My brother Alexander was at that time at Moscow, in a corps of cadets,
and we maintained a lively correspondence. As long as I stayed at home
this was impossible, because our father considered it his prerogative
to read all letters addressed to our house, and he would soon have put
an end to any but a commonplace correspondence. Now we were free to
discuss in our letters whatever we liked. The only difficulty was to
get money for stamps; but we soon learned to write in so small a hand
that we could convey an incredible amount of matter in each letter.
Alexander, whose handwriting was beautiful, contrived to get four
printed pages on one single page of notepaper, and his microscopic
lines were as legible as the best small type print. It is a pity that
these letters, which he kept as precious relics, have disappeared.
The State police, during one of their raids, robbed him even of these
treasures.
Our first letters were mostly about the little details of my new
surroundings, but our correspondence soon took a more serious
character. My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society
he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in,
and complained of feeling ‘a dull pain in the brain’--a physical pain,
as he used to say--when he was with people who cared only for small
talk. He was very much in advance of me in his intellectual development
and he urged me forward, raising new scientific and philosophical
questions one after another, and advising me what to read or to study.
What a happiness it was for me to have such a brother!--a brother who,
moreover, loved me passionately. To him I owe the best part of my
development.
Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in
his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote
from memory. ‘Read poetry,’ he wrote: ‘poetry makes men better.’ How
often, in my after life, I realized the truth of this remark of his!
Read poetry: it makes men better! He himself was a poet, and had a
wonderful facility for writing most musical verses; indeed, I think it
a great pity that he abandoned poetry. But the reaction against art,
which arose among the Russian youth in the early sixties, and which
Turguéneff has depicted in ‘Bazároff’ (_Fathers and Sons_), induced him
to look upon his verses with contempt, and to plunge headlong into the
natural sciences. I must say, however, that my favourite poet was none
of those whom his poetical gift, his musical ear, and his philosophical
turn of mind made him like best. His favourite Russian poet was
Venevítinoff, while mine was Nekrásoff, whose verses were very often
unmusical, but appealed most to my heart by their sympathy for ‘the
down-trodden and ill-treated.’
‘One must have a set purpose in his life,’ he wrote me once. ‘Without
an aim, without a purpose, life is not life.’ And he advised me to get
a purpose in my life worth living for. I was too young then to find
one; but something undetermined, vague, ‘good’ altogether, already rose
under that appeal, even though I could not say what that ‘good’ would
be.
Our father gave us very little spending money, and I never had any to
buy a single book; but if Alexander got a few roubles from some aunt,
he never spent a penny of it for pleasure, but bought a book and sent
it to me. He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. ‘One must
have some question,’ he wrote, ‘addressed to the book one is going to
read.’ However, I did not then appreciate this remark, and cannot think
now without amazement of the number of books, often of a quite special
character, which I read, in all branches, but particularly in the
domain of history. I did not waste my time upon French novels, since
Alexander, years before, had characterized them in one blunt sentence:
‘They are stupid and full of bad language.’
The great questions concerning the conception we should form of the
universe--our _Weltanschauung_, as the Germans say--were, of course,
the dominant subjects in our correspondence. In our childhood we had
never been religious. We were taken to church; but in a Russian church,
in a small parish or in a village, the solemn attitude of the people
is far more impressive than the Mass itself. Of all that I ever had
heard in church only two things had impressed me: the twelve passages
from the Gospels, relative to the sufferings of the Christ, which are
read in Russia at the night service on the eve of Good Friday, and the
short prayer condemning the spirit of domination, which is recited
during the Great Lent, and is really beautiful by reason of its simple,
unpretentious words and feeling, Púshkin has rendered it into Russian
verse.
Later on, at St. Petersburg, I went several times to a Roman Catholic
church, but the theatrical character of the service and the absence of
real feeling in it shocked me, the more so when I saw there with what
simple faith some retired Polish soldier or a peasant woman would pray
in a remote corner. I also went to a Protestant church; but coming out
of it I caught myself murmuring Goethe’s words:---
But you will never link hearts together
Unless the linking springs from your own heart.
Alexander, in the meantime, had embraced with his usual passion the
Lutheran faith. He had read Michelet’s book on Servetus, and had
worked out for himself a religion on the lines of that great fighter.
He studied with enthusiasm the Augsburg declaration, which he copied
out and sent me, and our letters now became full of discussions about
grace, and of texts from the apostles Paul and James. I followed my
brother, but theological discussions did not deeply interest me. Since
I had recovered from the typhoid fever I had taken to quite different
reading.
Our sister Hélène, who was now married, was at St. Petersburg, and
every Saturday night I went to visit her. Her husband had a good
library, in which the French philosophers of the last century and the
modern French historians were well represented, and I plunged into
them. Such books were prohibited in Russia, and evidently could not
be taken to school; so I spent most of the night, every Saturday, in
reading the works of the encyclopædists, the ‘Philosophical Dictionary’
of Voltaire, the writings of the Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius,
and so on. The infinite immensity of the universe, the greatness of
nature, its poetry, its ever throbbing life, impressed me more and
more; and that never-ceasing life and its harmonies gave me the ecstasy
of admiration which the young soul thirsts for, while my favourite
poets supplied me with an expression in words of that awakening love of
mankind and faith in its progress which make the best part of youth and
impress man for a life.
Alexander, by this time, had gradually come to a Kantian agnosticism,
and the ‘relativity of perceptions,’ ‘perceptions in time and space,
and time only,’ and so on, filled pages and pages in our letters, the
writing of which became more and more microscopical as the subjects
under discussion grew in importance. But neither then nor later on,
when we used to spend hours and hours in discussing Kant’s philosophy,
could my brother convert me to become a disciple of the Königsberg
philosopher.
Natural sciences--that is, mathematics, physics, and astronomy--were
my chief studies. In the year 1858, before Darwin had brought out
his immortal work, a professor of zoology at the Moscow University,
Roulier, published three lectures on transformism, and my brother took
up at once his ideas concerning the variability of species. He was not
satisfied, however, with approximate proofs only, and began to study
a number of special books on heredity and the like, communicating to
me in his letters the main facts, as well as his ideas and his doubts.
The appearance of the ‘Origin of Species’ did not settle his doubts
on several special points, but only raised new questions and gave him
the impulse for further studies. We afterward discussed--and that
discussion lasted for many years--various questions relative to the
origin of variations, their chances of being transmitted and being
accentuated; in short, those questions which have been raised quite
lately in the Weismann-Spencer controversy, in Galton’s researches, and
in the works of the modern Neo-Lamarckians. Owing to his philosophical
and critical mind, Alexander had noticed at once the fundamental
importance of these questions for the theory of variability of species,
even though they were so often overlooked then by many naturalists.
I must also mention a temporary excursion into the domain of political
economy. In the years 1858 and 1859 everyone in Russia spoke of
political economy; lectures on free trade and protective duties
attracted crowds of people, and my brother, who was not yet absorbed
by the variability of species, took a lively though temporary interest
in economical matters, sending me for reading the ‘Political Economy’
of Jean Baptiste Say. I read a few chapters only: tariffs and banking
operations did not interest me in the least; but Alexander took up
these matters so passionately that he even wrote letters to our
stepmother, trying to interest her in the intricacies of the customs
duties. Later on, in Siberia, as we were re-reading some of the letters
of that period, we laughed like children when we fell upon one of his
epistles in which he complained of our stepmother’s incapacity to be
moved even by such burning questions, and raged against a greengrocer
whom he had caught in the street, and who, ‘would you believe it,’ he
wrote with signs of exclamation, ‘although he was a tradesman, affected
a pig-headed indifference to tariff questions!’
* * * * *
Every summer about one-half of the pages were taken to a camp at
Peterhof. The lower forms, however, were dispensed from joining the
camp, and I spent the first two summers at Nikólskoye. To leave the
school, to take the train to Moscow, and there to meet Alexander was
such a happy prospect that I used to count the days that had to pass
till that glorious one should arrive. But on one occasion a great
disappointment awaited me at Moscow. Alexander had not passed his
examinations, and was left for another year in the same form. He was,
in fact, too young to enter the special classes; but our father was
very angry with him, nevertheless, and would not permit us to see each
other. I felt very sad. We were not children any more, and had so much
to say to each other. I tried to obtain permission to go to our aunt
Sulíma, at whose house I might meet Alexander, but it was absolutely
refused. After our father remarried we were never allowed to see our
mother’s relations.
That spring our Moscow house was full of guests. Every night the
reception-rooms were flooded with lights, the band played, the
confectioner was busy making ices and pastry, and card-playing went on
in the great hall till a late hour. I strolled aimlessly about in the
brilliantly illuminated rooms, and felt unhappy.
One night, after ten, a servant beckoned me, telling me to come out to
the entrance hall. I went. ‘Come to the coachmen’s house,’ the old
major-domo Frol whispered to me. ‘Alexander Alexéievich is here.’
I dashed across the yard, up the flight of steps leading to the
coachmen’s house, and into a wide, half-dark room, where, at the
immense dining-table of the servants, I saw Alexander.
‘Sásha, dear, how did you come?’ and in a moment we rushed into each
other’s arms, hugging each other and unable to speak from emotion.
‘Hush, hush! they may overhear you,’ said the servants’ cook,
Praskóvia, wiping away her tears with her apron. ‘Poor orphans! If your
mother were only alive----’
Old Frol stood, his head deeply bent, his eyes also twinkling.
‘Look here, Pétya, not a word to anyone; to no one,’ he said, while
Praskóvia placed on the table an earthenware jar full of porridge for
Alexander.
He, glowing with health, in his cadet uniform, already had begun to
talk about all sorts of matters, while he rapidly emptied the porridge
pot. I could hardly make him tell me how he came there at such a late
hour. We lived then near the Smolénsky boulevard, within a stone’s
throw of the house where our mother died, and the corps of cadets was
at the opposite outskirts of Moscow, full five miles away.
He had made a doll out of bedclothes, and had put it in his bed, under
the blankets; then he went to the tower, descended from a window, came
out unnoticed, and walked the whole distance.
‘Were you not afraid at night in the deserted fields round your corps?’
I asked.
‘What had I to fear? Only lots of dogs were upon me; I had teased them
myself. To-morrow I shall take my sword with me.’
The coachmen and other servants came in and out; they sighed as
they looked at us, and took seats at a distance, along the walls,
exchanging words in a subdued tone so as not to disturb us; while we
two, in each other’s arms, sat there till midnight, talking about
nebulæ and Laplace’s hypothesis, the structure of matter, the struggles
of the papacy under Boniface VIII. with the imperial power, and so on.
From time to time one of the servants would hurriedly run in, saying,
‘Pétinka, go and show thyself in the hall; they may ask for thee.’
I implored Sásha not to come next night; but he came, nevertheless--not
without having had a scrimmage with the dogs, against whom he had taken
his sword. I responded with feverish haste, when, earlier than the
day before, I was called once more to the coachmen’s house. Alexander
had made part of the journey in a cab. The previous night, one of the
servants had brought him what he had got from the card-players and
asked him to take it. He took some small coin to hire a cab, and so he
came earlier than on his first visit.
He intended to come next night, too, but for some reason it would
have been dangerous for the servants, and we decided to part till the
autumn. A short ‘official’ note made me understand next day that his
nocturnal escapades had passed unnoticed. How terrible would have been
the punishment, if they had been discovered. It is awful to think of
it: flogging before the corps till he was carried away unconscious on
a sheet, and then degradation to a soldiers’ sons’ battalion--anything
was possible, in those times.
What our servants would have suffered for hiding us, if information
of the affair had reached our father’s ears, would have been equally
terrible; but they knew how to keep secrets and not to betray one
another. They all knew of the visits of Alexander, but none of them
whispered a word to anyone of the family. They and I were the only ones
in the house who ever knew anything about it.