"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 soon fell in love with her. Not that she was beautiful,
for she was a Russian with 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 everyone.
"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; she liked to sow
the seeds of evil, in order to see it flourish. And that, too, by 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 used Caligula's famous wish. She also might have wished that
the whole human race had but one head; not in order that she might cut
it off, but that she might make the philosophy of Nihilism flourish
there.
"What a temptation to become the lord and master of such a monster! 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 satanic than 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,' said she, 'and that is what is wanting in Bakounine, I
am sorry to say.'
"That name was constantly in her mouth. 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 that
'Odyssey' of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine's
history, and which is, nevertheless, the exact truth; about his
adventures as chief of the insurgents at Prague and then at Dresden; of
his first death sentence; about his imprisonment at Olmutz, in the
casemates of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and in a
subterranean dungeon at Schusselburg; about his exile to Siberia and
his wonderful escape down the river Amour, on a Japanese
coasting-vessel, and about his final arrival, by way of Yokohama and
San Francisco, 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 pamphleteer 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 may call the
dynamite formula. At best, Bakounine would only become an incendiary,
and burn down cities. And what is that, I ask you? Bah! A second-hand
Rostoptchin! 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 curious and daily growing attraction which she had for
me. It was getting exasperating, and the more so as she resisted me as
stoutly as the shyest of innocents could have done. At the end of a
month of mad Satanism, I saw what her game was. Do you know what she
intended? 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--at least 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. In short, one morning she bluntly made the offer:
"'Become Bakounine's soul, and you shall possess me.'
"Of course I accepted, for it was too fantastically strange to refuse.
Don't 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 nihilize 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. It had a square table with writing
materials on it, in the center of the room. This 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 fat; a nose like a double funnel; and small,
sharp eyes, which had a magnetic lock, proclaimed the Tartar, the old
Turanian blood which produced the Attilas, the Genghis-Khans, the
Tamerlanes. The obesity which is characteristic of 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 scion of the atheistic hordes who had several times already
almost overrun Europe, and who, instead of ideas of progress, have
Nihilism buried in 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 silly
child to have dreamed of acting such a part to such a thinker. She had
not felt the profoundness of that horrible, philosophy which was hidden
under his material activity, nor had she seen the prophet under this
hero of the barricades. Perhaps he had not thought it advisable to
reveal himself to her; 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 Turgenieff's, I believe, but the idea certainly belonged to
him. He got his programme 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
and practical conclusions. It was, in a word, the applied philosophy of
chance, the indeterminate end of anarchy. Monstrous it may be, but
grand in its monstrosity!
"And you must note that the typical man of action so despised by the
Countess was, in Bakounine, the gigantic dreamer whom I have just shown
to you. His dream did not remain a dream, but began to be realized. It
was by the care of Bakounine that the Nihilistic party became an
entity; a party in which there is a little of everything, you know, but
on the whole, a formidable party, the advanced guard of which is 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,
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-Mountain.' 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 dreamed. 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
clever to have escaped discovery, and all I have to do is to look out,
lest any affiliated members of their society recognize me!"
Then he smiled and, turning to the waiter who had just come in, said:
"Open another bottle of champagne, and make the cork pop! It will, at
any rate, remind us of the day when we ourselves shall be blown up with
dynamite."