Our father was very proud of the origin of his family, and would point
with solemnity to a piece of parchment which hung on the wall of his
study. It was decorated with our arms--the arms of the principality
of Smolénsk covered with the ermine mantle and the crown of the
Monomáchs--and there was written on it, and certified by the Heraldry
Department, that our family originated with a grandson of Rostisláv
Mstislávich the Bold (a name familiar in Russian history as that of a
Grand Prince of Kíeff), and that our ancestors had been Grand Princes
of Smolénsk.
‘It cost me three hundred roubles to obtain that parchment,’ our father
used to say. Like most people of his generation, he was not much versed
in Russian history, and valued the parchment more for its cost than for
its historical associations.
As a matter of fact, our family is of very ancient origin indeed; but,
like most descendants of Rurik who may be regarded as representative of
the feudal period of Russian history, it was driven into the background
when that period ended, and the Románoffs, enthroned at Moscow, began
the work of consolidating the Russian state. In recent times, none of
the Kropótkins seem to have had any special liking for state functions.
Our great-grandfather and grandfather both retired from the military
service when quite young men, and hastened to return to their family
estates. It must also be said that of these estates the main one,
Urúsovo, situated in the government of Ryazán, on a high hill at the
border of fertile prairies, might tempt any one by the beauty of its
shadowy forests, its winding rivers, and its endless meadows. Our
grandfather was only a lieutenant when he left the service, and retired
to Urúsovo, devoting himself to his estate, and to the purchase of
other estates in the neighbouring provinces.
Probably our generation would have done the same; but our grandfather
married a Princess Gagárin, who belonged to a quite different family.
Her brother was well known as a passionate lover of the stage. He kept
a private theatre of his own, and went so far in his passion as to
marry, to the scandal of all his relations, a serf--the genial actress
Semyónova, who was one of the creators of dramatic art in Russia, and
undoubtedly one of its most sympathetic figures. To the horror of ‘all
Moscow,’ she continued to appear on the stage.
I do not know if our grandmother had the same artistic and literary
tastes as her brother--I remember her when she was already paralyzed
and could speak only in whispers; but it is certain that in the next
generation a leaning toward literature became a characteristic of our
family. One of the sons of the Princess Gagárin was a minor Russian
poet, and issued a book of poems--a fact which my father was ashamed
of and always avoided mentioning; and in our own generation several of
our cousins, as well as my brother and myself, have contributed more or
less to the literature of our period.
Our father was a typical officer of the time of Nicholas I. Not that
he was imbued with a warlike spirit or much in love with camp life;
I doubt whether he spent a single night of his life at a bivouac
fire, or took part in one battle. But under Nicholas I. that was of
quite secondary importance. The true military man of those times was
the officer who was enamoured of the military uniform and utterly
despised all other sorts of attire; whose soldiers were trained to
perform almost superhuman tricks with their legs and rifles (to break
the wood of the rifle into pieces while ‘presenting arms’ was one of
those famous tricks); and who could show on parade a row of soldiers
as perfectly aligned and as motionless as a row of toy-soldiers, ‘Very
good,’ the Grand Duke Mikhael said once of a regiment, after having
kept it for one hour presenting arms--‘only _they breathe_!’ To respond
to the then current conception of a military man was certainly our
father’s ideal.
True, he took part in the Turkish campaign of 1828; but he managed to
remain all the time on the staff of the chief commander; and if we
children, taking advantage of a moment when he was in a particularly
good temper, asked him to tell us something about the war, he had
nothing to tell but of a fierce attack of hundreds of Turkish dogs
which one night assailed him and his faithful servant, Frol, as they
were riding with despatches through an abandoned Turkish village.
They had to use swords to extricate themselves from the hungry beasts.
Bands of Turks would assuredly have better satisfied our imagination,
but we accepted the dogs as a substitute. When, however, pressed by our
questions, our father told us how he had won the cross of Saint Anne
‘for gallantry,’ and the golden sword which he wore, I must confess
we felt really disappointed. His story was decidedly too prosaic. The
officers of the general staff were lodged in a Turkish village, when
it took fire. In a moment the houses were enveloped in flames, and in
one of them a child had been left behind. Its mother uttered despairing
cries. Thereupon, Frol, who always accompanied his master, rushed into
the flames and saved the child. The chief commander, who saw the act,
at once gave father the cross for gallantry.
‘But, father,’ we exclaimed, ‘it was Frol who saved the child!’
‘What of that?’ replied he, in the most naïve way. ‘Was he not my man?
It is all the same.’
He also took some part in the campaign of 1831, during the Polish
Revolution, and in Warsaw he made the acquaintance of, and fell in love
with, the youngest daughter of the commander of an army corps, General
Sulíma. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp, in the Lazienki
palace; the lieutenant-governor, Count Paskiéwich, acting as nuptial
godfather on the bridegroom’s side. ‘But your mother,’ our father used
to add, ‘brought me no fortune whatever.’
Which was true. Her father, Nikolái Semyónovich Sulíma, was not versed
in the art of making a career or a fortune. He must have had in him too
much of the blood of those Cossacks of the Dnyéper, who knew how to
fight the well-equipped, warlike Poles or armies of the Turks, three
times more than themselves, but knew not how to avoid the snares of
the Moscow diplomacy, and, after having fought against the Poles in
the terrible insurrection of 1648, which was the beginning of the end
for the Polish republic, lost all their liberties in falling under the
dominion of the Russian Tsars. One Sulíma was captured by the Poles
and tortured to death at Warsaw, but the other ‘colonels’ of the same
stock only fought the more fiercely on that account, and Poland lost
Little Russia. As to our grandfather, he knew how, with his regiment
of cuirassiers during Napoleon I.’s invasion, to cut his way into a
French infantry square bristling with bayonets, and to recover, after
having been left for dead on the battlefield, with a deep cut in his
head; but he could not become a valet to the favourite of Alexander I.,
the omnipotent Arakchéeff, and was consequently sent into a sort of
honorary exile, first as a governor-general of West Siberia, and later
of East Siberia. In those times such a position was considered more
lucrative than a gold-mine, but our grandfather returned from Siberia
as poor as he went, and left only modest fortunes to his three sons and
three daughters. When I went to Siberia, in 1862, I often heard his
name mentioned with respect. He was almost driven to despair by the
wholesale stealing which went on in those provinces, and which he had
no means to repress.
Our mother was undoubtedly a remarkable woman for the times she
lived in. Many years after her death I discovered, in a corner of a
storeroom of our country house, a mass of papers covered with her firm
but pretty handwriting: diaries in which she wrote with delight of
the scenery of Germany, and spoke of her sorrows and her thirst for
happiness; books which she had filled with Russian verses prohibited by
censorship--among them the beautiful historical ballads of Ryléeff, the
poet, whom Nicholas I. hanged in 1826; other books containing music,
French dramas, verses of Lamartine, and Byron’s poems that she had
copied; and a great number of water-colour paintings.
Tall, slim, adorned with a mass of dark chestnut hair, with dark
brown eyes and a tiny mouth, she looks quite lifelike in a portrait
in oils that was painted _con amore_ by a good artist. Always lively
and often careless, she was fond of dancing, and the peasant women in
our village would tell us how she would admire from a balcony their
ring-dances--slow and full of grace--and how finally she would herself
join in them. She had the nature of an artist. It was at a ball that
she caught the cold that produced the inflammation of the lungs which
brought her to the grave.
All who knew her loved her. The servants worshipped her memory. It was
in her name that Madame Búrman took care of us, and in her name the
Russian nurse bestowed upon us her love. While combing our hair, or
signing us with the cross in our beds, Uliána would often say, ‘And
your mamma must now look upon you from the skies, and shed tears on
seeing you, poor orphans.’ Our whole childhood is irradiated by her
memory. How often in some dark passage, the hand of a servant would
touch Alexander or me with a caress; or a peasant woman, on meeting us
in the fields, would ask, ‘Will you be as good as your mother was? She
took compassion on us. You will, surely.’ ‘Us’ meant, of course, the
serfs. I do not know what would have become of us if we had not found
in our house, amidst the serf servants, that atmosphere of love which
children must have around them. We were her children, we bore likeness
to her, and they lavished their care upon us, sometimes in a touching
form, as will be seen later on.
Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass
away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good
person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is
transmitted again to the children. Is not that an immortality worth
striving for?