In 1885 I was again sent on the rights of a settler beyond the Baikal,
in the dead city of Selenginsk, where I spent eight of the most sad
years of my life. The naked steppe, the nailed-up cabins and the
tireless trailing of the police became my lot. I was given neither
the rights of a peasant nor a passport for travel in Siberia. And the
heart burned with a passionate desire to escape, to renew the struggle
with the enraged foe and take revenge for the innocently destroyed
powers for good--the daughters and sons of our motherland. I sought,
attempted, fought against obstacles, but all in vain. The steppe beyond
the Baikal, the moundless Mongolian steppe, and, on the north, the
inaccessible Baikal were the severe allies of the guard with which the
authorities had surrounded me. There was no railroad nor steamship
connection with the outside world. Right there then, in lifeless
Selenginsk, I languished for eight whole years, languished like a hawk
in a cage. All alone, ever yearning, I would go out into the steppe and
in a loud voice pour my tempestuous heart, longing for freedom, into
space.
There was not a day on which I did not think of escaping, and I
was always ready for any risk and peril, clinging to the littlest
possibility to get away, but all in vain. No one, absolutely no one,
promised any help. All those in whom it was possible to confide
considered any attempt to escape foredoomed. My soul ached. And only
the thought of my comrades--convicts who were sent to the Yakutsk huts,
only the thought of their suffering made me forget my own. The eight
empty years of my life in Selenginsk have remained all through my life
a gray void, eating up the warm feelings of a warm heart. I filled
my time with work, so as to be able to send my earnings to the dark
prisons, snowbound wastes, to the hungry, forgotten comrades. I read,
studied, in order to know how mankind lived, and how far or near was
the possibility of transforming it into that "intelligent being" with
whom it would be joyful to live. "Have patience," I would tell myself
in the moments of keen grief; "be patient, endure to the end; you will
get what you are waiting for."
In 1890, after living for four years on the rights of a peasant, I
finally received a passport to travel all over Siberia, and on the
same day I departed from the suffocating place so as to gradually
approach the boundary of European Russia as my term was nearing its
end. My health was much undermined by the severe trials I had undergone
in solitariness. Anæmia and strong neuralgia had tormented me in
Selenginsk. But the inherited vigor of the organism soon returned to
me, and the last four years of my life in Siberia, spent in journeying
from town to town, I succeeded in having many conversations with young
and mature people--succeeded in making allies of some of the leading
citizens of Siberia. And when in September, 1896, I returned to Russia
I found there many students of both sexes whom I taught in Siberia the
theories and the urgency of regenerating the old watchwords. They soon
tackled the work of liberation, and many of them remain loyal to this
date to our principles.