VYATKA—THE OFFICE AND DINING-ROOM OF HIS EXCELLENCY—K. Y. TYUFYAEV
The Governor of Vyatka did not receive me, but sent word that I was to
present myself next morning at ten.
I found in the room next morning the district police-captain, the
police-master, and two officials: they were all standing talking in
whispers and looking uneasily at the door. The door opened and there
walked in a short, broad-shouldered old man with a head set on his
shoulders like a bull-dog’s, and with big jaws, which completed his
resemblance to that animal and, moreover, wore a perpetual grin; the
elderly and at the same time satyr-like expression of his face, the
quick little grey eyes, and the sparse, stiff hair made an incredibly
disgusting impression.
To begin with, he gave the district police-captain a good dressing down
for the state of the roads on which he had driven the day before. The
district police-captain stood with his head somewhat bowed in token of
respect and submission, and replied to everything as servants used to do
in old days, ‘I obey, your Excellency.’
When he had done with the district police-captain, he turned to me. He
looked at me insolently and asked:
‘Did you finish your studies at the Moscow University?’
‘I took my degree.’
‘And then served?’
‘In the Kremlin department.’
‘Ha, ha, ha! a fine sort of service! Of course, you had plenty of time
there for supper parties and singing songs. Alenitsyn!’ he shouted.
A scrofulous-looking young man walked in.
‘Here, my boy, here is a graduate of the Moscow University. I expect he
knows everything except his duties in the service; it is His Majesty’s
pleasure that he should learn them with us. Take him into your office
and send me a special report on him. To-morrow you will come to the
office at nine o’clock, and now you can go. But stay, I forgot to ask
how you write.’
I did not understand for the moment.
‘Come, your handwriting.’
‘I have nothing with me.’
‘Bring paper and pen,’ and Alenitsyn handed me a pen.
‘What am I to write?’
‘What you like,’ observed the secretary. ‘Write, “On inquiry it
appears——”’
‘Well, you won’t be corresponding with the Tsar,’ the governor remarked,
laughing ironically.
Before I left Perm I had heard a great deal about Tyufyaev, but he far
surpassed all my expectations.
What does not Russian life produce!
Tyufyaev was born at Tobolsk. His father was possibly a convict and
belonged to the poorest class of artisan. At thirteen, young Tyufyaev
joined a troupe of travelling acrobats who wandered from fair to fair,
dancing on the tight-rope, turning somersaults, and so on. With these he
travelled from Tobolsk to the Polish provinces, entertaining the good
Russian people. There, I do not know why, he was arrested, and as he had
no passport he was treated as a vagrant, and sent on foot with a party
of convicts back to Tobolsk. His mother was by then a widow and was
living in great poverty. The son rebuilt the stove with his own hands
when it was broken: he had to find some calling; the boy had learned to
read and write, and he was engaged as a copying clerk in the local
court.
Being naturally of a free-and-easy character and having developed his
abilities by a many-sided education in the troupe of acrobats and the
party of convicts with whom he had passed from one end of Russia to the
other, he became an energetic and practical man.
At the beginning of the reign of Alexander some sort of inspector came
to Tobolsk. He needed capable clerks, and some one recommended Tyufyaev.
The inspector was so well pleased with him that he proposed taking him
along to Petersburg. Then Tyufyaev, whose ambition, to use his own
words, had never risen above the post of secretary in a district court,
formed a higher opinion of himself, and with iron will resolved to make
his career.
And he did make it. Ten years later we find him the indefatigable
secretary of Kankrin, who was at that time a general in the
commissariat. A year later he was superintending a department in
Araktcheyev’s secretariat which superintended all Russia. He was with
Araktcheyev in Paris at the time when it was occupied by the allied
troops. Tyufyaev spent the whole time sitting in the secretariat of the
expeditionary army and literally did not see one street in Paris. He sat
day and night collating and copying papers with his worthy colleague,
Kleinmihel.
Araktcheyev’s secretariat was like those copper mines into which men are
only sent to work for a few months, because if they remain longer they
die. Even Tyufyaev was tired at last in that factory of orders and
decrees, of regulations and commands, and began asking for a quieter
post. Araktcheyev could not fail to like a man like Tyufyaev, a man free
from higher pretensions, from all interests and opinions, formally
honest, devoured by ambition, and regarding obedience as the foremost
human virtue. Araktcheyev rewarded Tyufyaev with the post of deputy
governor. A few years later he made him governor of the Perm Province.
The province, through which Tyufyaev had once walked on a rope and once
tied to a rope, lay at his feet.
A governor’s power increases in direct ratio to his distance from
Petersburg, but it increases in geometrical progression in the provinces
where there are no nobility, as in Perm, Vyatka, and Siberia. Such a
region was just what Tyufyaev wanted.
He was an Oriental satrap, only an active, restless one, meddling in
everything and for ever busy. Tyufyaev would have been a ferocious
Commissaire of the Convention in 1794, a Carrier.[134]
Dissolute in his life, coarse in nature, intolerant of the slightest
contradiction, his influence was extremely pernicious. He did not take
bribes, though he did make his fortune, as it appeared after his death.
He was severe to his subordinates, he punished without mercy those who
were detected in wrongdoing, yet his officials were more dishonest than
anywhere. He carried the abuse of influence to an incredible point; for
instance, when he sent an official to an inquiry he would (that is, if
he were interested in the case) tell him that probably this or that
would be discovered, and woe to the official if something else were
discovered.
Perm was still full of the fame of Tyufyaev; there was a party of his
adherents there, hostile to the new governor, who, of course, had
surrounded himself with his own partisans.
On the other hand, there were people who hated him. One of them, a
rather original product of the warping influences of Russian life,
particularly warned me what Tyufyaev was like. I am speaking of a doctor
in one of the factories. This doctor, whose name was Tchebotarev, an
intelligent and very nervous man, had made an unfortunate marriage soon
after he had completed his studies, then he was transferred to
Ekaterinburg and without any experience plunged into the bog of
provincial life. Though placed in a fairly independent position in these
surroundings, he yet was mastered by them; all his resistance took the
form of sarcasms at the expense of the officials. He laughed at them to
their faces, he said the most insulting things with grimaces and
affectation. Since no one was spared, no one particularly resented the
doctor’s spiteful tongue. He made himself a social position by his
attacks and forced a flabby set of people to put up with the lash with
which he chastised them incessantly. I was warned that he was a good
doctor, but crazy and extremely impertinent.
His gossip and jokes were neither coarse nor pointless; quite the
contrary, they were full of humour and concentrated bitterness; it was
his poetry, his revenge, his outcry of anger and, to some extent,
perhaps, of despair. He had studied the circle of officials as an artist
and as a doctor, and, encouraged by their cowardice and lack of
resource, took any liberty he liked with them.
At every word he would add, ‘It won’t make a ha’p’orth of difference to
you.’
Once in joke I remarked upon his repeating this.
‘Why are you surprised?’ the doctor replied. ‘The object of everything
that is said is to convince. I am in haste to add the strongest argument
that exists. Convince a man that to kill his own father will not make a
ha’p’orth of difference and he will kill him.’
Tchebotarev never refused to lend small sums of a hundred or two hundred
roubles. When any one asked him for a loan, he would take out his
notebook and inquire the exact date when the borrower would return the
money.
‘Now,’ he would say, ‘allow me to make a bet of a silver rouble that you
won’t repay it then.’
‘Upon my soul,’ the other would object, ‘what do you take me for?’
‘It makes not a ha’p’orth of difference what I take you for,’ the doctor
would answer, ‘but the fact is I have been keeping a record for six
years, and not one person has paid me up to time yet, and hardly any one
has repaid me later either.’
The day fixed would pass and the doctor would very gravely ask for the
silver rouble he had won.
A spirit-tax contractor at Perm was selling a travelling coach. The
doctor presented himself before him and made the following speech: ‘You
have a coach to sell, I need it; you are a wealthy man, you are a
millionaire, every one respects you for it and I have therefore come to
pay you my respects also; as you are a wealthy man, it makes not a
ha’p’orth of difference to you whether you sell the coach or not, while
I need it very much and have very little money. You want to squeeze me,
to take advantage of my necessity and ask fifteen hundred for the coach.
I offer you seven hundred roubles. I shall be coming every day to
bargain with you and in a week you will let me have it for seven-fifty
or eight hundred; wouldn’t it be better to begin with that? I am ready
to give it.’
‘Much better,’ answered the astonished spirit-tax contractor, and he let
him have the coach.
Tchebotarev’s anecdotes and mischievous tricks were endless. I will add
two more.
‘Do you believe in magnetism?’ a rather intelligent and cultured lady
asked him in my presence.
‘What do you mean by magnetism?’
The lady talked some vague nonsense in reply.
‘It makes not a ha’p’orth of difference to you whether I believe in
magnetism or not, but if you like I will tell you what I have seen in
that way.’
‘Please do.’
‘Only listen attentively.’
After this he described in a very lively and interesting way the
experiments of a Harkov doctor, an acquaintance of his.
In the middle of the conversation, a servant brought some lunch in on a
tray. As he was going out, the lady said to him, ‘You have forgotten to
bring the mustard.’ Tchebotarev stopped. ‘Go on, go on,’ said the lady,
a little scared already, ‘I am listening.’
‘Has he brought the salt?’
‘So you are angry already,’ said the lady, turning crimson.
‘Not in the least. I assure you I know that you were listening
attentively. Besides, I know that, however intelligent a woman is and
whatever is being talked about, she can never rise above the kitchen—so
how could I dare to be angry with you personally?’
At Countess Polier’s factory he asked a lad, one of his patients there,
to enter his service. The boy was willing, but the foreman said that he
could not let him go without permission from the countess. Tchebotarev
wrote to the lady. She told the foreman to let the lad have his passport
on condition that the doctor paid five years’ _obrok_ in advance. The
doctor promptly wrote to the countess that he agreed to her terms, but
asked her as a preliminary to decide one point that troubled him, _i.e._
from whom could he recover the money if Encke’s Comet should,
intersecting the earth’s orbit, turn it out of its course—which might
occur a year and a half before the term fixed.
On the day of my departure for Vyatka the doctor appeared early in the
morning and began with the following foolishness: ‘Like Horace, once you
sang, and to this day you are translated.’[135] Then he took out his
notebook and asked if I would not like some money for the journey. I
thanked him and refused.
‘Why won’t you take any? It won’t make a ha’p’orth of difference to
you.’
‘I have money.’
‘That’s bad,’ he said; ‘the end of the world must be at hand.’ He opened
his notebook and wrote down: ‘After fifteen years of practice I have for
the first time met a man who won’t borrow, even though he is going
away.’
Having finished playing the fool, he sat down on my bed and said
gravely: ‘You are going to a terrible man. Be on your guard against him
and keep as far away from him as you can. If he likes you it will be a
poor recommendation; if he dislikes you, he will ruin you by slander, by
calumny, and I don’t know what, but he will ruin you, and it won’t make
a ha’p’orth of difference to him.’
With this he told me an incident the truth of which I had an opportunity
of verifying afterwards from documents in the secretariat of the
Minister of Home Affairs.
Tyufyaev carried on an open intrigue with the sister of a poor
government clerk. The brother was made a laughing-stock and he tried to
break off the liaison, threatened to report it to the authorities, tried
to write to Petersburg—in fact, made such a to-do that on one occasion
the police seized him and brought him before the provincial authorities
to be certified as a lunatic.
The provincial authorities, the president of the court, and the
inspector of the medical board, an old German who was very much liked by
the working people and whom I knew personally, all found that Petrovsky,
as the man was called, was mad.
Our doctor knew Petrovsky, who was a patient of his. He was asked as a
matter of form. He told the inspector that Petrovsky was not mad at all,
and that he proposed that they should make a fresh inquiry into the
case, otherwise he would have to pursue the matter further. The local
authorities were not at all opposed to this, but unluckily Petrovsky
died in the madhouse before the day fixed for the second inquiry,
although he was a sturdy young fellow.
The report of the case reached Petersburg. Petrovsky’s sister was
arrested (why not Tyufyaev?) and a secret investigation began. Tyufyaev
dictated the answers; he surpassed himself on this occasion. To hush it
up at once and to ward off the danger of a second involuntary journey to
Siberia, Tyufyaev instructed the girl to say that her brother had been
on bad terms with her ever since, carried away by youth and
inexperience, she had been seduced by the Emperor Alexander on his visit
to Perm, for which she had received five thousand roubles through
General Solomka.
Alexander’s habits were such that there was nothing incredible in the
story. To find out whether it was true was not easy, and in any case
would have created a great deal of scandal. To Count Benckendorf’s
inquiry, General Solomka answered that so much money had passed through
his hands that he could not remember the five thousand.
‘_La regina ne aveva molto!_’ says the Improvisatore in Pushkin’s
_Egyptian Nights_....
So this estimable pupil of Araktcheyev’s and worthy comrade of
Kleinmihel’s, acrobat, vagrant, copying clerk, secretary, and governor,
this tender heart, and disinterested man who put the sane into a
madhouse and did them to death there, the man who slandered the Emperor
Alexander to divert the attention of the Emperor Nicholas, was now
undertaking to train me in the service.
I was almost completely dependent upon him. He had only to write some
nonsense to the minister and I should have been sent off to some place
in Irkutsk. No need to write, indeed he had the right to send me to any
outlandish town, Kay or Tsarevo-Santchursk, without any discussion,
without any formalities. Tyufyaev dispatched a young Pole to Glazov
because the ladies preferred dancing the mazurka with him to dancing it
with his Excellency.
In this way Prince Dolgoruky was transferred from Perm to Verhoturye.
The latter place, lost in the mountains and the snows, is reckoned in
the province of Perm, though it is as bad as Beryozov for climate and
worse for desolation.
Prince Dolgoruky was one of the aristocratic scamps of the wrong sort
such as are rarely met with in our day. He played all sorts of pranks in
Petersburg, pranks in Moscow, and pranks in Paris.
His life was spent in this. He was an Izmailov on a small scale, a
Prince E. Gruzinsky without his band of runaways at Lyskovo, that is, a
spoilt, insolent, repulsive jester, a great gentleman and a great
buffoon at once. When his doings went beyond all bounds, he was ordered
to live in Perm.
He arrived in two carriages; in one he travelled with his dog, in the
other, his French cook with his parrots. The people of Perm were
delighted at the arrival of a wealthy visitor, and soon all the town was
crowding into his dining-room. Dolgoruky got up an affair with a young
lady at Perm; the latter, suspecting some infidelity, appeared
unexpectedly at the prince’s house one morning and found him with his
housemaid. This led to a scene which ended in the faithless lover taking
his riding-whip from the wall; the lady, seeing his intention, took to
flight, he followed her, scantily attired in a dressing-gown; overtaking
her in the little square in which the battalion were usually drilled, he
gave the jealous lady three or four lashes with the whip and calmly
returned home as though he had done his duty.
Such charming pranks brought down upon him the censure of his Perm
friends, and the authorities decided to send this mischievous urchin of
forty to Verhoturye. On the eve of departure he gave a splendid dinner,
and in spite of their differences the officials came to it. Dolgoruky
promised to give them some wonderful pie for dinner.
The pie certainly was excellent and vanished with incredible rapidity.
When nothing but scraps were left, Dolgoruky turned pathetically to his
guests and said: ‘Never let it be said that I grudged you anything at
parting. I ordered my Gardi to be killed yesterday for the pie.’
The officials looked at one another in horror, and looked round them for
the big Dane they knew so well; he was not to be seen. The prince saw
what they felt and bade the servant bring the rejected remnants of Gardi
and his skin; the rest of him was in the stomachs of the Perm officials.
Half the town was ill with horror.
Meanwhile Dolgoruky, pleased at having had a joke at the expense of his
friends, drove in triumph to Verhoturye. A third conveyance carried a
whole poultry yard, a poultry yard travelling with post horses! On the
way he carried off the ledgers from several posting-stations, mixed them
up, altered the entries and almost drove the posting superintendents out
of their minds, for even with their books they did not find it easy to
make their accounts balance.
The stifling emptiness and numbness of Russian life, strangely combined
with the liveliness and even turbulence of the Russian character,
develops every sort of eccentricity among us.
In Suvorov’s habit of crowing like a cock, just as in Prince Dolgoruky’s
dog-pie, in the savage deeds of Izmailov,[136] in the half-voluntary
madness of Mamonov,[137] in the violent crimes of Tolstoy ‘the
American,’ I detect a kindred note, familiar to us all, though weakened
in us by education, or directed to some other end.
I knew Tolstoy personally and just at the date when he lost his daughter
Sarra, an exceptional girl with marked poetic gifts. One glance at the
old man’s exterior, at his forehead covered with grey curls, at his
sparkling eyes and athletic frame revealed how much energy and vigour
nature had bestowed on him. He had developed only turbulent passions and
evil propensities, and that is not surprising; everything vicious is
allowed among us to develop for a long time without hindrance, while for
humane passions a man is sent to a garrison or Siberia at the first
step.... He rioted, gambled, fought, mutilated people and ruined
families for twenty years on end, till at last he was sent to Siberia,
from which he ‘returned an Aleutian’ as Griboyedov says, that is, he
made his way through Kamtchatka to America, and thence obtained
permission to return to Russia. Alexander pardoned him, and from the day
after his arrival he carried on the same life as before. Married to a
gypsy girl belonging to the Moscow camp and famous for her voice, he
turned his house into a gambling den, spent all his time in orgies, all
his nights at cards, and wild scenes of greed and drunkenness took place
beside the cradle of the little Sarra. The story goes that on one
occasion, to prove the nicety of his aim, he made his wife stand on the
table and shot through the heel of her shoe.
His last prank almost sent him to Siberia again. He had long been angry
with an artisan; he seized him in his house, bound him hand and foot,
and pulled out one of his teeth. Will it be believed that this incident
took place only ten or twelve years ago? The injured man lodged a
complaint. Tolstoy bribed the police and the judge, and the man was put
in prison for making a false accusation. At that time a well-known
Russian literary tan, N. F. Pavlov, was serving on the prison
commission. The artisan told him his story, the inexperienced official
took it up, Tolstoy was scared in earnest, the case was obviously going
to end in his condemnation; but great is the God of Russia. Count Orlov
wrote to Prince Shtcherbatov a secret report, in which he advised him to
hush up the case, so as not to allow the _open triumph of a man of
inferior rank over a member of the higher classes_. To Pavlov, Count
Orlov gave the advice to resign his post.... This is almost more
incredible than the extraction of the tooth. I was in Moscow at the time
and knew the imprudent official well. But let us return to Vyatka.
The government office was incomparably worse than prison. Not that the
actual work was great, but the stifling atmosphere, as of the Cave of
Dogs, of that scene of corruption, and the terrible, stupid waste of
time made the office insufferable. Alenitsyn did not worry me, he was,
indeed, more polite than I expected; he had been at the Kazan High
School and consequently had a respect for a graduate of the Moscow
University.
There were some twenty clerks in the office. For the most part they were
persons of no education and no moral conceptions; sons of clerks and
secretaries, accustomed from their cradle to regard the service as a
source of profit, and the peasants as soil that yielded revenue, they
sold their services, took twenty kopecks and quarter-roubles, cheated
for a glass of wine, demeaned themselves and did all sorts of shabby
things. My valet gave up going to the ‘billiard room,’ saying that the
officials cheated there worse than anybody, and one could not give them
a lesson because they were ‘officers.’ So with these people, whom my
servant did not beat only on account of their rank, I had to sit every
day from nine in the morning until two, and from five to eight in the
evening.
Besides Alenitsyn, who was the head of the office, there was a
head-clerk of the table at which I was put, who was also not a spiteful
creature, though drunken and illiterate. At the same table sat four
clerks. I had to talk to and become acquainted with these, and, indeed,
with all the others, too. Apart from the fact that these people would
have paid me out sooner or later for being ‘proud’ if I had not, it is
simply impossible to spend several hours of every day with the same
people without making their acquaintance. Moreover, it must not be
forgotten that provincials make up to any one from outside and
particularly to any one who comes from the capital, especially if there
is some interesting story connected with him.
After spending the whole day in this bondage, I would sometimes come
home with all my faculties in a state of stupefaction and fling myself
on the sofa, worn out, humiliated, and incapable of any work or
occupation. I heartily regretted my Krutitsky cell with its charcoal
fumes and black beetles, with a gendarme on guard and a lock on the
door. There I had freedom, I did what I liked and no one interfered with
me; instead of these vulgar sayings, dirty people, mean ideas and coarse
feelings, there had been the stillness of death and unbroken leisure.
And when I remembered that after dinner I had to go again, and again
to-morrow, I was at times overcome by fury and despair and tried to find
comfort in drinking wine and vodka.
And then, to make things worse, one of my fellow-clerks would look in
‘on his way’ and relieve his boredom by staying on talking until it was
time to go back to the office.
Within a few months, however, the position became somewhat easier.
Prolonged steady persecution is not in the Russian character unless a
personal or mercenary element comes in; and that is not because the
government does not want to stifle and crush a man, but is due to the
Russian carelessness, to our _laissez-aller_. Russians in authority are
as a rule ill-bred, coarse, and insolent; it is easy to provoke them to
rudeness, but persistent oppression is not in their line, they have not
enough patience for it, perhaps because it yields them no profit.
In the first heat to display, on the one hand, their zeal, on the other,
their power, they do all sorts of stupid and unnecessary things, then,
little by little, they leave a man in peace.
So it was with the office. The Ministry of Home Affairs had at that time
a craze for statistics: it had given orders for committees to be formed
everywhere, and had issued programmes which could hardly have been
carried out even in Belgium or Switzerland; at the same time, all sorts
of elaborate tables with maxima and minima, with averages and various
deductions from the totals for periods of ten years (made up on evidence
which had not been collected even a year beforehand!), with moral
remarks and meteorological observations. Not a farthing was assigned for
the expenses of the committees and the collection of evidence; all this
was to be done from love for statistics through the rural police and put
into proper shape in the government office. The clerks, overwhelmed with
work, and the rural police, who hate all peaceful and theoretical tasks,
looked upon a statistics committee as a useless luxury, as a caprice of
the ministry; however, the reports had to be sent in with tabulated
results and deductions.
This business seemed overwhelmingly difficult to the whole office; it
was simply impossible; but no one troubled about that, all they worried
about was that there should be no occasion for reprimands. I promised
Alenitsyn to prepare a preface and introduction, and to draw up
summaries of the tables with eloquent remarks introducing foreign words,
quotations, and striking deductions, if he would allow me to undertake
this very severe work not at the office but at home. Alenitsyn, after
parleying with Tyufyaev, agreed.
The introduction to my record of the work of the committee, in which I
discussed their hopes and their plans, for in reality nothing had been
done at all, touched Alenitsyn to the depths of his soul. Tyufyaev
himself thought it was written in masterly style. With that my labours
in the statistical line ended, but they put the committee under my
supervision. They no longer forced the hard labour of copying upon me,
and the drunken head-clerk who had been my chief became almost my
subordinate. Alenitsyn only insisted, from some consideration of
propriety, that I should go every day for a short time to the office.
To show the complete impossibility of real statistics, I will quote the
facts sent from the town of Kay. There, among various absurdities, were
for instance the entries: Drowned—2. Causes of drowning not known—2, and
in the column of totals these two figures were added together and the
figure 4 was entered. Under the heading of extraordinary incidents
occurred the following tragic anecdote: So-and-so, artisan, having
deranged his intelligence by stimulating beverages, hanged himself.
Under the heading of morality of the town’s inhabitants was the entry:
‘There are no Jews in the town of Kay.’ To the inquiry whether sums had
been allotted for the building of a church, a stock exchange, or an
almshouse, the answer ran thus: ‘For the building of a stock exchange
was assigned—nothing.’
The statistics that saved me from work at the office had the unfortunate
consequence of bringing me into personal relations with Tyufyaev.
There was a time when I hated that man; that time is long past and the
man himself is past. He died on his Kazan estates about 1845. Now I
think of him without anger, as of a peculiar wild beast met in a forest
which ought to have been tamed, but with which one could not be angry
for being a beast. At the time I could not help coming into conflict
with him; that was inevitable for any decent man. Chance helped me or he
would have done me great injury; to owe him a grudge for the harm he did
not do me would be absurd and paltry.
Tyufyaev lived alone. His wife was separated from him. The governor’s
favourite, the wife of a cook who for no fault but being married to her
had been sent away to the country, was, with an awkwardness which almost
seemed intentional, kept out of sight in the back rooms of his house.
She did not make her appearance officially, but officials who were
particularly devoted to the governor—that is, particularly afraid of not
being so—formed a sort of court about the cook’s wife ‘who was in
favour.’ Their wives and daughters paid her stealthy visits in the
evening and did not boast of doing so. This lady was possessed of the
same sort of tact as distinguished one of her brilliant
predecessors—Potyomkin; knowing the old man’s disposition and afraid of
being replaced, she herself sought out for him rivals that were not a
danger to her. The grateful old man repaid this indulgent love with his
devotion and they got on well together.
All the morning Tyufyaev worked and was in the office of the
secretariat. The poetry of life only began at three o’clock. Dinner was
for him no jesting matter. He liked a good dinner and he liked to eat it
in company. Preparations were always made in his kitchen for twelve at
table; if the guests were less than half that number he was mortified;
if there were no more than two visitors he was wretched; if there was no
one at all, he would go off on the verge of despair to dine in his
Dulcinea’s apartments. To procure people in order to feed them to
repletion is not a difficult task, but his official position and the
terror he inspired in his subordinates did not permit them freely to
enjoy his hospitality, nor him to turn his house into a tavern. He had
to confine himself to councillors, presidents (but with half of these he
was on bad terms), rich merchants, spirit-tax contractors, and the few
visitors to the town and ‘oddities,’ who were something in the style of
the _capacités_ whom Louis-Philippe wanted to introduce into elections.
Of course I was an oddity of the first magnitude in Vyatka.
Persons exiled ‘for their opinions’ to remote towns are somewhat feared,
but are never confounded with ordinary mortals. ‘Dangerous people’ have
for provincials the same attraction that notorious Lovelaces have for
women and courtesans for men. ‘Dangerous people’ are far more shunned by
Petersburg officials and wealthy Moscow people than by provincials and
especially by Siberians.
Those who were exiled in connection with the Fourteenth of December were
looked upon with immense respect. The first visit on New Year’s Day was
paid by officials to the widow of Yushnevsky. The senator Tolstoy when
taking a census of Siberia was guided by evidence received from the
exiled Decembrists in checking the facts furnished by the officials.
Minih[138] from his tower in Pelymo superintended the affairs of the
Tobolsk Province. Governors used to go to consult him about matters of
importance.
The working people are still less hostile to exiles: they are always on
the side of those who are punished. The word ‘convict’ disappears near
the Siberian frontier and is replaced by the word ‘unfortunate.’ In the
eyes of the Russian peasant legal sentence is no disgrace to a man. The
peasants of the Perm Province, living along the main road to Tobolsk,
often put out kvass, milk, and bread in a little window in case an
‘unfortunate’ should be secretly passing that way from Siberia.
By the way, speaking of exiles, Polish exiles begin to be met beyond
Nizhni and their number rapidly increases after Kazan. In Perm there
were forty, in Vyatka not less; there were besides several in every
district town.
They lived quite apart from the Russians and avoided all contact with
the inhabitants. There was great unity among them, and the rich shared
with the poor like brothers.
I never saw signs of either hatred or special goodwill towards them on
the part of the inhabitants. They looked upon them as outsiders—the more
so, as scarcely a single Pole knew Russian.
One tough old Sarmatian, who had been an officer in the Uhlans under
Poniatowski and had taken part in Napoleon’s campaigns, received
permission in 1837 to return to his Lithuanian domains. On the eve of
his departure he invited me and several Poles to dinner. After dinner my
cavalry officer came up to me, glass in hand, embraced me, and with a
warrior’s simplicity whispered in my ear, ‘Oh, why are you a Russian!’ I
did not answer a word, but this observation sank deeply into my heart. I
realised that _this_ generation could never set Poland free.
From the time of Konarski,[139] the Poles have come to look quite
differently upon the Russians.
As a rule Polish exiles are not oppressed, but the position is awful for
those who have no private means. The government gives those who have
nothing _fifteen roubles a month_; with that they must pay for lodging,
food, clothes, and fuel. In the bigger towns, in Kazan and Tobolsk, it
is possible to earn something by giving lessons or concerts, playing at
balls, drawing portraits and teaching dancing. In Perm and Vyatka they
had no such resources. And in spite of that they would ask nothing from
Russians.
Tyufyaev’s invitations to his rich Siberian dinners were a real
infliction to me. His dining-room was the same thing as the office only
in another form, less dirty but more vulgar, because it had the
appearance of free will and not of compulsion.
Tyufyaev knew his guests through and through, despised them, showed them
his claws at times, and altogether treated them as a master treats his
dogs, at one time with excessive familiarity, at another with a rudeness
which was beyond all bounds—and yet he invited them to his dinners and
they came to them in trembling and in joy, demeaning themselves, talking
scandal, listening, trying to please, smiling, bowing.
I blushed for them and felt ashamed.
Our friendship did not last long. Tyufyaev soon perceived that I was not
fit for ‘aristocratic’ Vyatka society.
A few months later he was displeased with me, a few months later still
he hated me, and I not only went no more to his dinners but even gave up
going to him at all. The visit of the Tsarevitch saved me from his
persecution, as we shall see later on.
I must note that I had done absolutely nothing to deserve first his
attentions and invitations, and afterwards his anger and disapproval. He
could not endure to see in me a man who behaved independently, though
not in the least insolently; I was always _en règle_ with him, and he
demanded obsequiousness. He loved his power jealously. He had earned it
and he exacted not only obedience but an appearance of absolute
subordination. In this, unhappily, he was typically national.
A landowner says to his servant, ‘Hold your tongue; I won’t put up with
your answering me!’
The head of a department observes, turning pale with anger, to a clerk
who has made some criticism, ‘You forget yourself; do you know to whom
you are speaking?’
The Tsar sends men to Siberia ‘for opinions,’ buries them in dungeons
for a poem—and all three of them are readier to forgive stealing and
bribe-taking, murder and robbery, than the impudence of human dignity
and the insolence of an independent word.
Tyufyaev was a true servant of the Tsar. He was thought highly of, but
not highly enough. Byzantine servility was in him wonderfully combined
with official discipline. Obliteration of self, renunciation of will and
thought before authority went hand in hand with savage oppression of
subordinates. He might have been a civilian Kleinmihel, his ‘zeal’ might
in the same way have conquered everything, and he might in the same way
have plastered the walls with the dead bodies of men, have dried the
palace with human lungs, and have thrashed the young men of the
engineering corps even more severely for not being informers.
Tyufyaev had an intense secret hatred for everything aristocratic; he
had gained it from bitter experience. The hard labour of Araktcheyev’s
secretariat had been his first refuge, his first deliverance. Till then
his superiors had never offered him a chair, but had employed him on
menial errands. When he served in the commissariat, the officers had
persecuted him in military fashion and one colonel had horsewhipped him
in the street in Vilna.... All this had entered into the copying clerk’s
soul and rankled there; now he was governor and it was his turn to
oppress, to keep men standing, to address them familiarly, to shout at
them, and sometimes to bring nobles of ancient lineage to trial.
From Perm, Tyufyaev had been transferred to Tver. The nobles of that
province could not, for all their submissiveness and servility, put up
with him. They petitioned the minister Bludov to remove him. Bludov
transferred him to Vyatka.
There he was quite at home again. Officials and contractors,
factory-owners and government clerks, a free hand with no one to
interfere.... Every one trembled before him, every one remained standing
in his presence, every one offered him drink and gave him dinners, every
one waited on his slightest wish; at weddings and name-day parties, the
first toast was ‘To the health of his Excellency!’