PREFACE

The Autobiographies which we owe to great minds have in former times

generally been of one of three types: ‘So far I went astray, thus I

found the true path’ (St. Augustine); or, ‘So bad was I, but who dares

to consider himself better!’ (Rousseau); or, ‘This is the way a genius

has slowly been evolved from within and by favourable surroundings’

(Goethe). In these forms of self-representation the author is thus

mainly pre-occupied with himself.

In the nineteenth century the autobiographies of men of mark are more

often shaped on lines such as these: ‘So full of talent and attractive

was I; such appreciation and admiration I won!’ (Johanne Louise

Heiberg, ‘A Life lived once more in Reminiscence’); or, ‘I was full

of talent and worthy of being loved, but yet I was unappreciated, and

these were the hard struggles I went through before I won the crown

of fame’ (Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Tale of a Life’). The main

pre-occupation of the writer, in these two classes of life-records,

is consequently with what his fellow-men have thought of him and said

about him.

The author of the autobiography before us is not pre-occupied with

his own capacities, and consequently describes no struggle to gain

recognition, Still less does he care for the opinions of his fellow-men

about himself; what others have thought of him, he dismisses with a

single word.

There is in this work no gazing upon one’s own image. The author is not

one of those who willingly speak of themselves; when he does so, it

is reluctantly and with a certain shyness. There is here no confession

that divulges the inner self, no sentimentality, and no cynicism. The

author speaks neither of his sins nor of his virtues; he enters into no

vulgar intimacy with his reader. He does not say when he fell in love,

and he touches so little upon his relations with the other sex, that

he even omits to mention his marriage, and it is only incidentally we

learn that he is married at all. That he is a father, and a very loving

one, he finds time to mention just once in the rapid review of the last

sixteen years of his life.

He is more anxious to give the psychology of his contemporaries than

of himself; and one finds in his book the psychology of Russia: the

official Russia and the masses underneath--Russia struggling forward

and Russia stagnant. He strives to tell the story of his contemporaries

rather than his own; and consequently, the record of his life contains

the history of Russia during his lifetime, as well as that of the

labour movement in Europe during the last half-century. When he plunges

into his own inner world, we see the outer world reflected in it.

There is, nevertheless, in this book an effect such as Goethe aimed

at in ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit,’ the representation of how a remarkable

mind has been shaped; and in analogy with the ‘Confessions’ of St.

Augustine, we have the story of an inner crisis which corresponds with

what in olden times was called ‘conversion.’ In fact, this inner crisis

is the turning point and the core of the book.

There are at this moment only two great Russians who think for the

Russian people, and whose thoughts belong to mankind, Leo Tolstoy and

Peter Kropotkin. Tolstoy has often told us, in poetical shape, parts

of his life. Kropotkin gives us here, for the first time, without any

poetical recasting, a rapid survey of his whole career.

However radically different these two men are, there is one parallel

which can be drawn between the lives and the views on life of both.

Tolstoy is an artist, Kropotkin is a man of science; but there came a

period in the career of each of them, when neither could find peace in

continuing the work to which he had brought great inborn capacities.

Religious considerations led Tolstoy, social considerations led

Kropotkin, to abandon the paths they had first taken.

Both are filled with love for mankind; and they are at one in the

severe condemnation of the indifference, the thoughtlessness, the

crudeness and brutality of the upper classes, as well as in the

attraction they both feel towards the life of the downtrodden and

ill-used man of the people. Both see more cowardice than stupidity in

the world. Both are idealists and both have the reformer’s temperament.

Both are peace-loving natures, and Kropotkin is the more peaceful of

the two--although Tolstoy always preaches peace and condemns those who

take right into their own hands and resort to force, while Kropotkin

justifies such action, and was on friendly terms with the Terrorists.

The point upon which they differ most is in their attitudes towards

the intelligent educated man and towards science altogether; Tolstoy,

in his religious passion, disdains and disparages the man equally with

the thing, while Kropotkin holds both in high esteem, although at the

same time he condemns men of science for forgetting the people and the

misery of the masses.

Many a man and many a woman have accomplished a great life-work without

having led a great life. Many people are interesting, although their

lives may have been quite insignificant and commonplace. Kropotkin’s

life is both great and interesting.

In this volume will be found a combination of all the elements out of

which an intensely eventful life is composed--idyll and tragedy, drama

and romance.

The childhood in Moscow and in the country, the portraits of his

mother, sister, and teachers, of the old and trusty servants, together

with the many pictures of patriarchal life, are done in such a masterly

way that every heart will be touched by them. The landscapes, the story

of the unusually intense love between the two brothers--all this is

pure idyll.

Side by side there is, unhappily, plenty of sorrow and suffering: the

harshness in the family life, the cruel treatment of the serfs, and the

narrow-mindedness and heartlessness which are the ruling stars of men’s

destinies.

There is variety and there are dramatic catastrophes: life at Court

and life in prison; life in the highest Russian society, by the side

of emperors and grand dukes, and life in poverty, with the working

proletariat, in London and in Switzerland. There are changes of costume

as in a drama; the chief actor having to appear during the day in fine

dress in the Winter Palace, and in the evening in peasant’s clothes

in the suburbs, as a preacher of revolution. And there is, too, the

sensational element that belongs to the novel. Although nobody could

be simpler in tone and style than Kropotkin, nevertheless parts of his

narrative, from the very nature of the events he has to tell, are more

intensely exciting than anything in those novels which aim only at

being sensational. One reads with breathless interest the preparations

for the escape from the hospital of the fortress of St. Paul and St.

Peter, and the bold execution of the plan.

Few men have moved, as Kropotkin did, in all layers of society; few

know all these layers as he does. What a picture! Kropotkin as a little

boy with curled hair, in a fancy-dress costume, standing by the Emperor

Nicholas, or running after the Emperor Alexander as his page, with the

idea of protecting him. And then again--Kropotkin in a terrible prison,

sending away the Grand Duke Nicholas, or listening to the growing

insanity of a peasant who is confined in a cell under his very feet.

He has lived the life of the aristocrat and of the worker; he has been

one of the Emperor’s pages and a poverty-stricken writer; he has lived

the life of the student, the officer, the man of science, the explorer

of unknown lands, the administrator, and the hunted revolutionist.

In exile he has had at times to live upon bread and tea as a Russian

peasant; and he has been exposed to espionage and assassination plots

like a Russian emperor.

Few men have had an equally wide field of experience. Just as Kropotkin

is able, as a geologist, to survey prehistoric evolution for hundreds

of thousands of years past, so too he has assimilated the whole

historical evolution of his own times. To the literary and scientific

education which is won in the study and in the university (such as

the knowledge of languages, belles-lettres, philosophy, and higher

mathematics), he added at an early stage of his life that education

which is gained in the workshop, in the laboratory, and in the open

field--natural science, military science, fortification, knowledge of

mechanical and industrial processes. His intellectual equipment is

universal.

What must this active mind have suffered when he was reduced to the

inactivity of prison life! What a test of endurance and what an

exercise in stoicism! Kropotkin says somewhere that a morally developed

personality must be at the foundation of every organization. That

applies to him. Life has made of him one of the cornerstones for the

building of the future.

The crisis in Kropotkin’s life has two turning points which must be

mentioned.

He approaches his thirtieth year--the decisive year in a man’s life.

With heart and soul he is a man of science; he has made a valuable

scientific discovery. He has found out that the maps of Northern Asia

are incorrect; that not only the old conceptions of the geography

of Asia are wrong, but that the theories of Humboldt are also in

contradiction with the facts. For more than two years he has plunged

into laborious research. Then, suddenly, on a certain day, the true

relations of the facts flash upon him; he understands that the main

lines of structure in Asia are not from north to south or from west

to east, but from the south-west to the north-east. He submits his

discovery to test, he applies it to numerous separated facts, and--it

holds its ground. Thus he knew the joy of scientific revelation in its

highest and purest form; he has felt how elevating is its action on the

mind.

Then comes the crisis. The thought that these joys are the lot of so

few, fills him now with sorrow. He asks himself whether he has the

right to enjoy this knowledge alone--for himself. He feels that there

is a higher duty before him--to do his part in bringing to the mass

of the people the information already gained, rather than to work at

making new discoveries.

For my part I do not think that he was right. With such conceptions

Pasteur would not have been the benefactor of mankind that he has been.

After all, everything, in the long run, is to the benefit of the mass

of the people. I think that a man does the utmost for the well-being

of all when he has given to the world the most intense production of

which he is capable. But this fundamental notion is characteristic of

Kropotkin; it contains his very essence.

And this attitude of mind carries him farther. In Finland, where

he is going to make a new scientific discovery, as he comes to the

idea--which was heresy at that time--that in prehistoric ages all

Northern Europe was buried under ice, he is so much impressed with

compassion for the poor, the suffering, who often know hunger in their

struggle for bread, that he considers it his highest, absolute duty to

become a teacher and helper of the great working and destitute masses.

Soon after that a new world opens before him---the life of the working

classes--and he _learns_ from those whom he intends to _teach_.

Five or six years later this crisis appears in its second phase. It

happens in Switzerland. Already during his first stay there Kropotkin

had abandoned the group of state-socialists, from fear of an economical

despotism, from hatred of centralization, from love for the freedom

of the individual and the commune. Now, however, after his long

imprisonment in Russia, during his second stay amidst the intelligent

workers of West Switzerland, the conception which floated before his

eyes of a new structure of society, more distinctly dawns upon him

in the shape of a society of federated associations, co-operating in

the same way as the railway companies, or the postal departments of

separate countries co-operate. He knows that he cannot dictate to the

future the lines which it will have to follow; he is convinced that

all must grow out of the constructive activity of the masses, but he

compares, for the sake of illustration, the coming structure with the

guilds and the mutual relations which existed in mediæval times, and

were worked out from below. He does not believe in the distinction

between leaders and led; but I must confess that I am old-fashioned

enough to feel pleased when Kropotkin, by a slight inconsistency, says

once in praise of a friend that he was ‘a born leader of men.’

The author describes himself as a Revolutionist, and he is surely quite

right in so doing. But seldom have there been revolutionists so humane

and mild. One feels astounded when, in alluding on one occasion to the

possibility of an armed conflict with the Swiss police, there appears

in his character the fighting instinct which exists in all of us. He

cannot say precisely in this passage whether he and his friends felt a

relief at being spared a fight, or a regret that the fight did not take

place. This expression of feeling stands alone. He has never been an

avenger, but always a martyr.

He does not impose sacrifices upon others; he makes them himself. All

his life he has done it, but in such a way that the sacrifice seems to

have cost him nothing. So little does he make of it. And with all his

energy he is so far from being vindictive, that of a disgusting prison

doctor he only remarks: ‘The less said of him the better.’

He is a revolutionist without emphasis and without emblem. He laughs

at the oaths and ceremonies with which conspirators bind themselves in

dramas and operas. This man is simplicity personified. In character he

will bear comparison with any of the fighters for freedom in all lands.

None have been more disinterested than he, none have loved mankind more

than he does.

But he would not permit me to say in the forefront of his book all the

good that I think of him, and should I say it, my words would outrun

the limits of a reasonable Preface.