"I met Countess Nioska W----, that strange woman who was usually called
Countess Satan, in Naples; I immediately attached myself to her out of
curiosity, and I soon fell in love with her. Not that she was beautiful,
for she was a Russian who had all the bad characteristics of the Russian
type. She was thin and squat, at the same time, while her face was
sallow and puffy, with high cheek bones and a Cossack's nose. But her
conversation bewitched every one.
"She was many-sided, learned, a philosopher, scientifically depraved,
satanic. Perhaps the word is rather pretentious, but it exactly
expresses what I want to say, for in other words, she loved evil for the
sake of evil. She rejoiced in other people's vices, and liked to sow the
seeds of evil, in order to see it flourish. And that on a fraud, on an
enormous scale. It was not enough for her to corrupt individuals; she
only did that to keep her hand in; what she wished to do, was to corrupt
the masses. By slightly altering it after her own fashion, she might
have adopted the famous saying of Caligula. She also wished that the
whole human race had but one head; but not in order that she might cut
it off, but that she might make the philosophy of _Nihility_ flourish
there.
"What a temptation to become the lord and master of such a monster! And
I allowed myself to be tempted, and undertook the adventure. The means
came unsought for by me, and the only thing that I had to do, was to
show myself more perverted and satanical that she was herself.--And so I
played the devil.
"'Yes,' I said, 'we writers are the best workmen for doing evil, as our
books may be bottles of poison. The so-called men of action, only turn
the handle of the mitrailleuse which we have loaded. Formulas will
destroy the world, and it is we who invent them.'
"'That is true,' she said, 'and that is what is wanting in Bakounine, I
am sorry to say.'
"That name was constantly in her mouth, and so I asked her for details,
which she gave me, as she knew the man intimately.
"'After all,' she said, with a contemptuous grimace, 'he is only a kind
of Garibaldi.'
"She told me, although she made fun of him as she did so, about his
Odyssey of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine's
legend, and which is, nevertheless, only the exact truth; his part of
chief of the insurgents, at Prague and then at Dresden; his first death
sentence; about his imprisonment at Olmütz and in the casemates of the
fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul; in a subterranean dungeon at
Schüsselburg; about his exile to Siberia and his wonderful escape down
the river Amour, on a Japanese coasting-vessel by way of Yokohama and
San Francisco, and about his final arrival in London, whence he was
directing all the operations of Nihilism.
"'You see,' she said, 'he is a thorough adventurer, and now all his
adventures are over. He got married at Tobolsk and became a mere
respectable, middle-class man. And then, he has no individual ideas.
Herzen, the phamphleteer of _Kolokol_ inspired him with the only fertile
phrase that he ever uttered: _Land and Liberty!_ But that is not yet the
definite formula, the general formula; what I will call, the dynamite
formula. At best, Bakounine would become an incendiary, and burn down
cities. And what is that, I ask you? Bah? A second-hand Rostopchin! He
wants a prompter, and I offered to become his but he did not take me
seriously.' ...
"It would be useless to enter into all the Psychological details which
marked the course of my passion for the Countess, and to explain to you
more fully the attraction of curiosity which she offered me more and
more every day. It was getting exasperating, and the more so, as she
resisted me as stoutly as the shyest of innocents could have done, but
at the end of a month of mad Satanism, I saw what her game was. Do you
know what she had thought of? She meant to make me Bakounine's prompter,
or, at any rate, that is what she said. But no doubt she reserved the
right to herself, and that is how I understood her, to prompt the
prompter, and my passion for her, which she purposely left unsatisfied,
assured her that absolute power over me.
"All this may appear madness to you, but it is, nevertheless, the exact
truth, and, in short, one morning she bluntly made the offer: 'Become
Bakounine's soul, and you shall have me.'
"Of course, I accepted, for it was too fantastically strange to refuse;
do you think so? What an adventure! What luck! A number of letters
between the Countess and Bakounine prepared the way; I was introduced to
him at his house, and they discussed me there. I became a sort of
Western prophet, a mystic charmer who was ready to nihilate the Latin
races, the Saint Paul of the new religion of nothingness, and at last a
day was fixed for us to meet in London. He lived in a small, one-storied
house in Pimlico, with a tiny garden in front, and nothing noticeable
about it.
"We were first of all shown into the commonplace parlor of all English
homes, and then upstairs. The room where the Countess and I were left,
was small, and very badly furnished, with a square table with writing
materials on it, in the middle. That was his sanctuary; the deity soon
appeared, and I saw him in flesh and bone; especially in flesh, for he
was enormously stout. His broad face, with prominent cheek-bones, in
spite of the fat; and with a nose like a double funnel, with small,
sharp eyes, which had a magnetic look, proclaimed the Tartar, the old
Turanian blood, which produced the Attilas, the Gengis-Khams, the
Tamerlanes. The obesity, which is characteristic of the nomad races, who
are always on horseback or driving, added to his Asiatic look. The man
was certainly not a European, a slave, a descendant of the deistic
Aryans, but a descendant of the Atheistic hordes, who had several times
already almost overrun Europe, and who, instead of any ideas of
progress, have the belief in nihility, at the bottom of their hearts.
"I was astonished, for I had not expected that the majesty of a whole
race, could be thus revived in a man, and my stupefaction increased
after an hour's conversation. I could quite understand why such a
Colossus had not wished for the Countess as his Egeria; she was a mere
silly child to have dreamt of acting such a part to such a thinker. She
had not felt the profoundness of that horrible philosophy which was
hidden under that material activity, nor had she seen the prophet under
that man of the barricades. Or, perhaps, he had not thought it advisable
to reveal himself to her like that; but he revealed himself to me, and
inspired me with terror.
"A prophet? Oh! yes. He thought himself an Attila, and foresaw the
consequences of his revolution; it was not only from instinct, but also
from theory that he urged a nation on to nihilism. The phrase is not
his, but Tourgueneff's, I believe, but the idea certainly belongs to
him. He got his program of agricultural communism from Herzen, and his
destructive radicalism from Pougatcheff, but he did not stop there. I
mean that he went on to evil for the sake of evil. Herzen wished for the
happiness of the Slav peasant; Pougatcheff wanted to be elected Emperor,
but all that Bakounine wanted, was to overthrow the actual order of
things, no matter by what means, and to replace social concentration by
a universal upheaval.
"It was the dream of a Tartar; it was true nihilism pushed to extreme
practical conclusions. It was, in a word, the applied philosophy of
chance, the indeterminateism of anarchy. Monstrous it may be, but grand
in its monstrosity.
"And you must note, that the man of action who was so despised by the
Countess, discovered in Bakounine the gigantic dreamer whom I have just
shown you, and his dream did not remain a dream, but began to be
realized. It was by the care of that organizer that the Nihilistic party
assumed a body; a party in which there is a little of everything, you
know; but on the whole, a formidable party, on account of the advanced
guard in true Nihilism, whose object is nothing less than to destroy the
Western world, to see it blossom from under the ruins of a general
dispersion, which is the last conception of modern Tartarism.
"I never saw Bakounine again, for the Countess's conquest would have
been too dearly bought by any attempt to act a comedy with this
_Old-Man-of-the-Mountains_. And besides that, after this visit, poor
Countess Satan appeared to me quite silly. Her famous Satanism was
nothing but the flicker of a spirit-lamp, after the general
conflagration of which the other had dreamt, and she had certainly shown
herself very silly, when she could not understand that prodigious
monster. And as she had seduced me, only by her intellect and her
perversity, I was disgusted as soon as she laid aside that mask. I left
her without telling her of my intention, and never saw her again,
either.
"No doubt they both took me for a spy from the _Third section of the
Imperial Chancellery_. In that case, they must have thought me very
strong to have resisted, and all I have to do is to look out, if any
affiliated members of their society recognize me!..."