! Only one

thing was lacking—a comrade of my own age, but I spent all my childhood

in solitude,[11] and certainly was not over-indulged in that respect.

My father and the Senator had another elder brother,[12] between whom

and the two younger brothers there was an open feud, in spite of which

they managed their estate in common or rather ruined it in common. The

triple control and the quarrel together led to glaring disorganisation.

My father and the Senator did everything to thwart the elder brother,

who did the same by them. The village elders and peasants lost their

heads; one brother was demanding wagons; another, hay; a third,

firewood; each gave orders, each sent his authorised agents. The elder

brother would appoint a village elder, the younger ones would remove him

within a month, upon some nonsensical pretext, and appoint another whom

their senior would not recognise. With all this, backbiting, slander,

spies and favourites were naturally plentiful, and under it all the poor

peasants, who found neither justice nor defence, were harassed on all

sides and oppressed with the double burden of work and the impossibility

of carrying out the capricious demands of their owners.

The first consequence of the feud between the brothers that made some

impression upon them, was the loss of their great lawsuit with the

Counts Devier, though justice was on their side. Though their interests

were the same, they could never agree on a course of action; their

opponents naturally profited by this. In addition to the loss of a large

and fine estate, the Senate sentenced each of the brothers to pay costs

and damages to the amount of 30,000 paper roubles. This lesson opened

their eyes and they made up their minds to divide their property. The

preliminary negotiations lasted for about a year, the estate was carved

into three fairly equal parts and they were to decide by casting lots

which was to come to which. The Senator and my father visited their

elder brother, whom they had not seen for several years, to negotiate

and be reconciled; then there was a rumour among us that he would visit

us to complete the arrangements. The rumour of the visit of this elder

brother excited horror and anxiety in our household.

He was one of those grotesquely original creatures who are only possible

in Russia, where life is original to grotesqueness. He was a man gifted

by nature, yet he spent his whole life in absurd actions, often almost

crimes. He had received a fairly good education in the French style, was

very well-read,—and spent his time in debauchery and empty idleness up

to the day of his death. He, too, had served at first in the Izmailovsky

regiment, had been something like an aide-de-camp in attendance on

Potyomkin, then served on some mission, and returning to Petersburg was

made chief prosecutor in the Synod. Neither diplomatic nor monastic

surroundings could restrain his unbridled character. For his quarrels

with the heads of the Church he was removed from his post; for a slap in

the face, which he either tried to give, or gave to a gentleman at an

official dinner at the governor-general’s, he was banished from

Petersburg. He went to his Tambov estate; there the peasants nearly

murdered him for his ferocity and amorous propensities; he was indebted

to his coachman and horses for his life.

After that he settled in Moscow. Deserted by all his relations and also

by his acquaintances, he lived in solitude in his big house in the

Tverskoy Boulevard, oppressing his house-serfs and ruining his peasants.

He amassed a great library of books and collected a regular harem of

serf-girls, both of which he kept under lock and key. Deprived of every

occupation and concealing a passionate vanity, often extremely naïve, he

amused himself by buying unnecessary things, and making still more

unnecessary demands on the peasants, which he exacted with ferocity. His

lawsuit concerning an Amati violin lasted thirty years, and ended in his

losing it. After another lawsuit he succeeded by extraordinary efforts

in winning the wall between two houses, the possession of which was of

no use to him whatever. Being himself on the retired list, he used, on

reading in the newspapers of the promotions of his old colleagues, to

buy such orders as had been given to them, and lay them on his table as

a mournful reminder of the decorations he might have received!

His brothers and sisters were afraid of him and had nothing to do with

him; our servants would go a long way round to avoid his house for fear

of meeting him, and would turn pale at the sight of him; women went in

terror of his impudent persecution, the house-serfs paid for special

services of prayer that they might not come into his possession.

So this was the terrible man who was to visit us. Extraordinary

excitement prevailed throughout the house from early morning; I had

never seen this legendary ‘enemy-brother,’ though I was born in his

house, where my father stayed when he came back from foreign parts; I

longed to see him and at the same time I was frightened, I do not know

why, but I was terribly frightened.

Two hours before his arrival, my father’s eldest nephew, two intimate

acquaintances and a good-natured stout and flabby official who was in

charge of the legal business arrived. They were all sitting in silent

expectation, when suddenly the butler came in, and, in a voice unlike

his own, announced that the brother ‘had graciously pleased to arrive.’

‘Ask him up,’ said the Senator, with perceptible agitation, while my

father took a pinch of snuff, the nephew straightened his cravat, and

the official turned aside and coughed. I was ordered to go upstairs, but

trembling all over, I stayed in the next room.

Slowly and majestically the ‘brother’ advanced, the Senator and my

father rose to meet him. He was holding an ikon with both hands before

his chest, as people do at weddings and funerals, and in a drawling

voice, a little through his nose, he addressed his brothers in the

following words:

‘With this ikon our father blessed me before his end, charging me and

our late brother Pyotr to watch over you and to be a father to you in

his place ... if our father knew of your conduct to your elder

brother!...’

‘Come, _mon cher frère_,’ observed my father in his studiously

indifferent voice, ‘well have you carried out our father’s last wish. It

would be better to forget these memories, painful to you as well as to

us.’

‘How? what?’ shouted the devout brother. ‘Is this what you have summoned

me for ...’ and he flung down the ikon, so that the silver setting gave

a metallic clink.

At this point the Senator shouted in a voice still more terrifying. I

rushed headlong upstairs and only had time to see the official and the

nephew, no less scared, retreating to the balcony.

What was done and how it was done, I cannot say; the frightened servants

huddled into corners out of sight, no one knew anything of what

happened, neither the Senator nor my father ever spoke of this scene

before me. Little by little the noise subsided and the partition of the

estate was carried out, whether then or on another day I do not

remember.

My father received Vassilyevskoe, a big estate in the Ruzsky district,

near Moscow. We spent the whole summer there the following year;

meanwhile the Senator bought himself a house in Arbat, and we returned

to live alone in our great house, deserted and deathlike. Soon

afterwards, my father too bought a house in Old Konyushenny Street.

With the Senator, in the first place, and Calot in the second, all the

lively elements of our household were withdrawn. The Senator alone had

prevented the hypochondriacal disposition of my father from prevailing;

now it had full sway. The new house was gloomy; it was suggestive of a

prison or a hospital; the lower storey was built with pillars supporting

the arched ceiling, the thick walls made the windows look like the

embrasures of a fortress. The house was surrounded on all sides by a

courtyard unnecessarily large.

To tell the truth, it is rather a wonder that the Senator managed to

live so long under the same roof as my father than that they parted. I

have rarely seen two men so complete a contrast as they were.

The Senator was of a kindly disposition, and fond of amusements; he

spent his whole life in the world of artificial light and of official

diplomacy, the world that surrounded the court, without a notion that

there was another more serious world, although he had been not merely in

contact with but intimately connected with all the great events from

1789 to 1815. Count Vorontsov had sent him to Lord Grenville[13] to find

out what General Bonaparte was going to undertake after abandoning the

Egyptian army. He had been in Paris at the coronation of Napoleon. In

1811 Napoleon had ordered him to be detained in Cassel, where he was

ambassador ‘at the court of King Jeremiah,’[14] as my father used to say

in moments of vexation. In fact, he took part in all the great events of

his time, but in a queer way, irregularly.

Though a captain in the Life Guards of the Izmailovsky regiment, he was

sent on a mission to London; Paul, seeing this in the correspondence,

ordered him at once to return to Petersburg. The soldier-diplomat set

off by the first ship and appeared before the Tsar. ‘Do you want to

remain in London?’ Paul asked in his hoarse voice. ‘If it should please

your Majesty to permit me,’ answered the captain-diplomat.

‘Go back without loss of time,’ said Paul in his hoarse voice, and he

did go back, without even seeing his relations, who lived in Moscow.

While diplomatic questions were being settled by bayonets and

grape-shot, he was an ambassador and concluded his diplomatic career at

the time of the Congress of Vienna, that bright festival of all the

diplomats.

Returning to Russia he was appointed court chamberlain in Moscow, where

there is no Court. Though he knew nothing of Russian Law and legal

procedure, he got into the Senate, became a member of the Council of

Trustees, a director of the Mariinsky Hospital, and of the Alexandrinsky

Institute, and he performed all his duties with a zeal that was hardly

necessary, with a censoriousness that only did harm and with an honesty

that no one noticed.

He was never at home, he tired out two teams of four strong horses in

the course of the day, one set in the morning, the other after dinner.

Besides the Senate, the sittings of which he never neglected, and the

Council of Wardens, which he attended twice a week, besides the hospital

and the institute, he hardly missed a single French play, and visited

the English Club three times a week. He had no time to be bored, he was

always busy and interested; he was always going somewhere, and his life

rolled lightly on good springs through a world of official papers and

pink tape.

Moreover, up to the age of seventy-five he was as strong as a young man,

was present at all the great balls and dinners, took part in every

ceremonial assembly and annual function, whether it were of an

agricultural or medical or fire insurance society or of the Society of

Scientific Research ... and, on the top of it all, perhaps because of

it, preserved to old age some degree of human feeling and a certain

warmth of heart.

No greater contrast to the sanguine Senator, who was always in movement

and only occasionally visited his home, can possibly be imagined than my

father, who hardly ever went out of his courtyard, hated the whole

official world and was everlastingly ill-humoured and discontented. We

also had eight horses (very poor ones), but our stable was something

like an almshouse for broken-down nags; my father kept them partly for

the sake of appearances and partly that the two coachmen and the two

postillions should have something to do, besides fetching the _Moscow

News_ and getting up cockfights, which they did very successfully

between the coachhouse and the neighbours’ yard.

My father had scarcely been in the service at all; educated by a French

tutor, in the house of a devout and highly respected aunt, he entered

the Izmailovsky regiment as a sergeant at sixteen, served until the

accession of Paul, and retired with the rank of captain in the Guards.

In 1801 he went abroad and remained abroad until 1811, wandering from

one country to another. He returned with my mother three months before

my birth, and after the fire of Moscow he spent a year on his estate in

the province of Tver, and then returned to live in Moscow, trying to

order his life so as to be as solitary and dreary as possible. His

brother’s liveliness hindered him in this.

After the Senator had left us, everything in the house began to assume a

more and more gloomy aspect. The walls, the furniture, the servants,

everything bore a look of displeasure and suspicion, and I need hardly

say that my father himself was of all the most displeased. The unnatural

stillness, the whispers and cautious footsteps of the servants, did not

suggest attentive solicitude, but oppression and terror. Everything was

immovable in the rooms; for five or six years the same books would lie

in the very same places with the same markers in them. In my father’s

bedroom and study the furniture was not moved nor the windows opened for

years together. When he went away into the country he took the key of

his room in his pocket, that they might not venture to scrub the floor

or wash the walls in his absence.

Chapter 2

THE TALK OF NURSES AND OF GENERALS—FALSE POSITION—RUSSIAN

ENCYCLOPAEDISTS—BOREDOM—THE MAIDS’ ROOM AND THE SERVANTS’ HALL—TWO

GERMANS—LESSONS AND READING—THE CATECHISM AND THE GOSPEL

Until I was ten years old I noticed nothing strange or special in my

position; it seemed to me simple and natural that I should be living in

my father’s house; that in his part of it I should be on my good

behaviour, while my mother lived in another part of the house, in which

I could be as noisy and mischievous as I liked. The Senator spoiled me

and gave me presents, Calot carried me about in his arms, Vera

Artamonovna dressed me, put me to bed, and gave me my bath, Madame

Proveau took me out for walks and talked to me in German; everything

went on in its regular way, yet I began pondering on things.

Stray remarks, carelessly uttered words, began to attract my attention.

Old Madame Proveau and all the servants were devoted to my mother, while

they feared and disliked my father. The scenes which sometimes took

place between them were often the subject of conversation between Madame

Proveau and Vera Artamonovna, both of whom always took my mother’s side.

My mother certainly had a good deal to put up with. Being an extremely

kind-hearted woman, with no strength of will, she was completely crushed

by my father, and, as always happens with weak characters, put up a

desperate opposition in trifling matters and things of no consequence.

Unhappily, in these trifling matters, my father was nearly always in the

right, and the dispute always ended in his triumph.

‘If I were in the mistress’s place,’ Madame Proveau would say, for

instance, ‘I would simply go straight back to Stuttgart; much comfort

she gets—nothing but ill-humour and unpleasantness, and deadly

dullness.’

‘To be sure,’ Vera Artamonovna would assent, ‘but that’s what ties her,

hand and foot,’ and she would point with her knitting-needle towards me.

‘How can she take him with her—what to? And as for leaving him here

alone, with our ways of going on, that would be too dreadful!’

Children in general have far more insight than is supposed, they are

quickly distracted and forget for a time what has struck them, but they

go back to it persistently, especially if it is anything mysterious or

dreadful, and with wonderful perseverance and ingenuity they go on

probing until they reach the truth.

Once on the look out, within a few weeks I had found out all the details

of my father’s meeting my mother, had heard how she had brought herself

to leave her parents’ home, how she had been hidden at the Senator’s in

the Russian Embassy at Cassel, and had crossed the frontier, dressed as

a boy; all this I found out without putting a single question to any

one.

The first result of these discoveries was to estrange me from my father

on account of the scenes of which I have spoken. I had seen them before,

but it had seemed to me that all that was in the regular order of

things; for I was so accustomed to the fact that every one in the house,

not excepting the Senator, was afraid of my father and that he was given

to scolding every one, that I saw nothing strange in it. Now I began to

take a different view of it, and the thought that part of all this was

endured on my account sometimes threw a dark oppressive cloud over my

bright, childish imagination.

A second idea that took root in me from that time, was that I was far

less dependent on my father than children are as a rule. I liked this

feeling of independence which I imagined for myself.

Two or three years later, two of my father’s old comrades in the

regiment, P. K. Essen, the governor-general of Orenburg, and A. N.

Bahmetyev, formerly commander in Bessarabia, a general who had lost his

leg at Borodino, were sitting with my father. My room was next to the

drawing-room in which they were sitting. Among other things my father

told them that he had been speaking to Prince Yussupov about putting me

into the service. ‘There’s no time to be lost,’ he added; ‘you know that

he will have to serve for years in order to reach any grade worth

speaking of.’

‘What a strange idea, friend, to make him a clerk,’ Essen said,

good-naturedly. ‘Leave it to me, and I will get him into the Ural

Cossacks. We’ll promote him from the ranks, that’s all that matters,

after that he will make his way as we all have.’

My father did not agree, he said that he had grown to dislike everything

military, that he hoped in time to get me a post on some mission to a

warm country, where he would go to end his days.

Bahmetyev, who had taken little part in the conversation, got up on his

crutches and said: ‘It seems to me that you ought to think very

seriously over Pyotr Kirillovitch’s advice. If you don’t care to put his

name down at Orenburg, you might put him down here. We are old friends

and it’s my way to tell you openly what I think; you will do your young

man no good with the civil service and university, and you will make him

of no use to society. He is quite obviously in a false position, only

the military service can open a career for him and put him right. Before

he reaches the command of a company, all dangerous ideas will have

subsided. Military discipline is a grand schooling, his future depends

on it. You say that he has abilities, but you don’t mean to say that

none but fools go into the army, do you? What about us and all our

circle? There’s only one objection you can make—that he will have to

serve a long time before he gets a commission, but it’s just in that

particular that we can help you.’

This conversation had as much effect as the remarks of Madame Proveau

and Vera Artamonovna. By that time I was thirteen and such lessons,

turned over and over, and analysed from every point of view during weeks

and months of complete solitude, bore their fruit. The result of this

conversation was that, although I had till then, like all boys, dreamed

of the army and a uniform, and had been ready to cry at my father’s

wanting me to go into the civil service, my enthusiasm for soldiering

suddenly cooled, and my love and tenderness for epaulettes, stripes and

gold lace, was by degrees completely eradicated. My smouldering passion

for the uniform had, however, one last flicker. A cousin of ours, who

had been at a boarding-school in Moscow and used sometimes to spend a

holiday with us, had entered the Yamburgsky regiment of Uhlans. In 1825

he came to Moscow as an ensign and stayed a few days with us. My heart

throbbed when I saw him with all his little cords and laces, wearing a

sword and a four-cornered helmet put on a little on one side and

fastened with a chin-strap. He was a boy of seventeen and short for his

age. Next morning I dressed up in his uniform, put on his sword and

helmet and looked at myself in the glass. Oh dear! how handsome I

thought myself in the short blue jacket with red braiding! And the

pompon, and the pouch ... what were the yellow nankeen breeches and the

short camlet jacket which I used to wear at home, in comparison with

these?

The cousin’s visit destroyed the effect of the generals’ talk, but soon

circumstances turned me against the army again, and this time for good.

The spiritual result of my meditations on my ‘false position’ was

somewhat the same as what I had deduced from the talk of my two nurses.

I felt myself more independent of society, of which I knew absolutely

nothing, felt that in reality I was thrown on my own resources, and with

somewhat childish conceit thought I would show the old generals what I

was made of.

With all that it may well be imagined how drearily and monotonously the

time passed in the strange conventlike seclusion of my father’s house. I

had neither encouragement nor distraction; my father had spoilt me until

I was ten, and now he was almost always dissatisfied with me; I had no

companions, my teachers came and went, and, seeing them out of the yard,

I used to run off on the sly, to play with the house-serf boys, which

was strictly forbidden. The rest of my time I spent wandering aimlessly

about the big dark rooms, which had their windows shut all day and were

only dimly lighted in the evening, doing nothing or reading anything

that turned up.

The servants’ hall and the maids’ room provided the only keen enjoyment

left me. There I found perfect peace and happiness; I took the side of

one party against another, discussed with my friends their affairs, and

gave my opinion upon them, knew all their private business, and never

dropped a word in the drawing-room of the secrets of the servants’ hall.

I must pause upon this subject. Indeed, I do not intend to avoid

digressions and episodes; that is the way of every conversation, that is

the way of life itself.

Children as a rule are fond of servants; their parents forbid them,

especially in Russia, to associate with servants; the children do not

obey them because it is dull in the drawing-room and lively in the

maids’ room. In this case, as in thousands of others, parents do not

know what they are about. I cannot conceive that our servants’ hall was

a less wholesome place for children than our ‘tea-room’ or

‘lounge-room.’ In the servants’ hall children pick up coarse expressions

and bad manners, that is true; but in the drawing-room they pick up

coarse ideas and bad feelings.

The very instruction to children to hold themselves aloof from those

with whom they are continually in contact is immoral.

A great deal is said among us about the complete depravity of servants,

especially when they are serfs. They certainly are not distinguished by

exemplary strictness of conduct, and their moral degradation can be seen

from the fact that they put up with too much and are too rarely moved to

indignation and resistance. But that is not the point. I should like to

know what class in Russia is less depraved? Are the nobility or the

officials? the clergy, perhaps?

Why do you laugh? The peasants, perhaps, are the only ones who may claim

to be different....

The difference between the nobleman and the serving man is very small. I

hate the demagogues’ flattery of the mob, particularly since the

troubles of 1848, but the aristocrats’ slander of the people I hate even

more. By picturing servants and slaves as degraded beasts, the planters

throw dust in people’s eyes and stifle the voice of conscience in

themselves. We are not often better than the lower classes, but we

express ourselves more gently and conceal our egoism and our passions

more adroitly; our desires are not so coarse, and the ease with which

they are satisfied and our habit of not controlling them make them less

conspicuous; we are simply wealthier and better fed and consequently

more fastidious. When Count Almaviva reckoned up to the Barber of

Seville the qualities he expected from a servant, Figaro observed with a

sigh: ‘If a servant must have all these virtues, are there many

gentlemen fit to be lackeys?’

Immorality in Russia as a rule does not go deep; it is more savage and

dirty, noisy and coarse, dishevelled and shameless than profound. The

clergy, shut up at home, drink and overeat themselves with the

merchants. The nobility get drunk in the sight of all, play cards until

they are ruined, thrash their servants, seduce their housemaids, manage

their business affairs badly and their family life still worse. The

officials do the same, but in a dirtier way, and in addition are guilty

of grovelling before their superiors and pilfering. As far as stealing

in the literal sense goes, the nobility are less guilty, they take

openly what belongs to others; when it suits them, however, they are

just as smart as other people. All these charming weaknesses are to be

met with in a still coarser form in those who are in private and not

government service, and in those who are dependent not on the Court but

on the landowners. But in what way they are worse than others as a

class, I do not know.

Going over my remembrances, not only of the serfs of our house and of

the Senator’s, but also of two or three households with which we were

intimate for twenty-five years, I do not remember anything particularly

vicious in their behaviour. Petty thefts, perhaps, ... but on that

matter all ideas are so muddled by their position, that it is difficult

to judge; _human property_ does not stand on ceremony with its kith and

kin, and is hail-fellow-well-met with the master’s goods. It would be

only fair to exclude from this generalisation the confidential servants,

the favourites of both sexes, masters’ mistresses and talebearers; but

in the first place they are an exception—these Kleinmihels of the

stable[15] and Benckendorfs[16] from the cellar, Perekusihins[17] in

striped linen gowns, and barelegged Pompadours; moreover, they do behave

better than any of the rest, they only get drunk at night and do not

pawn their clothes at the pot-house.

The simple-hearted immorality of the rest revolves round a glass of

vodka and a bottle of beer, a merry talk and a pipe, absences from home

without leave, quarrels which sometimes end in fights, and sly tricks

played on the masters who expect of them something inhuman and

impossible. Of course, on the one hand, the lack of all education, on

the other, the simplicity of the peasant in slavery have brought out a

great deal that is monstrous and distorted in their manners, but for all

that, like the negroes in America, they have remained half children, a

trifle amuses them, a trifle distresses them; their desires are limited,

and are rather naïve and human than vicious.

Vodka and tea, the tavern and the restaurant, are the two permanent

passions of the Russian servant; for their sake, he steals, for their

sake, he is poor, on their account, he endures persecution and

punishment and leaves his family in poverty. Nothing is easier than for

a Father Matthew[18] from the height of his teetotal intoxication to

condemn drunkenness, and sitting at the tea-table, to wonder why

servants go to drink tea at the restaurant, instead of drinking it at

home, although at home it is cheaper.

Vodka stupefies a man, it enables him to forget himself, stimulates him

and induces an artificial cheerfulness; this stupefaction and

stimulation are the more agreeable the less the man is developed and the

more he is bound to a narrow, empty life. How can a servant not drink

when he is condemned to the everlasting waiting in the hall, to

perpetual poverty, to being a slave, to being sold? He drinks to

excess—when he can—because he cannot drink every day; that was observed

fifteen years ago by Senkovsky in the _Library of Good Reading_.[19] In

Italy and the South of France there are no drunkards, because there is

plenty of wine. The savage drunkenness of the English working man is to

be explained in the same way. These men are broken in the inevitable and

unequal conflict with hunger and poverty; however hard they have

struggled they have met everywhere a blank wall of oppression and sullen

resistance that has flung them back into the dark depths of social life,

and condemned them to the never-ending, aimless toil that consumes mind

and body alike. It is not surprising that after spending six days as a

lever, a cogwheel, a spring, a screw, the man breaks savagely on

Saturday afternoon out of the penal servitude of factory work, and in

half an hour is drunk, for his exhaustion cannot stand much. The

moralists would do better to drink Irish or Scotch whisky themselves and

to hold their tongues, or with their inhuman philanthropy they may

provoke terrible replies.

Drinking tea at the restaurant has a different significance for

servants. Tea at home is not the same thing for the house-serf; at home

everything reminds him that he is a servant; at home he is in the dirty

servants’ room, he must get the samovar himself; at home he has a cup

with a broken handle, and any minute his master may ring for him. At the

restaurant he is a free man, he is a gentleman; for him the table is

laid and the lamps are lit; for him the waiter runs with the tray; the

cup shines, the tea-pot glitters, he gives orders and is obeyed, he

enjoys himself and gaily calls for pressed caviare or a turnover for his

tea.

In all of this there is more of childish simplicity than immorality.

Impressions quickly take possession of them but do not send down roots;

their minds are continually occupied, or rather distracted, by casual

subjects, small desires, trivial aims. A childish belief in everything

marvellous turns a grown-up man into a coward, and the same childish

belief comforts him in the bitterest moments. Filled with wonder, I was

present at the death of two or three of my father’s servants; it was

then that one could judge of the simple-hearted carelessness with which

their lives had passed, of the absence of great sins upon their

conscience; if there were anything, it had all been settled

satisfactorily with the priest.

This resemblance between servants and children accounts for their mutual

attraction. Children hate the aristocratic ideas of the grown-ups and

their benevolently condescending manners, because they are clever and

understand that in the eyes of grown-up people they are children, while

in the eyes of servants they are people. Consequently they are much

fonder of playing cards or loto with the maids than with visitors.

Visitors play for the children’s benefit with condescension, give way to

them, tease them and throw up the game for any excuse; the maids, as a

rule, play as much for their own sakes as for the children’s; and that

gives the game interest.

Servants are extremely devoted to children, and this is not a slavish

devotion, but the mutual affection of the weak and the simple. In old

days there used to be a patriarchal dynastic affection between

landowners and their serfs, such as exists even now in Turkey. To-day

there are in Russia no more of those devoted servants, attached to the

race and family of their masters. And that is easy to understand. The

landowner no longer believes in his power, he does not believe that he

will have to answer for his serfs at the terrible Day of Judgment, but

simply makes use of his power for his own advantage. The servant does

not believe in his subjection and endures violence not as a chastisement

and trial from God, but simply because he is defenceless; it is no use

kicking against the pricks.

I used to know in my youth two or three specimens of those fanatics of

slavery, of whom eighteenth century landowners speak with a sigh,

telling stories of their unflagging service and their great devotion,

and forgetting to add in what way their fathers and themselves had

repaid such self-sacrifice.

On one of the Senator’s estates a feeble old man called Andrey Stepanov

was living in peace, that is, on free rations.

He had been valet to the Senator and my father when they were serving in

the Guards, and was a good, honest, and sober man, who looked into his

young masters’ eyes, and, to use their own words, ‘guessed from them

what they wanted,’ which, I imagine, was not an easy task. Afterwards he

looked after the estate near Moscow. Cut off from the beginning of the

war of 1812 from all communication, and afterwards left alone, without

money, on the ashes of a village which had been burnt to the ground, he

sold some beams to escape starvation. The Senator, on his return to

Russia, proceeded to set his estate in order, and going into details of

the past, came to the sale of the beams. He punished his former valet by

sending him away in disgrace, depriving him of his duties. The old man,

burdened with a family, departed into exile. We used to stay for a day

or two on the estate where Andrey Stepanov was living. The feeble old

man, crippled by paralysis, used to come every time leaning on his

crutch, to pay his respects to my father and to speak to him.

The devotion and the gentleness with which he talked, his grievous

appearance, the locks of yellowish grey hair on each side of his bald

pate, touched me deeply. ‘I have heard, master,’ he said on one

occasion, ‘that your brother has received another decoration. I am

getting old, your honour, I shall soon give up my soul to God, and yet

the Lord has not vouchsafed to me to see your brother in his

decorations, not even once before my end to behold his honour in his

ribbons and all his finery!’

I looked at the old man, his face was so childishly candid, his bent

figure, his painfully twisted face, lustreless eyes, and weak voice—all

inspired confidence; he was not lying, he was not flattering, he really

longed before his death to see, in ‘all his ribbons and finery,’ the man

who could not for fifteen years forgive him the loss of a few beams. Was

this a saint, or a madman? But perhaps it is only madmen who attain

saintliness?

The new generation has not this idolatrous worship, and if there are

cases of serfs not caring for freedom, that is simply due to indolence

and material considerations. It is more depraved, there is no doubt, but

it is a sign that the end is near; if they want to see anything on their

master’s neck, it is certainly not the Vladimir ribbon.

Here I will say something of the position of our servants in general.

Neither the Senator nor my father oppressed the house-serfs

particularly, that is, they did not ill-treat them physically. The

Senator was hasty and impatient, and consequently often rough and

unjust, but he had so little contact with the house-serfs and took so

little notice of them that they scarcely knew each other. My father

wearied them with his caprices, never let pass a look, a word or a

movement, and was everlastingly lecturing them; to a Russian this often

seems worse than blows or abuse.

Corporal punishment was almost unknown in our house, and the two or

three cases in which the Senator and my father resorted to the revolting

method of the police station were so exceptional, that all the servants

talked about it for months afterwards; and it was only provoked by

glaring offences.

More frequently house-serfs were sent for soldiers, and this punishment

was a terror to all the young men; without kith or kin, they still

preferred to remain house-serfs, rather than to be in harness for twenty

years. I was greatly affected by those terrible scenes.... Two soldiers

of the police would appear at the summons of the landowner: they would

stealthily, in a casual, sudden way, seize the appointed victim. The

village elder commonly announced at this point that the master had the

evening before ordered that he was to be taken to the recruiting office,

and the man would try through his tears to put a brave face on it, while

the women wept: every one made him presents and I gave him everything I

could, that is, perhaps a twenty-kopeck piece and a neck-handkerchief.

I remember, too, my father’s ordering some village elder’s beard to be

shaved off, because he had spent the obrok[20] which he had collected. I

did not understand this punishment, but was struck by the appearance of

this old man of sixty; he was in floods of tears, and kept bowing to the

ground and begging for a fine of one hundred roubles in addition to the

obrok if only he might be spared this disgrace.

When the Senator was living with us, the common household consisted of

thirty men and almost as many women; the married women, however,

performed no service, they looked after their own families; there were

five or six maids or laundresses, who never came upstairs. To these must

be added the boys and girls who were being trained in their duties, that

is, in sloth and idleness, in lying and the use of vodka.

To give an idea of the life in Russia of those days, I think it will not

be out of place to say a few words on the maintenance of the

house-serfs. At first, they used to be given five roubles a month for

food and afterwards six. The women had a rouble a month less, and

children under ten had half the full allowance. The servants made up

‘artels’[21] and did not complain of the allowance being too small, and,

indeed, provisions were extraordinarily cheap in those days. The highest

wage was a hundred roubles a year, while others received half that

amount and some only thirty roubles. Boys under seventeen got no wages

at all. In addition to their allowance, servants were given clothes,

greatcoats, shirts, sheets, quilts, towels and mattresses covered with

sailcloth; boys, who did not get wages, were allowed money for their

physical and moral purification, that is, for the bath-house and for

preparing for communion. Taking everything into account, a servant cost

three hundred roubles a year; if to this we add a share of medicine, of

a doctor and of the surplus edibles brought from the village, even then

it is not over 350 roubles. This is only a quarter of the cost of a

servant in Paris or London.

The planters usually take into account the insurance premium of slavery,

that is, the maintenance of wife and children by the owner, and a meagre

crust of bread somewhere in the village for the slave in old age. Of

course this must be taken into account; but the cost is greatly lessened

by the fear of corporal punishment, the impossibility of changing their

position, and a much lower scale of maintenance.

I have seen enough of the way in which the terrible consciousness of

serfdom destroys and poisons the existence of house-serfs, the way in

which it oppresses and stupefies their souls. Peasants, especially those

who pay a fixed sum in lieu of labour, have less feeling of their

personal bondage; they somehow succeed in not believing in their

complete slavery. But for the house-serf, sitting on a dirty locker in

the hall from morning till night, or standing with a plate at table,

there is no room for doubt.

Of course there are people who live in the servants’ hall like fish in

water, people whose souls have never awakened, who have acquired a taste

for their manner of life and who perform their duties with a sort of

artistic relish.

Of that class we had one extremely interesting specimen, our footman

Bakay, a man of tall figure and athletic build, with solid, dignified

features and an air of the greatest profundity; he lived to an advanced

age, imagining that the position of a footman was one of the greatest

consequence.

This worthy old man was perpetually angry or a little drunk, or angry

and a little drunk at once. He took an exalted view of his duties and

ascribed a serious importance to them: with a peculiar bang and crash he

would throw up the steps of the carriage and slam the carriage door with

a report like a pistol shot. With a gloomy air he stood up stiff and

rigid behind the carriage, and every time there was a jolt over a rut he

would shout in a thick and displeased voice to the coachman: ‘Steady!’

regardless of the fact that the rut was already five paces behind.

Apart from going out with the carriage, his chief occupation, a duty he

had voluntarily undertaken, consisted of training the serf boys in the

aristocratic manners of the servants’ hall. When he was sober, things

went fairly well, but when his head was a little dizzy, he became

incredibly pedantic and tyrannical. I sometimes stood up for my friends,

but my authority had little influence on Bakay, whose temper was of a

Roman severity; he would open the door into the drawing-room for me and

say: ‘This is not the place for you; be pleased to leave the room or I

shall carry you out.’ He lost no opportunity of scolding the boys, and

often added a cuff to his words, or, with his thumb and first finger,

gave them a flip on the head with the sharpness and force of a spring.

When at last he had chased the boys out and was left alone, he

transferred his persecution to his one friend, Macbeth, a big

Newfoundland dog, whom he used to feed, comb and groom. After sitting in

solitude for two or three minutes he would go out into the yard, call

Macbeth to join him on the locker, and begin a conversation. ‘What are

you sitting out there in the yard in the frost for, stupid, when there

is a warm room for you? What a beast! What are you rolling your eyes

for, eh? Have you nothing to say?’ Usually a slap would follow these

words. Macbeth would sometimes growl at his benefactor; and then Bakay

would upbraid him in earnest: ‘You may go on feeding a dog, but he will

still remain a dog, he will show his teeth at any one, without caring

who it is ... the fleas would have eaten him up if it had not been for

me!’ And offended by his friend’s ingratitude he would wrathfully take a

pinch of snuff and fling what was left between his fingers on Macbeth’s

nose. Then the dog would sneeze, clumsily brush away the snuff with his

paw, and, leaving the bench indignantly, would scratch at the door;

Bakay would open it with the word ‘Rascal’ and give him a kick as he

went out. Then the boys would come back, and he would set to flipping

them on the head again.

Before Macbeth, we had a setter called Berta; she was very ill and Bakay

took her on to his mattress and looked after her for two or three weeks.

Early one morning I went out into the servants’ hall. Bakay tried to say

something to me, but his voice broke and a big tear rolled down his

cheek—the dog was dead. There is a fact for the student of human nature.

I do not for a moment suppose that he disliked the boys; it was simply a

case of a severe character, accentuated by drink and unconsciously

moulded by the spirit of the servants’ hall.

But besides these amateurs of slavery, what gloomy images of martyrs, of

hopeless victims, pass mournfully before my memory.

The Senator had a cook Alexey, a sober industrious man of exceptional

talent who made his way in the world. The Senator himself got him taken

into the Tsar’s kitchen, where there was at that time a celebrated

French cook. After being trained there, he got a post in the English

club, grew rich, married and lived like a gentleman; but the bonds of

serfdom would not let him sleep soundly at night, nor take pleasure in

his position.

After having a service celebrated to the Iversky Madonna, Alexey plucked

up his courage and presented himself before the Senator to ask for his

freedom for five thousand roubles. The Senator was proud of _his_ cook,

just as he was proud of _his_ painter, and so he would not take the

money, but told the cook that he should be set free for nothing at his

master’s death. The cook was thunderstruck; he grieved, grew thin and

worn, turned grey and ... being a Russian, took to drink. He neglected

his work; the English Club dismissed him. He was engaged by the Princess

Trubetskoy, who worried him by her petty niggardliness. Being on one

occasion extremely offended by her, Alexey, who was fond of expressing

himself eloquently, said, speaking through his nose with his air of

dignity: ‘What a clouded soul dwells in your illustrious body!’ The

princess was furious, she turned the cook away, and, as might be

expected from a Russian lady, wrote a complaint to the Senator. The

Senator would have done nothing to him, but, as a polite gentleman, he

felt bound to send for the cook, gave him a good scolding and told him

to go and beg the princess’s pardon.

The cook did not go to the princess but went to the pot-house. Within a

year he had lost everything from the capital he had saved up for his

ransom to the last of his aprons. His wife struggled and struggled on

with him, but at last went off and took a place as a nurse. Nothing was

heard of him for a long time. Then the police brought Alexey in tatters

and wild-looking; he had been picked up in the street, he had no

lodging, he wandered from tavern to tavern. The police insisted that his

master should take him. The Senator was distressed and perhaps

conscience-stricken, too; he received him rather mildly and gave him a

room. Alexey went on drinking, was noisy when he was drunk and imagined

that he was composing verses; he certainly had some imagination of an

incoherent sort. We were at that time at Vassilyevskoe. The Senator, not

knowing what to do with the cook, sent him there, thinking that my

father would bring him to reason. But the man was too completely

shattered. I saw in his case the concentrated anger and hatred against

the masters which lies in the heart of the serf, and might be

particularly dangerous in a cook; he would grind his teeth and speak

with malignant mimicry. He was not afraid to give full rein to his

tongue in my presence; he was fond of me and would often, patting me

familiarly on the shoulders, say that I was ‘a good branch of a rotten

tree.’

After the Senator’s death, my father gave him his freedom at once. It

was too late and simply meant getting rid of him, he was ruined in any

case.

Besides Alexey, I cannot help recalling another victim of serfdom. The

Senator had a serf aged about five-and-thirty who acted as his

secretary. My father’s eldest brother, who died in 1813, had sent him as

a boy to a well-known doctor to be trained as a feldsher (or doctor’s

assistant) that he might be of use in a village hospital which his

master was intending to found. The doctor procured permission for him to

attend the lectures of the Academy of Medicine and Surgery; the young

man had abilities, he learned Latin, German, and something of doctoring.

At five-and-twenty he fell in love with the daughter of an officer,

concealed his position from her and married her. The deception could not

last long. After his master’s death, the wife learned with horror that

they were serfs. The Senator, his new owner, did not oppress them in any

way, indeed he was fond of young Tolotchanov, but the trouble with the

wife persisted; she could not forgive her husband for the deception and

ran away from him with another man. Tolotchanov must have been devoted

to her, for from that time he sank into a melancholy that bordered upon

madness, spent his nights in debauchery, and, having no means of his

own, squandered his master’s money. When he saw that he could not set

things right, on the 31st of December 1821 he poisoned himself.

The Senator was not at home; Tolotchanov went in to my father in my

presence and told him that he had come to say good-bye to him and to ask

him to tell the Senator that he had spent the money that was missing.

‘You are drunk,’ my father told him. ‘Go and sleep it off.’

‘I shall soon go for a long sleep,’ said the doctor, ‘and I only beg you

not to remember evil against me.’

Tolotchanov’s tranquil air rather alarmed my father and, looking more

intently at him, he asked:

‘What’s the matter with you, are you raving?’

‘Not at all, I have only taken a wine-glassful of arsenic.’

They sent for a doctor and the police, gave him an emetic, and made him

drink milk. When he was on the point of vomiting, he restrained himself

and said: ‘Stay there, stay there, I did not swallow you for that.’

Afterwards, when the poison began to act more freely, I heard his moans

and his voice repeating in agony, ‘It burns! it burns! it’s fire!’

Some one advised him to send for a priest; he refused, and told Calot

that there could not be a life beyond the grave, that he knew too much

anatomy to believe that. At midnight he asked the doctor, in German,

what time it was, then saying, ‘Well, it’s the new year, I wish you a

happy one,’ he died.

In the morning I rushed to the little lodge that served as a bath-house;

Tolotchanov had been taken there; the body was lying on the table,

dressed just as he had died, in a dress-coat without a cravat, with his

chest open, and his features were terribly distorted and had even turned

black. This was the first dead body I had seen; I went away almost

fainting. And the playthings and pictures I had had given me for the New

Year did not comfort me. Tolotchanov’s dark-looking face hovered before

my eyes and I kept hearing his ‘It burns! it’s fire!’

I will say only one thing more, to conclude this gloomy subject: the

servants’ hall had no really bad influence upon me at all. On the

contrary, it awakened in me from my earliest years an invincible hatred

for every form of slavery and every form of tyranny. At times when I was

a child, Vera Artamonovna would say by way of the greatest rebuke for

some naughtiness: ‘Wait a bit, you will grow up and turn into just such

another master as the rest.’ I felt this a horrible insult. The old

woman need not have worried herself—just such another as the rest,

anyway, I have not become.

Besides the servants’ hall and the maids’ room I had one other

distraction, and in that I was not hindered in any way. I loved reading

as much as I hated lessons. My passion for unsystematic reading was,

indeed, one of the chief obstacles to serious study. I never could, for

instance, then or later, endure the theoretical study of languages, but

I very soon learnt to understand and chatter them incorrectly, and at

that stage I remained, because it was sufficient for my reading.

My father and the Senator had between them a fairly large library,

consisting of French books of the eighteenth century. The books lay

about in heaps in a damp, unused room in a lower storey of the Senator’s

house. Calot had the key. I was allowed to rummage in these literary

granaries as I liked, and I read and read to my heart’s content. My

father saw two advantages in it, that I should learn French more quickly

and that I should be occupied, that is, should sit quietly and in my own

room. Besides, I did not show him all the books I read, nor lay them on

the table; some of them were hidden in the sideboard.

What did I read? Novels and plays, of course. I read fifty volumes of

the French and Russian drama; in every volume there were three or four

plays. Besides French novels my mother had the Tales of La Fontaine and

the comedies of Kotzebue, and I read them two or three times. I cannot

say that the novels had much influence on me; though like all boys I

pounced eagerly on all equivocal or somewhat improper scenes, they did

not interest me particularly. A play which I liked beyond all measure

and read over twenty times in the Russian translation, the _Marriage of

Figaro_,[22] had much greater influence on me. I was in love with

Cherubino and the Countess, and what is more, I was myself Cherubino; my

heart throbbed as I read it and without myself clearly recognising it I

was conscious of a new sensation. How enchanting I thought the scene in

which the page is dressed up as a girl, how intensely I longed to hide

somebody’s ribbon in my bosom and kiss it in secret. In reality I had in

those years no feminine society.

I only remember that occasionally on Sundays Bahmetyev’s two daughters

used to come from their boarding-school to visit us. The younger, a girl

of sixteen, was strikingly beautiful. I was overwhelmed when she entered

the room and never ventured to address a word to her, but kept stealing

looks at her lovely dark eyes and dark curls. I never dropped a hint on

the subject and the first breath of love passed unseen by any one, even

by her.

Years afterwards when I met her, my heart throbbed violently and I

remembered how at twelve years old I had worshipped her beauty.

I forgot to say that _Werther_ interested me almost as much as the

_Marriage of Figaro_; half the novel was beyond me and I skipped it, and

hurried on to the terrible _dénouement_, over which I wept like a

madman. In 1839 _Werther_ happened to come into my hands again; this was

when I was at Vladimir and I told my wife how as a boy I had cried over

it and began reading her the last letters ... and when I came to the

same passage, my tears began flowing again and I had to stop.

Up to the age of fourteen I cannot say that my father greatly restricted

my liberty, but the whole atmosphere of our house was oppressive for a

lively boy. The persistent and unnecessary fussiness concerning my

physical health, together with complete indifference to my moral

well-being, was horribly wearisome. There were everlasting precautions

against my taking a chill, or eating anything indigestible, and anxious

solicitude over the slightest cough or cold in the head. In the winter I

was kept indoors for weeks at a time, and when I was allowed to go out,

it was only wearing warm high boots, thick scarves and such things. At

home it was always insufferably hot from the stoves. All this would

inevitably have made me a frail and delicate child but for the iron

health I inherited from my mother. She by no means shared my father’s

prejudices, and in her half of the house allowed me everything which was

forbidden in his.

My education made slow progress without emulation, encouragement, or

approval; I did my lessons lazily, without method or supervision, and

thought to make a good memory and lively imagination take the place of

hard work. I need hardly say that there was no supervision over my

teachers either; once the terms upon which they were engaged were

settled, they might, so long as they turned up at the proper time and

sat through their hour, go on for years without rendering any account to

any one.

One of the queerest episodes of my education at that time was the

engagement of the French actor Dalès to give me lessons in elocution.

‘No attention is paid to it nowadays,’ my father said to me, ‘but my

brother Alexander was every evening for six months reciting “Le récit de

Théramène”[23] with his teacher without reaching the perfection that he

insisted upon.’

So I set to work at recitation.

‘Well, Monsieur Dalès, I expect you can give him dancing lessons as

well?’ my father asked him on one occasion.

Dalès, a fat old man over sixty, who was fully aware of his own

qualities, but no less fully aware of the propriety of being modest

about them, replied: ‘that he could not judge of his own talents, but

that he had often given advice in the ballet dances _au grand Opéra_.’

‘So I supposed,’ my father observed, offering him his open snuff-box, a

civility he would never have shown to a Russian or a German teacher. ‘I

should be very glad if you could _le dégourdir un peu_; after his

recitation he might have a little dancing.’

‘_Monsieur le comte peut disposer de moi._’

And my father, who was excessively fond of Paris, began recalling the

foyer of the opera in 1810, the youth of George,[24] the declining years

of Mars,[25] and inquiring about cafés and theatres.

Now imagine my little room, a gloomy winter evening, the windows frozen

over and water dripping down a string from them, two tallow candles on

the table and our tête-à-tête. On the stage, Dalès still spoke fairly

naturally, but at a lesson thought it his duty to depart further from

nature in his delivery. He read Racine in a sort of chant and at the

cæsura made a parting such as an Englishman makes in his hair, so that

each line seemed like a broken stick.

At the same time he waved his arm like a man who has fallen into the

water and does not know how to swim. He made me repeat every line

several times and always shook his head, saying, ‘Not right, not right

at all, _attention_, “_Je crains Dieu, cher Abner_,”’ then the parting,

at which he would close his eyes and with a slight shake of his head,

tenderly pushing away the waves with his hand, add: ‘_et n’ai point

d’autre crainte_.’

Then the old gentleman who ‘feared nothing but God’ looked at his watch,

shut the book and pushed a chair towards me; this was my partner.

Under the circumstances it was not surprising that I never learned to

dance.

The lessons did not last long; they were cut short very tragically a

fortnight later.

I was at the French theatre with the Senator; the overture was played

once, then a second time and still the curtain did not rise. The front

rows, wishing to show they knew their Paris, began to be noisy in the

way the back rows are there. The manager came before the curtain, bowed

to the right, bowed to the left, bowed straight before him, and said:

‘We ask the kind indulgence of the audience; a terrible calamity has

befallen us, our comrade Dalès’—and the man’s voice was actually broken

by tears—‘has been found in his room stifled by charcoal fumes.’

It was in this violent way that the fumes of a Russian stove delivered

me from recitations, monologues and solo dances with my four-legged

mahogany partner.

At twelve years old I was transferred from feminine to masculine hands.

About that time my father made two unsuccessful attempts to engage a

German to look after me.

A German who looks after children is neither a tutor nor a nurse; it is

quite a special profession. He does not teach the children and he does

not dress them, but sees that they are taught and dressed, takes care of

their health, goes out for walks with them and talks any nonsense to

them so long as it is in German. If there is a tutor in the house, the

German is under his orders; if there is a male-nurse, he takes his

orders from the German. The visiting teachers, who come late owing to

unforeseen causes and leave early owing to circumstances over which they

have no control, do their best to win the German’s favour, and in spite

of his complete ignorance he begins to regard himself as a man of

learning. Governesses employ the German in shopping for them and in all

sorts of commissions, but only allow him to pay his court to them if

they suffer from striking physical defects or a complete lack of other

admirers. Boys of fourteen will go, without their parents’ knowledge, to

the German’s room to smoke, and he puts up with it because he must do

everything he can to remain in the house. Indeed at about that period

the German is thanked, presented with a watch and discharged. If he is

tired of sauntering about the streets with children and receiving

reprimands for their having colds, or stains on their clothes, the

‘children’s German’ becomes simply a German, sets up a little shop,

sells amber cigarette-holders, eau-de-Cologne and cigars to his former

nurslings, and carries out other secret commissions for them.[26]

The first German who was engaged to look after me was a native of

Silesia and was called Jokisch; to my mind the surname was sufficient

reason not to have engaged him. He was a tall, bald man, distinguished

by an extreme lack of cleanliness; he used to boast of his knowledge of

agricultural science, and I imagine it must have been on that account

that my father engaged him. I looked on the Silesian giant with

aversion, and the only thing that reconciled me to him was that he used,

as we walked to the Dyevitchy grounds and to the Pryesnensky ponds, to

tell me indecent anecdotes which I repeated in the servants’ hall. He

stayed no more than a year; he did something disgraceful in the village

and the gardener tried to kill him with a scythe, so my father told him

to take himself off.

He was succeeded by a Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel soldier (probably a

deserter) called Fyodor Karlovitch, who was distinguished by his fine

handwriting and extreme stupidity. He had been in the same position in

two families before and had acquired some experience, so adopted the

tone of a tutor; moreover, he spoke French with the accent invariably on

the wrong syllable.[27]

I had not a particle of respect for him and poisoned every moment of his

existence, especially after I had convinced myself that he was incapable

of understanding decimal fractions and the rule of three. As a rule

there is a great deal of ruthlessness and even cruelty in boys’ hearts;

with positive ferocity I persecuted the poor Wolfenbüttel _Jäger_ with

proportion sums; this so interested me that I triumphantly informed my

father of Fyodor Karlovitch’s stupidity, though I was not given to

discussing such subjects with him.

Moreover, Fyodor Karlovitch boasted to me that he had a new swallow-tail

coat, dark blue with gold buttons, and I actually did see him on one

occasion setting off to attend a wedding in a swallow-tail coat which

was too big for him but had gold buttons. The boy whose duty it was to

wait upon him informed me that he had borrowed the coat from a friend

who served at the counter of a perfumery shop. Without the slightest

sympathy I pestered the poor fellow to tell me where his blue dress-coat

was.

‘There are so many moths in your house,’ he said, ‘that I have left it

with a tailor I know, to be taken care of.’

‘Where does that tailor live?’

‘What is that to you?’

‘Why not tell me?’

‘You needn’t poke your nose into other people’s business.’

‘Well, perhaps not, but it is my name-day in a week, so please do get

the blue coat from the tailor for that day.’

‘No, I won’t, you don’t deserve it because you are so impertinent.’

For his final discomfiture Fyodor Karlovitch must needs one day brag

before Bouchot, my French teacher, of having been a recruit at Waterloo,

and of the Germans having given the French a terrible thrashing. Bouchot

merely stared at him and took a pinch of snuff with such a terrible air

that the conqueror of Napoleon was a good deal disconcerted. Bouchot

walked off leaning angrily on his gnarled stick and never referred to

him afterwards except as ‘_le soldat de Villainton_.’ I did not know at

the time that this pun was perpetrated by Béranger and could not boast

of having sprung from Bouchot’s fertile fancy.

At last Blücher’s companion in arms had some quarrel with my father and

left our house; after that my father did not worry me with any more

Germans.

While our Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel friend held the field I sometimes used

to visit some boys with whom a friend of his lived, also in the capacity

of a German; and with these boys we used to take long walks; after his

departure I was left again in complete solitude. I was bored, struggled

to get out of it, and found no means of escape. As I had no chance of

overriding my father’s will I might perhaps have been broken in to this

existence, if a new intellectual interest and two meetings, of which I

will speak in the following chapter, had not soon afterwards saved me. I

am quite certain that my father had not the faintest notion what sort of

life he was forcing upon me, or he would not have thwarted me in the

most innocent desires, nor have refused me the most natural requests.

Sometimes he allowed me to go with the Senator to the French theatre,

and this was the greatest enjoyment for me; I was passionately fond of

seeing acting, but this pleasure brought me as much pain as joy. The

Senator used to arrive with me when the play was half over, and as he

invariably had an invitation for the evening, would drag me away before

the end. The theatre was in Apraxin’s House, at Arbatsky Gate, and we

lived in Old Konyushenny Street, that is very close by, but my father

sternly forbade my returning without the Senator.

I was about fifteen when my father engaged a priest to give me Scripture

lessons, so far as was necessary for entering the University. The

Catechism came into my hands after I had read Voltaire. Nowhere does

religion play so modest a part in education as in Russia, and that, of

course, is a great piece of good fortune. A priest is always paid

half-price for lessons in religion, and, indeed, if the same priest

gives Latin lessons also, he is paid more for them than for teaching the

Catechism.

My father regarded religion as among the essential belongings of a

well-bred man; he used to say that one must believe in the ‘Holy

Scriptures’ without criticism, because you could do nothing in that

domain with reason, and all intellectual considerations merely obscured

the subject; that one must observe the rites of the religion in which

one was born, without, however, giving way to excessive devoutness,

which was all right for old women, but not proper in men. Did he himself

believe? I imagine that he did believe a little, from habit, from regard

for propriety, and from a desire to be on the safe side. He did not

himself, however, take part in any church observances, sheltering

himself behind the delicate state of his health. He scarcely ever

received a priest, at most he would ask him to perform a service in the

empty drawing-room and would send him there five roubles. In the winter

he excused himself on the plea that the priest and the deacon always

brought such chilliness with them that he invariably caught cold. In the

country he used to go to church and receive the priest, but rather with

a view to secular affairs than religious considerations. My mother was a

Lutheran and therefore one degree more religious; on one or two Sundays

in every month she would drive to her church, or as Bakay persisted in

calling it, to ‘her kirche,’ and, having nothing better to do, I went

with her. There I learned to mimic the German pastors, their declamation

and verbosity with artistic finish, and I retained the talent in riper

years.

Every year my father commanded me to fast, confess, and take the

sacrament. I was afraid of confession, and the church _mise en scène_

altogether impressed and alarmed me. With genuine awe I went up to take

the sacrament, but I cannot call it a religious feeling, it was the awe

which is inspired by everything incomprehensible and mysterious,

especially when a grave and solemn significance is attributed to it;

casting spells and telling fortunes affect one in the same way. I took

the sacrament after matins in Holy Week, and, after devouring eggs

coloured red and Easter cakes, I thought no more of religion for the

rest of the year.

But I used to read the Gospel a great deal and with love, both in the

Slavonic and in the Lutheran translation. I read it without any

guidance, and, though I did not understand everything, I felt a deep and

genuine respect for what I read. In my early youth I was often

influenced by Voltairianism, and was fond of irony and mockery, but I do

not remember that I ever took the Gospel in my hand with a cold feeling;

and it has been the same with me all my life; at all ages and under

various circumstances I have gone back to reading the Gospel, and every

time its words have brought peace and gentleness to my soul.

When the priest began giving me lessons he was surprised to find not

only that I had a general knowledge of the Gospel but that I could quote

texts, word for word; ‘but the Lord God,’ he said, ‘though He has opened

his mind, had not yet opened his heart.’ And my theologian, shrugging

his shoulders, marvelled at my ‘double nature,’ but was pleased with me,

thinking that I should be able to pass my examination.

Soon a religion of a different sort took possession of my soul.

Chapter 3

THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER I. AND THE FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER—MORAL

AWAKENING—THE TERRORIST BOUCHOT—MY KORTCHEVA COUSIN

One winter morning the Senator arrived not at the time he usually

visited us; looking anxious, he went with hurried footsteps into my

father’s study and closed the door, motioning me to remain in the

drawing-room.

Luckily I had not long to rack my brains guessing what was the matter.

The door of the servants’ hall opened a little way and a red face,

half-hidden in the wolf-fur of a livery overcoat, called me in a

whisper; it was the Senator’s footman. I rushed to the door.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘The Tsar has just died at Taganrog.’

The news impressed me; I had never thought of the possibility of the

Tsar’s death; I had grown up with a great respect for Alexander, and

recalled mournfully how I had seen him not long before in Moscow. When

we were out walking, we had met him beyond the Tverskoy Gate; he was

quietly riding along with two or three generals, returning from Hodynki,

where there had been a review. His face was gracious, his features soft

and rounded, his expression tired and melancholy. When he was on a level

with us, I raised my hat, he bowed to me, smiling. What a contrast to

Nicholas, who always looked like a slightly bald Medusa with cropped

hair and moustaches. In the street, at the court, with his children and

ministers, with his couriers and maids of honour, he was incessantly

trying whether his eyes had the power of a rattlesnake, of freezing the

blood in the veins.[28] If Alexander’s external gentleness was assumed,

surely such hypocrisy is better than the naked shamelessness of

despotism.

While vague ideas floated through my mind, while portraits of the new

Emperor Constantine were sold in the shops, while appeals to take the

oath of allegiance were being delivered, and good people were hastening

to do so, rumours were suddenly afloat that the Tsarevitch had refused

the crown. Then that same footman of the Senator’s, who was greatly

interested in political news and had a fine field for gathering it—in

all the public offices and vestibules of senators, to one or other of

which he was always driving from morning to night, for he did not share

the privilege of the horses, who were changed after dinner—informed me

that there had been rioting in Petersburg and that cannons were being

fired in Galerny Street.

On the following evening Count Komarovsky, a general of the gendarmes,

was with us: he told us of the troops in St. Isaac’s Square, of the

Horse Guards’ attack, of the death of Count Miloradovitch.

Then followed arrests; ‘so-and-so has been taken,’ ‘so-and-so has been

seized,’ ‘so-and-so has been brought up from the country’; terrified

parents trembled for their children. The sky was overcast with gloomy

storm-clouds.

In the reign of Alexander political punishments were rare; the Tsar did,

it is true, banish Pushkin for his verses and Labzin for having, when he

was secretary, proposed to elect a coachman, called Ilya Baykov, a

member of the Academy of Arts[29]; but there was no systematic

persecution. The secret police had not yet grown into an independent

body of gendarmes, but consisted of a department under the control of De

Sanglain, an old Voltairian, a wit, a great talker, and a humorist in

the style of Jouy.[30] Under Nicholas, this gentleman himself was under

the supervision of the police and he was considered a liberal, though he

was exactly what he had always been; from this fact alone, it is easy to

judge of the difference between the two reigns.

Nicholas was completely unknown until he came to the throne; in the

reign of Alexander he was of no consequence, and no one was interested

in him. Now every one rushed to inquire about him; no one could answer

questions but the officers of the Guards; they hated him for his cold

cruelty, his petty fussiness and his vindictiveness. One of the first

anecdotes that went the round of the town confirmed the officers’

opinion of him. The story was that at some drill or other the Grand Duke

had so far forgotten himself as to try and take an officer by the

collar. The officer responded with the words: ‘Your Highness, my sword

is in my hand.’ Nicholas drew back, said nothing, but never forgot the

answer. After the Fourteenth of December he made inquiries on two

occasions as to whether this officer was implicated. Fortunately he was

not.[31]

The tone of society changed before one’s eyes; the rapid deterioration

in morals was a melancholy proof of how little the sense of personal

dignity was developed among Russian aristocrats. Nobody (except women)

dared show sympathy, dared utter a warm word about relations or friends,

whose hands had been shaken only the day before they had been carried

off at night by the police. On the contrary, there were savage fanatics

for slavery, some from abjectness, others, worse still, from

disinterested motives.

Women alone did not take part in this shameful abandonment of those who

were near and dear ... and women alone stood at the Cross too, and at

the blood-stained guillotine there stood, first, Lucile Desmoulins,[32]

that Ophelia of the Revolution, always beside the axe, waiting for her

turn, and later, George Sand, who gave the hand of sympathy and

friendship on the scaffold to the youthful fanatic Alibaud.[33]

The wives of men, exiled to hard labour, lost their civil rights,

abandoned wealth and social position, and went to a lifetime of bondage

in the terrible climate of Eastern Siberia, under the still more

terrible yoke of the police there. Sisters, who had not the right to go

with their brothers, withdrew from court, and many left Russia; almost

all of them kept a feeling of love for the victims alive in their

hearts; but there was no such love in the men, terror consumed it in

their hearts, not one of them dared mention the luckless exiles.

While I am touching on the subject, I cannot forbear saying a few words

about one of those heroic stories, of which very little has been heard.

A young French governess was living in the old-fashioned family of the

Ivashevs. Ivashev’s son and heir wanted to marry her. This drove all his

relations frantic; there was an uproar, tears, petitions. The French

girl had not the support of a brother like Tchernov, who on his sister’s

behalf killed Novosiltsov and was killed by him in a duel. She was

persuaded to leave Petersburg, and he to put off for a time his design

of marrying her. Ivashev was one of the more active conspirators and he

was sentenced to penal servitude for life. His relations did not succeed

in saving him from the _mésalliance_. As soon as the dreadful news

reached the young girl in Paris, she set off for Petersburg and asked

permission to go to the province of Irkutsk to join her betrothed.

Benckendorf tried to dissuade her from this criminal intention; he did

not succeed and reported the matter to Nicholas. The Tsar directed that

the position of women who did not desert their exiled husbands should be

explained to her, adding that he would not prevent her going, but that

she must know that, if wives who went to Siberia from fidelity to their

husbands deserved some indulgence, she had not the slightest right to

any since she was wilfully entering into marriage with a criminal.

Nicholas and she both kept their word, she went to Siberia, and he did

nothing to alleviate her fate.

‘The Monarch though severe was just.’[34]

In the prison nothing was known of the permission given her, and when

the poor girl arrived she had, while a correspondence was carried on

with the authorities in Petersburg, to wait in a little settlement

inhabited by all sorts of former criminals, with no means of finding out

anything about Ivashev or communicating with him.

By degrees she became acquainted with her new companions. Among them was

an exiled robber who worked in the prison; she told him her story. Next

day the robber brought her a note from Ivashev. A day later he offered

to bring her notes from Ivashev and to take her letters to him. He had

to work in the prison from morning till evening; at nightfall he would

take Ivashev’s letter and would set off with it regardless of snowstorms

and fatigue, and return to his work at dawn.[35]

At last the permission came and they were married. A few years later

penal servitude was exchanged for a settlement. Their position was

somewhat better, but their strength was exhausted; the wife was the

first to sink under the weight of all she had gone through. She faded

away as a flower of southern lands must fade in the Siberian snows.

Ivashev did not survive her, he actually died a year later, but before

then he had left this sphere; his letters (which made some impression on

the Third Section[36]) bear the traces of an infinitely mournful, holy

madness and gloomy poetry; he was not really living after her death, but

slowly and solemnly dying. This chronicle does not end with his death.

After Ivashev’s exile his father made over his estate to his

illegitimate son, begging him to help his poor brother and not to forget

him. The exiles left two little boys, helpless, fatherless and

motherless, who had neither name nor rights and seemed likely to become

cantonists[37] and settlers in Siberia. Ivashev’s brother entreated

Nicholas for permission to take the children. Nicholas granted

permission. A few years later he risked another petition, he moved

heaven and earth for their father’s name to be restored to them; and in

this too he was successful.

The accounts of the rising and of the trial of the leaders, and the

horror in Moscow, made a deep impression on me; a new world which became

more and more the centre of my moral existence was revealed to me. I do

not know how it came to pass, but though I had no understanding, or only

a very dim one, of what it all meant, I felt that I was not on the same

side as the grape-shot and victory, prisons and chains. The execution of

Pestel,[38] and his associates finally dissipated the childish dream of

my soul.

Every one expected some mitigation of the sentence on the condemned men,

the coronation was about to take place. Even my father, in spite of his

caution and his scepticism, said that the death penalty would not be

carried out, and that all this was done merely to impress people. But,

like every one else, he knew little of the youthful monarch. Nicholas

left Petersburg, and, without visiting Moscow, stopped at the Petrovsky

Palace.... The citizens of Moscow could scarcely believe their eyes when

they read in the _Moscow News_ of the terrible event of the fourteenth

of July.

The Russian people had become unaccustomed to the death penalty; since

the days of Mirovitch,[39] who was executed instead of Catherine II.,

and of Pugatchov[40] and his companions, there had been no executions;

men had died under the knout, soldiers had run the gauntlet (contrary to

the law) until they fell dead, but the death penalty _de jure_ did not

exist. The story is told that in the reign of Paul there was some

partial rising of the Cossacks on the Don in which two officers were

implicated. Paul ordered them to be tried by court martial, and gave the

hetman or general full authority. The court condemned them to death, but

no one dared to confirm the sentence; the hetman submitted the matter to

the Tsar. ‘They are a pack of women,’ said Paul; ‘they want to throw the

execution on me, very much obliged to them,’ and he commuted the

sentence to penal servitude.

Nicholas re-introduced the death penalty into our criminal proceedings,

at first illegally, but afterwards he included it in the Code.

The day after receiving the terrible news there was a religious service

in the Kremlin.[41] After celebrating the execution Nicholas made his

triumphal entry into Moscow. I saw him then for the first time; he was

on horseback riding beside a carriage in which the two empresses, his

wife and Alexander’s widow, were sitting. He was handsome, but there was

a coldness about his looks; no face could have more mercilessly betrayed

the character of the man than his. The sharply retreating forehead and

the lower jaw developed at the expense of the skull were expressive of

iron will and feeble intelligence, rather of cruelty than of sensuality;

but the chief point in the face was the eyes, which were entirely

without warmth, without a trace of mercy, wintry eyes. I do not believe

that he ever passionately loved any woman, as Paul loved Anna

Lopuhin,[42] and as Alexander loved all women except his wife; ‘he was

favourably disposed to them,’ nothing more.

In the Vatican there is a new gallery in which Pius VII., I believe, has

placed an immense number of statues, busts, and statuettes, dug up in

Rome and its environs. The whole history of the decline of Rome is there

expressed in eyebrows, lips, foreheads; from the daughters of Augustus

down to Poppaea, the matrons have succeeded in transforming themselves

into cocottes, and the type of cocotte is predominant and persists; the

masculine type, surpassing itself, so to speak, in Antinous and

Hermaphroditus, divides into two. On one hand there is sensual and moral

degradation, low brows and features defiled by vice and gluttony,

bloodshed and every wickedness in the world, petty as in the hetaira

Heliogabalus, or with sunken cheeks like Galba; the last type is

wonderfully reproduced in the King of Naples.... But there is

another—the type of military commander in whom everything social and

moral, everything human has died out, and there is left nothing but the

passion for domination; the mind is narrow and there is no heart at all;

they are the monks of the love of power; force and austere will is

manifest in their features. Such were the Emperors of the Praetorian

Guard and of the army, whom the turbulent legionaries raised to power

for an hour. Among their number I found many heads that recalled

Nicholas before he wore a moustache. I understand the necessity for

these grim and inflexible guards beside what is dying in frenzy, but

what use are they to what is youthful and growing?

In spite of the fact that political dreams absorbed me day and night, my

ideas were not distinguished by any peculiar insight; they were so

confused that I actually imagined that the object of the Petersburg

rising was, among other things, to put the Tsarevitch Constantine on the

throne, while limiting his power. This led to my being devoted for a

whole year to that eccentric creature. He was at that time more popular

than Nicholas; for what reason I do not know, but the masses, for whom

he had never done anything good, and the soldiers, to whom he had done

nothing but harm, loved him. I well remember how during the coronation

he walked beside the pale-faced Nicholas with scowling, light-yellow,

bushy eyebrows, a bent figure with the shoulders hunched up to the ears,

wearing the uniform of the Lettish Guards with a yellow collar. After

giving away the bride at the wedding of Nicholas with Russia, he went

away to complete the disaffection of Warsaw. Nothing more was heard of

him until the 29th of November 1830.[43]

My hero was not handsome and you could not find such a type in the

Vatican. I should have called it the Gatchina type, if I had not seen

the King of Sardinia.

I need hardly say that now solitude weighed upon me more than ever, for

I longed to communicate my ideas and my dreams to some one, to test them

and to hear them confirmed; I was too proudly conscious of being

‘ill-intentioned’ to say nothing about it, or to speak of it

indiscriminately. My first choice of a confidant was my Russian tutor.

I. E. Protopopov was full of that vague and generous liberalism which

often passes away with the first grey hair, with marriage and a post,

but yet does ennoble a man. My teacher was touched, and as he was taking

leave embraced me with the words: ‘God grant that these feelings may

take root and grow stronger in you.’ His sympathy was a great comfort to

me. After this he began bringing me much-dog’s-eared manuscript copies

in small handwriting of Pushkin’s poems, the ‘Ode to Freedom,’ ‘The

Dagger,’ ‘Ryleyev’s Reverie.’ I used to copy them in secret ... (and now

I print them openly!).

Of course, my reading, too, took a different turn. Politics was now in

the foreground, and above all the history of the Revolution, of which I

knew nothing except from Madame Proveau’s tales. In the library in the

basement I discovered a history of the ‘nineties written by a Royalist.

It was so partial that even at fourteen I did not believe it. I happened

to hear from old Bouchot that he had been in Paris during the

Revolution; and I longed to question him; but Bouchot was a stern and

forbidding man with an immense nose and spectacles; he never indulged in

superfluous conversation, he conjugated verbs, dictated copies, scolded

me and went away, leaning on his thick gnarled stick.

‘Why did they execute Louis XVI.?’ I asked him in the middle of a

lesson.

The old man looked at me, frowning with one grey eyebrow and lifting the

other, pushed his spectacles up on his forehead like a visor, pulled out

a large blue handkerchief and, blowing his nose with dignity, said:

‘_Parce qu’il a été traître à la patrie_.’

‘If you had been one of the judges, would you have signed the death

sentence?’

‘With both hands.’

This lesson was of more value to me than all the subjunctives; it was

enough for me; it was clear that the king deserved to be executed.

Old Bouchot did not like me and thought me empty-headed and mischievous,

because I did not prepare my lessons properly, and he often used to say

‘you’ll come to no good,’ but when he noticed my sympathy with his

regicide ideas, he began to be gracious instead of being cross, forgave

my mistakes and used to tell me episodes of the year ’93, and how he had

left France, when ‘the dissolute and the dishonest’ got the upper hand.

He would finish the lesson with the same dignity, without a smile, but

now he would say indulgently: ‘I really did think that you were coming

to no good, but your generous feelings will be your salvation.’

To this encouragement and sympathy from my teacher was soon added a

warmer sympathy which had more influence on me.

The granddaughter[44] of my father’s eldest brother was living in a

little town in the province of Tver. I had known her from my earliest

childhood, but we rarely met; she used to come once a year for Christmas

or for Carnival to stay at Moscow with her aunt. Nevertheless, we became

friends. She was five years older than I, but so small and young-looking

that she might have been taken for the same age. What I particularly

liked her for was that she was the first person who treated me as a

human being, that is, did not continually express surprise at my having

grown, ask me what lessons I was doing, and whether I was good at them,

and whether I wanted to go into the army and into what regiment, but

talked to me as people in general talk to each other; though she

retained that tone of authority which girls like to assume with boys who

are a little younger than themselves. We had written to each other and

after 1824 fairly often, but letters again mean pens and paper, again

the schoolroom table with its blots and pictures carved with a penknife;

I longed to see her, to talk to her about my new ideas, and so it may be

imagined with what joy I heard that my cousin was coming in February

(1826), and would stay with us for some months. I scratched on my table

the days of the month until her arrival and blotted them out as they

passed, sometimes intentionally forgetting three days so as to have the

pleasure of blotting out rather more at once, and yet the time dragged

on very slowly; then the time fixed had passed and her coming was

deferred until a later date, and that passed, as it always does.

I was sitting one evening with my tutor Protopopov in my schoolroom, and

he as usual, taking a sip of fizzing kvass after every sentence, was

talking of the hexameter, horribly with voice and hand chopping up every

line of Gnyeditch’s _Iliad_ at the cæsura, when all of a sudden the snow

in the yard crunched with a different sound from that made by town

sledges, the tied-up bell gave the relic of a tinkle, there was talk in

the yard.... I flushed crimson, I had no more thought for the measured

wrath of ‘Achilles, son of Peleus’; I rushed headlong to the hall and my

cousin from Tver, wrapped in fur coats, shawls, and scarves, wearing a

bonnet and fluffy white high boots, red with the frost and, perhaps,

with joy, rushed to kiss me.

People usually talk of their early childhood, of its griefs and joys

with a smile of condescension, as though, like Sofya Pavlovna in _Woe

from Wit_, they would say with a grimace: ‘Childishness!’ As though they

had grown better in later years, as though their feelings were keener or

deeper. Within three years children are ashamed of their playthings—let

them be, they long to be grown-up, they grow and change so rapidly, they

see that from their jackets and the pages of their schoolbooks; but one

would have thought grown-up people might understand that childhood

together with two or three years of youth is the fullest, most exquisite

part of life, the part that is most our own, and, indeed, almost the

most important, for it imperceptibly shapes our future.

So long as a man is advancing with discreet footsteps forward, without

stopping or taking thought, so long as he does not come to a precipice

or break his neck, he imagines that his life lies before him, looks down

on the past and does not know how to appreciate the present. But when

experience has crushed the flowers of spring and the flush of summer has

cooled, when he begins to suspect that his life is practically over,

though its continuation remains, then he turns with different feelings

to the bright, warm, lovely memories of early youth.

Nature with her everlasting snares and economic devices _gives_ man

youth, but _takes_ the formed man for herself; she draws him on,

entangles him in a web of social and family relations, three-fourths of

which are independent of his will; he, of course, gives his personal

character to his actions, but he belongs to himself far less than in

youth; the lyrical element of the personality is feebler and therefore

also the power of enjoyment—everything is weaker, except the mind and

the will.

My cousin’s life was not a bed of roses. Her mother she lost when she

was a baby. Her father was a desperate gambler, and, like all who have

gambling in their blood, he was a dozen times reduced to poverty and a

dozen times rich again, and ended all the same by completely ruining

himself. _Les beaux restes_ of his property he devoted to a stud-farm on

which he concentrated all his thoughts and feelings. His son, an ensign

in the Uhlans, my cousin’s only brother and a very good-natured youth,

was going the straight road to ruin; at nineteen he was already a more

passionate gambler than his father.

At fifty, the father, for no reason at all, married an old maid who had

been a pupil in the Smolny Convent.[45] Such a complete, perfect type of

the Petersburg boarding-school miss it has never been my lot to meet.

She had been one of the best pupils, and afterwards had become _dame de

classe_ in the school; thin, fair, and short-sighted, she had something

didactic and edifying about her very appearance. Not at all stupid, she

was full of an icy enthusiasm in words, talked in hackneyed phrases of

virtue and devotion, knew chronology and geography by heart, spoke

French with a revolting correctness and concealed an inner vanity which

was like an artificial Jesuitical modesty. In addition to these traits

of the ‘seminarists in yellow shawls’ she had others which were purely

Nevsky or Smolny characteristics. She used to raise her eyes full of

tears to heaven, as she spoke of the visits of their common mother (the

Empress Maria Fyodorovna), was in love with the Emperor Alexander, and,

I remember, used to wear a locket, or a signet ring, with a scrap of a

letter from the Empress Elizabeth in it, ‘_Il a repris son sourire de

bienveillance!_’

The reader can picture the harmonious trio: the father, a gambler,

passionately devoted to horses, gypsies, noise, carousals, races, and

trotting matches; the daughter brought up in complete independence,

accustomed to do what she liked in the house; and the learned lady who,

from an elderly schoolmistress, had been turned into a young wife. Of

course, she did not like her stepdaughter, and of course her

stepdaughter did not like her; as a rule great affection can only exist

between women of five-and-thirty and girls of seventeen when the former,

with resolute self-sacrifice, determine to have no sex.

I am not at all surprised at the common hostility between stepdaughters

and stepmothers, it is natural and it is right. The new person put into

the mother’s place excites aversion in the children, the second marriage

is for them like a second funeral. The children’s love is vividly

expressed in this feeling, it whispers to the orphans: ‘Your father’s

wife is not your mother.’ At first Christianity understood that with the

conception of marriage which it developed, with the immortality of the

soul which it preached, a second marriage was altogether incongruous;

but, making continual concessions to the world, the Church compromised

with its principles and was confronted with the implacable logic of

life, with the simple childish heart that in practice revolts against

the pious incongruity of regarding its father’s companion as its mother.

On her side, too, the woman who comes to her new home from church and

finds a family, children awaiting her, is in an awkward position; she

has nothing to do with them, she must affect feelings which she cannot

have, she must persuade herself and others that another woman’s children

are as dear to her as her own.

And therefore I do not in the least blame the lady from the convent nor

my cousin for their mutual dislike, but I understand how the young girl,

unaccustomed to discipline, was fretting to escape anywhere out of the

parental home. Her father was beginning to get old and was more and more

under the thumb of his learned wife. Her brother, the Uhlan, was going

from bad to worse, and, in fact, life was not pleasant at home, and at

last she persuaded her stepmother to let her come for some months,

possibly even for a year, to us.

The day after her arrival my cousin turned the whole order of my life,

except my lessons, upside down, arbitrarily fixed hours for our reading

together, advised me not to read novels, but recommended Ségur’s

_Universal History_ and the _Travels of Anacharsis_. Her stoical ideals

led her to oppose my marked inclination for smoking in secret, which I

did by wrapping the tobacco in paper (cigarettes did not exist in those

days); she liked preaching morality to me in general, and if I did not

obey her teaching, at least I listened meekly. Luckily she could not

keep up to her own standards, and, forgetting her rules, she read

Zschokke’s[46] tales with me instead of the archæological novel, and

secretly sent a boy out to buy, in winter, buckwheat cakes and

pease-pudding, and, in summer, gooseberries and currants.

I think my cousin’s influence over me was very good; with her a warm

element came into the cell-like seclusion of my youth, it fostered and

perhaps, indeed, preserved the scarcely developing feelings which might

very well have been completely crushed by my father’s irony. I learnt to

be observant, to be wounded by a word, to care about somebody else, to

love; I learnt to talk about my feelings. She supported my political

aspirations, predicted for me an extraordinary future and fame, and I,

with childish vanity, believed her that I was a future ‘Brutus or

Fabricius.’

To me alone she confided the secret of her love for an officer of the

Alexandrinsky Regiment of Hussars, in a black cape and a black dolman;

it was a genuine secret, for the hussar himself, as he commanded his

squadron, never suspected what a pure flame was glowing for him in the

bosom of a girl of eighteen. I do not know whether I envied his lot,

probably I did a little, but I was proud of having been chosen as a

confidant, and imagined (after Werther) that this was one of those

tragic passions, which would have a great _dénouement_ accompanied by

suicide, poison, and a dagger, and the idea even occurred to me that I

might go to him and tell him all about it.

My cousin had brought shuttlecocks from Kortcheva; in one of the

shuttlecocks there was a pin, she would never play with any other, and

whenever it fell to me or any one else she would take it, saying she was

used to playing with it. The demon of mischief, which was always my evil

tempter, prompted me to change the pin, that is, to stick it in another

shuttlecock. The trick was fully successful, my cousin always took to

the one with the pin in it. A fortnight later I told her; her face

changed, she dissolved into tears and went off to her own room. I was

panic-stricken and unhappy and, after waiting for half an hour, went to

her; her door was locked. I begged her to open it; she refused to let me

in and said that she was ill, that I was no friend to her, but a

heartless boy. I wrote her a note and besought her to forgive me; after

tea we made it up, I kissed her hand, she embraced me and at once

explained the full importance of the matter. A year before, the hussar

had dined with them and after dinner played battledore and shuttlecock,

and this was the shuttlecock with which he had played. I had pangs of

conscience, I thought that I had committed a real sacrilege.

My cousin stayed until October. Her father sent for her to come home,

promising to let her come to us at Vassilyevskoe the following year. We

looked forward with horror to parting and, behold, one day a chaise came

for her, and her maid carried off boxes and baskets to pack in it while

our servants filled the chaise with all sorts of provisions for a full

week’s journey, and crowded at the entrance to say good-bye. We embraced

warmly, she wept and I wept—the chaise drove out into the side street

beside the very place where they used to sell us buckwheat cakes and

pease-pudding, and vanished. I crossed the yard, it seemed so cold and

horrid; I went up into my room—and there it seemed cold and empty. I set

to work on my lesson for Protopopov, while I wondered where the chaise

was now, and whether it had passed the town-gate or not.

My only comfort was the thought of our being together again at

Vassilyevskoe the following June!

For me the country was always a time of renewal, I was passionately fond

of country life. The forest, the fields, and the freedom—it was all so

new for me who had been brought up in cotton-wool, within brick walk,

not daring on any pretext to go out beyond the gate without asking leave

and being accompanied by a footman....

‘Are we going this year to Vassilyevskoe or not?’ From early spring I

was greatly interested in this question. My father invariably said that

this year he was going away early, that he longed to see the leaves come

out, but he never could get off before July. Some years he would put it

off so late that we never went at all. He wrote to the country every

winter that the house was to be got ready and thoroughly warmed, but

this was done through deep diplomatic considerations rather than quite

seriously, in order that the village elder and the counting-house clerk

might be afraid he would soon be coming and look after their work more

carefully.

It seemed that we were going. My father told the Senator that he was

longing to rest in the country and that the estate wanted looking after,

but again weeks went by.

Little by little there seemed more ground for hope, provisions began to

be sent off, sugar, tea, all sorts of cereals, and wine—then again there

was a pause, and then at last an order was despatched to the village

elder to send so many peasants’ horses on such a day—and so we were

going, we were going!

I did not think then what the loss of four or five days when work in the

fields was at its height must have meant to the peasants, but rejoiced

with all my heart and hastened to pack my books and exercise books. The

horses were brought, with inward satisfaction I heard their munching and

snorting in the yard, and took great interest in the bustle of the

coachmen, and the wrangling of the servants as to who should sit in

which cart and where each should put his belongings. In the servants’

quarters lights were burning until daybreak, and all were packing,

dragging sacks and bags from place to place, and dressing for the

journey (which was one of over fifty miles). My father’s valet was the

most exasperated of all, he realised the full importance of the packing;

with intense irritation he flung out everything which had been put in by

others, tore his hair with vexation and was quite unapproachable.

My father did not get up a bit earlier next day, in fact I think he got

up later than usual, and drank his coffee just as slowly, but at last,

at eleven o’clock, he ordered the horses to be put in. Behind the

carriage, which had four seats and was drawn by six carriage horses,

there followed three and sometimes four conveyances—a coach, a chaise, a

wagon, or instead of it, two carts; all these were filled with the

house-serfs and their belongings, although wagon-loads had been sent on

beforehand, and everything was so tightly packed that no one could sit

with comfort. We stopped half way to have dinner and to feed the horses

in the big village of Perhushkovo, the name of which occurs in

Napoleon’s bulletins. This village belonged to the son of that elder

brother of my father of whom I have spoken in connection with the

division of the property. The neglected house of the owner stood on the

high-road, surrounded by flat, cheerless-looking fields; but even this

dusty vista delighted me after the stuffiness of town. In the house the

warped boards and stairs shook, sounds and footsteps resounded loudly,

the walls echoed as it were with astonishment. The old-fashioned

furniture from the former owner’s art museum was living out its day in

this exile; I wandered with curiosity from room to room, went upstairs

and downstairs and finally into the kitchen. There our man-cook, with a

cross and ironical expression, was preparing a hasty dinner. The

steward, a grey-haired old man with a swelling on his head, was usually

sitting in the kitchen; the cook addressed his remarks to him and

criticised the stove and the hearth, while the steward listened to him

and from time to time answered laconically: ‘May-be,’ and looked

disconsolately at all the upset, wondering when the devil would carry us

off again.

The dinner was served on a special English service, made of tin or some

composition, bought _ad hoc_. Meanwhile the horses had been put in; in

the hall and vestibule, people who were fond of meetings and

leave-takings were gathering together: footmen who were finishing their

lives on bread and pure country air, old women who had been

prepossessing maids thirty years before, all the locusts of a

landowner’s household who through no fault of their own eat up the

peasants’ substance like real locusts. With them came children with

flaxen hair; barefooted and muddy, they kept poking forward while the

old women pulled them back. They caught me on every opportunity, and

every year wondered that I had grown so much. My father said a few words

to them; some went up to kiss his hand, which he never gave them, others

bowed, and we set off.

A few miles from Prince Golitsyn’s estate of Vyazma the elder of

Vassilyevskoe was waiting for us on horseback at the edge of the forest,

and he escorted us by a cross-road. In the village by the big house,

approached by a long avenue of limes, we were met by the priest, his

wife, the church servitors, the house-serfs, several peasants, and the

village fool, who was the only one to display a feeling of human

dignity, for he did not take off his hat, but stood smiling at a little

distance and took to his heels as soon as any of the town servants

attempted to approach him.

I have seen few places more picturesque than Vassilyevskoe. For any one

who knows Kuntsovo and Yussupov’s Arhangelskoe, or Lopuhin’s estate

facing the Savin monastery, it is enough to say that Vassilyevskoe lies

on a continuation of the same bank of the Moskva, twenty miles from the

same monastery. On the sloping side of the river lie the village, the

church, and the old manor house. On the other side there is a hill and a

small village, and there my father built a new house. The view from it

embraced an expanse of ten miles of country; seas of quivering

cornfields stretched endlessly; homesteads and villages with white

churches could be seen here and there; forests of various hues made a

semicircular setting, and the Moskva like a pale blue ribbon ran through

it all. Early in the morning I opened the window in the room upstairs

and gazed and listened and breathed.

And yet I regretted the old brick house, perhaps because I was there

when I first went to the country; I so loved the long, shady avenue

leading up to it and the garden that had run wild; the house had fallen

into ruins and a slender graceful birch tree was growing out of a crack

in the wall of the hall. On the left an avenue of willows ran along the

riverside, beyond it there were reeds and the white sand down to the

river; on that sand and among those reeds I used at ten and eleven years

old to play for a whole morning. A bent old man, the gardener, used

always to be sitting before the house, he used to distil peppermint

water, cook berries, and secretly regale me on all sorts of vegetables.

There were great numbers of rooks in the garden: the tops of the trees

were covered with their nests, and they used to circle round them,

cawing; sometimes, especially in the evening, they used to fly up in

regular hundreds racing after one another with a great clamour;

sometimes one would fly hurriedly from tree to tree and then all would

be still.... And towards night an owl would wail somewhere in the

distance like a child, or go off into a peal of laughter.... I was

afraid of these wild wailing sounds and yet I went to listen to them.

Every year, or, at least, every alternate year, we used to go to

Vassilyevskoe. As I went away, I used to measure my height on the wall

by the balcony, and I went at once on arriving to find how much I had

grown. But in the country I could measure not only my physical growth,

these periodical returns to the same objects showed me clearly the

difference in my inner development. Other books were brought, other

objects interested me. In 1823 I was quite a child, I had children’s

books with me, and even those I did not read, but was much more

interested in a hare and a squirrel which were living in the loft near

my room. One of my principal enjoyments consisted in my father’s

permission to shoot from a falconet every evening, which operation of

course entertained all the servants, and grey-haired old men of fifty

were as much diverted as I was. In 1827 I brought with me Plutarch and

Schiller; early in the morning I used to go out into the forest as far

as I could and, imagining that I was in the Bohemian forests, read aloud

to myself. Nevertheless, I was greatly interested in a dam which I was

making on a small stream with the help of a serf-boy and would run a

dozen times a day to look at it and repair it. In 1829 and 1830 I was

writing a philosophical article on Schiller’s _Wallenstein_, and of my

old toys none but the falconet retained its charm.

Besides shooting there was, however, another enjoyment for which I

retained an unalterable passion—watching the evenings in the country;

now as then, such evenings are still times of devoutness, peace, and

poetry. One of the last serenely-bright moments in my life reminds me

also of those village evenings. The sun was sinking majestically,

brilliantly, into an ocean of fire, was dissolving into it.... All at

once the rich purple was followed by deep blue dusk, everything was

covered with a smoky mist: in Italy the darkness falls quickly. We

mounted our mules; on the way from Frascati to Rome we had to ride

through a little village; here and there lights were already twinkling;

everything was still, the mules’ hoofs rang musically on the stone, a

fresh and rather damp wind was blowing from the Apennines. As we came

out of the village, there was a little Madonna standing in a niche with

a lamp burning before her; some peasant girls as they came from work

with white kerchiefs on their heads sank on their knees and chanted a

prayer; they were joined by some strolling flute-players who were

passing by. I was deeply affected, deeply touched. We looked at each

other ... and with slow steps rode on to the inn where a carriage was

waiting for us. As we drove homewards I talked of the evenings at

Vassilyevskoe, and what was there to tell?

‘In silence stood the garden trees,

Among the hills the village lay,

And thither at the fall of night

The lingering cattle wend their way.’

OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.

... The shepherd cracks his long whip and plays on his birch-bark pipe;

there is the lowing and bleating and stamping of the herds returning

over the bridge, the dog with a bark chases a straying sheep while she

runs with a sort of wooden gallop; and then the songs of the peasant

girls, on their way home from the fields, come closer and closer; but

the path turns off to the right and the sounds retreat again. From the

houses children run out at the creaking gates to meet their cows and

sheep; work is over. The children are playing in the street and on the

river-bank, their voices ring out with shrill clearness over the river

in the evening glow; the parched smell of corn-kilns mingles in the air,

the dew begins little by little to lie like smoke over the fields, the

wind moves over the forest with a sound as though the leaves were

boiling and the summer lightning, quivering, lights up the landscape

with a dying, tremulous azure, and Vera Artamonovna, grumbling rather

than cross, says, coming upon me under a lime tree: ‘How is it there is

no finding you anywhere, and tea has been ready long ago and every one

is at the table, here I have been looking and looking for you until my

legs are tired. I can’t go running about at my age; and why are you

lying on the damp grass like that? ... you’ll have a cold to-morrow,

I’ll be bound.’

‘Oh, come, come,’ I say, laughing to the old woman, ‘I shan’t have a

cold and I don’t want any tea, but you steal me the best of the cream

from the very top.’

‘Well, you really are a boy, there’s no being angry with you ... that’s

a queer thing to ask for! I have got the cream ready for you without

your asking. Look at the lightning ... well, that’s right! It’s good for

the corn.’

And I go home skipping and whistling.

We did not visit Vassilyevskoe after 1832. My father sold it while I was

in exile. In 1843 we stayed at another estate in the Moscow province, in

the district of Zvenigorod, about fourteen miles from Vassilyevskoe. I

could not help going over to visit my old home. And here we were again

riding along the same cross-road; the familiar fir-wood and the hill

covered with nut trees came into view, and then the ford over the river,

the ford that had so delighted me twenty years before, the gurgling of

the water, the crunching of the pebbles, the shouting coachmen and the

struggling horses ... and here was the village and the priest’s house

where he used to sit on a bench in a dark-brown cassock, simple-hearted,

good-natured, red-haired, always in a sweat, always nibbling something

and always afflicted with a hiccup; and here was the counting-house

where the clerk Vassily Epifanov, who was never sober, used to write his

accounts, huddled up over the paper, holding the pen by the very end

with his third finger bent tightly under it. The priest was dead and

Vassily Epifanov was keeping accounts and getting drunk in another

village. We stopped at the village elder’s hut, but found only the wife

at home, the man himself was in the fields.

A strange element had crept in during those ten years; instead of our

house on the hill there was a new one, and a new garden was laid out

beside it. As we turned by the church and the graveyard, we met a

deformed-looking figure, dragging itself along almost on all fours; it

was showing me something, I went up: it was a hunchback and paralytic

old woman, half-crazy, who used to live on charity and work in the

former priest’s garden. She had been about seventy then and death seemed

to have overlooked her. She recognised me, shed tears, shook her head

and kept saying: ‘Ough! why even you are getting old, I only knew you

from your walk, while I—there, there, ough! ough! don’t talk of it!’

As we were driving back, I saw in the fields in the distance the village

elder, the same as in our time. At first he did not know me, but when we

had driven by, as though suddenly coming to himself with a start, he

took off his hat and bowed low. When we had driven a little further I

turned round; the village elder, Grigory Gorsky, was still standing in

the same place, looking after us; his tall, bearded figure, bowing in

the midst of the cornfield, gave us a friendly send-off from the home

which had passed into strangers’ hands.

Chapter 4

NICK AND THE SPARROW HILLS

‘_Write how here on that spot (the Sparrow Hills) the story of

our lives, yours and mine, developed._’—A Letter, 1833.

Three years before the time of my cousin’s visit we were walking on the

banks of the Moskva at Luzhniki, _i.e._ on the other side of the Sparrow

Hills. At the river’s edge we met a French tutor of our acquaintance

dressed in nothing but his shirt; he was panic-stricken and was

shouting, ‘He is drowning, he is drowning!’ But before our friend had

time to take off his shirt or put on his trousers, an Ural Cossack ran

down from the Sparrow Hills, dashed into the water, vanished, and a

minute later reappeared with a frail-looking man, whose head and arms

were flopping about like clothes hung out in the wind. He laid him on

the bank, saying, ‘We had better roll him or else he will die.’

The people standing round collected fifty roubles and offered it to the

Cossack. The latter without affectation said very simple-heartedly:

‘It’s a sin to take money for such a thing, and it was no trouble

either; come to think of it, he is no more weight than a cat. But we are

poor people, though,’ he added. ‘Ask, we don’t; but, there, if people

give, why not take; we are humbly thankful.’ Then tying up the money in

a handkerchief he went to graze his horses on the hill. My father asked

his name and wrote about the incident next day to Essen. Essen promoted

him to be a non-commissioned officer. A few months later the Cossack

came to see us and with him a pock-marked bald German, smelling of scent

and wearing a curled fair wig; he came to thank us on behalf of the

Cossack, it was the drowned man. From that time he took to coming to see

us.

Karl Ivanovitch Sonnenberg, that was his name, was at that time

completing the German part of the education of two young rascals; from

them he went to a landowner of Simbirsk, and from him to a distant

relative of my father’s. The boy, the care of whose health and German

accent had been entrusted to him and whom Sonnenberg called Nick,

attracted me. There was something kind, gentle, and dreamy about him; he

was not at all like the other boys it had been my luck to meet, but,

nevertheless, we became close friends. He was silent and dreamy; I was

playful but afraid to tease him.

About the time when my cousin went back to Kortcheva, Nick’s grandmother

died; his mother he had lost in early childhood. There was a great upset

in the house, and Sonnenberg who really had nothing to do was very busy

too, and imagined that he was run off his legs; he brought Nick in the

morning and asked that he might remain with us for the rest of the day.

Nick was sad and frightened; I suppose he had been fond of his

grandmother. He so poetically recalled her in after years:

“When even’s golden beams are blent

With rosy vistas, radiant hued,

I call to mind how in our home

The ancient customs we pursued.

On every Sunday’s eve there came

Our grey and stately priest arrayed,

And, bowing to the holy shrine,

With his assistants knelt and prayed.

Our grandmamma, the honoured dame,

Would lean upon her spacious chair

And, fingering her rosary,

Would bend her head in whispered prayer.

And through the doorway we could see

The house-servants’ familiar faces,

As praying for a ripe old age

They knelt in their accustomed places.

Meantime, upon the window-panes

The evening glow would shine, reflected,

While incense floated through the hall

By censers, swinging wide, projected.

Amid the silence so profound

No sound was heard except the praying

Of mingled voices. On my heart

Some feeling undefined was weighing,

A wistful sadness, dim and vague,

Of fleeting, childish dreams begot.

Unknown to me my heart was full

Of yearning for I knew not what.”—

OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.[47]

... After we had been sitting still a little I suggested reading

Schiller. I was surprised at the similarity of our tastes; he knew far

more by heart than I did and knew precisely the passages I liked best;

we closed the book and, so to speak, began sounding our mutual

sympathies.

From Möros who went with a dagger in his sleeve ‘to free the city from

the tyrant,’ from Wilhelm Tell who waited for Vogt on the narrow path to

Küsznacht, the transition to Nicholas and the Fourteenth of December was

easy. These thoughts and these comparisons were not new to Nick; he,

too, knew Pushkin’s and Ryleyev’s[48] unpublished poems. The contrast

between him and the empty-headed boys I had occasionally met was

striking.

Not long before, walking to the Pryesnensky Ponds, full of my Bouchot

terrorism, I had explained to a companion of my own age the justice of

the execution of Louis XVI. ‘Quite so,’ observed the youthful Prince O.,

‘but you know he was God’s anointed!’ I looked at him with compassion,

ceased to care for him and never asked to go and see him again.

There were no such barriers with Nick, his heart beat as mine did. He,

too, had broken loose from the grim conservative shore, and we had but

to shove off more vigorously together and almost from the first day we

resolved to work in the interests of the Tsarevitch Constantine!

Before that day we had had few long conversations. Karl Ivanovitch

pestered us like an autumn fly and spoilt every conversation with his

presence; he interfered in everything without understanding, made

observations, straightened Nick’s shirt collar, was in a hurry to get

home, in fact, was detestable. A month later we could not pass two days

without seeing each other or writing letters; with all the impulsiveness

of my nature I devoted myself more and more to Nick, while he had a

quiet and deep love for me.

From the very beginning our friendship took a serious tone. I do not

remember that mischievous pranks ever took a foremost place with us,

particularly when we were alone. Of course we did not sit still, our

boyish years showed themselves in laughing and playing the fool, teasing

Sonnenberg and playing with bows and arrows in the yard; but at the

bottom of it all there was something very different from idle

companionship. Besides our being of the same age, besides our ‘chemical

affinity,’ we were united by our common faith. Nothing in the world so

purifies and ennobles early youth, nothing keeps it so safe as a keenly

alert interest of a purely human character. We respected our future in

ourselves, we looked at each other as ‘chosen vessels,’ predestined.

Nick and I often walked out into the country. We had our favourite

places, the Sparrow Hills, the fields beyond the Dragomilovsky Gate. He

would come with Sonnenberg to fetch me at six or seven in the morning,

and if I were asleep would throw sand and little pebbles at my window. I

would wake up smiling and hasten to go out to him.

The indefatigable Karl Ivanovitch had instituted these walks.

In the old-fashioned patriarchal education of Ogaryov Sonnenberg plays

the part of Biron.[49] When he made his appearance the influence of the

old peasant who had looked after the boy was put aside; the discontented

oligarchy of the servants’ hall were forced against the grain to

silence, knowing that there was no overcoming the damned German who fed

at the master’s table. Sonnenberg made violent changes in the old order

of things. The old man who had been nurse positively grew tearful when

he learned that the wretched German had taken the young master _himself_

to buy ready-made boots at a shop! Sonnenberg’s revolution, like Peter

the Great’s, was distinguished by a military character even in the most

peaceful matters. It does not follow from that that Karl Ivanovitch’s

thin little shoulders had ever been adorned with epaulettes. But nature

has so made the German, that if he does not reach the slovenliness and

_sans-gêne_ of a philologist or a theologian, he is inevitably of a

military mind, even though he be a civilian. By virtue of this

peculiarity Karl Ivanovitch liked tight-fitting clothes, buttoned up and

cut with a waist, by virtue of it he was a strict observer of his own

rules, and if he proposed to get up at six o’clock in the morning, he

would get Nick up at one minute before six, and in no case later than

one minute after six, and would go out into the open air with him.

The Sparrow Hills, at the foot of which Karl Ivanovitch had been so

nearly drowned, soon became our ‘Holy Mountain.’

One day after dinner my father proposed to drive out into the country.

Ogaryov was with us and my father invited him and Sonnenberg to go too.

These expeditions were not a joking matter. Before reaching the

town-gate we had to drive for an hour or more in a four-seated carriage,

built by ‘Joachim,’ which had not saved it from becoming disgracefully

shabby in its fifteen years of tranquil service and being heavier than a

siege cannon. The four horses of different sizes and colours who had

grown fat and lazy in idleness were covered with sweat and foam within a

quarter of an hour; the coachman Avdey was forbidden to let them get

into this condition, and so had no choice but to let them walk. The

windows were usually closed, however hot it might be; and with all this,

we had the indifferently oppressive supervision of my father and the

restlessly fussy and irritating supervision of Karl Ivanovitch. But we

gladly put up with everything for the sake of being together.

At Luzhniki we crossed the river Moskva in a boat at the very spot where

the Cossack had pulled Karl Ivanovitch out of the water. My father

walked, as always, bent and morose; beside him Karl Ivanovitch tripped

along, entertaining him with gossip and scandal. We went on in front of

them, and getting far ahead ran up to the Sparrow Hills at the spot

where the first stone of Vitberg’s temple was laid.

Flushed and breathless, we stood there mopping our faces. The sun was

setting, the cupolas glittered, the city lay stretched further than the

eye could reach; a fresh breeze blew on our faces, we stood leaning

against each other and, suddenly embracing, vowed in sight of all Moscow

to sacrifice our lives to the struggle we had chosen.

This scene may strike others as very affected and very theatrical, and

yet twenty-six years afterwards I am moved to tears recalling it; there

was a sacred sincerity in it, and that our whole life has proved. But

apparently a like destiny awaits all vows made on that spot; Alexander

was sincere, too, when he laid the first stone of that temple, which, as

Joseph II.[50] said (though then mistakenly) when laying the first stone

in some town in Novorossia, was destined to be the last.

We did not know all the strength of the foe with whom we were entering

into battle, but we took up the fight. That strength broke much in us,

but it did not crush us, and we did not surrender to it in spite of all

its blows. The wounds received from it were honourable. Jacob’s strained

thigh was the sign that he had wrestled in the night with a God.

From that day the Sparrow Hills became a place of worship for us and

once or twice a year we went there, and always by ourselves. There, five

years later, Ogaryov asked me timidly and shyly whether I believed in

his poetic talent, and wrote to me afterwards (1833) from his country

house: ‘I have come away and feel sad, sad, as I have never been before.

And it’s all the Sparrow Hills. For a long time I hid my enthusiasm in

myself; shyness or something else, I don’t myself know what, prevented

me from uttering it, but on the Sparrow Hills that enthusiasm was not

weighed down by solitude. You shared it with me and those were moments

that I shall never forget, like memories of past happiness they have

haunted me on my journey, while all around I saw nothing but forest; it

was all so dark blue and in my soul was darkness, darkness.

‘Write,’ he concluded, ‘how on that spot (that is, on the Sparrow Hills)

the history of our lives, yours and mine, developed.’

Five more years passed. I was far from the Sparrow Hills, but near me

their Prometheus, A. L. Vitberg, stood, austere and gloomy. In 1842

returning finally to Moscow, again I visited the Sparrow Hills, once

more we stood on the site of the foundation stone and gazed at the same

view, two together, but the other was not Nick.

From 1827 we were not parted. In every memory of that time, general and

particular, he with his boyish features and his love for me was

everywhere in the foreground. Early could be seen in him that sign of

grace, which is vouchsafed to few, whether for woe or for bliss I know

not, but certainly for being apart from the crowd. A large portrait of

Ogaryov as he was at that time (1827–8), painted in oils, remained for

many years afterwards in his father’s house. In later days I often stood

before it and gazed at him. He was painted with a turned-down shirt

collar; the painter had wonderfully reproduced the luxuriant chestnut

hair, the youthfully soft beauty of his irregular features and his

rather swarthy colouring; there was a dreaminess in the portrait that

gave promise of intense thought, a vague melancholy and extreme

gentleness shone in his big grey eyes that suggested the future

greatness of a mighty spirit; such indeed he grew to be. This portrait,

presented to me, was taken by a woman who was a stranger; perhaps these

lines will meet her eyes and she will send it to me.

I do not know why the memories of first love are given such precedence

over the memories of youthful friendship. The fragrance of first love

lies in the fact that it forgets the difference of sex, that it is

passionate friendship. On the other hand, friendship between the young

has all the ardour of love and all its character, the same delicate fear

of touching on its feelings with a word, the same mistrust of self and

boundless devotion, the same agony at separation, and the same jealous

desire for exclusive affection.

I had long loved Nick and loved him passionately, but did not venture to

call him my friend, and when he was spending the summer at Kuntsovo I

wrote to him at the end of a letter: ‘Whether your friend or not, I

don’t know yet.’ He first used the second person singular in writing to

me and used to call me his Agathon after Karamzin,[51] while I called

him my Raphael after Schiller.[52]

You may smile if you like, but let it be a mild, good-natured smile, as

men smile when they think of being fifteen. Or would it not be better to

muse over the question, ‘Was I like that when I was developing?’ and to

bless your fate if you have had youth (merely being young is not enough

for it), to bless it doubly if you had a friend then.

The language of that period seems affected and bookish to us now, we

have become unaccustomed to its vague enthusiasm, its confused fervour

that passes suddenly into yearning tenderness or childish laughter. It

would be as absurd in a man of thirty as the celebrated _Bettina will

schlafen_,[53] but in its proper time this language of youth, this

_jargon de la puberté_, this change of the psychological voice is very

sincere, even the bookish tone is natural to the age of theoretical

knowledge and practical ignorance.

Schiller remained our favourite.[54] The characters of his dramas were

for us living persons; we analysed them, loved and hated them, not as

poetic creations but as living men. Moreover we saw ourselves in them. I

wrote to Nick, somewhat troubled by his being too fond of Fiesco, that

behind every Fiesco stands his Verrina. My ideal was Karl Moor, but I

soon changed it in favour of the Marquis of Posa. I imagined in a

hundred variations how I would speak to Nicholas, and how afterwards he

would send me to the mines or the scaffold. It is a strange thing that

almost all our day-dreams ended in Siberia or the scaffold and hardly

ever in triumph; can this be characteristic of the Russian imagination,

or is it the effect of Petersburg with its five gallows and its penal

servitude reflected on the young generation?

And so, Ogaryov, hand in hand we moved forward into life! Fearlessly and

proudly we advanced, lavishly we responded to every appeal and sincerely

we gave ourselves up to every enthusiasm. The path we chose was a thorny

one, we have never left it for one moment, wounded and broken we have

gone forward and no one has turned us aside. I have reached ... not the

goal but the spot where the road goes downhill, and involuntarily I seek

thy hand that we may go down together, that I may press it and say

smiling mournfully, ‘So this is all!’

Meanwhile in the dull leisure to which the events of life have condemned

me, finding in myself neither strength nor freshness for new labours, I

am writing down our memories. Much of that which united us so closely

has taken shape in these pages. I present them to thee. For thee they

have a double value, the value of tombstones on which we meet familiar

names.[55]

... And is it not strange to think that had Sonnenberg known how to

swim, or had he been drowned then in the Moskva, had he been pulled out

not by a Cossack of the Urals but by some soldier of the Apsheronsky

infantry, I should not have met Nick or should have met him later,

differently, not in that room in our old house, where, smoking cigars on

the sly, we entered so deeply into each other’s lives and drew strength

from each other. He did not forget our ‘old house.’

‘Old Home! My old friend! I have found thee,

Thy cold desolation I see;

The past is arising before me,

And sadly I gaze upon thee.

Unswept and untended the courtyard,

Neglected and fallen the well,

Green leaves that once whispered and murmured

Lie yellow and dead where they fell.

The house is dismantled and empty,

The plaster is spread on the grass,

The heavy grey clouds wander sadly

And weep for thy plight as they pass.

I entered. The rooms were familiar:

’Twas here—when we children were young—

The peevish old man sat and grumbled,

We feared his malevolent tongue.

And this room, my friend, oh! my comrade!

We shared, one in heart and in mind,

What bright golden thoughts were conceived here

In days that lie dimly behind!

A star shimmered faint through the window:

The words that are left on the wall

Were written when youth was triumphant,

Inspirer, dictator of all!

In this little room love and friendship

Were fostered. What joys did they bring!

But now, in its drear empty corners

The spiders’ webs broaden and cling.

And suddenly, smitten with terror,

Methought in the graveyard near by

I stood and I called on my loved ones,

The dead did not answer my cry....’

OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.[56]

Chapter 5

DETAILS OF HOME LIFE—EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PEOPLE IN RUSSIA—A DAY IN OUR

HOUSE—VISITORS AND _HABITUÉS_—SONNENBERG—THE VALET AND OTHERS

The insufferable dreariness of our house grew greater every year. If my

University time had not been approaching, if it had not been for my new

friendship, my political enthusiasm and the liveliness of my

disposition, I should have run away or perished.

My father was hardly ever in a good humour, he was perpetually

dissatisfied with everybody. A man of great intelligence and great

powers of observation, he had seen, heard, and remembered an immense

amount; an accomplished man of the world, he could be extremely polite

and interesting, but he did not care to be and sank more and more into

ill-humoured unsociability.

It is hard to say exactly what it was that put so much bitterness and

spleen into his blood. Periods of passion, of great unhappiness, of

mistakes and losses were completely absent from his life. I could never

fully understand what was the origin of the spiteful mockery and

irritability that filled his soul, the mistrustful unsociability and the

vexation that consumed him. Did he bear with him to the grave some

memory which he confided to no one, or was this simply the result of the

combination of two elements so absolutely opposed as the eighteenth

century and Russian life, with the assistance of a third, terribly

conducive to the development of ill-humour, the idleness of the

slave-owner?

Last century produced in the West, particularly in France, a wonderful

crop of men endowed with all the weak points of the Regency and all the

strong points of Rome and Sparta. These mixtures of Faublas[57] and

Regulus opened wide the doors of the Revolution and were the first to

rush in, crowding each other in their haste to reach the ‘window’ of the

guillotine. Our age no longer produces these single-minded powerful

natures; the eighteenth century on the contrary called them forth

everywhere, even where they were not needed, even where they could not

develop except into something grotesque. In Russia men exposed to the

influence of this mighty Western movement became original, but not

historical figures. Foreigners at home, foreigners in other lands, idle

spectators, spoilt for Russia by Western prejudices and for the West by

Russian habits, they were a sort of intellectual superfluity and were

lost in artificial life, in sensual pleasure and in unbearable egoism.

To this class belonged the Tatar Prince, N. B. Yussupov, a Russian

grandee and a European _grand seigneur_, a foremost figure in Moscow,

conspicuous for his intelligence and his wealth. About him gathered a

perfect galaxy of grey-headed gallants and _esprits forts_, all the

Masalskys and Santis and _tutti quanti_. They were all rather cultured

and well-educated people; having no work in life they flung themselves

upon pleasure, pampered themselves, loved themselves, good-naturedly

forgave themselves all transgressions, exalted their gastronomy to the

level of a Platonic passion and reduced love for women to a sort of

voracious gourmandise.

The old sceptic and Epicurean Yussupov, a friend of Voltaire and

Beaumarchais,[58] of Diderot and Casti,[59] really was gifted with

artistic taste. To see this, one need but go to Arhangelskoe and look at

his galleries, that is, if they have not yet been sold bit by bit by his

heir. He was magnificently fading out of life at eighty, surrounded by

marble, painted and living beauty. In his house near Moscow Pushkin

conversed with him and addressed a wonderful epistle to him, and there,

too, pictures were painted by Gonzaga,[60] to whom Yussupov dedicated

his theatre.

By his education, by his service in the Guards, by position and

connections, my father belonged to this circle, but neither his

character nor his health permitted him to lead a frivolous life to the

age of seventy: and he passed to the opposite extreme. He tried to lead

a solitary life and found in it a deadly dullness, the mare because he

tried to arrange it entirely _for himself_. His strength of will changed

into obstinate caprice, his unemployed energies spoilt his character,

making him insufferable.

When he was being educated, European civilisation was still so new in

Russia that to be educated was equivalent to being so much the less

Russian. To the end of his days he wrote more freshly and correctly in

French than in Russian. He had literally not read one single book in

Russian, not even the Bible. Though, indeed, he had not read the Bible

in other languages either; he knew the subject-matter of the Holy

Scriptures generally from hearsay and from extracts, and had no

curiosity to look into it. He had, it is true, a respect for

Derzhavin[61] and Krylov[62]: Derzhavin because he had written an ode on

the death of his uncle, Prince Meshtchersky, Krylov because he had been

with him as second at N. N. Bahmetyev’s duel. My father did once pick up

Karamzin’s _History of the Russian Empire_, having heard that the

Emperor Alexander was reading it, but he laid it aside, saying

contemptuously: ‘It is nothing but Izyaslavitches and Olgovitches, to

whom can it be of interest?’

For men he had an open, undisguised contempt—for all. Never under any

circumstances did he reckon upon anybody, and I do not remember that he

ever applied to any one with any serious request. He himself did nothing

for any one. In his relations with outsiders he demanded one thing only,

the observance of the proprieties; _les apparences, les convenances_

made up the whole of his moral religion. He was ready to forgive much,

or rather to overlook it, but breaches of good form and good manners

made him beside himself, and in such cases he was without any tolerance,

without the slightest indulgence or compassion. I so long raged inwardly

against this injustice that at last I understood it. He was convinced

beforehand that every man is capable of any evil act; and that, if he

does not commit it, it is either that he has no need to, or that the

opportunity does not present itself; in the disregard of formalities he

saw a personal affront, a disrespect to himself; or a ‘plebeian

education,’ which in his opinion cut a man off from all human society.

‘The soul of man,’ he used to say, ‘is darkness, and who knows what is

in any man’s soul? I have too much business of my own to be interested

in other people’s, much less to judge and criticise their intentions;

but I cannot be in the same room with an ill-bred man, he offends me,

grates upon me; of course he may be the best-hearted man in the world

and for that he will have a place in paradise, but I don’t want him.

What is most important in life is _esprit de conduite_, it is more

important than the most lofty intellect or any kind of learning. To know

how to be at ease everywhere, to put yourself forward nowhere, the

utmost courtesy with all and no familiarity with any one.’

My father disliked every sort of _abandon_, every sort of openness; all

that he called familiarity, just as he called every feeling

sentimentality. He persistently posed as a man superior to all such

petty trifles; for the sake of what, with what object? What was the

higher interest to which the heart was sacrificed?—I do not know. And

for whom did this haughty old man, who despised men so genuinely and

knew them so well, play his part of impartial judge?—For a woman whose

will he had broken although she sometimes contradicted him; for an

invalid who lay always at the mercy of the surgeon’s knife; for a boy

whose high spirits he had developed into disobedience; for a dozen

lackeys whom he did not reckon as human beings!

And what patience was spent on it, what perseverance, and how

wonderfully well the part was played in spite of age and illness. Truly

the soul of man is darkness.

Later on when I was arrested, and afterwards when I was sent into exile,

I saw that the old man’s heart was more open to love and even to

tenderness than I had thought. I never thanked him for it, not knowing

how he would take my gratitude.

Of course he was not happy; always on his guard, always dissatisfied, he

saw with a pang the hostile feelings he roused in all his household; he

saw the smile pass from the face and the words checked at his entrance;

he spoke of it with mockery, with vexation, but made not a single

concession and went his way with the utmost persistence. Mockery, irony,

cold, malignant and scornful, was a weapon which he used like an artist;

he employed it equally against us and against the servants. In early

youth one can bear many things better than sarcasm, and until I went to

prison I was really estranged from my father, and joined with the maids

and men-servants in leading a little war against him.

Moreover, he had persuaded himself that he was dangerously ill and was

continually undergoing treatment; besides our own household doctor, he

was visited by two or three others and had three or four consultations a

year at least. Visitors, seeing always his unfriendly face and hearing

nothing but complaints of his health, which was far from being so bad as

he thought, left off coming. He was angry at this but never reproached a

single person nor invited one. A terrible dullness reigned in the house,

particularly on the endless winter evenings—two lamps lighted a whole

suite of rooms; wearing felt or lamb’s-wool high boots, a velvet cap,

and a coat lined with white lambskin, bowed, with his hands clasped

behind his back, the old man walked up and down, followed by two or

three brown dogs, and never uttering a word.

A carefulness spent on worthless objects grew with his melancholy. He

managed the estate badly for himself and badly for his peasants. The

village elders and his _missi dominici_ robbed their master and the

peasants; on the other hand, everything that met the eye was subjected

to redoubled supervision, candles were saved and the thin _vin de

Graves_ was replaced by sour Crimean wine at the very time when a whole

forest was cut down in one village, and in another his own oats were

sold to him. He had his privileged thieves; the peasant whom he made

collector of _obrok_ (payment from a serf in lieu of labour) in Moscow

and whom he sent every summer to supervise the village elder, the

market, the garden, the forest, and the field labours, saved enough in

ten years to buy a house in Moscow. From a child I hated this minister

without portfolio; on one occasion he beat an old peasant in the yard in

my presence. I was so furious that I hung on to his beard and almost

fainted. From that time I could not look at him without dislike until he

died in 1845. I several times asked my father where did Shkun get the

money to buy a house.

‘That’s what sobriety does,’ the old man answered, ‘he never takes a

drop of liquor.’

Every year near the time of carnival, the peasants from the Penza

province used to bring from near Kerensk _obrok_ in kind. For a

fortnight a trail of poor-looking wagons were on the road, laden with

pork, sucking pigs, geese, fowls, grain, rye, eggs, butter, and linen.

The arrival of the Kerensk peasants was a holiday for all the

house-serfs; they robbed the peasants and fleeced them at every step

without the slightest right to do so. The coachmen charged them for the

water in the well, and would not let their horses drink without payment.

The women made them pay for warmth in the house, they had to pay homage

to one aristocrat of the servants’ hall with a sucking pig and a towel,

to another with a goose and butter. All the time they stayed in the yard

the servants kept up a feast, holiday dishes were made, sucking pigs

were roasted, and the hall was continually full of the fumes of onion,

burnt fat, and the drink which had just been consumed. For the last two

days of these junketings Bakay did not go into the hall and did not

finish dressing, but sat in the outer kitchen with an old livery coat

thrown over his shoulders, without his waistcoat and jacket. He was

growing visibly thinner and becoming darker and older. My father put up

with all this pretty calmly, knowing that it was inevitable and could

not be altered.

After the dead provisions had been received, my father—and the most

remarkable point about it is that the practice was repeated yearly—used

to call the cook, Spiridon, and send him to the poultry bazaar and the

Smolensky market to find out the prices; the cook returned with

fabulously small prices, less than half the real ones. My father would

tell him he was a fool and send for Shkun or Slyepushkin. The latter had

a fruit stall at the Ilyinsky Gate. And both considered the cook’s

prices terribly low, made inquiries and brought back prices rather

higher. At last Slyepushkin offered to take the whole lot, eggs and

sucking pigs and butter and rye ‘to save all disturbance to your health,

sir.’ He gave a price I need hardly say somewhat higher than the cook’s.

My father agreed. Slyepushkin would bring him oranges and little cakes

in honour of the bargain, and brought the cook a note for two hundred

roubles.

This Slyepushkin was in great favour with my father and often borrowed

money from him; he showed his originality in his thorough understanding

of the old man’s character.

He would ask for five hundred roubles for two months, and a day before

the two months were over would appear in the hall with an Easter cake on

a dish and the five hundred roubles on the Easter cake. My father would

take the money, Slyepushkin would make a bow and ask for his hand to

kiss, which was never given. But three days later Slyepushkin would come

again to borrow money and ask for fifteen hundred roubles. My father

would give it and Slyepushkin would again bring it by the time fixed. My

father used to hold him up as an example, but a week later he would ask

for a bigger sum, and in that way enjoyed the use of an extra five

thousand roubles a year for his business, for the trifling interest of

two or three Easter cakes, a few pounds of figs and Greek nuts and a

hundred oranges and apples from the Crimea.

In conclusion, I will mention how some hundreds of acres of building

timber were lost in Novoselye. In the ‘forties, M. F. Orlov who, I

remember, had been commissioned by the Countess Anna Alexeyevna to

purchase an estate for her children, began treating for the Tver estate

which had come to my father from the Senator. They agreed on the price

and the business seemed to be settled. Orlov went to look at the land

and then wrote to my father that on the map he had shown him a forest,

but that there was no such forest.

‘That’s a clever man,’ said my father, ‘he took part in the conspiracy

and wrote a book on finance, but as soon as it comes to business you can

see what a silly fellow he is. These Neckers! Well, I’ll ask Grigory

Ivanovitch to ride over, he’s not a conspirator, but he’s an honest man

and knows his work.’

Grigory Ivanovitch, too, went over to Novoselye and brought the news

that there was no forest, but only a semblance of one rigged up; so that

neither from the big house nor the high-road could the clearing catch

the eye. After the land was assigned to him the Senator had been at

least five times to Novoselye, and yet the secret had never leaked out.

To give a full idea of our manner of life I will describe a whole day

from the morning; the monotony of the days was precisely what was most

deadly; our life went like an English clock regulated to go slowly,

quietly, evenly, loudly recording each second.

At nine o’clock in the morning the valet who sat in the room next the

bedroom informed Vera Artamonovna, my ex-nurse, that the master was

getting up. She went to prepare the coffee which he always drank alone

in his study. Everything in the house assumed a different aspect, the

servants began sweeping the rooms, or at any rate made a show of doing

something. The hall, until then empty, filled up, and even the big

Newfoundland dog Macbeth sat before the stove and watched the fire

without blinking.

Over his coffee the old man read the _Moscow News_ and the _Journal de

St. Pétersbourg_. I may mention that he had given orders for the _Moscow

News_ to be warmed, that his hands might not be chilled by the dampness

of the paper, and that he read the political news in the French text,

finding the Russian obscure. At one time he used to get a Hamburg

newspaper, but could not reconcile himself to the fact that the Germans

printed in German characters, and was always pointing out to me the

difference between the French print and the German, saying that these

grotesque Gothic letters with their little tails were bad for the eyes.

Afterwards he subscribed to the _Journal de Francfort_, but in the end

he confined himself to the journals of his own country.

When he had finished reading he would observe that Karl Ivanovitch

Sonnenberg was in the room. When Nick was fifteen Karl Ivanovitch had

set up a shop, but having neither goods nor customers, after wasting on

this profitable undertaking the money he had somehow scraped up, he

retired from it with the honourable title of ‘merchant of Reval.’ He was

by then over forty, and at that agreeable age he led the life of a bird

of the air or a boy of fourteen, that is, did not know where he would

sleep next day nor on what he would dine. He took advantage of my

father’s being somewhat well-disposed towards him; we shall see at once

what that meant.

In 1830 my father bought near our house another, bigger, better, and

with a garden. The house had belonged to the Countess Rastoptchin, wife

of the celebrated governor of Moscow. We moved into it; after that he

bought a third house which was quite unnecessary, but was next it. Both

these houses stood empty; they were not let for fear of fire (the houses

were insured) and disturbance from tenants. Moreover they were not kept

in repair, so they were on the sure road to ruin. In one of them the

homeless Karl Ivanovitch was permitted to live on condition that he did

not open the gates after ten o’clock (not a difficult condition, since

the gates were never closed), and that he bought firewood and did not

get it from our household supplies (as a matter of fact he bought it

from our coachman), and that he waited upon my father in the capacity of

a clerk of special commissions, _i.e._ came in the morning to inquire

whether there were any orders, turned up at dinner and, if there were no

one else dining with him, spent the evening entertaining him with news

and conversation.

Simple as Karl Ivanovitch’s duties might appear to be, my father knew

how to inject so much bitterness into them that my poor merchant of

Reval, accustomed to all the calamities which can fall upon the head of

a man with no money, with no brains, of small stature, pock-marked face

and German nationality, could not always endure it. At intervals of two

years or a year and a half, Karl Ivanovitch, deeply offended, would

declare that ‘this is utterly unbearable,’ would pack up, buy or

exchange various articles of suspicious value and dubious quality, and

set off for the Caucasus. Ill-luck usually pursued him with ferocity. On

one occasion his wretched nag—he was driving with his own horse in

Tiflis and in the Redoubt Kali—fell down not far from the region of the

Don Cossacks; on another, half his luggage was stolen from him; on

another, his two-wheeled gig upset and his French perfumes were spilt

over the broken wheel, unappreciated by any one, at the foot of Elborus;

then he would lose something, and when he had nothing left to lose he

lost his passport. Ten months later Karl Ivanovitch, a little older, a

little more battered, a little poorer, with still fewer teeth and less

hair, would as a rule meekly present himself before my father with a

store of Persian insect powder, of faded silks and rusty Circassian

daggers, and would settle in the empty house again on the condition of

fulfilling the same duties and heating his stove with his own firewood.

Observing Karl Ivanovitch, my father would at once begin a small attack

upon him. Karl Ivanovitch would inquire after his health, the old man

would thank him with a bow and then after a moment’s thought would

inquire, for instance: ‘Where do you buy your pomade?’ I must here

mention that Karl Ivanovitch, the ugliest of mortals, was a terrible

flirt, considered himself a Lovelace, dressed with an effort at

smartness and wore a curled golden wig. All this, of course, had long

ago been weighed and taken account of by my father. ‘At Bouïs’s on

Kuznitsky Bridge,’ Karl Ivanovitch would answer abruptly, somewhat

piqued, and he would cross one leg over the other like a man ready to

defend himself.

‘What’s the scent called?’

‘Nacht-Violette,’ answered Karl Ivanovitch.

‘He cheats you, violet is a delicate scent.’ Then in French, ‘_C’est un

parfum_, but that’s something strong, disgusting, they embalm bodies

with something of that sort! My nerves have grown so weak it makes me

positively sick; tell them to give me the eau-de-Cologne.’

Karl Ivanovitch would himself dash for the flask.

‘Oh no, you must call some one else or you will come still closer; I

shall be ill, I shall faint.’

Karl Ivanovitch, who was reckoning on the effect of his pomade in the

maids’ room, would be deeply offended.

After sprinkling the room with eau-de-Cologne my father would invent

commissions; to buy some French snuff and some English magnesia, and to

look at a carriage advertised for sale in the papers (he would never buy

it). Karl Ivanovitch, bowing himself out agreeably and inwardly relieved

to get off, would go away till dinner.

After Karl Ivanovitch, the cook made his appearance; whatever he bought

or whatever he ordered, my father thought it extremely expensive.

‘Ough, ough, how expensive! Why, is it because no supplies have come

in?’

‘Just so, sir,’ answered the cook, ‘the roads are so bad.’

‘Oh very well, till they are in better condition we will buy less.’

After this he would sit down to his writing-table and write reports and

orders to the villages, make up his accounts, between whiles scolding

me, receiving the doctors and above all quarrelling with his valet. The

latter was the greatest victim in the whole house. A little, sanguine

man, hasty and hot-tempered, he seemed as though created expressly to

irritate my father and provoke his reprimands. The scenes that were

repeated between them every day might have filled a farce, but it was

all perfectly serious. My father knew very well that the man was

necessary to him and often put up with rude answers from him, but never

ceased trying to train him, in spite of his efforts having been

unsuccessful for thirty-five years. The valet on his side would not have

put up with such a life if he had not had his own recreations; he was as

a rule rather tipsy by dinner-time. My father noticed this, but confined

himself to roundabout allusions to it, advising him, for instance, to

munch a little black bread and salt that he might not smell of vodka.

Nikita Andreyevitch had the habit when he was a little drunk of scraping

with his feet in a peculiar way when he handed the dishes. As soon as my

father noticed this, he would invent some commission for him, would send

him, for instance, to ask the barber Anton if he had changed his

address, adding to me in French, ‘I know that he has not moved, but the

fellow is not sober, he will drop the soup-tureen end smash it, spill

the soup on the cloth and frighten me. Let him go out for an airing. _Le

grand air_ will do him good.’

Usually on such occasions the valet made some answer; but if he could

find nothing to say he would go out, muttering between his teeth. Then

his master would call him and in the same calm voice ask him ‘what did

he say?’

‘I didn’t address a word to you.’

‘To whom were you speaking, then? There is no one but you and me in this

room or the next.’

‘To myself.’

‘That’s very dangerous, that’s the way madness begins.’

The valet would depart in a rage and go to his room; there he used to

read the _Moscow News_ and plait hair for wigs for sale. Probably to

relieve his anger he would take snuff furiously; whether his snuff was

particularly strong or the nerves of his nose were weak I cannot say,

but this was almost always followed by his sneezing violently five or

six times.

The master rang the bell, the valet flung down his handful of hair and

went in.

‘Was that you sneezing?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I wanted to bless you.’ And he would make a motion with his hand for

the valet to withdraw.

On the last day of carnival, all the servants would, according to

custom, come in the evening to beg the master’s forgiveness: on these

solemn occasions my father used to go out into the great drawing-room,

accompanied by his valet. Then he would pretend not to recognise some of

them.

‘Who is that venerable old man standing there in the corner?’ he would

ask the valet.

‘The coachman Danilo,’ the valet would answer abruptly, knowing that all

this was only a dramatic performance.

‘Good gracious! how he has changed. I really believe that it is entirely

from drink that men get old so quickly; what does he do?’

‘He hauls the firewood in for the stoves.’

The old man assumed an expression of insufferable pain.

‘How is it you have not learned to talk in thirty years?... Hauls—how

can he haul the firewood in?—firewood is carried in, not hauled in.

Well, Danilo, thank God, the Lord has been pleased to let me see you

once more. I forgive you all your sins for this year, all the oats which

you waste so immoderately, and for not brushing the horses, and do you

forgive me. Go on hauling in firewood while you have the strength, but

now Lent is coming, so take less drink, it is bad for us at our age, and

besides it is a sin.’ He conducted the whole inspection in this style.

We used to dine between three and four o’clock. The dinner lasted a long

time and was very boring. Spiridon was an excellent cook, but my

father’s economy on the one hand, and his own on the other, rendered the

dinner somewhat meagre, in spite of the fact that there were a great

many dishes. Beside my father stood a red clay bowl into which he

himself put all sorts of pieces for the dogs; moreover, he used to feed

them with his own fork, which was deeply resented by the servants and

consequently by me. Why, it is hard to say....

Visitors rarely called upon us and more rarely dined. I remember out of

all those who visited us one man whose arrival to dinner would sometimes

smooth the wrinkles out of my father’s face, N. N. Bahmetyev. He was the

brother of the lame general of that name and was himself a general also,

though long on the retired list. My father and he had been friends as

long ago as the time when both had been officers in the Izmailovsky

regiment. They had both been gay young rakes in the days of Catherine,

and in the reign of Paul had both been court-martialled, Bahmetyev for

having fought a duel with some one and my father for having been his

second; then one of them had gone away to foreign lands as a tourist,

while the other went to Ufa as Governor. There was no likeness between

them. Bahmetyev, a stout, healthy and handsome old man, was fond of

having a good dinner and getting a little drunk after it; was fond of

lively conversation and many other things. He used to boast that in his

day he had eaten as many as a hundred hearth-cakes, and he could when

about sixty devour up to a dozen buckwheat pancakes drowned in a pool of

butter with complete impunity. I have been a witness of these

achievements more than once.

Bahmetyev had some shadowy influence over my father, or at any rate did

keep him in check. When Bahmetyev noticed that my father’s ill-humour

was beyond bounds, he would put on his hat and say with a military

scrape: ‘Good-bye—you are ill and stupid to-day; I meant to stay to

dinner but I cannot endure sour faces at table! _Gehorsamer

diener!_’ ... and my father by way of explanation would say to me: ‘What

a lively impresario. N. N. still is! Thank God, he’s a healthy man and

cannot understand a suffering Job like me; there are twenty degrees of

frost, but he dashes here all the way from Pokrovka in his sledge as

though it were nothing ... while I thank the Creator every morning that

I wake up alive, that I am still breathing. Oh ... oh ... ough ...! it’s

a true proverb; the well-fed don’t understand the hungry!’ This was the

utmost condescension that could be expected from him.

From time to time there were family dinners at which the Senator, the

Golohvastovs and others were present, and these dinners were not

casually given, nor for the sake of any pleasure to be derived from

them, but were due to profound considerations of economy and diplomacy.

Thus on the 20th February, the Senator’s name-day, we gave a dinner in

his honour, while on the 24th June, my father’s name-day, a dinner was

given at the Senator’s, an arrangement which, besides setting a moral

example of brotherly love, saved each of them from giving a much bigger

dinner at home.

Then there were various _habitués_; Sonnenberg would appear _ex

officio_, and having just before dinner swallowed a glass of vodka and a

Reval sardine at home he would refuse a minute glass of some specially

flavoured vodka; sometimes my last French tutor, a miserly old fellow

with an insolent face, fond of talking scandal, would come. Monsieur

Thirié so often made mistakes, pouring wine into his tumbler instead of

beer and drinking it off apologetically, that at last my father said to

him, ‘The _vin de Graves_ stands on your right side, so you won’t make a

mistake again,’ and Thirié, stuffing a huge pinch of snuff into his

broad nose that turned up on one side, scattered the snuff on his plate.

Among these visitors one was an extremely funny individual. A little

bald old man, invariably dressed in a short and narrow swallow-tail

coat, and in a waistcoat that ended precisely where the waistcoat now

begins, and carrying a thin little cane, he was in his whole figure the

embodiment of a period twenty years earlier, in 1830 of 1810 and in 1840

of 1820. Dmitri Ivanovitch Pimenov, a civil councillor by grade, was one

of the superintendents of the Sheremetyevsky Almshouse, and was,

moreover, a literary man. Scantily endowed by nature and brought up on

the sentimentalism of Karamzin, on Marmontel[63] and Marivaux,[64]

Pimenov might be said to take a position midway between Shalikov and V.

Panaev.[65] The Voltaire of this honourable phalanx was the head of the

secret police under Alexander, Yakov Ivanovitch de Sanglain; its

promising young man, Pimen Arapov.[66] They were all in close relation

with the universal patriarch Ivan Ivanovitch Dmitriev;[67] he had no

rivals, but there was Vassily Lvovitch Pushkin.[68] Pimenov went every

Thursday to the ancient Dmitriev to discuss beauties of style and the

deterioration of the language of to-day in his house in Sadovy Street.

Pimenov himself had tried the slippery career of Russian literature; at

first he had edited the _Thoughts of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld_, then

he wrote a treatise on feminine beauty and charm. Of this treatise,

which I have not taken in my hand since I was sixteen, I remember only

long comparisons in the style in which Plutarch compares his heroes; of

the fair with the dark, ‘though a fair woman is this and that and the

other, on the other hand a dark woman is this and that and the

other....’ Pimenov’s chief peculiarity lay not in his having edited

books which no one ever read, but in the fact that if he began laughing

he could not stop, and his mirth would grow into a regular fit of

hysterics with sudden outbursts and hollow peals of laughter. He knew

this, and so, when he saw something laughable coming, began to take

measures; brought out a pocket-handkerchief, looked at his watch,

buttoned up his coat, hid his face in his hands, and when the crisis

came, stood up, turned to the wall, leaned against it and writhed in

agony for half an hour or more, then, crimson and exhausted by the

paroxysm, he would sit down mopping the perspiration from his bald head,

though the fit would seize him again long afterwards. Of course my

father had not the faintest respect for him: he was gentle, kind,

awkward, a literary man and poor, and therefore not worth considering on

any ground: but he was fully aware of his convulsive risibility. On the

strength of it he would make him laugh until every one else in the room

was, under his influence, also moved to a sort of unnatural laughter.

The instigator of our mirth would look at us, smiling innocently, as a

man looks at a crowd of noisy puppies.

Sometimes my father played dreadful tricks on the unfortunate amateur of

feminine charm and beauty. ‘Colonel So-and-so,’ the servant would

announce.

‘Ask him in,’ my father would say, and turning to Pimenov he would add:

‘Please be on your guard when he is here, Dmitri Ivanovitch; he has an

unfortunate tic and when he talks he makes a strange sound as though he

had a chronic hiccup.’ Thereupon he would give a perfect imitation of

the Colonel. ‘I know you are ready to laugh, please restrain yourself.’

This was enough. At the second word the Colonel uttered, Pimenov would

take out his handkerchief, make a parasol of his hands, and at last jump

up.

The Colonel would look at him in amazement, while my father would say to

me with great composure: ‘What is the matter with Dmitri Ivanovitch? _Il

est malade_, he has spasms; tell them to make haste and get him a glass

of cold water and give him eau-de-Cologne.’ On such occasions Pimenov

would snatch up his hat and go, laughing, until he had reached the

Arbatsky Gates, halting at the cross-roads and leaning against

lamp-posts.

For several years he came regularly every alternate Sunday to dine with

us, and his punctuality in coming and his unpunctuality if he missed a

Sunday angered my father equally and impelled him to worry Pimenov. Yet

the good-natured man went on coming, and coming on foot from the Red

Gate to old Konyushenny Street till he died, and not at all funnily.

After ailing for a long time, the solitary old bachelor, as he lay

dying, saw his housekeeper carry off all his things, his clothes, even

the linen from his bed, leaving him entirely uncared for.

But the real _souffre-douleur_ at dinner were various old women, the

poor and casual dependents of Princess Hovansky, my father’s sister. For

the sake of a change, and also partly to find out how everything was

going on in our house, whether there were quarrels in the family,

whether the cook had had a fight with his wife, and whether the master

had found out that Palashka or Ulyasha were about to bring an addition

to the household, they would sometimes come on holidays to spend a whole

day. It must be noted that these widows had forty or fifty years ago,

before they were married, been attached to the household of my father’s

aunt, old Princess Meshtchersky, and afterwards to that of her niece,

and had known my father since those days; that in this interval between

their dependence in their youth and their return in old age, they had

spent some twenty years quarrelling with their husbands, keeping them

from drink, looking after them when they were paralysed, and escorting

them to the cemetery. Some had been trailing from one place to another

in Bessarabia with a garrison officer and a crowd of children, others

had spent years with a criminal charge hanging over their husbands, and

all these experiences of life had left upon them the traces of

government offices and provincial towns; a dread of the powerful of this

earth, a cringing spirit and a sort of dull-witted bigotry.

Amazing scenes took place with them.

‘Why is this, Anna Yakimovna; are you ill that you don’t eat anything?’

my father would ask. Huddling herself together the widow of some

overseer in Kremenchug, a wretched old woman with a worn and faded face,

who always smelt strongly of some plaster, would answer with cringing

eyes and deprecating fingers: ‘Forgive me, Ivan Alexeyevitch, sir, I am

really ashamed, but there, it is my old-fashioned ways, sir. Ha, ha, ha,

it’s the Fast of the Assumption now.’

‘Oh, how tiresome! You are always so devout! It’s not what goes into the

mouth, my good woman, that defiles, but what comes out of it; whether

you eat one thing or another, it all goes the same way; now what comes

out of the mouth, you must watch over ... your judgments of your

neighbours. Come, you had better dine at home on such days, or we shall

have a Turk coming next asking for pilau; I don’t keep a restaurant _à

la carte_.’

The frightened old woman, who had intended to ask for some dish made of

flour or cereals, would fall upon the kvass and salad, making a great

show of eating a great deal.

But it is noteworthy that she, or any of the others, had only to eat

meat during a fast for my father, though he never touched Lenten dishes

himself, to say, shaking his head mournfully: ‘I should not have thought

it was right for you, Anna Yakimovna, to forsake the habits of your

forefathers for the last few years of your life. I sin and eat meat,

owing to my many infirmities; but you, thank God, have kept the fasts

all your life and suddenly at your age ... what an example for _them_,’

and he motioned towards the servants. And the poor old woman had to

attack the kvass and the salad again.

These scenes made me very indignant; sometimes I was so bold as to

intervene and remind him of the contrary opinion he had expressed. Then

my father would rise from his seat, take off his velvet cap by the

tassel, and, holding it in the air, thank me for the lesson and beg

pardon for his forgetfulness, and then would say to the old lady: ‘It’s

a terrible age! It’s no wonder you eat meat in the fast, since children

teach their parents! What are we coming to? It’s dreadful to think of

it! Luckily you and I won’t live to see it.’

After dinner my father lay down to rest for an hour and a half. The

servants at once dispersed to beer-shops and eating-houses. At seven

o’clock tea was served; then sometimes some one would come in, the

Senator more often than any one; it was a time of leisure for all of us.

The Senator usually brought various items of news and told them eagerly.

My father affected complete inattention as he listened to him: he

assumed a serious face, when his brother had expected him to be dying of

laughter, and would cross-question him as though he had not heard the

point, when the Senator had been describing something striking.

The Senator came in for it in a very different way when he contradicted

or was not of the same opinion as his younger brother (which rarely

happened, however), and sometimes, indeed, when he did not contradict,

if my father was particularly ill-humoured. In these tragi-comic scenes,

what was funniest was the Senator’s genuine heat and my father’s

affected artificial coolness.

‘Well, you are ill to-day,’ the Senator would say impatiently, and he

would snatch his hat and rush off. Once in his vexation he could not

open the door and kicked it with all his might, saying ‘the confounded

door!’

My father went up, coolly opened the door inwards, and in a perfectly

composed voice observed: ‘The door does its duty, it opens inwards, and

you try to open it outwards, and are cross with it.’ It may not be out

of place to mention that the Senator was two years older than my father

and addressed him in the second person singular, while the latter as the

younger brother used the plural form, ‘you.’

After the Senator had gone, my father would retire to his bedroom, would

every day inquire whether the gates were closed, would receive an answer

in the affirmative, would express doubts on the subject but do nothing

to make certain. Then began a lengthy routine of washings, fomentations,

and medicines; his valet made ready on a little table by the bed a

perfect arsenal of different objects—medicine-bottles, night-lights,

pill-boxes. The old man as a rule read for an hour Bourienne’s _Mémorial

de Sainte Helène_ and other memoirs; then came the night.

Such was our household when I left it in 1834, so I found it in 1840,

and so it continued until his death in 1846.

At thirty when I returned from exile I realised that my father had been

right in many things, that he had unhappily a distressingly good

understanding of men. But it was not my fault that he preached even what

was true in a way so revolting to a youthful heart. His mind chilled by

a long life in a circle of depraved men put him on his guard against

every one, and his callous heart did not crave for reconciliation, and

so he remained in a hostile attitude to every one on earth.

I found him in 1839, and still more markedly in 1842, weak and really

ill. The Senator was dead, the desolation about him was greater than

ever and he even had a different valet; but he himself was just the

same, only his physical powers were changed, there was the same spiteful

intelligence, the same tenacious memory, he still worried every one over

trifles, and Sonnenberg, still unchanged, camped out in the old house as

before and carried out commissions.

Only then I appreciated all the desolateness of his life; I looked with

an aching heart at the mournful significance of this lonely abandoned

existence, dying out in the arid, barren, stony wilderness which he had

created about himself, but which it was not in his power to change; he

knew that, he saw death approaching, and, overcoming weakness and

infirmity, he jealously and obstinately controlled himself. I was

dreadfully sorry for the old man, but I could do nothing, he was

unapproachable.

... Sometimes I passed softly by his study where, sitting in a rough,

uncomfortable, deep armchair, surrounded by his dogs, he would all alone

play with my three-year-old boy. It seemed as though the clenched hands

and stiffened nerves of the old man relaxed at the sight of the child,

and he found rest from the incessant agitation, conflict, and vexation

in which he had kept himself, as his dying hand touched the cradle.

Chapter 6

THE KREMLIN DEPARTMENT—MOSCOW UNIVERSITY—OUR SET—THE CHEMIST—THE MALOV

AFFAIR—THE CHOLERA—FILARET—V. PASSEK—GENERAL LISSOVSKY—THE SUNGUROV

AFFAIR

‘_Oh, years of boundless ecstasies,

Of visions bright and free!

Where now your mirth untouched by spite,

Your hopeful toil and noisy glee?_’

OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.

In spite of the lame general’s sinister predictions my father put my

name down with N. B. Yussupov for a berth in the Kremlin department. I

signed a paper and there the matter ended; I heard nothing more of the

service, except that three years later Yussupov sent the Palace

architect, who always shouted as though he were standing on the

scaffolding of the fifth storey and there giving orders to workmen in

the basement, to announce that I had received the first grade in the

service. These amazing incidents were, I may remark in passing, useless,

for I rose above the grades received in the service by taking my

degree—it was not worth while taking so much trouble for the sake of two

or three years’ seniority. And meanwhile this supposed post in the

service almost prevented me from entering the university. The Council,

seeing that I was reckoned as in the office of the Kremlin department,

refused me the right to go in for the examination.

For those in the government service, there were special after-dinner

courses of study, extremely limited in scope and only qualifying for

entrance into the so-called ‘committee examinations.’ All the wealthy

idlers, the young snobs who had learnt nothing, all those who did not

want to serve in the army and were in a hurry to get the grade of

assessor went in for the ‘committee examinations’; they were gold mines

for the old professors, who coached them privately for twenty roubles

the lesson.

To begin my life in these Caudine Forks of learning was far from suiting

my ideas. I told my father resolutely that if he could not find some way

out of it, I should resign my post in the service.

My father was angry, said that with my caprices I was preventing him

from making a career for me, and abused the teachers who had put this

nonsense into my head, but, seeing that all this had very little effect

upon me, he made up his mind to go to Yussupov.

The latter settled the matter in a trice, after the fashion of a great

nobleman and a Tatar. He called his secretary and told him to write me a

leave of absence for three years. The secretary hesitated and hesitated,

and at last, half in terror, submitted that leave of absence for longer

than four months could not be given without the sanction of the Most

High.

‘What nonsense, my man,’ the prince said to him. ‘Where is the

difficulty? Well, if leave of absence is impossible, write that I

commission him to attend the university courses for three years to

perfect himself in the sciences.’

His secretary wrote this and next day I was sitting in the amphitheatre

of the Physico-Mathematical auditorium.

The University of Moscow and the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Syelo play a

significant part in the history of Russian education and in the life of

the last two generations.

The Moscow University grew in importance together with the city itself

after 1812. Degraded by Peter the Great from being the royal capital,

Moscow was promoted by Napoleon (partly intentionally, but still more

unintentionally) to being the capital of the Russian people. The people

realised their ties of blood with Moscow from the pain felt at the news

of its being taken by the enemy. From that time a new epoch began for

the city. Its university became more and more the centre of Russian

culture. All the conditions necessary for its development were

combined—historical significance, geographical position, and the absence

of the Tsar.

The intensified mental activity of Petersburg after the death of Paul

came to a gloomy close on the Fourteenth of December. Nicholas appeared

with five gibbets, with penal servitude, with the white strap and the

light-blue uniform of Benckendorf.[69]

The tide turned, the blood rushed to the heart, the activity that was

outwardly concealed was surging inwardly. Moscow University remained

firm and was the foremost to stand out in sharp relief against the

general darkness. The Tsar began to hate it from the time of the

Polezhaev affair.[70] He sent A. Pissarev, the major-general of the

‘Kaluga Evenings,’ as director, commanded the students to be dressed in

uniform, commanded them to wear a sword, then forbade them to wear a

sword, condemned Polezhaev to be a common soldier for his verses and

punished Kostenetsky and his comrades for their prose, destroyed the

Kritskys[71] for a bust, sentenced us to exile for Saint-Simonism, then

made Prince Sergey Mihailovitch Golitsyn director, and then took no

further notice of that ‘hot-bed of vice,’ piously advising young men who

had finished their studies at the Lyceum or at the School of

Jurisprudence not to enter it.

Golitsyn was a surprising person, it was long before he could accustom

himself to the irregularity of there being no lecture when a professor

was ill; he thought the next on the list ought to take his place, so

that it sometimes happened to Father Ternovsky to lecture in the clinic

on women’s diseases and the gynæcologist Richter to discourse on the

Immaculate Conception.

But in spite of that the university that had fallen into disgrace grew

in influence; the youthful strength of Russia streamed to it from all

sides, from all classes of society, as into a common reservoir; in its

halls they were purified from the superstitions they had picked up at

the domestic hearth, reached a common level, became like brothers and

dispersed again to all parts of Russia and among all classes of its

people.

Until 1848 the organisation of our universities was purely democratic.

Its doors were open to every one who could pass the examination, who was

neither a serf, a peasant, nor a man excluded from his commune. Nicholas

spoilt all this; he put restrictions on the admission of students,

increased the fees of those who paid their own expenses, and permitted

none to be relieved of payment but poor _noblemen_. All these belonged

to the series of senseless measures which will disappear with the last

breath of that drag on the Russian wheel, together with passports,

religious intolerance and so on.[72]

The young men of all sorts and conditions coming from above and from

below, from the south and from the north, were quickly fused into a

compact mass of comrades. Social distinctions had not among us the

distressing influence which we find in English schools and barracks; I

am not speaking of the English universities. They exist exclusively for

the aristocracy and for the rich. A student who thought fit to boast

among us of his blue blood or his wealth would have been sent to

Coventry and made the butt of his comrades.

The external distinctions—and they did not go very deep—that divided the

students arose from other causes. Thus, for instance, the medical

section which was on the other side of the garden was not so closely

united with us as the other faculties; moreover, the majority of the

medical students consisted of seminarists and Germans. The Germans kept

a little apart and were deeply imbued with the Western bourgeois spirit.

All the education of the luckless seminarists, all their ideas were

utterly different from ours, we spoke different languages; brought up

under the yoke of monastic despotism, weighed down by rhetoric and

theology, they envied us our ease and freedom; we were vexed at their

Christian meekness.[73]

I entered in the section of physics and mathematics in spite of the fact

that I had never had a marked ability, nor much liking for mathematics.

Nick and I had been taught mathematics together by a teacher whom we

loved for his anecdotes and stories; interesting as he was, he could

hardly have developed a passion for his subject. His knowledge of

mathematics extended only to conic sections, _i.e._ exactly as far as

was necessary for preparing High School boys for the university; a real

philosopher, he never had the curiosity to glance at the ‘university

grades’ of mathematics.

What was particularly remarkable was that he had never read more than

one book on the subject, and that book, Francoeur’s Course, he studied

over and over again for ten years; but being continent by temperament

and disliking superfluous luxury, he never went beyond a certain page.

I chose the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics because the natural

sciences were taught in that Faculty, and just at that time I developed

a great passion for natural science.

A rather strange meeting had led me to those studies.

After the famous division of the family property in 1822, which I have

described, my father’s ‘elder brother’ went to live in Petersburg. For a

long time nothing was heard of him, then suddenly a rumour came that he

was getting married. He was at that time over sixty, and every one knew

that he had a grown-up son besides other children. He married the mother

of his eldest son; the bride, too, was over fifty. With this marriage he

legitimised his son. Why not all the children? It would be hard to say

why, if we had not known the chief object of it all; his one desire was

to deprive his brothers of the inheritance, and this he completely

attained by legitimising the son.

In the famous inundation of Petersburg in 1824 the old man was drenched

with water in his carriage. He caught cold, took to his bed, and in the

beginning of 1825 he died.

Of the son there were strange rumours. It was said that he was

unsociable, refused to make acquaintances, sat alone for ever absorbed

in chemistry, spent his life at his microscope, read even at dinner and

hated feminine society. Of him it is said in _Woe from Wit_,[74]

‘He is a chemist, he is a botanist,

Our nephew, Prince Fyodor,

He flies from women and even from me.’

His uncles, who transferred to him the grudge they had against his

father, never spoke of him except as ‘the Chemist,’ using this word as a

term of disparagement, and assuming that chemistry was a subject that

could not be studied by a gentleman.

His father used to oppress him dreadfully, not merely insulting him with

the spectacle of grey-headed cynical vice, but actually being jealous of

him as a possible rival in his seraglio. The Chemist on one occasion

tried to escape from this ignoble existence by taking laudanum. The

comrade with whom he used to work at chemistry by chance saved him. His

father was thoroughly frightened, and before his death had begun to

treat his son better.

After his father’s death the Chemist released the luckless odalisques,

halved the heavy _obrok_ laid by his father on the peasants, forgave all

arrears and presented them gratis with the army receipt for the full

quota of recruits, which the old man used to sell them after sending his

serfs as soldiers.

A year and a half later he came to Moscow. I longed to see him, for I

liked him both for the way he treated his peasants and on account of the

undeserved dislike his uncles felt for him.

One morning a small man in gold spectacles, with a big nose, with hair

somewhat thin on the top, and with hands burnt by chemical reagents,

called upon my father. My father met him coldly, sarcastically; his

nephew responded in the same coin and gave him quite as good as he got:

after taking each other’s measure, they began speaking of extraneous

matters with external indifference, and parted politely but with

concealed dislike. My father saw that he was an opponent who would not

give in to him.

They did not become more intimate later. The Chemist very rarely visited

his uncles; the last time he saw my father was after the Senator’s

death, when he came to ask him for a loan of thirty thousand roubles for

the purchase of land. My father would not lend it. The Chemist was moved

to anger and, rubbing his nose, observed with a smile, ‘There is no risk

whatever in it; my estate is entailed; I am borrowing money for its

improvement. I have no children and we are each other’s heirs.’ The old

man of seventy-five never forgave his nephew for this sally.

I took to visiting the Chemist from time to time. He lived in an

extremely original way. In his big house on the Tverskoy Boulevard he

used one tiny room for himself and one as a laboratory. His old mother

occupied another little room on the other side of the corridor, the rest

of the house was abandoned and remained exactly as it had been when his

father left it to go to Petersburg. The blackened candelabra, the

wonderful furniture among which were rarities of all sorts, a

grandfather clock said to have been bought by Peter the Great in

Amsterdam, an armchair said to have come from the house of Stanislav

Leszcynski,[75] frames without pictures in them, pictures turned to the

wall, were all left anyhow, filling up three big, unheated and unlighted

drawing-rooms. Servants were usually playing some musical instrument and

smoking in the hall, where in old days they had scarcely dared to

breathe nor say their prayers. A man-servant would light a candle and

escort one through this museum of antiquities, observing every time that

there was no need to take my cloak off as it was very cold in the

drawing-rooms. Thick layers of dust covered the horns and various

curios, the reflections of which moved together with the candle in the

elaborately carved mirrors, straw left from the packing lay undisturbed

here and there together with scraps of paper and bits of string.

At last we reached the door hung with a rug which led to the terribly

overheated study. In it the Chemist, in a soiled dressing-gown lined

with squirrel fur, was invariably sitting, surrounded by books, phials,

retorts, crucibles, and other apparatus. In that study where Chevalier’s

microscope now reigned supreme and there was always a smell of chlorine,

and where a few years before terrible infamous deeds were perpetrated—in

that study I was born. My father on his return from foreign parts before

his quarrel with his brother stayed for some months in his house, and in

the same house, too, my wife was born in 1817. The Chemist sold the

house two years later, and it chanced that I was in the house again at

evening parties, at Sverbeyev’s, arguing there about Pan-Slavism and

getting angry with Homyakov, who never lost his temper about anything.

The rooms had been done up, but the front entrance, the vestibule, the

stairs, the hall were all untouched, and so was the little study.

The Chemist’s housekeeping was even less complicated, especially when

his mother had gone away for the summer to their estate near Moscow and

with her the cook. His valet used to appear at four o’clock with a

coffee-pot, pour into it a little strong broth and, taking advantage of

the chemical furnace, would set it there to warm, together with various

poisons. Then he would bring bread and half a woodcock from the

restaurant, and that made up the whole dinner. When it was over the

valet would wash the coffee-pot and it would return to its natural

duties. In the evening, the valet would appear again, take from the sofa

a heap of books, and a tiger-skin that had come down to the Chemist from

his father, bring sheets, pillows and bedclothes, and the study was as

easily transformed into a bedroom as it had been into a kitchen and a

dining-room.

From the very beginning of our acquaintance the Chemist saw that I was

interested in earnest, and began to persuade me to give up the ‘empty’

study of literature and the ‘dangerous and quite useless pursuit of

politics,’ and take to natural science. He gave me Cuvier’s speech on

_Geological Cataclysms_ and De Candolle’s _Plant Morphology_. Seeing

that these were not thrown away upon me he offered me the use of his

excellent collection, apparatus, herbariums, and even his guidance. He

was very interesting on his own ground, extremely learned, witty and

even polite; but one could not go beyond the monkeys with him; from

stones to ourangoutangs, everything interested him, but he did not care

to be drawn beyond them, particularly into philosophy, which he regarded

as twaddle. He was neither a conservative nor a reactionary, he simply

did not believe in people, that is, believed that egoism is the sole

source of all action, and thought that it was restrained merely by the

senselessness of some and the ignorance of others.

I was revolted by his materialism. The superficial, timid,

half-Voltairianism of our fathers was not in the least like the

Chemist’s materialism. His outlook was calm, consistent, complete. He

reminded me of the celebrated answer made by Lalande[76] to Napoleon:

‘Kant accepts the hypothesis of God,’ Bonaparte said to him. ‘Sire,’

replied the astronomer, ‘in my studies I have never had occasion to make

use of that hypothesis.’

The Chemist’s atheism went far beyond the sphere of theology. He

considered Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire[77] a mystic and Oken[78] simply a

degenerate. He closed the works of the natural philosophers with the

same contempt with which my father had closed Karamzin’s _History_.

‘They have invented first causes, spiritual powers, and then are

surprised that they can neither find them nor understand them,’ he said.

This was a second edition of my father, in a different age and

differently educated.

His views on all the problems of life were still more comfortless. He

thought that there was as little responsibility for good and evil in man

as in the beasts; that it was all a matter of organisation,

circumstances, and the general condition of the nervous system, of which

he said _more was expected than it was capable of giving_. He did not

like family life, spoke with horror of marriage, and naïvely

acknowledged that in the thirty years of his life he had never loved one

woman. However, one warm spot in this frozen man still remained; it

could be seen in his attitude to his old mother; they had suffered a

great deal together at the hands of his father, and their troubles had

united them; he touchingly surrounded her solitary and infirm old age

with tranquillity and attention, as far as he knew how.

He never advocated his theories, except those that concerned chemistry;

they came out casually or were called for by me. He even showed

reluctance in answering my romantic and philosophic objections; his

answers were brief, and he made them with a smile and with that delicacy

with which a big old mastiff plays with a puppy, allowing him to tease

and only pushing him off with a light pat of his paw. But it was just

that which provoked me most and I would return to the charge without

weariness, never gaining an inch of ground, however. Later on, namely

twelve years afterwards, just as I recalled my father’s observations I

frequently recalled the Chemist’s. Of course, he had been right in

three-quarters of everything against which I argued, but of course I was

right too. There are truths (we have spoken of this already) which like

political rights are not given to those under a certain age.

The Chemist’s influence made me choose the Faculty of Physics and

Mathematics; perhaps I should have done better to enter in the Medical

Faculty, but there was no great harm in my first acquiring some degree

of knowledge of the differential and integral calculus and then

completely forgetting it.

Without the natural sciences there is no salvation for the modern man.

Without that wholesome food, without that strict training of the mind by

facts, without that closeness to the life surrounding us, without

humility before its independence, the monastic cell remains hidden in

the soul, and in it the drop of mysticism which may flood the whole

understanding with its dark waters.

Before I completed my studies the Chemist had gone away to Petersburg,

and I did not see him again until I came back from Vyatka. Some months

after my marriage I went half secretly for a few days to the estate near

Moscow where my father was then living. The object of my going was to

effect a complete reconciliation with him, for he was still angry with

me for my marriage.

On the way I halted at Perhushkovo where we had so many times broken our

journey in old days. The Chemist was expecting me there and had actually

got a dinner and two bottles of champagne ready for me. In those four or

five years he had not changed at all except for being a little older.

Before dinner he asked me quite seriously: ‘Tell me, please, openly, how

do you find married life, is there anything good in it, or not much?’ I

laughed. ‘What boldness it is on your part,’ he went on. ‘I wonder at

you; in a normal condition a man can never venture on such a terrible

step. Two or three very good matches have been proposed to me, but when

I imagine a woman taking up her abode in my room, setting everything in

order according to her ideas, perhaps forbidding me to smoke my tobacco,

making a fuss and an upset, I am so panic-stricken that I prefer to die

in solitude.’

‘Shall I stay the night with you or go on to Perhushkovo?’ I asked him

after dinner.

‘I have plenty of room here,’ he answered, ‘but for you I think it would

be better to go on, you will reach your father at ten o’clock. You know,

of course, that he is still angry with you; well—in the evening before

going to bed old people’s nerves are usually exhausted and feeble—he

will probably receive you much better this evening than to-morrow; in

the morning you will find him quite ready for battle.’

‘Ha, ha, ha! I recognise my teacher in physiology and materialism,’ said

I, laughing heartily, ‘how your remark recalls those blissful days when

I used to go to you like Goethe’s _Wagner_ to weary you with my idealism

and listen with some indignation to your chilling opinions.’

‘Since then,’ he answered, laughing too, ‘you have lived enough to know

that all men’s doings depend simply on their nerves and their chemical

composition.’

Later on we had some sort of disagreement, probably we were both to

blame.... Nevertheless in 1846 he wrote me a letter. I was then

beginning to be the fashion after the publication of the first part of

_Who is to Blame?_ The Chemist wrote to me that he saw with grief that I

was wasting my talent on ‘idle pursuits!... I forgive you everything for

the sake of your letters on the study of nature. In them I understood

the German philosophy (so far as it is possible for the mind of man to

do so)—why then instead of going on with serious work are you writing

tales?’ I sent him a few friendly lines in reply, and with that our

relations ended.

If the Chemist’s own eyes ever rest upon these lines, I would beg him to

read them just before going to sleep at night when his nerves are

exhausted, and then I am sure he will forgive me this affectionate

gossip, especially as I keep a very warm and good memory of him.

And so at last the seclusion of the parental home was over. I was _au

large_. Instead of solitude in our little room, instead of quiet and

half-concealed interviews with Ogaryov alone, I was surrounded by a

noisy family, seven hundred in number. I was more at home in it in a

fortnight than I had been in my father’s house from the day of my birth.

But the parental roof pursued me even to the university in the shape of

a footman whom my father ordered to accompany me, particularly when I

went on foot. For a whole session I was trying to get rid of my escort

and only with difficulty succeeded in doing so officially. I say

‘officially,’ because Pyotr Fyodorovitch, upon whom the duty was laid,

very quickly grasped, first, that I disliked being accompanied, and,

secondly, that it was a great deal more pleasant for him in various

places of entertainment than in the hall of the Faculty of Physics and

Mathematics, where the only pleasures open to him were conversation with

the two porters and regaling them and himself with snuff.

With what object was an escort sent with me? Could Pyotr, who from his

youth had been given to getting drunk for several days at a time, have

prevented me from doing anything? I imagine that my father did not even

suppose so, but for his own peace of mind took steps, which were

insufficient but were still steps, like people who do not believe but

take the sacrament. It was part of the old-fashioned education of

landowners. Up to seven years old, it was the rule that I should be led

by the hand up the staircase, which was rather steep; up to eleven, I

was washed in my bath by Vera Artamonovna; therefore, very consistently,

a servant was sent with me when I was a student; until I was twenty-one,

I was not allowed to be out after half-past ten. I was inevitably in

freedom and on my own feet when in exile; had I not been exiled,

probably the same regime would have continued up to twenty-five or even

thirty-five.

Like the majority of lively boys brought up in solitude, I flung myself

on every one’s neck with such sincerity and impulsiveness, made

propaganda with such senseless imprudence, and was so candidly fond of

every one, that I could not fail to call forth a warm response from lads

almost of the same age. (I was then in my seventeenth year.)

The sage rule—to be courteous to all, intimate with no one and to trust

no one—did as much to promote this readiness to make friends as the

persistent thought with which we entered the university, the thought

that here our dreams would be accomplished, that here we should sow the

seeds and lay the foundation of a league. We were persuaded that out of

this lecture-room would come the company which would follow in the

footsteps of Pestel and Ryleyev, and that we should be in it.

They were a splendid set of young men in our year. It was just at that

time that theoretical tendencies were becoming more and more marked

among us. The scholastic method of learning and aristocratic indolence

were alike disappearing, and not yet replaced by that German

utilitarianism which enriches men’s minds with science, as the fields

with manure, for the sake of an increased crop. A considerable group of

students no longer regarded science as a necessary but wearisome

short-cut by which they would come to be collegiate assessors. The

problems that were arising amongst us had no reference whatever to

grades in the service.

On the other hand, the interest in science had not yet had time to

degenerate into doctrinarianism; science did not draw us away from the

life and suffering around us. Our sympathy with it raised the social

morality of the students, too, in an extraordinary way. We said openly

in the lecture-room everything that came into our heads; manuscript

copies of prohibited poems passed from hand to hand, prohibited books

were read with commentaries, but for all that I do not remember a single

case of tale-bearing or treachery. There were timid young men who turned

away and held aloof, but they too were silent.[79]

One silly boy, questioned by his mother on the Malov affair, under

threat of the birch told her something. The fond mother—an aristocrat

and a princess—flew to the rector and told him her son’s tale as proof

of his penitence. We heard of this and tormented him so that he could

not remain until the end of his session.

This affair, for which I too was imprisoned, deserves to be described.

Malov was a stupid, coarse, and uncultured professor in the political

section. The students despised him and laughed at him. ‘How many

professors have you in your section?’ asked the director of a student in

the political lecture-room. ‘Nine, not counting Malov,’ answered the

student.[80] Well, this professor, who had to be left out of the

reckoning when the others were counted, began to be more and more

insolent in his treatment of the students; the latter made up their

minds to turn him out of the lecture-room. After deliberating together

they sent two delegates to our section to invite me to come with an

auxiliary force. I at once gave the word to go out to battle with Malov,

and several students went with me; when we went into the lecture-room

Malov was on the spot and saw us come in.

On the faces of all the students could be seen the same fear: that on

that day he might say nothing rude to them. This anxiety was soon over.

The overflowing lecture-room was restless and a vague subdued hum rose

from it. Malov made some observations; there began a scraping of feet.

‘You express your thoughts like horses, with your legs,’ observed Malov,

probably imagining that horses think with a trot and a gallop, and a

storm arose, whistling, hisses, shouts; ‘Out with him, _pereat_!’ Malov,

pale as a sheet, made a desperate effort to control the uproar but could

not; the students jumped on to the benches, Malov quietly left his chair

and, shrinking together, began to make his way to the door; the students

went after him, saw him through the university court into the street and

flung his goloshes after him. The last circumstance was important, for

the case at once assumed a very different character in the street; but

where in the world are there lads of seventeen or eighteen who would

consider that?

The University Council was alarmed and persuaded the director to present

the affair as completely closed, and for that reason to put the

ringleaders, or at least some of them, in prison. This was prudent; it

might otherwise easily have happened that the Tsar would have sent an

aide-de-camp who, with a view to gaining a cross, would have turned the

affair into a plot, a conspiracy, a mutiny, and would have suggested

sending all the culprits to penal servitude, which the Tsar would

graciously have commuted to service as common soldiers. Seeing that vice

was punished and virtue triumphant, the Tsar confined himself to

graciously confirming the students’ wishes by authority of the Most High

and dismissed the professor. We had driven Malov out as far as the

university gates and he put him outside them. It was _vae victis_ with

Nicholas, but on this occasion it was not for us to complain.

And so the affair went on merrily; after dinner next day the porter from

the head office, a grey-headed old man, who conscientiously assumed _à

la lettre_ that the students’ tips were for vodka and therefore kept

himself continually in a condition approximating to drunkenness rather

than sobriety, came to me bringing in the cuff of his coat a note from

the rector; I was instructed to present myself before him at seven

o’clock. After he had gone, a pale and frightened student appeared, a

baron from the Baltic provinces, who had received a similar invitation

and was one of the luckless victims led on by me. He began showering

reproaches upon me and then asked advice as to what he was to say.

‘Lie desperately, deny everything, except that there was an uproar and

that you were in the lecture-room.’

‘But the rector will ask why I was in the political lecture-room and not

in my own.’

‘What of it? Why, don’t you know that Rodion Heiman did not come to give

his lecture, so you, not wishing to waste your time, went to hear

another.’

‘He won’t believe it.’

‘Well, that’s his affair.’

As we were going into the university courtyard I looked at my baron, his

plump little cheeks were very pale and altogether he was in a bad way.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you may be sure that the rector will begin with me

and not with you, so you say exactly the same with variations. You did

not do anything in particular, as a matter of fact. Don’t forget one

thing, for making an uproar and for telling lies ever so many of you

will be put in prison, but if you go and tell tales and mix anybody else

up in it before me, I’ll tell the others and we’ll poison your

existence.’

The baron promised and kept his word honestly.

The rector at that time was Dvigubsky, one of the surviving specimens of

the professors before the flood, or to be more accurate, before the

fire, that is, before 1812. They are extinct now; with the directorship

of Prince Obolensky the patriarchal period of Moscow University ended.

In those days the government did not trouble itself about the

university; the professors lectured or did not lecture, the students

attended or did not attend, and went about, not in uniform jackets _ad

instar_ of light-cavalry officers, but in all sorts of outrageous and

eccentric garments, in tiny little caps that would scarcely keep on

their virginal locks. The professors consisted of two groups or classes

who placidly hated each other. One group was composed exclusively of

Germans, the other of non-Germans. The Germans, among whom were

good-natured and learned men such as Loder, Fischer, Hildebrand, and

Heym himself, were as a rule distinguished by their ignorance of the

Russian language and disinclination to learn it, their indifference to

the students, their spirit of Western exclusiveness, their immoderate

smoking of cigars and the immense quantity of decorations which they

invariably wore. The non-Germans for their part knew not a single living

language except Russian, were servile in their patriotism, as uncouth as

seminarists, and, with the exception of Merzlyakov,[81] were treated as

of little account, and instead of an immoderate consumption of cigars

indulged in an immoderate consumption of liquor. The Germans for the

most part hailed from Göttingen and the non-Germans were sons of

priests.

Dvigubsky was one of the non-Germans: his appearance was so venerable

that a student from a seminary, who came in for a list of classes, went

up to kiss his hand and ask for his blessing, and always called him ‘The

Father Rector.’ At the same time he was wonderfully like an owl with an

Anna ribbon on its neck, in which form another student, who had received

a more worldly education, drew his portrait. When he came into our

lecture-room either with the dean Tchumakov, or with Kotelnitsky, who

had charge of a cupboard inscribed _Materia Medica_, kept for some

unknown reason in the mathematical lecture-room, or with Reiss, who was

bespoken from Germany because his uncle was a very good chemist, and

who, when he read French, used to call a lamp-wick a _bâton de coton_,

and poison, _poisson_, and so cruelly distorted the word ‘lightning’

that many people supposed he was swearing—we looked at them with round

eyes as at a collection of antiquities, as at the last of the

Abencerrages,[82] representatives of a different age not so near to us

as to Tredyakovsky[83] and Kostrov[84]; the times in which Heraskov[85]

and Knyazhnin[86] were still read, the times of the good-natured

Professor Diltey, who had two little dogs, one which always barked and

the other which never barked, for which reason he very justly called one

Bavardka and the other Prudentka.

But Dvigubsky was not at all a good-natured professor; he received us

extremely curtly and was rude. I reeled off a fearful rigmarole and was

disrespectful; the baron served up the same story. The rector,

irritated, told us to present ourselves next morning before the Council,

where in the course of half an hour they questioned, condemned and

sentenced us and sent the sentence to Prince Golitsyn for ratification.

I had scarcely had time to rehearse the trial and the sentence of the

University Senate to the students five or six times in the lecture-room

when all at once the inspector, who was a major in the Russian army and

a French dancing-master, made his appearance with a non-commissioned

officer, bringing an order to seize me and conduct me to prison. Some of

the students went to see me on my way, and in the courtyard there was

already a crowd of young men, so evidently I was not the first taken; as

we passed, they all waved their caps and their hands; the university

soldiers moved them back but the students would not go.

In the dirty cellar which served as a prison I found two of the arrested

men, Arapetov and Olov; Prince Andrey Obolensky and Rozenheim had been

put in another room; in all, there were six of us punished for the Malov

affair. Orders were given that we should be kept on bread and water; the

rector sent some sort of soup, which we refused, and it was well we did

so. As soon as it got dark and the lecture-rooms emptied, our comrades

brought us cheese, game, cigars, wine, and liqueurs. The soldier in

charge was angry and grumbled, but accepted twenty kopecks and carried

in the provisions. After midnight he went further and let several

visitors come in to us; so we spent our time feasting by night and

sleeping by day.

On one occasion it somehow happened that the assistant-director Panin,

the brother of the Minister of Justice, faithful to his Horse-Guard

habits, took it into his head to go the round of the Imperial prison in

the university cellars by night. We had only just lighted a candle and

put it under a chair so that the light could not be seen from outside,

and were beginning on our midnight repast, when we heard a knock at the

outer door; not the sort of knock which weakly begs a soldier to open,

which is more afraid of being heard than of not being heard; no, this

was a peremptory knock, a knock of authority. The soldier was petrified;

we hid the bottles and the students in a little cupboard, blew out the

candle and threw ourselves on our trestle-beds. Panin entered. ‘I

believe you are smoking?’ he said, so lost in thick clouds of smoke that

we could hardly distinguish him and the inspector who was carrying a

lantern. ‘Where do they get a light, do you give it them?’ The soldier

swore that he did not. We answered that we had tinder with us. The

inspector undertook to remove it and to take away the cigars, and Panin

withdrew without observing that the number of caps in the room was

double the number of heads.

On Saturday evening the inspector made his appearance and announced that

I and another one might go home, but that the rest would remain until

Monday. This distinction seemed to me insulting and I asked the

inspector whether I might remain; he drew back a step, looked at me with

the threateningly majestic air with which tsars and heroes in a ballet

depict anger in a dance, and saying, ‘Stay by all means,’ walked away. I

got more into trouble at home for this last sally than for the whole

business.

And so the first nights I slept away from home were spent in prison. Not

long afterwards it was my lot to have experience of a very different

prison, and there I stayed not eight days but nine months, after which I

went not home but into exile. All that comes later, however.

From that time forward I enjoyed the greatest popularity in the

lecture-room. From the first I had been accepted as a good comrade.

After the Malov affair, I became, like Gogol’s famous lady, a comrade

‘agreeable in all respects.’

Did we learn anything with all this going on, could we study? I imagine

that we did. The teaching was more meagre and its scope narrower than in

the ’forties. It is not the function of a university, however, to give a

complete training in any branch of knowledge; its work is to put a man

in a position to continue study on his own account; its work is to

provoke inquiry, to teach men to ask questions. And this was certainly

done by such professors as M. G. Pavlov, and on the other side, by such

as Katchenovsky.

But contact with other young men in the lecture-rooms and the exchange

of ideas and opinions did more to develop the students than lectures and

professors.... The Moscow University did its work; the professors whose

lectures contributed to the development of Lermontov, Byelinsky,[87]

Turgenev, Kavelin,[88] and Pirogov[89] may play their game of boston in

tranquillity and still more tranquilly lie under the earth.

And what original figures, what marvels there were among them—from

Fyodor Ivanovitch Tchumakov, who made formulas to fit in with those in

the text-book with the reckless freedom of the privileged landowner,

adding and removing letters, taking powers for roots and _x_ for the

known quantity, to Gavril Myagkov, who lectured on military tactics.

From perpetually dealing with heroic subjects, Myagkov’s very appearance

had acquired an air of drill and discipline; buttoned up to the throat

and wearing a cravat entirely free from curves, he delivered his

lectures as though giving words of command. ‘Gentlemen!’ he would shout;

‘in the field—of artillery!’ This did not mean that cannons were

advancing into the field of battle, but simply that such was the heading

in the margin. What a pity Nicholas avoided visiting the University! If

he had seen Myagkov, he would certainly have made him Director.

And Fyodor Fyodorovitch Reiss, who in his chemistry lectures never went

beyond the second person of the chemical divinity, _i.e._ hydrogen!

Reiss, who had actually been made Professor of Chemistry because not he,

but his uncle, had at one time studied that science! Towards the end of

the reign of Catherine, the old uncle had been invited to Russia; he did

not want to come, so sent his nephew instead....

Among the exceptional incidents of my course, which lasted four years

(for the University was closed for a whole session during the cholera),

were the cholera itself, the arrival of Humboldt and the visit of

Uvarov.

Humboldt was welcomed on his return to Moscow from the Urals in a solemn

assembly, held in the precincts of the University by the Society of

Scientific Research, the members of which were various senators and

governors—people, in fact, who took no interest in science, either

natural or unnatural. The fame of Humboldt, a privy councillor of his

Prussian Majesty, on whom the Tsar had graciously bestowed the Anna, and

to whom he had also commanded that equipment and diploma should be

presented free of charge, had reached even them. They were determined

not to disgrace themselves before a man who had been to Mount Chimborazo

and had lived at Sans-Souci.

To this day we look upon Europeans and upon Europe in the same way as

provincials look upon those who live in the capital, with deference and

a feeling of our own inferiority, flattering them and imitating them,

taking everything in which we are different for a defect, blushing for

our peculiarities and concealing them. The fact is that we were

intimidated by the jeers of Peter the Great, by the insults of Biron, by

the haughty superiority of German officers and French tutors, and we

have not recovered from it. They talk in Western Europe of our duplicity

and wily cunning; they mistake the desire to show off and swagger a bit

for the desire to deceive. Among us the same man is ready to be naïvely

Liberal with a Liberal or to play the Legitimist with a reactionary, and

this with no ulterior motive, simply from politeness and a desire to

please; the bump _de l’approbativité_ is strongly developed in our

skulls.

‘Prince Dmitri Golitsyn,’ observed Lord Durham, ‘is a true Whig, a Whig

in soul!’

Prince D. V. Golitsyn is a respectable Russian gentleman, but why he was

a Whig and in what way he was a Whig I don’t understand. You may be

certain that in his old age the prince wanted to please Durham and so

played the Whig.

The reception of Humboldt in Moscow and in the University was no jesting

matter. The Governor-General, various military and civic chiefs, and the

members of the Senate, all turned up with ribbons across their

shoulders, in full uniform, and the professors wore swords like warriors

and carried three-cornered hats under their arms. Humboldt, suspecting

nothing, came in a dark-blue coat with gold buttons, and, of course, was

overwhelmed with confusion. From the vestibule to the hall of the

Society of Scientific Research, ambushes were prepared for him on all

sides: here stood the rector, there a dean, here a budding professor,

there a veteran whose career was over and who for that reason spoke very

slowly; every one welcomed him in Latin, in German, in French, and all

this took place in those awful stone tubes, called corridors, in which

one cannot stay for a minute without being laid up with a cold for a

month. Humboldt, hat in hand, listened to everybody and answered

everybody—I feel certain that all the savages among whom he had been,

red-skinned and copper-coloured, caused him less trouble than his Moscow

reception.

As soon as he reached the hall and sat down, he had to get up again. The

Director, Pissarev, thought it necessary, in brief but vigorous

language, to lay down the law in Russian concerning the services of his

Excellency, the celebrated traveller; after which Sergey Glinka,[90]

‘the officer,’ with a voice of the year 1812, deep and hoarse, recited

his poem which began:

‘_Humboldt—Prométhée de nos jours!_’

Whilst Humboldt wanted to talk about his observations on the magnetic

needle and to compare his meteorological records on the Urals with those

of Moscow, the rector came up to show him instead something plaited of

the imperial hair of Peter the Great ... and Ehrenberg and Rosa had

difficulty in finding a chance to tell him something about their

discoveries.[91]

Things are not much better among us in the nonofficial world: ten years

ago Liszt was received in Moscow society in much the same way. Silly

enough things were done in his honour in Germany, but here it took quite

a different character. In Germany, it was all old-maidish exaltation,

sentimentality, all _Blumenstreuen_, while with us it was all servility,

homage paid to power, rigid standing at attention, with us it was all ‘I

have the honour to present myself to your Excellency.’ And in that case,

unfortunately, there was Liszt’s fame as a celebrated Lovelace to add to

it all. The ladies flocked round him, as peasant-boys at the cross-roads

flock round a traveller while his horses are being harnessed,

inquisitively examining himself, his carriage, his cap.... No one

listened to anybody but Liszt, no one spoke to anybody else, nor

answered anybody else. I remember that at one evening party,

Homyakov,[92] blushing for the honourable company, said to me, ‘Please

let us argue about something, that Liszt may see that there are people

in the room not exclusively occupied with him.’ For the consolation of

our ladies I can only say one thing, that in just the same way

Englishwomen dashed about, crowded round, pestered and obstructed other

celebrities such as Kossuth and afterwards Garibaldi. But alas for those

who want to learn good manners from Englishwomen and their husbands!

Our second ‘famous’ visitor was also in a certain sense ‘the Prometheus

of our day,’ only he stole the light not from Jupiter but from men. This

Prometheus, sung not by Glinka but by Pushkin himself, in his ‘Epistle

to Lucullus,’ was the Minister of Public Instruction, S. S. Uvarov. He

amazed us by the multitude of languages and the variety of subjects with

which he was acquainted; a veritable shopman in the stores of

enlightenment, he had committed to memory patterns of all the sciences,

samples or rather snippets of them. In the reign of Alexander, he wrote

Liberal brochures in French; later on, corresponded on Greek subjects

with Goethe in German. When he became Minister, he discoursed upon

Slavonic poetry of the fourth century, upon which Katchenovsky observed

to him that in those days our forefathers had enough to do to fight the

bears, let alone singing ballads about the gods of Samothrace and the

mercy of tyrants. He used to carry in his pocket, by way of a

testimonial, a letter from Goethe, in which the latter paid him an

extremely odd compliment, saying: ‘There is no need for you to apologise

for your style; you have succeeded in what I never can succeed in

doing—forgetting the German grammar.’

So this actual civil Pic-de-la-Mirandole[93] introduced a new kind of

torture. He ordered that the best students should be selected to deliver

a lecture, each on his own subject, instead of the professor. The deans,

of course, selected the liveliest.

These lectures went on for a whole week. The students had to prepare in

all the subjects of their course, and the deans picked out the student’s

name and the subject by lot. Uvarov invited all the distinguished people

of Moscow. Archimandrites and senators, the Governor-General and Ivan

Ivanovitch Dmitriev—all were present.

I had to lecture on mineralogy in Lovetsky’s place—and already he is

dead!

‘Where’s our old comrade Langeron!

Where’s our old comrade Benigsen!

You, too, are nowhere to be seen,

And you, too, might have never been!’

Alexey Leontyevitch Lovetsky was a tall, roughly-hewn, heavily-moving

man with a big mouth and a large face, entirely devoid of expression.

Removing in the corridor his pea-green overcoat adorned with a number of

collars of varying size, such as were worn during the First Consulate,

he would begin, before entering the lecture-room, in an even,

passionless voice (which was in perfect keeping with his stony subject):

‘We concluded in the last lecture all that is necessary concerning the

Siliceous Rocks.’ Then he would sit down and go on: ‘The Argillaceous

Rocks....’ He had created an invariable system for formulating the

qualities of each mineral, from which he never departed; so that it

sometimes happened that the characteristics were entered in the

negative:

‘Crystallisation—does not crystallise.

‘Employment—is not employed for any purpose.

‘Use—injurious to the organism....’

He did not, however, avoid poetry, nor moral reflections, and every time

he showed us artificial stones and told us how they were made, he added:

‘Gentlemen, it’s a fraud!’ In dealing with husbandry, he found moral

qualities in a good cock if he ‘crowed well and was attentive to the

hens,’ and a distinct virtue in an aristocratic ram if he had ‘bald

knees.’ He would also tell us touching tales in which flies describe how

on a fine summer evening they walked about a tree and were covered with

resin which turned into amber, and he always added: ‘That, gentlemen, is

prosopopeia!’

When the dean summoned me, the audience was rather exhausted; two

mathematical lectures had reduced the listeners, who did not understand

a single word, to apathy and depression. Uvarov asked for something a

little livelier and for a student with a ‘well-balanced tongue.’

Shtchepkin pointed to me.

I mounted the platform. Lovetsky was sitting near, motionless, with his

arms on his knees like a Memnon or Osiris, and was looking uneasy. I

whispered to him, ‘What luck that I have to lecture in your room. I

won’t give you away.’

‘Don’t boast when you are going into action,’ the worthy professor

responded, scarcely moving his lips and not looking at me. I almost

burst out laughing; but when I looked before me, there was a mist before

my eyes, I felt that I was turning pale and there was a sort of dryness

on my tongue. I had never spoken in public before, the lecture-room was

full of students—they relied upon me; at the table below were the

‘mighty of this world’ and all the professors of our section. I picked

up the question and read in an unnatural voice, ‘Crystallisation, its

conditions, laws and forms.’

While I was thinking how to begin, the happy thought occurred to me that

if I made a mistake, the professors might notice it, but they would not

say a word, while the rest of the audience knew nothing about the

subject themselves, and the students would be satisfied so long as I did

not break down in the middle, because I was a favourite. And so in the

name of Haüy, Werner, and Mitscherlich, I delivered my first lecture,

concluding it with philosophic reflections, and all the time addressing

myself to the students and not to the Minister. The students and the

professors shook hands with me and thanked me. Uvarov led me off to be

introduced to Prince Golitsyn and the latter said something, of which I

could catch nothing but the vowel sounds. Uvarov promised me a book in

honour of the occasion, but never sent it.

The second and third occasions of my appearance in public were very

different. In 1836 I played the part of ‘Ugar’ in the old Russian farce,

while the wife of the colonel of gendarmes was ‘Marfa,’ before all the

_beau-monde_ of Vyatka, including Tyufyaev. We had been rehearsing for a

month, but yet my heart beat violently and my hands trembled, when a

deathly silence followed the overture and the curtain began rising with

a sort of horrid shudder; Marfa and I were waiting behind the scenes.

She was so sorry for me, or else so afraid that I should spoil the

performance, that she gave me an immense glass of champagne, but even

with that I was half dead.

After making my début under the auspices of a Minister of Education and

a colonel of gendarmes, I appeared without any nervousness or

self-conscious shyness at a Polish meeting in London and that was my

third public appearance. The place of the Minister Uvarov was on that

occasion filled by the ex-Minister, Ledru-Rollin.[94]

But is not this enough of student reminiscences? I am afraid it may be a

sign of senility to linger so long over them; I will only add a few

details concerning the cholera of 1831.

Cholera—the word so familiar now in Europe and so thoroughly at home in

Russia that a patriotic poet calls the cholera the one faithful ally of

Nicholas—was heard then for the first time in the North. Every one

trembled before the terrible plague that was moving up the Volga towards

Moscow. Exaggerated rumours filled the imagination with horror. The

disease advanced capriciously, halting, skipping over places, and it

seemed to have missed Moscow, when suddenly the terrible news, ‘The

cholera is in Moscow!’ was all over the city.

In the morning a student in the political section felt ill, next day he

died in the university hospital. We rushed to look at his body. He was

emaciated, as though after a long illness, the eyes were sunk, the

features were distorted, beside him lay a porter, who had been taken ill

in the night.

We were informed that the university was to be closed. This order was

read to our section by the professor of technology, Denisov; he was

melancholy, perhaps frightened. Next morning he too died.

We assembled together from all sections in the big university courtyard;

there was something touching in this crowd of young people bidden to

disperse before the plague. Their faces were pale and particularly full

of feeling; many were thinking of friends and relations. We said

good-bye to the government scholars, who had been separated from us by

quarantine measures, and were being distributed in small numbers in

different houses. And at home we were all met by the stench of chloride

of lime, vinegar—and a diet such as might well have laid a man up, apart

from chloride and cholera.

Strange to say those gloomy days have remained as it were a time of

ceremonial solemnity in my memory.

Moscow assumed quite a different aspect. The public activities, unknown

at ordinary times, gave it a new life. There were fewer carriages in the

streets, and gloomy crowds of people stood at the cross-roads and talked

about poisoners. The conveyances that were taking the sick moved at a

walking pace, escorted by police; people drew aside from black hearses

with the dead. Bulletins concerning the disease were printed twice a

day. The town was surrounded by a cordon as in time of war, and the

soldiers shot a poor sacristan who was making his way across the river.

All this absorbed men’s minds, terror of the plague ousted terror of the

authorities; the people murmured, and then there came one piece of news

upon another, that so-and-so had been taken ill, that so-and-so had

died....

The Metropolitan, Filaret, arranged a universal service of prayer. On

the same day and at the same hour, all the priests made the round of

their parishes in procession with banners. The terrified inhabitants

came out of their houses and fell on their knees, as the procession

passed, praying with tears for the remission of sins. Even the priests,

accustomed to address God on intimate terms, were grave and moved. Some

of them went to the Kremlin. There in the open air, surrounded by the

higher clergy, knelt the Metropolitan praying that this cup might pass

away. On the same spot six years before, he had held a thanksgiving for

the hanging of the Decembrists.

Filaret was by way of being a high priest in opposition; on behalf of

what he was in opposition, I never could make out. Perhaps on behalf of

his own personality. He was an intelligent and learned man, and a master

of the Russian language, successfully introducing Church Slavonic into

it; but all this gave him no ground for opposition. The common people

did not like him and called him a freemason, because he was closely

associated with Prince A. N. Golitsyn and was preaching in Petersburg in

the palmy days of the Bible Society. The Synod forbade his catechism

being used in teaching. The clergy under his sway went in terror of his

despotism; possibly it was as rivals that Nicholas and he hated each

other.

Filaret was very clever and ingenious in humiliating the temporal power;

in his sermons there was the light of that vague Christian socialism for

which Lacordaire and other far-sighted Catholics were distinguished.

From his exalted ecclesiastical tribune, Filaret declared that a man can

never lawfully be the tool of another, that there can be nothing between

men but an exchange of services, and this, he said, in a state in which

half the population were slaves.

He said to the fettered convicts in the forwarding prison on the Sparrow

Hills: ‘The civil law has condemned you and drives you away, but the

Church hastens after you, longing to say one more word, one more prayer

for you and to give you her blessing on your journey.’ Then comforting

them, he added ‘that they, condemned convicts, had broken with their

past, that a new life lay before them, while among others (probably

there were no others except officials present) there were far greater

criminals,’ and he quoted the example of the robber at Christ’s side.

Filaret’s sermon at the service on the occasion of the cholera surpassed

all his other efforts; he took as his text how the angel offered David

the choice of war, famine or plague as a punishment; David chose plague.

The Tsar came to Moscow furious, sent the Court Minister, Prince

Volkonsky, to give Filaret a good ‘dressing down’ and threatened to send

him to be Metropolitan in Georgia. The Metropolitan meekly submitted and

sent a new message to all the churches, in which he explained that they

would be wrong to look in the text of his first sermon for an

application to their beloved Emperor, that by David was meant ourselves

defiled by sin. Of course, this made the first sermon intelligible even

to those who had not grasped its meaning at first.

This was how the Metropolitan of Moscow played at opposition.

The service had as little effect on the cholera as the chloride of lime;

the disease spread further and further.

I was in Paris during the severest visitation of cholera in 1849. The

plague was terrible. The hot days of June helped to spread it: the poor

died like flies, the tradespeople fled from Paris while others sat

behind locked doors. The government, exclusively occupied with its

struggles against the revolutionaries, did not think of taking active

measures. The scanty collections raised for relief were insufficient for

the emergency. The poor working people were left abandoned to the

caprice of destiny, the hospitals had not beds enough, the police had

not coffins enough, and in the houses, packed to overflowing with

families, the bodies remained two or three days in inner rooms. In

Moscow it was not like that.

Prince D. V. Golitsyn, at that time governor-general, a weak but

honourable man, cultured and much respected, aroused the enthusiasm of

Moscow society, and somehow everything was arranged in a private way,

that is, without the special interference of government. A committee was

formed of citizens of standing—wealthy landowners and merchants. Every

member undertook one quarter of Moscow. Within a few days twenty

hospitals had been opened; they did not cost the government a farthing,

everything was done by subscription. Shopkeepers gave gratis everything

needed for the hospitals, bedclothes, linen, and warm clothing for the

patients on recovery. Young men volunteered as superintendents of the

hospitals to ensure that half of these contributions should not be

stolen by the attendants.

The university did its full share. The whole medical faculty, students

and doctors _en masse_, put themselves at the disposal of the cholera

committee; they were assigned to the different hospitals and remained

there until the cholera was over. For three or four months these

admirable young men lived in the hospitals as orderlies, assistants,

nurses, secretaries, and all this without any remuneration and at a time

when there was such an exaggerated fear of the infection. I remember one

student, a Little Russian, who at the very beginning of the cholera had

asked for leave of absence on account of important family affairs. Leave

is rarely given in term-time, but at last he obtained it; just as he was

about to set off, the students went to the hospitals. The Little Russian

put his leave in his pocket and went with them. When he came out of the

hospital his leave was long overdue and he was the first to laugh over

his trip.

Moscow, apparently so drowsy and apathetic, so absorbed in scandal and

piety, weddings, and nothing at all, always wakes up when it is

necessary, and is equal to the occasion when the storm breaks over

Russia.

In 1612 she was joined in blood-stained nuptials with Russia, and their

union was welded in fire in 1812.

She bowed her head before Peter because the future of Russia lay in his

brutal clutch. But with murmurs and disdain Moscow received within her

walls the woman stained with her husband’s blood, that impenitent Lady

Macbeth, that Lucretia Borgia without her Italian blood, the Russian

Empress of German birth[95]—and scowling and pouting, she quietly

withdrew from Moscow.

Scowling and pouting, Napoleon waited for the keys of Moscow at the

Dragomilovsky Gate, impatiently playing with his cigar-holder and

tugging at his glove. He was not accustomed to enter foreign towns

unescorted.

‘But my Moscow came not forth,’ as Pushkin says; but set fire to

herself.

The cholera came and again the people’s city showed itself full of heart

and energy!

In August 1830, we went to Vassilyevskoe, stopped, as we always did, at

the Radcliffian[96] castle of Perhushkovo, and, after feeding ourselves

and our horses, were preparing to continue our journey. Bakay, with a

towel round his waist like a belt, had already shouted: ‘Off!’ when a

man galloped up on horseback, signalling to us to stop, and one of the

Senator’s postillions, covered with dust and sweat, leapt off his horse

and handed my father an envelope. In the envelope was the news of the

Revolution of July! There were two pages of the _Journal des Débats_

which he had brought with a letter; I read them over a hundred times and

got to know them by heart, and for the first time I was bored in the

country.

It was a glorious time, events came quickly. Scarcely had the meagre

figure of Charles X. had time to disappear behind the mists of Holyrood,

when Belgium flared up, the throne of the Citizen King tottered, and a

warm revolutionary spirit began to be apparent in debates and

literature. Novels, plays, poems, all once more became propaganda and

conflict.

At that time we knew nothing of the artificial stage-setting of the

revolution in France, and we took it all for the genuine thing.

Any one who cares to see how strongly the news of the revolution of July

affected the younger generation should read Heine’s description of how

he heard in Heligoland ‘that the great Pan of the Pagans is dead.’ There

was no sham ardour there, Heine at thirty was as enthusiastic, as

childishly excited, as we were at eighteen.

We followed step by step every word, every event, the bold questions and

abrupt answers, the doings of General Lafayette, and the doings of

General Lamarque; we not only knew every detail concerning them but

loved all the leading men (the Radical ones, of course) and kept their

portraits, from Manuel[97] and Benjamin Constant to Dupont de l’Eure[98]

and Armand Carrel.[99]

In the midst of this ferment all at once, like a bomb exploding close

by, the news of the rising in Warsaw overwhelmed us. This was not far

away, this was at home, and we looked at each other with tears in our

eyes, repeating our favourite line:

‘Nein! es sind keine leere Träume!’

We rejoiced at every defeat of Dibitch; refused to believe in the

failures of the Poles, and I at once added to my shrine the portrait of

Thaddeus Kosciuszko.

It was just then that I saw Nicholas for the second time and his face

was still more strongly imprinted on my memory. The nobles were giving a

ball in his honour. I was in the gallery of the Assembly Hall and could

stare at him to my heart’s content. He had not yet begun to wear a

moustache. His face was still young, but the change in it since the time

of the Coronation struck me. He stood morosely by a column, staring

coldly and grimly before him, without looking at any one. He had grown

thinner. In those features, in those pewtery eyes one could read the

fate of Poland and indeed of Russia also. He was shaken, frightened, he

doubted[100] the security of his throne and was ready to revenge himself

for what he had suffered, for his fear and his doubts.

With the pacification of Poland all the restrained malignancy of the man

was let loose. Soon we, too, felt it.

The network of espionage cast about the university from the beginning of

the reign began to be drawn tighter. In 1832 a Pole who was a student in

our section was a victim. Sent to the university as a government

scholar, not at his own initiative, he had been put in our course; we

made friends with him; he was discreet and melancholy in his behaviour,

we never heard a rash word from him, but we never heard a word of

weakness either. One morning he was missing from the lectures, next day

he was missing still. We began to make inquiries; the government

scholars told us in secret that he had been fetched away at night, that

he had been summoned before the authorities, and then people had come

for his papers and belongings and had told them not to speak of it.

There the matter ended, _we never heard anything of the fate of this

luckless young man_.[102]

A few months passed when suddenly there was a report in the lecture-room

that several students had been seized in the night; among them were

Kostenetsky, Kolreif, Antonovitch and others; we knew them well, they

were all excellent fellows. Kolreif, the son of a Protestant pastor, was

an extremely gifted musician. A court martial was appointed to try them;

this meant in plain language that they were doomed to perish. We were

all in a fever of suspense to know what would happen to them, but from

the first they too vanished without trace. The storm that was crushing

the rising blades of corn was everywhere. We no longer had a foreboding

of its approach, we felt it, we saw it, and we huddled closer and closer

together.

The danger strung up our tense nerves, made our hearts beat faster and

made us love each other with greater devotion. There were five of us at

first and now we met Vadim Passek.

In Vadim there was a great deal that was new to us. We had all with

slight variations had a similar bringing up, that is, we knew nothing

but Moscow and our country estates, we had all learned out of the same

books, had lessons from the same tutors, and been educated at home or at

a boarding-school preparatory for the university. Vadim had been born in

Siberia during his father’s exile, in the midst of want and privation.

His father had been himself his teacher. He had grown up in a large

family of brothers and sisters, under a crushing weight of poverty but

in complete freedom. Siberia had put its imprint on him, which was quite

unlike our provincial stamp; he was far from being so vulgar and petty,

he was distinguished by more sturdiness and a tougher fibre. Vadim was a

savage in comparison with us. His daring was of another kind, unlike

ours, more that of the _bogatyr_, and sometimes conceited; the

aristocracy of misfortune had developed a peculiar self-respect in him;

but he knew how to love others too, and gave himself to them without

stint. He was bold—even reckless to excess—a man born in Siberia, and in

an exiled family too, has an advantage over us in not being afraid of

Siberia.

Vadim from family tradition hated the autocracy with his whole soul, and

he took us to his heart as soon as we met. We made friends very quickly.

Though, indeed, at that time, there was neither ceremony nor reasonable

precaution, nothing like it, to be seen in our circle.

‘Would you like to make the acquaintance of Ketscher, of whom you have

heard so much?’ Vadim said to me.

‘I certainly should.’

‘Come to-morrow, then, at seven o’clock; don’t be late, he’ll be with

me.’

I went—Vadim was not at home. A tall man with an expressive face and a

good-naturedly menacing look behind his spectacles was waiting for him.

I took up a book, he took up a book. ‘But perhaps you,’ he said as he

opened it, ‘perhaps you are Herzen?’

‘Yes; and you Ketscher?’

A conversation began and grew more and more eager....

And from that minute (which may have been about the end of 1831) we were

inseparable friends; from that minute the anger and sweetness, the laugh

and shout of Ketscher have resounded at all the stages, in all the

incidents of our life.

Our meeting with Vadim introduced a new element into our fraternity.

We met as before most frequently at Ogaryov’s. His invalid father had

gone to live on his estate in Penza. Ogaryov lived alone on the lowest

storey of their house at the Nikitsky Gate. This was not far from the

University, and all were particularly attracted there. Ogaryov had that

magnetic attraction which forms the first thread of crystallisation in

every mass of casually meeting atoms, if only they have some affinity.

Wherever such men are flung down, they imperceptibly become the heart of

the organism.

But besides his bright, cheerful room, furnished with red and gold

striped hangings, always haunted by the smoke of cigars and the smell of

punch and other—I was going to say—edibles and beverages, but I stopped,

because there rarely were any edibles except cheese—well, besides

Ogaryov’s ultra-student-like abode where we argued for nights together,

and sometimes caroused for nights also, another house, in which almost

for the first time we learnt to respect family life, became more and

more our favourite resort.

Vadim often left our conversations and went off home; he missed his

mother and sisters if he did not see them for long together. To us who

lived heart and soul in comradeship, it was strange that he could prefer

his family to our company.

He introduced us to it. In that family everything bore traces of the

Tsar’s _persecution_; only yesterday it had come from Siberia, it was

ruined, harassed, and at the same time full of that dignity which

misfortune lays, not upon every sufferer, but on the faces of those who

have known how to bear it.

Their father had been seized in the reign of Paul in consequence of some

political treachery, flung into the Schlüsselburg and exiled to Siberia.

Alexander brought back thousands of those exiled by his insane father,

but Passek was forgotten. He was the nephew of that Passek who took part

in the murder of Peter III., and who was afterwards governor-general in

the Polish provinces, and he might have claimed part of an inheritance

which had already passed into other hands, and it was those ‘other

hands’ which kept him in Siberia.

While in the Schlüsselburg Passek married the daughter of one of the

officers in the garrison there. The young girl knew that things would go

hard with her, but she was not deterred by fear of exile. At first they

struggled on somehow in Siberia, selling the last of their belongings,

but their poverty grew more and more terrible, and the more rapidly so

as their family increased. Weighed down by privation, by hard work,

deprived of warm clothing and at times even of bread, they yet succeeded

in coming through and in bringing up a whole family of young lions; the

father transmitted to them his proud, indomitable spirit and faith in

himself, the secret of fortitude in misfortune; he educated them by his

example, the mother by her self-sacrifice and bitter tears. The sisters

were in no way inferior to the brothers in heroic fortitude. Yes—why be

afraid of words—they were a family of heroes. What they had all borne

for one another, what they had done for the family was incredible, and

always with head erect, not in the least crushed.

In Siberia the three sisters had only one pair of shoes; they used to

keep them for going on walks, that strangers might not see the extremity

of their need.

At the beginning of 1826 Passek received permission to return to Russia.

It was winter, and it was no easy matter to move with such a family,

without fur coats, without money, from the province of Tobolsk, while on

the other hand the heart yearned for Russia: exile is more than ever

insufferable after it is over. Our martyrs struggled back somehow; a

peasant woman, who had nursed one of the children during the mother’s

illness, brought her hard-earned savings to help them on the way, asking

only that they would take her too; the drivers brought them to the

Russian frontier for a trifle, or for nothing; some of the family walked

while others were driven, and the young people took turns; so they made

the long winter journey from the Urals to Moscow. Moscow was the dream

of the young ones, their hope—and there hunger awaited them.

While forgiving Passek, the government never thought of returning him

some part of his property. Exhausted by his efforts and privations, the

old man took to his bed; they knew not where to find bread for the

morrow.

At that moment Nicholas celebrated his coronation, banquet followed upon

banquet, Moscow was like a heavily decorated ballroom, everywhere

lights, shields, and gay attire.... The two elder sisters, without

consulting any one, wrote a petition to Nicholas, describing the

position of the family, and begged him to inquire into the case and

restore their property. They left the house secretly in the morning and

went to the Kremlin, squeezing their way to the front, and awaited the

Tsar, ‘crowned and exalted on high.’ When Nicholas came down the steps

of the red staircase, the two girls quietly stepped forward and offered

the petition. He passed by, pretending not to see them; an aide-de-camp

took the paper and the police led them away.

Nicholas was about thirty at the time and already was capable of such

heartlessness. This coldness, this caution is characteristic of little

commonplace natures, cashiers, and petty clerks. I have often noticed

this unyielding firmness of character in postal officials, salesmen of

theatre and railway tickets, and people who are continually bothered and

interrupted at every minute. They learn not to see a man, though he is

standing by. But how did this autocratic clerk train himself not to see,

and what need had he not to be a minute late for a function?

The girls were kept in custody until evening. Frightened and insulted,

they besought the police superintendent to let them go home, where their

absence must have upset the whole family. Nothing was done about the

petition.

The father could endure no more, his sufferings had been too great; he

died. The children were left with their mother, struggling on from day

to day. The greater the need, the harder the sons worked; all three

finished their university course brilliantly and took their degrees. The

two elder ones went off to Petersburg; there, being excellent

mathematicians, they gave lessons in addition to their work in the

service (one in the Admiralty and the other in the Engineers) and,

denying themselves everything, sent the money they earned home to the

family.

I vividly remember the old mother in her dark gown and white cap; her

thin, pale face was covered with wrinkles, she looked far older than she

was, only her eyes retained something of her youth; so much gentleness,

love, anxiety, and so many past tears could be seen in them. She adored

her children; she was rich, famous, young in them; with deep and devout

feeling she spoke of them in her weak voice, which sometimes broke and

quivered with suppressed tears.

When they were all gathered together in Moscow and sitting round their

simple repast, the old woman was beside herself with joy; she walked

round the table, looked after their wants, and, suddenly stopping, would

gaze at all her young people with such pride, with such happiness, and

then lift her eyes to me as though asking: ‘They really are fine, aren’t

they?’ At such times I longed to throw myself on her neck and kiss her

hands; and, moreover, they really were all of them very handsome, too.

She was happy then, why did she not die at one of those dinners?...

In two years, she had lost the three elder sons. One died, gloriously,

his heroism acknowledged by his enemies in the midst of victory and

glory, though it was not for his own cause he sacrificed his life. He

was the young general killed by the Circassians at Dargo. Laurels do not

heal a mother’s grief.... The others did not have so happy an end; the

hardness of Russian life weighed upon them, weighed upon them till it

crushed them. Poor mother! and poor Russia!

Vadim died in February 1843. I was with him at the end, and for the

first time looked upon the death of a man dear to me, and at the same

time death in its full horror, in all its meaningless fortuitousness, in

all its blind, immoral injustice.

Ten years before his death Vadim married my cousin[103] and I was best

man at his wedding. Married life and the change in his habits parted us

somewhat. He was happy in his private life, but unfortunate in his

outward circumstances, and unsuccessful in his undertakings. Not long

before our arrest, he went to Harkov, where he had been promised a

lecturer’s chair at the university. His going there saved him indeed

from prison, but his name was not forgotten by the police. Vadim was

refused the post. The assistant-director admitted to him that they had

received a document by which they were forbidden to give him the chair,

on account of connections with evilly-disposed persons of which the

government had obtained knowledge.

Vadim was left without a post, that is, without bread—that was his

Vyatka.

We were exiled. Relations with us were dangerous. Black years of poverty

followed for him; in seven years of struggle to get a bare living, in

mortifying contact with coarse and heartless people, far from friends

and from all possibility of corresponding with them, his health gave

way.

‘Once we had spent all our money to the last farthing,’ his wife told me

afterwards; ‘on the previous evening I had tried to get hold of ten

roubles somehow, but had not succeeded. I had already borrowed from

every one from whom it was possible to borrow a little. In the shops

they refused to give us provisions except for cash, we thought of

nothing but what would the children have to eat next day. Vadim sat

gloomily by the window, then he got up, took his hat and said he would

like a walk. I saw that he was very much depressed; I felt frightened,

but still I was glad that he should distract his mind a little. When he

was gone I flung myself on the bed and wept very bitterly, then I began

thinking what to do—everything we had of the slightest value, our rings

and our spoons, had long ago been pawned; I saw no resource left but to

apply to my people and beg their bitter, cold assistance. Meanwhile

Vadim wandered aimlessly about the streets and so reached Petrovsky

Boulevard. As he passed by Shiryaev’s shop it occurred to him to inquire

whether the bookseller had sold even one copy of his book; he had been

in the shop five days before, but had found nothing for him; he walked

despondently into the shop.

‘Very glad to see you,’ Shiryaev said to him, ‘there is a letter from

our Petersburg agent, he has sold three hundred roubles’ worth of your

book; would you like to have the money?’ And Shiryaev counted him out

fifteen gold roubles. Vadim lost his head in his delight, rushed into

the first restaurant for provisions, bought a bottle of wine and fruit

and dashed home in a cab in triumph. At the moment I was watering the

remainder of some broth for the children, and was meaning to put a

little aside for him and to assure him that I had already had some, when

he suddenly came in with the parcel and the bottle, gay and joyous.’ And

she sobbed and could not utter another word.

After my exile I met him casually in Petersburg and found him very much

changed. He kept his convictions, but he kept them like a warrior who

will not let the sword drop out of his hand, though he feels that he is

wounded to death. He was by then exhausted and looked coldly into the

future. So, too, I found him in Moscow in 1842, his circumstances had

somewhat improved, his work had begun to be appreciated; but all this

came too late—it was like the epaulettes of Polezhaev or the release of

Kolreif—granted not by the Russian Tsar but by Russian life.

Vadim was wasting away; in the autumn of 1842 tuberculosis was

discovered, that terrible disease which I was destined to see once

again.

A month before his death I began to notice with horror that his mental

faculties were growing dimmer and weaker, like candles smouldering out

and leaving the room darker and gloomier. Soon it was with difficulty

and effort that he could find the words for incoherent speech, then he

scarcely spoke at all and only inquired anxiously for his medicines and

whether it was not time to take them.

At three o’clock one night in February, Vadim’s wife sent for me; the

sick man was very bad, he had asked for me. I went in to him and gently

took his hand, his wife mentioned my name; he gazed long and wearily at

me but did not recognise me and closed his eyes. The children were

brought in; he looked at them but I think did not recognise them either.

His moaning became more painful, he would subside for minutes and then

suddenly give a prolonged sigh and groan; then a bell pealed in a

neighbouring church, Vadim listened and said, ‘That’s matins,’ after

that he did not utter another word.... His wife knelt sobbing by the

dead man’s bedside; a good, kind lad, one of their university comrades,

who had been looking after him of late, bustled about, moving back the

medicine table, raising the curtains.... I went away—it was bright and

frosty, the rising sun shone brilliantly on the snow as though something

good had happened; I went to order the coffin.

When I went back a deathlike stillness reigned in the little house, the

dead man in accordance with Russian custom lay on a table in the

drawing-room, at a little distance from it sat his friend, the artist

Rabus, making a pencil sketch of him through his tears; beside the dead

man stood a tall woman with silently folded arms and an expression of

infinite sorrow; no artist could have moulded a nobler and finer figure

of grief. The woman was not young, but retained traces of a stern,

majestic beauty; she stood motionless, wrapped in a long black velvet

cloak lined with ermine fur.

I stopped in the doorway.

Two or three minutes passed in the same stillness, when all at once she

bent down, warmly kissed the dead man on the forehead, and said,

‘Farewell! farewell, friend Vadim,’ and with resolute steps walked into

the inner rooms. Rabus went on drawing, he nodded to me, we had no

inclination to speak. I sat down by the window in silence.

That woman was Madame E. Tchertkov, the sister of Count Zahar

Tchernyshev, exiled for the Fourteenth of December.

The Simonovsky archimandrite, Melhisedek, of his own accord offered a

grave within the precincts of his monastery. Melhisedek had once been a

humble carpenter and a desperate dissenter, had afterwards gone back to

orthodoxy, become a monk, been made Father Superior and afterwards

archimandrite. With all that, he remained a carpenter, that is, he kept

his heart and his broad shoulders and his red, healthy face. He knew

Vadim and respected him for his historical researches concerning Moscow.

When the dead man’s body arrived before the monastery gates, they were

opened and Melhisedek came out with all the monks to meet the martyr’s

poor coffin with soft, mournful chanting, and to follow it to the grave.

Not far from Vadim’s grave lie the ashes of another dear friend,

Venevitinov,[104] with the inscription ‘How well he knew life, how

little he lived!’ How well Vadim, too, knew life!

This was not enough for fate. Why did the old mother live so long? She

had seen the end of their exile, had seen her children in all the beauty

of their youth, in all the brilliance of their talent, what more had she

to live for! Who prizes happiness should seek an early death. Happiness

that lasts is no more to be found than ice which never melts.

Vadim’s eldest brother died a few months after the second, Diomid, had

been killed; he caught cold, neglected his illness, and his undermined

organism succumbed. He was barely forty and he was the eldest.

These three graves of three friends cast long dark shadows over the

past; the last months of my youth are seen through funeral crape and the

smoke of incense....

A year passed, the trial of my university comrades was over. They were

found guilty (just as we were later on, and later still the Petrashevsky

group[105]) of a design to form a secret society, and of criminal

conversations; for this they were sent as common soldiers to Orenburg.

Nicholas made an exception of one of them, Sungurov. He had completed

his studies and was in the service, married and had children. He was

condemned to deprivation of rights of property and exile to Siberia.

‘What could a handful of young students do, they ruined themselves for

nothing!’ All that is very sensible, and people who argue in that way

ought to be gratified at the _good sense_ of the young generation that

followed us. After our affair which followed that of Sungurov, fifteen

years passed in tranquillity before the Petrashevsky affair, and it was

those fifteen years from which Russia is only just beginning to recover

and by which two generations were ruined, the elder lost in debauchery,

and the younger, poisoned from childhood, whose sickly representatives

we are seeing to-day.

After the Decembrists, all attempts to form societies were, indeed,

unsuccessful; the scantiness of our forces and the vagueness of our aims

pointed to the necessity for another kind of work—preparatory,

spiritual. All that is true.

But what would young men be made of who could wait for solutions to

theoretical problems while calmly looking on at what was being done

around them, at the hundreds of Poles clanking their fetters on the

Vladimir Road, at serfdom, at the soldiers flogged in the Hodynsky Field

by some General Lashkevitch, at fellow-students lost and never heard of

again? For the moral purification of the generation, as a pledge of the

future, they were bound to be so indignant as to be senseless in their

attempts and disdainful of danger. The savage punishments inflicted on

boys of sixteen or seventeen served as a terrible lesson and in a way a

hardening process; the cruel blows aimed at every one of us by a

heartless monster dispelled for good all rosy hopes of indulgence for

youth. It was dangerous to jest with Liberalism, and no one could dream

of playing at conspiracy. For one carelessly concealed tear over Poland,

for one boldly uttered word, there were years of exile, of the white

strap,[106] and sometimes even of the fortress; that was why it was

important that those words were uttered and that those tears were shed.

Young people perished sometimes, but they perished without checking the

mental activity that was solving the sphinx riddle of Russian life,

indeed they even justified its hope.

Our turn came now. Our names were already on the list of the secret

police. The first play of the light-blue cat with the mouse began as

follows.

When our condemned comrades were being sent off to Orenburg by étape, on

foot without sufficient warm clothing, Ogaryov in our circle, I.

Kireyevsky in his, got up subscriptions. All the condemned men were

without money. Kireyevsky brought the money collected to the commander,

Staal, a good-natured old man of whom I shall have more to say later.

Staal promised to give the money and asked Kireyevsky, ‘But what are

these lists for?’ ‘The names of those who subscribed,’ answered

Kireyevsky, ‘and the amounts.’ ‘You do believe that I will give them the

money?’ asked the old man. ‘Of course.’ ‘And I imagine that those who

have given it to you trust you. And so what is the use of our keeping

their names?’ With these words Staal threw the lists into the fire, and,

of course, he did very well.

Ogaryov himself took the money to the barracks, and this went off

without a hitch, but the prisoners took it into their heads to send

their thanks from Orenburg to their comrades, and, as a government

official was going to Moscow, they seized the opportunity and asked him

to take a letter, which they were afraid to trust to the post. The

official did not fail to take advantage of this rare chance for proving

all the ardour of his loyal sentiments and presented the letter to the

general of gendarmes in Moscow.

The general of gendarmes at this time was Lissovsky, who was appointed

to the post when A. A. Volkov went out of his mind imagining that the

Poles wanted to offer him the crown of Poland (an ironical trick of

destiny to send a general of gendarmes mad over the crown of the

Jagellons![107]).

Lissovsky, himself a Pole, was neither spiteful nor ill-disposed: having

wasted his property over cards and a French actress, he philosophically

preferred the place of general of gendarmes in Moscow to a place in the

debtors’ prison of the same city.

Lissovsky summoned Ogaryov, Ketscher, S. Vadim, I. Obolensky and others,

and charged them with being in relations with political criminals. On

Ogaryov’s observing that he had not written to any one, and that if any

one had written to him he could not be responsible for it, and that,

moreover, no letter had reached him, Lissovsky answered: ‘You got up a

subscription for them, _that’s still worse_. As it is the first offence

the Sovereign is _so merciful_ as to _pardon_ you; only I warn you,

gentlemen, a strict supervision will be kept over you; be careful.’

Lissovsky looked round at all with a significant glance, and his eyes

resting upon Ketscher, who was taller and a little older than the rest

and who raised his eyebrows so fiercely, he added: ‘You, my good sir,

ought to be ashamed in your position.’ It might have been supposed that

Ketscher was vice-chancellor of the Russian Heraldry Office, while as a

matter of fact he was only a humble district doctor.

I was not sent for, probably my name was not in the letter.

This threat was like a promotion, a consecration, a winning of our

spurs. Lissovsky’s advice threw oil on the fire, and as though to make

their future task easier for the police we put on velvet _bérets à la_

Karl Sand[108] and tied tricolor scarves round our necks.

Colonel Shubensky, who was quietly and softly with velvet steps creeping

into Lissovsky’s place, pounced upon his weakness with us; we were to

serve him for a step in his promotion—and we did so serve him.

But first I will add a few words concerning the fate of Sungurov and his

companions. Nicholas let Kolreif return ten years later from Orenburg,

where his regiment was stationed. He pardoned him on the ground of his

being in consumption, just as, because he was in consumption, Polezhaev

was promoted to be an officer, and because he was dead Bestuzhev was

given a cross. Kolreif returned to Moscow and died in the arms of his

old, grief-stricken father.

Kostenetsky distinguished himself in the Caucasus and was promoted to

the rank of an officer. It was the same with Antonovitch. The fate of

the luckless Sungurov was incomparably more dreadful. On reaching the

first étape on the Sparrow Hills, Sungurov asked leave from the officer

in charge to go out into the fresh air, as the hut, packed to

overflowing with exiles, was suffocating. The officer, a young man of

twenty, went out himself into the road with him. Sungurov, choosing a

favourable moment, turned off the road and disappeared. Probably he knew

the locality well. He succeeded in getting away from the officer, but

next day the gendarmes got on his track. When Sungurov saw that it was

impossible to escape, he cut his throat. The gendarmes took him to

Moscow unconscious and losing blood.

The unfortunate officer was degraded to the ranks.

Sungurov did not die. He was tried again, this time not as a political

prisoner, but as a runaway convict: half his head was shaved: it is an

original method (probably inherited from the Tatars) in use for

preventing escapes and it shows even more than corporal punishment the

complete contempt for human dignity of the Russian legislature. To this

external disgrace the sentence added one stroke of the lash within the

walls of the prison. Whether this sentence was carried out I do not

know. After that, Sungurov was sent to Nertchinsk to the mines.

I heard his name pronounced once more and then it vanished for ever.

In Vyatka I once met in the street a young doctor, a fellow-student at

the university, who was on his way to some post in a factory. We talked

of old days and common acquaintances.

‘My God!’ said the doctor, ‘do you know whom I saw on my way here in the

Nizhni-Novgorod Province? I was sitting in the posting-station waiting

for horses. It was very nasty weather. An étape officer, in charge of a

party of convicts, came in to get warm. We got into conversation;

hearing that I was a doctor, he asked me to go to the étape to look at

one of the convicts and see whether he were shamming or really were

seriously ill. I went, of course, with the intention of declaring in any

case that the convict was ill. In the small étape there were eighty men

in chains, shaven and unshaven, women and children; they all moved apart

as the officer went up, and we saw, lying on straw in a corner on the

dirty floor, a figure wrapped in a convict’s greatcoat.

‘“This is the invalid,” said the officer.

‘I had no need to lie, the poor wretch was in a high fever; emaciated

and exhausted by prison and the journey, with half his head shaven and

his beard uncut, he looked terrible as he stared about aimlessly, and

continually asked for water.

‘“Well, brother, are you very bad?” I said to the sick man, and added to

the officer: “it is impossible for him to go on.”

‘The sick man fixed his eyes upon me and muttered “Is that you?”—he

mentioned my name. “You don’t know me?” he added in a voice which went

to my heart like a knife.

‘“Forgive me,” I said, taking his dry and burning hand, “I can’t recall

you.”

‘“I am Sungurov,” he answered.

‘Poor Sungurov!’ repeated the doctor, shaking his head.

‘Well, did they leave him?’ I asked.

‘No, but they got a cart for him.’

After I had written this I learned that Sungurov died at Nertchinsk. His

property which consisted of two hundred and fifty souls in the

Bronnitsky district near Moscow, and four hundred souls in the Arzamas

district of the Nizhni-Novgorod Province, _went to pay for the keep of

him and his comrades in prison while awaiting trial_.

His family was ruined; the first care of the authorities, however, was

to diminish it. _Sungurov’s wife was seized with her two children, and

spent six months_ in the Pretchistensky prison, and her baby died there.

May the rule of Nicholas be damned for ever and ever! Amen!

Chapter 7

THE END OF MY STUDIES—THE SCHILLER PERIOD—EARLY YOUTH AND

BOHEMIANISM—SAINT-SIMONISM AND N. POLEVOY

Before the storm had broken over our heads my time at the university was

coming to an end. The ordinary anxieties, the nights without sleep spent

in trying to learn useless things by heart, the superficial study in a

hurry and the thought of the examination stifling all interest in

science—all that was as it always is. I wrote a dissertation on

astronomy for the gold medal, but only got the silver one. I am certain

that I am incapable of understanding now what I wrote then, and that it

was worth its weight—in silver.

It sometimes happens to me to dream that I am a student going in for an

examination—I think with horror how much I have forgotten and feel that

I shall be plucked,—and I wake up rejoicing from the bottom of my heart

that the sea and passports, and years and crimes cut me off from the

university, that no one is going to torture me, and no one dare give me

a disgusting minimum. And, indeed, the professors would be surprised

that I should have gone so far back in so few years. One did, indeed,

express this to me.[109]

After the final examination the professors shut themselves up to reckon

the marks, while we, excited by hopes and doubts, hung about the

corridors and entrance in little groups. Sometimes some one would come

out of the council-room. We rushed to learn our fate, but for a long

time it was not settled. At last Heiman came out. ‘I congratulate you,’

he said to me, ‘you are a graduate.’ ‘Who else, who else?’ ‘So-and-so,

and So-and-so.’ I felt at once sad and gay; as I went out at the

university gates I thought that I should not go out at them again as I

had yesterday and every day; I was shut out of the university, of that

common home where I had spent four years, so youthfully and so well; on

the other hand I was comforted by the feeling of being accepted as

completely grown-up, and, why not admit it? by the title of graduate I

had gained all at once.[110]

Alma Mater! I am so greatly indebted to the university, and lived in its

life and with it so long after I had finished my studies, that I cannot

think of it without love and respect. It cannot charge me with

ingratitude, though in relation with the university gratitude is easy,

it is inseparable from the love and bright memories of youth ... and I

send it my blessing from this far-off foreign land!

The year we spent after taking our degrees made a glorious end to early

youth. It was one prolonged feast of friendship, exchange of ideas,

inspiration, carousing....

A little group of university friends who had succeeded in surviving did

not part, but went on living in their common sympathies and fancies, and

no one thought of his material prospects or future career. I should not

think well of this in men of mature age, but I prize it in the young.

Youth when it has not been sapped by the moral corruption of

petty-bourgeois ideas is everywhere impractical, and is especially bound

to be so in a young country which is full of such great strivings and

has attained so little. Moreover, to be impractical need not imply

anything false, everything turned toward the future is bound to have a

share of idealism. If it were not for the impractical characters, all

the practical people would remain at the same dull stage of perpetual

repetition.

Some enthusiasm preserves a man from real degradation far more than all

the moral admonitions in the world. I remember youthful orgies, moments

of revelry that sometimes went beyond bounds, but I do not remember one

really immoral affair in our circle, nothing of which a man would have

to feel seriously ashamed, which he would try to forget and conceal.

Everything was done openly, and what is bad is rarely done openly. Half,

more than half, of the heart was turned away from idle sensuality and

morbid egoism, which concentrate on impure thoughts and accentuate vice.

I consider it a great misfortune for a nation when their young

generation has no youth; we have already observed that being young is

not enough. The most grotesque period of German student life is a

hundred times better than the petty-bourgeois maturity of young men in

France and England. To my mind the elderly Americans of fifteen are

simply disgusting.

In France there was at one time a brilliant aristocratic youth, and

later on a brilliant revolutionary youth. All the St. Justs[111] and

Hoches,[112] Marceaux and Desmoulins,[113] the heroic children who grew

up on the gloomy poetry of Jean-Jacques, were real youth. The Revolution

was the work of young men, neither Danton nor Robespierre nor Louis XVI.

himself outlived their thirty-fifth year. With Napoleon the young men

were turned into orderlies, with the Restoration, ‘the revival of old

age,’—youth was utterly incompatible—everything became mature,

businesslike, that is, petty-bourgeois.

The last youths of France were the Saint-Simonists and the Fourierists.

The few exceptions cannot alter the prosaically dull character of French

youth. Escousse and Lebras[114] shot themselves because they were young

in a society of old men. Others struggled like fish thrown out of the

water on to the muddy bank, till some fell at the barricades, others

were caught in the Jesuit snares.

But since youth asserts its rights, the greater number of young

Frenchmen work off their youth in a Bohemian period, that is, if they

have no money, live in little cafés with little grisettes in the

Quartier Latin, and in grand cafés with grand lorettes, if they have

money. Instead of a Schiller period, they have a Paul de Kock period; in

it, strength, energy, everything young is rapidly and rather wretchedly

wasted and the man is ready—for a _commis_ in a commercial house. The

Bohemian period leaves at the bottom of the soul one passion only—the

thirst for money, and the whole future is sacrificed to it, there are no

other interests; these practical people laugh at theoretical questions

and despise women (the result of numerous conquests over those whose

trade it is to be conquered). As a rule, the Bohemian period is passed

under the guidance of some worn-out sinner, of some faded celebrity,

_d’un vieux prostitué_, living at some one else’s expense, an actor who

has lost his voice, or a painter whose hands tremble, and he is the

model who is imitated in accent, in dress, and above all in a haughty

view of human affairs and a profound understanding of good fare.

In England the Bohemian period is replaced by a paroxysm of charming

originalities and amiable eccentricities. For instance, senseless

tricks, absurd squandering of money, ponderous practical jokes, heavy,

but carefully concealed vice, profitless trips to Calabria or Quito, to

the North and to the South—with horses, dogs, races, and stuffy dinners

by the way, then a wife and an enormous number of fat and rosy babies;

business transactions, the _Times_, Parliament, and the old port which

weighs them to the earth.

We played pranks too and we caroused, but the fundamental tone was not

the same, the diapason was too elevated. Mischief and dissipation never

became our goal. Our goal was faith in our vocation; supposing that we

were mistaken, still, believing it as a fact, we respected in ourselves

and in each other the instruments of the common cause. And in what did

our feasts and orgies consist? Suddenly it would occur to us that in

another two days it would be the sixth of December, St. Nikolay’s day.

The supply of Nikolays was terrific, Nikolay Ogaryov, Nikolay S——,

Nikolay Ketscher, Nikolay Sazonov....

‘I say, who is going to celebrate the name-day?’

‘I! I!...’

‘I will next day then.’

‘That’s all nonsense, what’s the good of next day? We will keep it in

common, by subscription! And what a feast it will be!’

‘Yes! yes! at whose rooms are we to assemble?’

‘S—— is ill, so it’s clear it must be at his.’

And so plans and calculations are made, and it is incredibly absorbing

for the future guests and hosts. One Nikolay drives off to Yar’s to

order supper, another to Materne’s for cheese and salami. Wine, of

course, is bought in Petrovka from Depré’s, on whose price-list Ogaryov

wrote the epigram:

‘De près ou de loin,

Mais je fournis toujours.’

Our inexperienced taste went no further than champagne, and was so young

that we sometimes even preferred _Rivesaltes mousseux_ to champagne. I

once saw the name on a wine-list in Paris, remembered 1833 and tried a

bottle, but, alas, even my memories did not help me to drink more than a

glass.

Before the festive day, the wines would be tried, and so it would be

necessary to send a messenger for more, as it appeared they were liked.

While we are on the subject, I cannot refrain from describing what

happened to Sokolovsky. He was perpetually without money and immediately

spent everything he received. A year before his arrest, he arrived in

Moscow and stayed with S——. He had, I remember, succeeded in selling the

manuscript of _Heveri_, and so resolved to give a feast not only for us

but also _pour les gros bonnets_, _i.e._ invited Polevoy, Maximovitch,

and others. On the morning of the previous day, he set out with

Polezhaev, who was at that time in Moscow with his regiment, to make

purchases, bought cups and even a samovar and all sorts of unnecessary

things and finally wines and eatables, that is, pasties, stuffed

turkeys, and soon. In the evening we arrived at S——’s. Sokolovsky

suggested uncorking one bottle, and then another, and by the end of the

evening, it appeared that there was no more wine and no more money.

Sokolovsky had spent everything he had left over after paying some small

debts. Sokolovsky was mortified, but controlled his feeling; he thought

and thought, then wrote to the _gros bonnets_ that he had been taken

seriously ill and was putting off the feast.

For the celebration of the four name-days, I wrote out a complete

programme, which was deemed worthy of the special attention of the

inquisitor Golitsyn, who asked me at the committee whether the programme

had really been carried out.

‘_À la lettre_,’ I replied. He shrugged his shoulders as though he had

spent his whole life in the Smolny Convent or keeping Good Friday.

After supper as a rule a vital question, a question that aroused

controversy arose, _i.e._ how to prepare the punch. Other things were

usually eaten and drunk in good faith, like the voting in Parliament,

without dispute, but in this every one must have a hand and, moreover,

it was after supper.... ‘Light it—don’t light it yet—light it how?—put

it out with champagne or Sauterne?—put the fruit and pineapple in while

it is burning or afterwards?’

‘Evidently when it is burning, and then the whole aroma will go into

punch.’

‘But, I say, the pineapple will swim, the edges will be scorched, it is

simply a waste.’

‘That’s all nonsense,’ Ketscher would shout louder than all, ‘but what’s

not nonsense is that you must put out the candles.’

The candles were put out; all the faces looked blue, and the features

seemed to quiver with the movement of the flame. And meantime the

temperature in the little room was becoming tropical. Every one was

thirsty and the punch was not ready. But Joseph the Frenchman sent from

Yar’s was ready; he had prepared something, the antithesis of punch, an

iced beverage of various wines _à la base de cognac_. A genuine son of

the ‘_grand peuple_,’ he explained to us, as he put in the French wine,

that it was so good because it had twice passed the Equator. ‘_Oui, oui,

messieurs, deux fois l’équateur, messieurs!_’

When the beverage remarkable for its arctic iciness had been finished

and in fact there was no need of more drink, Ketscher shouted, stirring

the fiery lake in the soup-tureen and making the last lumps of sugar

melt with a hiss and a wail, ‘It’s time to put it out! time to put it

out!’

The flame turns red with the champagne, and races over the surface of

the punch with a look of despair and foreboding.

Then comes a voice of despair, ‘But I say, old man, you’re mad, the wax

is melting right into the punch.’

‘Well, you try holding the bottle yourself in such heat so that the wax

does not melt.’

‘Well, something ought to have been wrapped round it first,’ the

distressed voice continues.

‘Cups, cups, have you enough? How many are there of us? Nine, ten,

fourteen, yes, yes!’

‘Where’s one to find fourteen cups?’

‘Well any one who hasn’t got a cup must take a glass.’

‘The glasses will crack.’

‘Never, never, you’ve only to put a spoon in them.’

Candles are brought, the last flicker of flame runs across the middle,

makes a pirouette and vanishes.

‘The punch is a success!’

‘It is a great success!’ is said on all sides.

Next day my head aches—I feel sick. That’s evidently from the punch, too

mixed! And on the spot I make a sincere resolution never to drink punch

for the future; it is a poison.

Pyotr Fyodorovitch comes in.

‘You came home in somebody else’s hat, our hat is a much better one.’

‘The devil take it entirely.’

‘Should I run to Nikolay Mihailovitch’s Kuzma?’

‘Why, do you imagine some one went home without a hat?’

‘It would be just as well anyway.’

At this point I guess that the hat is only a pretext, and that Kuzma has

invited Pyotr Fyodorovitch to the field of battle.

‘You go and see Kuzma; only first ask the cook to let me have some sour

cabbage.’

‘So, Alexandr Ivanitch, the gentlemen kept their name-days in fine

style?’

‘Yes, indeed, there hasn’t been such a supper in our time.’

‘So we shan’t be going to the university to-day?’

My conscience pricks me and I make no answer.

‘Your papa was asking me, “How is it,” says he, “he is not up yet?”

Without thinking, I said, “His honour’s head aches; he complained of it

from early morning, so I did not even pull up the blinds.” “Well,” said

he, “you did right there.”’

‘But do let me go to sleep, for Christ’s sake. You want to go and see

Kuzma, so go.’

‘This minute, this minute, sir; first I’ll run for the cabbage.’

A heavy sleep closes my eyes again; two or three hours later I wake up

much better. What are they doing there? I wonder. Ketscher and Ogaryov

stayed the night. It’s vexatious that punch has such an effect on the

head, for it must be owned it’s very nice. It is a mistake to drink

punch by the glassful; henceforth and for ever I will certainly drink no

more than a small cupful.

Meantime my father has already finished interviewing the cook and

reading the newspapers.

‘You have a headache to-day?’

‘Yes, a bad one.’

‘Perhaps you have been working too hard?’ And as he asks the question I

can see that he has his doubts already.

‘I forgot though, I believe you spent the evening with Nikolasha[115]

and Ogaryov.’

‘Of course.’

‘Did they regale you with anything ... for the name-day? Madeira in the

soup again? Ah, I don’t like all that. Nikolasha is too fond of wine I

know, and where he gets that weakness from I don’t understand. Poor

Pavel Ivanovitch ... why, on the twenty-ninth of June, his name-day, he

would invite all the relations and have a dinner in the regular way,

quiet and proper. But the fashion nowadays, champagne and sardines in

oil, it’s a disgusting sight. As for that luckless young Ogaryov, I say

nothing about him, he is alone and abandoned! Moscow ... with plenty of

money, his coachman Eremey “goes to fetch wine.” The coachman’s glad to,

he gets ten kopecks at the shop for it.’

‘Yes, I lunched with Nikolay Pavlovitch. But I don’t think that that’s

why my head aches. I will go for a little walk; that always does me

good.’

‘By all means; you will dine at home, I hope.’

‘Of course, I am only going out for a little.’

To explain the Madeira in the soup, it must be said that about a year

before the famous celebration of the four name-days, Ogaryov and I had

gone off for a spree in Easter-week and, to get out of dining at home, I

had said that I had been invited to dinner by Ogaryov’s father.

My father disliked my friends as a rule; he used to call them by the

wrong surnames, invariably making the same mistake, thus he never failed

to call S—— Sakeny and Sazonov, Snaziny. He liked Ogaryov least of all,

both because he wore his hair long and because he smoked without asking

his leave. On the other hand, he regarded him as a distant cousin and so

could not distort the name of a relation. Moreover, his father, Platon

Bogdanovitch, belonged both by family and by fortune to the little

circle of persons recognised by my father, and he liked my being

intimate with the family. He would have liked it better still, if Platon

Bogdanovitch had had no son.

And so to refuse the invitation was considered impossible.

Instead of settling ourselves in Platon Bogdanovitch’s respectable

dining-room, we set off first to the Prices’ booth (I was delighted

later on to meet this family of acrobats in Geneva and in London). There

was a little girl there, over whom we raved and whom we had named

Mignon.

After gazing at Mignon and resolving to see her again in the evening, we

set off to dine at Yar’s. I had a gold piece and Ogaryov about the same.

We were at that time complete novices and so, after long consultation,

we ordered fish soup with champagne in it, a bottle of Rhine-wine, and

some tiny bird, so that when we got up from the dinner, which was

frightfully expensive, we were quite hungry and so went off to look at

Mignon again.

When my father said good-night to me, he observed that he thought I

smelt of wine.

‘That must be because there was Madeira in the soup.’ ‘_Au madère_—that

must be Platon Bogdanovitch’s son-in-law’s idea; _cela sent les casernes

de la garde_.’

From that time forth, if my father fancied that I had been drinking, or

that my face was red, he would be sure to say to me, ‘I suppose you have

had Madeira in your soup to-day!’

And so I hastened off to S——’s.

Ogaryov and Ketscher were, of course, on the spot. Ketscher, looking

tousled, was displeased with some arrangements that were being made and

was criticising them severely. Ogaryov, on the homeopathic system of

driving out one nail with another, was drinking up what was left, not

merely after the supper but after the foraging of Pyotr Fyodorovitch,

who was already singing, whistling, and playing a tattoo in S——’s

kitchen.

Recalling the days of our youth, of all our circle, I do not remember a

single incident which would weigh on the conscience, which one would be

ashamed to think of. And that applies to all our friends without

exception.

There were, of course, Platonic dreamers and disillusioned youths of

seventeen among us. Vadim even wrote a drama in which he tried to depict

‘the terrible ordeal of his spent heart.’ The drama began like this: ‘A

garden—house in distance—windows lighted—storm raging—no one in

sight—garden gate not fastened, it flaps to and fro and creaks.’

‘Are there any characters in the drama besides the gate in the garden?’

I asked Vadim.

And Vadim, rather nettled, said, ‘You’re always playing the fool! It’s

not a jest, it’s the record of my heart; if you go on like that I won’t

read it’—and proceeded to read it.

There were follies, too, that were not at all Platonic; even some that

ended not in writing plays but in the chemist’s shop. But there were no

vulgar intrigues ruining a woman or humiliating a man, there were no

kept mistresses (indeed the vulgar word for them did not exist among

us). Tranquil, secure, prosaic, petty-bourgeois vice, vice by contract,

passed our circle by.

‘Then you do admit the worse form of vice, prostitution?’ I shall be

asked.

Not I, but you do! that is, not you individually, but all of you. It is

so firmly established in the social structure that it asks for no

sanction from me.

Social enthusiasm, general theories, were our salvation; and not they

alone but also a high development of scientific and artistic interest.

Like fumigating paper, they burnt out the grease spots. I have preserved

some of Ogaryov’s letters of that period, and the background of our

lives can be easily judged from them. On June 7, 1833, Ogaryov, for

instance, wrote to me:

‘I believe we know each other, I believe we can be open. You will not

show my letters to any one else. And so tell me—for some time past I

have been so absolutely brimming over, I may say, suffocated with

sensations and thoughts, that I fancy, it’s more than fancy, the idea

sticks in my head, that it is my vocation to be a poet, a creative

artist or a musician, _alles eins_, but I feel that I must live in that

thought, for I have a feeling in myself that I am a poet;—granted that I

have written rubbish so far, yet the fire in my soul, the exuberance of

my feelings, gives me the hope that I shall write decently (excuse the

vulgar expression). Tell me, friend, am I to believe in my vocation? You

know me, maybe, better than I know myself, and will not make a

mistake.’—_June 7, 1833._

‘You write: but you are a poet, a real poet! Friend, can you conceive

all that those words do for me? And so all that I feel, to which I

strive, in which I live is not an illusion! It is not an illusion! Are

you telling the truth? It is not the delirium of fever—that I feel. You

know me better than any one, don’t you? I certainly feel that you do.

No, this exalted life is not the delirium of fever, not the illusion of

imagination, it is too exalted for deception, it is real, I live in it,

I cannot imagine myself with any other life. Why don’t I understand

music, what a symphony would rise out of my soul now! One can catch the

stately _adagio_, but I have no power to express myself; I want to say

more than has been said, _presto, presto_, I want a tempestuous,

irrepressible _presto_. _Adagio_ and _presto_, the two extremes. Away

with these compromises, _andante_, _allegro_, _moderato_, faltering or

feeble-minded, they can neither speak strongly nor feel

strongly.’—TCHERTKOVO, _Aug. 18, 1833_.

We have grown out of the habit of this enthusiastic bubble of youth and

it is strange to us, but in these lines, written by a youth under

twenty, it can clearly be seen that he is insured against vulgar vice

and vulgar virtue, and that even if he is not saved from the mire, he

will come out of it unsullied.

It is not lack of self-confidence, it is the hesitation of faith, it is

the passionate desire for confirmation, for the superfluous word of

love, so precious to us. Yes, it is the uneasiness of creative

conception, it is the anxious searchings of a soul in travail.

‘I cannot yet,’ he writes in the same letter, ‘catch the notes which are

resounding in my soul, physical incapacity limits the imagination. But,

hang it all! I am a poet, poetry whispers the truth to me where I could

not have grasped it with cold reason.’

So ends the first part of our youth; the second begins in prison. But

before we go on to it, I must say something of the tendencies, of the

ideas, with which it found us.

The period that followed the suppression of the Polish insurrection

educated us rapidly. We were not merely troubled that Nicholas had grown

to his full stature and was firmly established in severity; we began

with inward horror to discover that in Europe, too, and especially in

France, to which we looked for our political watchword and battle-cry,

things were not going well; we began to look upon our theories with

suspicion.

The childish liberalism of 1826, which gradually passed into the French

political theory expounded by the Lafayettes and Benjamin Constant and

sung by Béranger, lost its magic power over us after the ruin of Poland.

Then one section of the young people, and among them Vadim, threw

themselves into a close and earnest study of Russian history.

Another set took to the study of German philosophy.

Ogaryov and I belonged to neither of these sets. We had grown too

closely attached to certain ideas to part with them readily.

Our faith in revolution of the festive Béranger stamp was shaken, but we

looked for something which we could find neither in the _Chronicle_ of

Nestor[116] nor in the transcendental idealism of Schelling.

In the midst of this ferment, in the midst of surmises, of confused

efforts to understand the doubts which frightened us, the pamphlets of

Saint Simon and his followers, their tracts and their trial came into

our hands. They impressed us.

Critics, superficial and not superficial, have laughed enough at Father

Enfantin[117] and his apostles; the time has now come for some

recognition of these forerunners of socialism.

These enthusiastic youths with their strange waistcoats and their

budding beards made a magnificent and poetic appearance in the midst of

the petty-bourgeois world. They heralded a new faith, they had something

to say, they had something in the name of which to judge the old order

of things, fain to judge them by the Code Napoleon and the religion of

Orleans.

On the one hand came the emancipation of woman, the call to her to join

in common labour, the giving of her destiny into her own hands, alliance

with her as with an equal.

On the other hand the justification, the _redemption_ of the flesh,

_Réhabilitation de la chair_!

Grand words, involving a whole world of new relations between human

beings; a world of health, a world of spirit, a world of beauty, the

world of natural morality, and therefore of moral purity. Many have

scoffed at emancipation of women and at the recognition of the rights of

the flesh, giving to those words a filthy and vulgar meaning; our

monastically depraved imagination fears the flesh, fears woman.

Simple-hearted people grasped that the purifying sanctification of the

flesh is the death knell of Christianity; the religion of life had come

to replace the religion of death, the religion of beauty to replace the

religion of castigation and mortification by prayer and fasting. The

crucified body had risen again in its turn and was no longer ashamed;

man attained a harmonious unity and divined that he was a whole being

and not made up like a pendulum of two different metals restraining each

other, that the enemy bound up with him had disappeared.

What courage was needed in France to proclaim in the hearing of all

those words of deliverance from the spiritual ideas which are so strong

in the minds of the French and so completely absent from their conduct!

The old world, ridiculed by Voltaire, undermined by the Revolution, but

fortified, patched up and made secure by the petty-bourgeois for their

own personal convenience, had never experienced this before. It tried to

judge the heretics on the basis of its secret conspiracy of hypocrisy,

but these young men unmasked it. They were accused of being apostates

from Christianity, and they pointed above their judge’s head to the holy

picture that had been covered with a curtain after the Revolution of

1830. They were charged with justifying sensuality, and they asked their

judge, was his life chaste?

The new world was pushing at the door, and our hearts opened wide to

meet it. Saint-Simonism lay at the foundation of our convictions and

remained so in its essentials unalterably.

Impressionable, genuinely youthful, we were easily caught up in its

mighty current and passed early over that boundary at which whole crowds

of people remain standing with their hands folded, go back or seek from

side to side a ford—to cross the ocean!

But not all ventured with us. Socialism and Realism remain to this day

the touchstones flung on the paths of revolution and science. Groups of

travellers, tossed up against these rocks by the current of events, or

by process of reasoning, immediately divide and make two everlasting

parties which, in various disguises, cut across the whole of history,

across all upheavals, across innumerable political parties and even

circles of no more than a dozen youths. One stands for logic, the other

for history; one for dialectics, the other for embryology. One is more

correct, the other more practical.

There can be no talk of choice; it is harder to bridle thought than any

passion, it leads one on unconsciously; any one who can chain it by

feeling, by dreams, by dread of consequences, will chain it, but not all

can. If thought gets the upper hand in any one, he does not inquire

about its practicability, or whether it will make things easier or

harder; he seeks the truth, and inflexibly, impartially lays down his

principles, as the Saint-Simonists did at one time, as Proudhon does to

this day.

Our circle drew in closer. Even then, in 1833, the Liberals looked at us

askance, as having strayed from the true path. Just before we went to

prison, Saint-Simonism became a barrier between N. A. Polevoy and me.

Polevoy was a man of extraordinarily ingenious and active mind, which

readily absorbed every kind of nutriment; he was born to be a

journalist, a chronicler of successes, of discoveries, of political and

learned controversies. I made his acquaintance at the end of my time at

the university—and was sometimes in his house and at his brother

Ksenofont’s. This was the time when his reputation was at its highest,

the period just before the prohibition of the _Telegraph_.

This man who lived in the latest discovery, in the question of the hour,

in the last novelty, in theories and in events, and who changed like a

chameleon, could not, for all the liveliness of his mind, understand

Saint-Simonism. For us Saint-Simonism was a revelation, for him it was

insanity, a silly Utopia, hindering social development. To all my

rhetoric, my expositions and arguments, Polevoy was deaf; he lost his

temper and grew vindictive. Opposition from a student was particularly

annoying to him, for he greatly prized his influence on the young, and

saw in this dispute that it was slipping away from him.

On one occasion, offended by the absurdity of his objections, I observed

that he was just as old-fashioned a Conservative as those against whom

he had been fighting all his life. Polevoy was deeply offended by my

words and, shaking his head, said to me: ‘The time will come when you

will be rewarded for a whole lifetime of toil and effort by some young

man’s saying with a smile, “Be off, you are behind the times.”’ I felt

sorry for him and ashamed of having hurt his feelings, but at the same

time I felt that his sentence could be heard in his melancholy words.

They were not those of a mighty champion, but of an exhausted and aged

gladiator. I realised then that he would not advance, and was incapable

of standing still at the same point with a mind so active and a basis so

insecure.

You know what happened to him afterwards: he set to work upon his

_Parasha, the Siberian_.[118]

What luck a timely death is for a man who can at the right moment

neither leave the stage nor move forward! I have thought that looking at

Polevoy, looking at Pius IX., and at many others!

Appendix

A. POLEZHAEV

To complete the gloomy record of that period, I ought to add a few

details about A. Polezhaev.

As a student, Polezhaev was renowned for his excellent verses. Amongst

other things he wrote a humorous parody of ‘_Onyegin_,’ called

‘_Sashka_,’ in which, regardless of proprieties, he attacked many things

in a jesting tone, in very charming verses.

In the autumn of 1826, Nicholas, after hanging Pestel, Muravyov, and

their friends, celebrated his coronation in Moscow. For other sovereigns

these ceremonies are occasions for amnesties and pardons: Nicholas,

after celebrating his apotheosis, proceeded again to ‘strike down the

foes of the father-land,’ like Robespierre after his ‘Fête-Dieu.’

The secret police brought him Polezhaev’s poem.

And so at three o’clock one night, the rector woke Polezhaev, told him

to put on his uniform and go to the office. There the director was

awaiting him. After looking to see that all the necessary buttons were

on his uniform and no unnecessary ones, he invited Polezhaev without any

explanation to get into his carriage and drove off with him.

He conducted him to the Minister of Public Instruction. The latter put

Polezhaev into his carriage and he too drove him off—but this time

straight to the Tsar.

Prince Lieven left Polezhaev in the drawing-room—where several courtiers

and higher officials were already waiting although it was only six

o’clock in the morning—and went into the inner apartments. The courtiers

imagined that the young man had distinguished himself in some way and at

once entered into conversation with him. A senator suggested that he

might give lessons to his son.

Polezhaev was summoned to the study. The Tsar was standing leaning on

the bureau and talking to Lieven. He flung a searching and malignant

glance at the newcomer; there was a manuscript in his hand.

‘Did you write these verses?’ he inquired.

‘Yes,’ answered Polezhaev.

‘Here, prince,’ the Tsar continued, ‘I will give you a specimen of

university education, I will show you what young men learn there. Read

the manuscript aloud,’ he added, addressing Polezhaev.

The agitation of the latter was so great that he could not read.

Nicholas’s eyes were fixed immovably upon him. I know them and know

nothing so terrible, so hopeless, as those colourless, cold, pewtery

eyes.

‘I cannot,’ said Polezhaev.

‘Read!’ shouted the imperial drum-major.

That shout restored Polezhaev’s faculties; he opened the manuscript.

Never, he told us, had he seen ‘_Sashka_’ so carefully copied and on

such splendid paper.

At first it was hard for him to read; then as he got more and more into

the spirit of the thing, he read the poem in a loud and lively voice. At

particularly startling passages, the Tsar made a sign with his hand to

the Minister and the latter covered his eyes with horror.

‘What do you say to that?’ Nicholas inquired at the end of the reading.

‘I will put a stop to this corruption; these are the _last traces, the

last remnants_; I will root them out. What is his record?’

The minister, of course, knew nothing of his record, but some human

feeling must have stirred in him, for he said: ‘He has an excellent

record, your Majesty.’

‘That record has saved you, but you must be punished, as an example to

others. Would you like to go into the army?’

Polezhaev was silent.

‘I give you a chance of clearing your name in the army. Well?’

‘I must obey,’ answered Polezhaev.

The Tsar went up to him, laid his hand on his shoulder and, saying to

him, ‘Your fate is in your own hands, if I forget you you can _write_ to

me,’ _kissed him on the forehead_.

I made Polezhaev repeat the story of the kiss a dozen times, it seemed

to me so incredible. He swore that it was true.

From the Tsar, he was led off to Dibitch, who lived on the spot in the

palace. Dibitch was asleep; he was awakened, came out yawning, and,

after reading the paper handed to him, asked the aide-de-camp: ‘Is this

he?’—‘Yes, your Excellency.’

‘Well! it’s a capital thing; you will serve in the army. I have always

been in the army, and you see what I’ve risen to, and maybe you’ll be

made a field-marshal.’ This stupid, inappropriate, German joke was

Dibitch’s equivalent to a kiss. Polezhaev was led off to the camp and

handed over to the soldiers.

Three years passed. Polezhaev remembered the Tsar’s words and wrote him

a letter. No answer came. A few months later he wrote a second; again

there was no answer. Convinced that his letters did not reach the Tsar,

he ran away, and ran away in order to present a petition in person. He

behaved carelessly, saw his old friends in Moscow and was entertained by

them; of course, that could not be kept secret. In Tver he was seized

and sent back to his regiment, as a runaway soldier, on foot and in

chains. The court martial condemned him to run the gauntlet; the

sentence was despatched to the Tsar for ratification.

Polezhaev wanted to kill himself before the punishment. After searching

in vain in his prison for a sharp instrument, he confided in an old

soldier who liked him. The soldier understood him and respected his

wishes. When the old man learned that the answer had come, he brought

him a bayonet and, as he gave him it, said through his tears: ‘I have

sharpened it myself.’

The Tsar did not confirm Polezhaev’s sentence.

Then it was that he wrote the fine poem beginning:

‘I perished lonely,

No help was nigh.

My evil genius

Passed mocking by.’[119]

Polezhaev was sent to the Caucasus. There for distinguished service he

was promoted to be a non-commissioned officer. Years and years passed;

his hopeless, dreary position broke him down; become a police poet and

sing the glories of Nicholas he could not, and that was the only way of

escape from the army.

There was, however, another means of escape, and he preferred it; he

drank to win forgetfulness. There is a terrible poem of his, ‘To Vodka.’

He succeeded in getting transferred to a regiment of the Carabineers

stationed in Moscow. This was a considerable alleviation of his lot, but

malignant consumption had already laid its grip upon him.

It was at this period that I made his acquaintance, about 1833. He

struggled on another four years and died in the military hospital.

When one of his friends went to ask for the body for burial, no one knew

where it was; the military hospital did a trade in corpses; they sold

them to the university and to the Medical Academy, made them into

skeletons, and so on. At last he found poor Polezhaev’s body in a

cellar; he was lying under a heap of others and the rats had gnawed off

one foot.

After his death, his poems were published, and his portrait in a

soldier’s uniform was to have been included in the edition. The censor

thought this unseemly, and the poor martyr was portrayed with the

epaulettes of an officer—he had been promoted in the hospital.

PART II

PRISON & EXILE

(1834–1838)