THE INVESTIGATION—GOLITSYN SENIOR—GOLITSYN JUNIOR—GENERAL
STAAL—SOKOLOVSKY—SENTENCE
But with all this what of our case, what of the investigation and the
trial?
They were no more successful in the new committee than in the old. The
police had been on our track for a long time, but in their zeal and
impatience could not wait to find anything adequate, and did something
silly. They had sent a retired officer called Skaryatka to lead us on
and catch us; he made acquaintance with almost all of our circle, but we
very soon guessed what he was and held aloof from him. Other young men,
for the most part students, had not been so cautious, but these others
had no serious connection with us.
One student, on completing his studies, gave a supper to his friends on
24th June 1834. Not one of us was at the festivity, indeed not one of us
had been invited. The young men drank too much, played the fool, danced
the mazurka, and among other things sang Sokolovsky’s well-known song on
the accession of Nicholas:
‘The Emperor of Russia
Has gone to realms above,
The operating surgeon
Slit his belly open.
‘The Government is weeping
And all the people weep;
There’s coming to rule over us
Constantine the freak.
‘But to the King of Heaven,
Almighty God above,
Our Tsar of blessed memory
Has handed a petition.
‘When He read the paper,
Moved to pity, God
Gave us Nicholas instead,
The blackguard, the....’[127]
In the evening Skaryatka suddenly remembered that it was his name-day,
told a tale of how advantageously he had sold a horse, and invited the
students to his quarters, promising them a dozen of champagne. They all
went, the champagne appeared, and the host, staggering, proposed that
they should once more sing Sokolovsky’s song. In the middle of the
singing the door opened and Tsinsky with the police walked in. All this
was crude, stupid, clumsy, and at the same time unsuccessful.
The police wanted to catch us; they were looking for external evidence
to involve in the case some five or six men whom they had already
marked, and only succeeded in catching twenty innocent persons.
It is not easy, however, to disconcert the Russian police. Within a
fortnight they arrested us as implicated in the supper case. In
Sokolovsky’s possession they found letters from S——, in S——’s possession
letters from Ogaryov, and in Ogaryov’s possession my letters.
Nevertheless, nothing was discovered. The first investigation failed. To
ensure the success of the second, the Tsar sent from Petersburg the
choicest of the inquisitors, A. F. Golitsyn.
This kind of person is rare in Russia. It is represented among us by
Mordvinov, the famous head of the Third Section, Pelikan, the rector of
Vilna, and a few accommodating Letts and degraded Poles.[128] But
unluckily for the inquisition, Staal, the Commandant of Moscow, was
appointed the first member. Staal, a straightforward military man, a
gallant old general, went into the case and found that it consisted of
two circumstances that had no connection with each other: the affair of
the supper party, for which the police ought to be punished, and the
arrest for no apparent reason of persons whose only guilt, so far as
could be seen, lay in certain half-expressed opinions, for which it
would be both difficult and absurd to try them.
Staal’s opinion did not please Golitsyn junior. The dispute between them
took a bitter character; the old warrior flared up, wrathfully struck
the floor with his sabre and said: ‘Instead of ruining people, you had
better draw up a report on the advisability of closing all the schools
and universities; that would warn other unfortunate youths; however, you
can do what you like, but you must do it without me. I won’t set foot in
the committee again.’ With these words the old man hurriedly left the
room.
The Tsar was informed of this the same day.
In the morning when the commandant appeared with his report, the Tsar
asked him why he would not attend the committee; Staal told him why.
‘What nonsense!’ replied the Tsar, ‘to quarrel with Golitsyn, for shame!
I trust you will attend the committee as before.’
‘Sire,’ answered Staal, ‘spare my grey hairs. I have lived to reach them
without the slightest stain on my honour. My zeal is known to your
Majesty, my blood, the remnant of my days are yours, but this is a
question of my honour—my conscience revolts against what is being done
in the committee.’
The Tsar frowned. Staal bowed himself out, and was not once in the
committee afterwards.
This anecdote, the accuracy of which is not open to the slightest doubt,
throws great light on the character of Nicholas. How was it that it did
not enter his head that if a man whom he could not but respect, a brave
warrior, an old man who had won his position, so obstinately besought
him to spare his honour, the case could not be quite clean? He could not
have done less than insist on Staal’s explaining the matter in the
presence of Golitsyn. He did not do this, but gave orders that we should
be confined more strictly.
When he had gone there were only enemies of the accused in the
committee, presided over by a simple-hearted old man, Prince S. M.
Golitsyn, who knew as little about the case nine months after it had
begun as he did nine months before it began. He preserved a dignified
silence, very rarely put in a word, and at the end of an examination
invariably asked: ‘May we let him go?’ ‘We may,’ Golitsyn junior would
answer, and the senior would say with dignity to the prisoner, ‘You may
go.’
My first examination lasted four hours.
The questions were of two kinds. The object of the first was to discover
a manner of thinking, ‘in opposition to the spirit of government,
revolutionary opinions, imbued with the pernicious doctrines of Saint
Simon,’ as Golitsyn junior and the auditor Oransky expressed it.
These questions were easy, but they were hardly questions. In the papers
and letters that had been seized, the opinions were fairly simply
expressed; the questions could in reality only relate to the substantial
fact of whether a man had or had not written the words in question. The
committee thought it necessary to add to every written phrase, ‘How do
you explain the following passage in your letter?’
Of course it was useless to explain; I wrote evasive and empty phrases
in reply. In one letter the auditor discovered the phrase: ‘All
constitutional parties lead to nothing, they are contracts between a
master and his slaves; the problem is not to make things better for the
slaves, but to put an end to their being slaves.’ When I had to explain
this phrase I observed that I saw no obligation to defend constitutional
government, and that, if I had defended it, it would have been charged
against me.
‘A constitutional form of government may be attacked from two sides,’
Golitsyn junior observed in his nervous hissing voice; ‘you do not
attack it from the point of view of monarchy, or you would not talk
about slaves.’
‘In that I err in company with the Empress Catherine II., who ordered
that her subjects should not be called slaves.’
Golitsyn, breathless with anger at this ironical reply, said: ‘You seem
to imagine that we are assembled here to conduct scholastic arguments,
that you are defending a thesis in the university.’
‘With what object, then, do you ask for explanations?’
‘You appear not to understand what is wanted of you.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What obstinacy there is in all of them,’ Golitsyn senior, the
president, added, shrugging his shoulders and glancing at Shubensky, the
colonel of gendarmes. I smiled. ‘Just like Ogaryov,’ the simple-hearted
president observed.
A pause followed, the committee was assembled in Golitsyn senior’s
library; I turned to the bookshelves and began examining the books.
Among other things there was an edition in many volumes of the works of
Saint Simon. ‘Here,’ I said, turning to the president, ‘is it not
unjust? I am being tried on account of Saint-Simonism, while you,
prince, have twenty volumes of his works.’
As the good-natured old man had never read anything in his life, he
could not think what to answer. But Golitsyn junior looked at me with
the eyes of a viper and asked: ‘Don’t you see that those are the memoirs
of the Duc de Saint Simon of the time of Louis XIV.?’
The president with a smile gave me a nod that signified, ‘Well, my boy,
you put your foot in it, didn’t you?’ and said, ‘You can go.’
While I was in the doorway the president asked: ‘Is he the one who wrote
about Peter the Great, that thing you were showing me?’
‘Yes,’ answered Shubensky.
I stopped.
‘_Il a des moyens_,’ observed the president.
‘So much the worse. Poison in clever hands is all the more dangerous,’
added the inquisitor; ‘a very pernicious and quite incorrigible young
man.’
My sentence lay in those words.
Apropos of Saint Simon. When the police-master seized Ogaryov’s books
and papers, he laid aside a volume of Thiers’ _History of the French
Revolution_, then found a second volume, a third, up to an eighth. At
last he could bear it no longer, and said: ‘Good Lord, what a number of
revolutionary books ... and here is another,’ he added, giving the
policeman Cuvier’s _Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe Terrestre_.’
The second kind of question was more complicated. In them all sorts of
police traps and inquisitional tricks were made use of to confuse,
entangle, and involve one in contradictions. Hints of evidence given by
others and all sorts of moral tests were employed. It is not worth while
to repeat them, it is enough to say that all their devices did not draw
any of the four of us into conflicting statements.
After I had received my last question, I was sitting alone in the little
room in which we wrote. All at once the door opened and Golitsyn junior
walked in with a gloomy and anxious face. ‘I have come,’ he said, ‘to
have a few words with you before your evidence is completed. My late
father’s long connection with yours makes me take a special interest in
you. You are young and may still make a career; to do so you must clear
yourself of this affair ... and fortunately it depends on yourself. Your
father has taken your arrest deeply to heart and is living now in the
hope that you will be released: Prince Sergey Mihailovitch and I have
just been speaking about it and we are genuinely ready to do all we can;
give us the means of assisting you.’
I saw the drift of his words, the blood rushed to my head, I gnawed my
pen with vexation. He went on: ‘You are going straight under the white
strap, or to the fortress, on the way you will kill your father; he will
not survive the day when he sees you in the grey overcoat of a soldier.’
I tried to say something but he interrupted me:
‘I know what you want to say. Have a little patience! That you had
designs against the government is evident. To merit the mercy of the
Most High you must give proofs of your penitence. You are obstinate, you
give evasive answers and from a false sense of honour you spare men of
whom we know more than you do and _who have not been so discreet as
you_[129]; you will not help them, and they will drag you down with them
to ruin. Write a letter to the committee, simply, frankly, say that you
feel your guilt, that you were led away by your youth, name the
unfortunate, misguided men who have led you astray.... Are you willing
at this easy price to purchase your future and your father’s life?’
‘I know nothing and have not a word to add to my evidence,’ I replied.
Golitsyn got up and said coldly: ‘As you please, it is not our fault!’
With that the examination ended.
In the January or February of 1835 I was before the committee for the
last time. I was summoned to read through my answers, to add to them if
I wished, and to sign them.
Only Shubensky was present. When I had finished reading them over I said
to him: ‘I should like to know what charge can be made against a man
upon these questions and upon these answers? Under what article of the
Code do you bring me?’
‘The Imperial Code is drawn up for criminals of a different kind,’
observed the light-blue colonel.
‘That’s a different point. After reading over all these literary
exercises, I cannot believe that that makes up the whole charge on
account of which I have been in prison over six months.’
‘But do you really imagine,’ replied Shubensky, ‘that we believe you
that you have not formed a secret society?’
‘Where is the society?’
‘It is your luck that no traces have been found, that you have not
succeeded in doing anything. We stopped you in time, that is, to speak
plainly, we have saved you.’
It was the story of the locksmith’s wife and her husband in Gogol’s
_Inspector General_ over again.
When I had signed, Shubensky rang the bell and told them to summon the
priest. The priest came up and wrote below my signature that all the
evidence had been given by me voluntarily and without any compulsion. I
need hardly say that he had not been present at the examination, and
that he had not even the decency to ask me how it had been. (It was my
impartial witness outside the gate again!)
At the end of the investigation, prison conditions were somewhat
relaxed. Members of our families could obtain permits for interviews. So
passed another two months.
In the middle of March our sentence was ratified. No one knew what it
was; some said we were being sent to the Caucasus, others that we should
be taken to Bobruisk, others again hoped that we should all be released
(this was the sentence which was proposed by Staal and sent separately
by him to the Tsar; he advised that our imprisonment should be taken as
equivalent to punishment).
At last, on 20th March, we were all assembled at Prince Golitsyn’s to
hear our sentence. This was a gala day for us. We saw each other for the
first time after our arrest.
Noisily, gaily embracing and shaking hands, we stood surrounded by a
cordon of gendarmes and garrison officers. This meeting cheered us all
up; there was no end to the questions and the anecdotes.
Sokolovsky was present, pale and somewhat thinner, but as brilliantly
amusing as ever.
The author of _The Fabric of the World_ and of _Heveri_ and other rather
good poems, had naturally great poetic talent, but was not wildly
original enough to dispense with culture, nor sufficiently well-educated
to develop his talent. A charming rake, a poet in life, he was not in
the least a political man. He was amusing, charming, a merry companion
in merry moments, a ‘bon vivant,’ fond of having a good time, as we all
were, perhaps a little too much so.
Having dropped accidentally from a carousal into prison, Sokolovsky
behaved extremely well, he grew up in confinement. The auditor of the
committee, a pedant, a pietist, a detective, who had grown thin and
grey-headed in envy and slander, not daring from religion and devotion
to the throne to understand the last two verses of his poem in their
grammatical sense, asked Sokolovsky ‘to whom do those rude words at the
end of the song refer?’
‘Rest assured,’ said Sokolovsky, ‘not to the Tsar, and I would
particularly draw your attention to that extenuating circumstance.’
The auditor shrugged his shoulders, turned up his eyes to the ceiling
and after gazing a long time in silence at Sokolovsky took a pinch of
snuff.
Sokolovsky was arrested in Petersburg and sent to Moscow without being
told where he was being taken. The police often perpetrate these jests
among us, and quite unnecessarily. It is the form their creative fancy
takes. There is no occupation in the world so prosaic, so revolting that
it has not its artistic yearnings, its craving for decoration and
adornment. Sokolovsky was taken straight to prison and put into a dark
cell. Why was he put in prison while we were kept in barracks?
He had two or three shirts with him and nothing else at all. In England
every one on being brought into prison is at once put into a bath, but
with us they take every precaution against cleanliness.
If Dr. Haas had not sent Sokolovsky a bundle of his own linen he would
have been crusted with dirt.
Dr. Haas was a very original eccentric person. The memory of this ‘crazy
and fanatical’ man ought not to be lost in the rubbish heap of official
necrologies describing the virtues of persons of the first two grades
which no one ever heard of before their death.
A thin little, waxen-looking old man, in a black, swallow-tail coat,
short trousers, black silk stockings and shoes with buckles, he looked
as though he had just come out of some drama of the eighteenth century.
In this _grand gala_ of funerals and weddings, and in the agreeable
climate of the northern latitude of fifty-nine degrees, Haas used every
week to drive to the étape on the Sparrow Hills when a batch of convicts
were being sent off. In the capacity of prison doctor he had access to
them, he used to go to inspect them and always brought with him a basket
full of all manner of things, provisions and dainties of all
sorts—walnuts, cakes, oranges, and apples, for the women. This aroused
the wrath and indignation of the benevolent ladies who were afraid of
giving pleasure by philanthropy, and afraid of being more charitable
than was necessary to save the convicts from dying of hunger and cold.
But Haas was not easy to move, and after listening mildly to reproaches
for his ‘foolish spoiling of the female convicts,’ would rub his hands
and say: ‘Be so kind to see, gracious madam, a bit of bread, a copper
every one will give them, but a sweet or an orange for long they will
see not, no one gives them, that I can from your words deduce; I do them
this pleasure for that it will not a long time be repeated.’
Haas lived in the hospital. A patient came before dinner to consult him.
Haas examined him and went into his study to write some prescription. On
his return he found neither the patient nor the silver forks and spoons
which had been lying on the table. Haas called the porter and asked him
if any one had come in besides the patient. The porter grasped the
position, rushed out and returned a minute later with the spoons and the
patient, whom he had stopped with the help of another hospital porter.
The rascal fell at the doctor’s feet and besought mercy. Haas was
overcome with confusion.
‘Go for the police,’ he said to one of the porters, and to the other,
‘and you send the secretary here at once.’
The porters, pleased at the capture and at their share in the business
altogether, ran off, and Haas, taking advantage of their absence, said
to the thief, ‘You are a false man, you have deceived and tried to rob
me. God will judge you ... and now run quickly to the back gates before
the porters come back ... but stay, perhaps you have no money, here is
half a rouble, but try to reform your soul; from God you will not escape
as from the policeman.’
At this even the members of his own household protested. But the
incorrigible doctor maintained his point: ‘Theft is a great vice; but I
know the police, I know how they torment them—they will question him,
they will flog him; to give up one’s neighbour to the lash is a far
worse vice; besides, who can tell, perhaps what I have done may touch
his heart!’
His friends shook their heads and said, ‘_Er hat einen raptus_’; the
benevolent ladies said, ‘_C’est un brave homme mais ce n’est pas tout à
fait en règle, cela_,’ and tapped their foreheads. And Haas rubbed his
hands and went his own way.
... Sokolovsky had hardly finished his anecdotes, when several others
speaking at once began to tell theirs; it was as though we had all
returned from a long journey—there was no end to the questions, jokes,
and witticisms.
Physically, S—— had suffered more than the rest; he was thin and had
lost part of his hair. He had been at his mother’s in the country in the
Tambov province when he heard that we had been arrested, and at once set
off for Moscow, for fear that his mother should be alarmed by a visit of
the gendarmes, but he caught cold on the way and reached home in a high
fever. The police found him in bed, and it was impossible to move him to
the police station. He was placed under arrest at home, a soldier of the
police station was put on guard in the bedroom and the local police
superintendent was told off to act as brother-of-mercy by the patient’s
bedside, so that on recovering consciousness after delirium he met the
attentive glance of the one, or the battered countenance of the other.
At the beginning of the winter he was moved to the Lefortovsky Hospital;
it appeared there was not a single empty private room for a prisoner,
but such trifles were not deemed worth considering; a corner screened
off apart, with no stove, was found, the sick man was put in this
southern verandah and a sentry told off to watch him. What the
temperature in this hole was in winter may be judged from the fact that
the sentry was so benumbed with cold at night that he would go into the
corridor to warm himself at the stove, begging S—— not to tell of it.
The hospital authorities themselves saw that such tropical quarters were
impossible in a latitude so near the pole, and moved S—— to a room near
the one in which frost-bitten patients were rubbed.
Before we had time to describe and listen to half our adventures, the
adjutants began suddenly bustling about, the gendarmes’ officers drew
themselves up, and the police set themselves to rights: the door opened
solemnly and little Prince Sergey Mihailovitch Golitsyn walked in _en
grande tenue_ with a ribbon across his shoulder; Tsinsky was in a
uniform of the suite, even the auditor, Oransky, put on some sort of
pale-green civil-military uniform for the joyful occasion. The
commandant, of course, had not come.
Meanwhile the noise and laughter had risen to such a pitch that the
auditor came fiercely into the room and observed that loud conversation
and, above all, laughter seemed a flagrant disrespect to the will of the
Most High, which we were about to hear.
The doors were opened. Officers divided us into three groups: in the
first was Sokolovsky, the painter Utkin, and an officer called Ibaev; we
were in the second; in the third, _tutti frutti_.
The sentence regarding the first category was read aloud. It was
terrible; condemned for high treason, they were sent to the
Schlüsselburg for an indefinite period. When Oransky, drawling to give
himself dignity, read with emphasis that for ‘insulting the Majesty and
Most August Family, _et cetera_,’ Sokolovsky observed: ‘Well, I never
insulted the family.’
Among his papers besides this poem were found some resolutions written
in jest as though by the Grand Duke Michael Pavlovitch, with intentional
mistakes in spelling, and those orthographical errors helped to convict
him.
Tsinsky, to show that he could be free and easy and affable, said to
Sokolovsky after the sentence: ‘Hey, have you ever been in Schlüsselburg
before?’ ‘Last year,’ Sokolovsky answered promptly, ‘as though I knew
what was coming, I drank a bottle of Madeira there.’ Two years later
Utkin died in the fortress. Sokolovsky, half dead, was released and sent
to the Caucasus; he died at Pyatigorsk. Some remnant of shame and
conscience led the government after the death of two to transfer the
third to Perm. Ibaev only died in the spiritual sense: he became a
mystic.
Utkin, ‘a free artist confined in prison,’ as he described himself at
the examinations, was a man of forty; he had never taken part in any
kind of political affair, but, being of a generous and impulsive
temperament, he gave free rein to his tongue in the committee and was
abrupt and rude in his answers. For this he was done to death in a damp
cell, in which the water trickled down the walls.
Ibaev’s greater guilt lay in his epaulettes. Had he not been an officer,
he would never have been so punished. The man had happened to be present
at some supper party, had probably drunk too much and sung like all the
rest, but certainly neither more nor louder than the others.
Our turn came. Oransky wiped his spectacles, cleared his throat, and
began reverently announcing the will of the Most High. The Tsar, after
examining the report of the committee and taking into special
consideration the youth of the criminals, _commanded that we should not
be brought to trial_, and informed us that by law we ought, as men
guilty of high treason by singing seditious songs, to lose our lives or,
alternatively, to be sentenced to penal servitude for life. Instead of
this, the Tsar in his infinite mercy forgave the greater number of the
guilty, leaving them in their present abode under the supervision of the
police. The more guilty among them he commanded to be put under
reformatory treatment, which consisted in being sent to civilian duty
for an indefinite period to remote provinces, to live under the
superintendence of the local police authorities.
It appeared that there were six of the ‘more guilty’: Ogaryov, S——,
Lahtin, Obolensky, Sorokin, and I. I was to be sent to Perm. Among those
condemned was Lahtin, who had not been arrested at all. When he was
summoned to the committee to hear the sentence, he supposed that it was
as a warning, to be punished by hearing how others were punished. The
story was that some one of Prince Golitsyn’s circle, being angry with
Lahtin’s wife, had prepared this agreeable surprise for him. A man of
delicate health, he died three years later in exile.
When Oransky had finished reading, Colonel Shubensky stepped forward. In
choice language and in the style of Lomonossov he informed us that it
was due to the good offices of the noble gentleman who had presided at
the committee that the Tsar had been so merciful.
Shubensky waited for all of us to thank Prince Golitsyn, but this did
not come off.
Some of those who were pardoned nodded, stealing a stealthy glance at us
as they did so.
We stood with folded arms, making not the slightest sign that our hearts
were touched by the Imperial and princely mercy.
Then Shubensky thought of another dodge and, addressing Ogaryov, said:
‘You are going to Penza; do you imagine that that is by chance? Your
father is lying paralysed at Penza and the prince besought the Tsar to
fix that town, that your being near might to some extent alleviate the
blow of your exile for him. Do you not think you have reason to thank
the prince?’
There was no help for it, Ogaryov made a slight bow. This was what they
were trying to get.
The good-natured old man was pleased at this, and next, I don’t know
why, he summoned me. I stepped forward with the devout intention of not
thanking him whatever he or Shubensky might say; besides, I was being
sent farther away than any and to the nastiest town.
‘You are going to Perm,’ said Prince Golitsyn. I said nothing. He was
disconcerted and, to say something, added, ‘I have an estate there.’
‘Would you care to send some commission through me to your steward?’ I
asked with a smile.
‘I do not give commissions to people like you—Carbonari,’ added the
resourceful old man.
‘Then what do you wish of me?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I thought you called me.’
‘You can go,’ Shubensky interposed.
‘Allow me,’ I replied, ‘since I am here to remind you that you told me,
Colonel, last time I was before the committee, that no one accused me of
being connected with the supper-party affair. Yet in the sentence it is
stated that I was one of those guilty in connection with that affair.
There is some mistake here.’
‘Do you wish to protest against the decision of the Most High?’ observed
Shubensky. ‘You had better take care that Perm is not changed to
something worse. I shall order your words to be taken down.’
‘I meant to ask you to do so. In the sentence the words occur “on the
report of the committee.” I am protesting against your report and not
against the will of the Most High. I appeal to the prince: there was no
question in my case of a supper party or of songs, was there?’
‘As though you do not know,’ said Shubensky, beginning to turn pale with
wrath, ‘that you are ten times more guilty than those who were at the
supper party. He now’—he pointed to one of those who had been
pardoned—‘in a state of intoxication sang some filthy song, but
afterwards he begged forgiveness on his knees with tears. But you are
still far from a sign of penitence.’
The gentleman at whom the colonel pointed said nothing, but hung his
head and flushed crimson....
It was a good lesson, much good his meanness did him!...
‘Excuse me, it is not the point whether my guilt is greater or not,’ I
went on, ‘but, if I am a murderer, I don’t want to be considered a
thief. I don’t want it to be said of me, even in justification, that I
did something in a “state of intoxication,” as you expressed it just
now.’
‘If I had a son who showed such stubbornness I would myself beg the Tsar
to send him to Siberia.’
At this point the chief police-master interposed some incoherent
nonsense. It is a pity that Golitsyn junior was not present, it would
have been an opportunity for his eloquence.
It all ended, of course, in nothing.
Lahtin went up to Prince Golitsyn and begged that his departure might be
deferred. ‘My wife is with child,’ he said.
‘I am not responsible for that,’ answered Golitsyn.
A wild beast, a mad dog when it bites, looks grave and sticks up its
tail, but this crazy aristocrat, though he had the reputation of a
good-natured man, was not ashamed to make this vulgar joke.
We were left once more for a quarter of an hour in the room, and, in
spite of the zealous upbraidings of the gendarmes and police officers,
warmly embraced one another and took a long farewell. Except Obolensky I
saw none of them again until I came back from Vyatka.
Departure was before us.
Prison had been a continuation of our past; but our departure into the
wilds was a complete break with it.
Our youthful existence in our circle of friends was over.
Our exile would probably last several years. Where and how should we
meet, and should we ever meet?...
I regretted my old life, and I had to leave it so abruptly ... without
saying good-bye. I had no hope of seeing Ogaryov. Two of my friends had
succeeded in seeing me during the last few days, but that was not enough
for me.
If I could but once again see my youthful comforter and press her hand,
as I had pressed it in the graveyard.... I longed both to take leave of
my past and to greet my future in her person....
We did see each other for a few minutes on the 9th of April 1835, on the
day before I was sent off into exile.
For years I kept that day sacred in my memory; it was one of the
happiest moments in my life.
Why must the thought of that day and of all the bright days of my past
bring back so much that is terrible?... The grave, the wreath of
dark-red roses, two children holding my hand—torches, crowds of exiles,
the moon, the warm sea under the mountain-side, the words that I did not
understand and that wrung my heart....
All is over!