IX

I well remember the Crimean war. At Moscow it affected people but

little. Of course, in every house lint and bandages for the wounded

were made at evening parties; not much of it, however, reached the

Russian armies, immense quantities being stolen and sold to the armies

of the enemy. My sister Hélène and other young ladies sang patriotic

songs, but the general tone of life in society was hardly influenced by

the great struggle that was going on. In the country, on the contrary,

the war caused much gloominess. The levies of recruits followed one

another rapidly, and we continually heard the peasant women singing

their funereal songs. The Russian people look upon war as a calamity

which is being sent upon them by Providence, and they accepted this

war with a solemnity that contrasted strangely with the levity I saw

elsewhere under similar circumstances. Young though I was, I realized

that feeling of solemn resignation which pervaded our villages.

My brother Nicholas was smitten like many others by the war fever, and

before he had ended his course at the corps he joined the army in the

Caucasus. I never saw him again.

In the autumn of 1854 our family was increased by the arrival of two

sisters of our stepmother. They had had their own house and some

vineyards at Sebastopol, but now they were homeless, and came to stay

with us. When the allies landed in the Crimea, the inhabitants of

Sebastopol were told that they need not be afraid, and had only to stay

where they were; but after the defeat at the Alma, they were ordered to

leave with all haste, as the city would be invested within a few days.

There were few conveyances, and there was no way of moving along the

roads in face of the troops which were marching southward. To hire a

cart was almost impossible, and the ladies, having abandoned all they

had on the road, had a very hard time of it before they reached Moscow.

I soon made friends with the younger of the two sisters, a lady of

about thirty, who used to smoke one cigarette after another, and to

tell me of all the horrors of their journey. She spoke with tears in

her eyes of the beautiful battle-ships which had to be sunk at the

entrance of the harbour of Sebastopol, and she could not understand how

the Russians would be able to defend Sebastopol from the land; there

was no wall even worth speaking of.

I was in my thirteenth year when Nicholas I. died. It was late in the

afternoon of February 18 (March 2), that the policemen distributed in

all the houses of Moscow a bulletin announcing the illness of the Tsar,

and inviting the inhabitants to pray in the churches for his recovery.

At that time he was already dead, and the authorities knew it, as

there was telegraphic communication between Moscow and St. Petersburg;

but not a word having been previously uttered about his illness, they

thought that the people must be gradually prepared for the announcement

of his death. We all went to church and prayed most piously.

Next day, Saturday, the same thing was done, and even on Sunday morning

bulletins about the Tsar’s health were distributed. The news of the

death of Nicholas reached us only about midday, through some servants

who had been to the market. A real terror reigned in our house and in

the houses of our relatives, as the information spread. It was said

that the people in the market behaved in a strange way, showing no

regret, but indulging in dangerous talk. Full-grown people spoke in

whispers, and our stepmother kept repeating, ‘Don’t talk before the

men;’ while the servants whispered among themselves, probably about the

coming ‘freedom.’ The nobles expected at every moment a revolt of the

serfs--a new uprising of Pugachóff.

At St. Petersburg, in the meantime, men of the educated classes, as

they communicated to one another the news, embraced in the streets.

Everyone felt that the end of the war and the end of the terrible

conditions which prevailed under the ‘iron despot’ were near at hand.

Poisoning was talked about, the more so as the Tsar’s body decomposed

very rapidly, but the true reason only gradually leaked out: a too

strong dose of an invigorating medicine that Nicholas had taken.

In the country, during the summer of 1855, the heroic struggle which

was going on in Sebastopol for every yard of ground and every bit

of its dismantled bastions was followed with a solemn interest. A

messenger was sent regularly twice a week from our house to the

district town to get the papers; and on his return, even before he had

dismounted, the papers were taken from his hands and opened. Hélène or

I read them aloud to the family, and the news was at once transmitted

to the servants’ room, and thence to the kitchen, the office, the

priest’s house, and the houses of the peasants. The reports which came

of the last days of Sebastopol, of the awful bombardment, and finally

of the evacuation of the town by our troops were received with tears.

In every country house round about, the loss of Sebastopol was mourned

over with as much grief as the loss of a near relative would have been,

although everyone understood that now the terrible war would soon come

to an end.

X

It was in August 1857, when I was nearly fifteen, that my turn came to

enter the corps of pages and I was taken to St. Petersburg. When I left

home I was still a child; but human character is usually settled in a

definite way at an earlier age than is generally supposed, and it is

evident to me that under my childish appearance I was then very much

what I was to be later on. My tastes, my inclinations, were already

determined.

The first impulse to my intellectual development was given, as I have

said, by my Russian teacher. It is an excellent habit in Russian

families--a habit now, unhappily, on the decline--to have in the house

a student who aids the boys and the girls with their lessons, even when

they are at a gymnasium. For a better assimilation of what they learn

at school, and for a widening of their conceptions about what they

learn, his aid is invaluable. Moreover, he introduces an intellectual

element into the family and becomes an elder brother to the young

people--often something better than an elder brother, because the

student has a certain responsibility for the progress of his pupils;

and as the methods of teaching change rapidly, from one generation to

another, he can assist his pupils much better than the best educated

parents could.

Nikolái Pávlovich Smirnóff had literary tastes. At that time, under

the wild censorship of Nicholas I., many quite inoffensive works by

our best writers could not be published; others were so mutilated as

to deprive many passages in them of any meaning. In the genial comedy

by Griboyédoff, ‘Misfortune from Intelligence,’ which ranks with

the best comedies of Molière, Colonel Skalozúb had to be named ‘Mr.

Skalozúb,’ to the detriment of the sense and even of the verses; for

the representation of a colonel in a comical light would have been

considered an insult to the army. Of so innocent a book as Gógol’s

‘Dead Souls’ the second part was not allowed to appear, nor the first

part to be reprinted, although it had long been out of print. Numerous

verses of Púshkin, Lérmontoff, A. K. Tolstóy, Ryléeff, and other poets

were not permitted to see the light; to say nothing of such verses as

had any political meaning or contained a criticism of the prevailing

conditions. All these circulated in manuscript, and my teacher used to

copy whole books of Gógol and Púshkin for himself and his friends, a

task in which I occasionally helped him. As a true child of Moscow he

was also imbued with the deepest veneration for those of our writers

who lived in Moscow--some of them in the Old Equerries’ Quarter.

He pointed out to me with respect the house of the Countess Saliás

(Eugénie Tour), who was our near neighbour, while the house of the

noted exile Alexander Hérzen always was associated with a certain

mysterious feeling of respect and awe. The house where Gógol lived was

for us an object of deep respect, and though I was not nine when he

died (in 1851), and had read none of his works, I remember well the

sadness his death produced at Moscow. Turguéneff well expressed that

feeling in a note, for which Nicholas I. ordered him to be put under

arrest and sent into exile to his estate.

Pushkin’s great poem, ‘Evghéniy Onyéghin,’ made but little impression

upon me, and I still admire the marvellous simplicity and beauty of his

style in that poem more than its contents. But Gógol’s works, which I

read when I was eleven or twelve, had a powerful effect on my mind, and

my first literary essays were in imitation of his humorous manner. An

historical novel by Zagóskin, ‘Yúriy Miloslávskiy,’ about the times of

the great uprising of 1612, Púshkin’s ‘The Captain’s Daughter,’ dealing

with the Pugachóff uprising, and Dumas’ ‘Queen Marguerite’ awakened

in me a lasting interest in history. As to other French novels, I

have only begun to read them since Daudet and Zola came to the front.

Nekrásoff’s poetry was my favourite from early years: I knew many of

his verses by heart.

Nikolái Pávlovich Smirnóff early began to make me write, and with his

aid I wrote a long ‘History of a Sixpence,’ for which we invented all

sorts of characters, into whose possession the sixpence fell.

My brother Alexander had at that time a much more poetical turn of

mind. He wrote most romantic stories, and began early to make verses,

which he did with wonderful facility and in a most musical and easy

style. If his mind had not subsequently been taken up by natural

history and philosophical studies, he undoubtedly would have become a

poet of mark. In those years his favourite resort for finding poetical

inspiration was the gently sloping roof underneath our window. This

aroused in me a constant desire to tease him. ‘There is the poet

sitting under the chimney-pot, trying to write his verses,’ I used to

say; and the teasing ended in a fierce scrimmage, which brought our

sister Hélène to a state of despair. But Alexander was so devoid of

revengefulness that peace was soon concluded, and we loved each other

immensely. Among boys, scrimmage and love seem to go hand in hand.

I had even then taken to journalism. In my twelfth year I began to

edit a daily journal. Paper was not to be had at will in our house,

and my journal was of a Lilliputian size. As the Crimean war had not

yet broken out, and the only newspaper which my father used to receive

was the Gazette of the Moscow Police, I had not a great choice of

models. As a result my own Gazette consisted merely of short paragraphs

announcing the news of the day: as, ‘Went out to the woods. N. P.

Smirnóff shot two thrushes,’ and the like.

This soon ceased to satisfy me, and in 1855 I started a monthly

review which contained Alexander’s verses, my novelettes, and some

sort of ‘varieties.’ The material existence of this review was fully

guaranteed, for it had plenty of subscribers; that is, the editor

himself and Smirnóff, who regularly paid his subscription, of so

many sheets of paper, even after he had left our house. In return, I

accurately wrote out for my faithful subscriber a second copy.

When Smirnóff left us, and a student of medicine, N. M. Pávloff, took

his place, the latter helped me in my editorial duties. He obtained for

the review a poem by one of his friends, and--still more important--the

introductory lecture on physical geography by one of the Moscow

professors. Of course this had not been printed before: a reproduction

would never have found its way into so serious a publication.

Alexander, I need not say, took a lively interest in the review, and

its renown soon reached the corps of cadets. Some young writers on

the way to fame undertook the publication of a rival. The matter was

serious: in poems and novels we could hold our own; but they had a

‘critic,’ and a ‘critic’ who writes, in connection with the characters

of some new novel, all sorts of things about the conditions of life,

and touches upon a thousand questions which could not be touched upon

anywhere else, makes the soul of a Russian review. They had a critic,

and we had none! Happily enough, the article he wrote for the first

number was shown to my brother. It was rather pretentious and weak, and

Alexander at once wrote an anti-criticism, ridiculing and demolishing

the critic in a violent manner. There was great consternation in the

rival camp when they learned that this anti-criticism would appear

in our next issue; they gave up publishing their review and their

best writers joined our staff. We triumphantly announced the future

‘exclusive collaboration’ of so many distinguished writers.

In August 1857 the review had to be suspended, after nearly two years’

existence. New surroundings and a quite new life were before me. I went

away from home with regret, the more so because the whole distance

between Moscow and St. Petersburg would be between me and Alexander,

and I already considered it a misfortune that I had to enter a military

school.