I
This was, then, the terrible fortress where so much of the true
strength of Russia had perished during the last two centuries, and the
very name of which is uttered in St. Petersburg in a hushed voice.
Here Peter I. tortured his son Alexis and killed him with his own hand;
here the Princess Tarakánova was kept in a cell which filled with water
during an inundation--the rats climbing upon her to save themselves
from drowning; here the terrible Minich tortured his enemies, and
Catherine II. buried alive those who objected to her having murdered
her husband. And from the times of Peter I., for a hundred and seventy
years, the annals of this mass of stone which rises from the Nevá in
front of the Winter Palace were annals of murder and torture, of men
buried alive, condemned to a slow death, or driven to insanity in the
loneliness of the dark and damp dungeons.
Here the Decembrists, who were the first to unfurl in Russia the banner
of republican rule and the abolition of serfdom, underwent their
first experiences of martyrdom, and traces of them may still be found
in the Russian Bastille. Here were imprisoned the poets Ryléeff and
Shevchénko, Dostoévsky, Bakúnin, Chernyshévsky, Písareff, and so many
others of our best contemporary writers. Here Karakózoff was tortured
and hanged.
Here, somewhere in the Alexis ravelin, was still kept Necháieff, who
was given up to Russia by Switzerland as a common-law criminal, but was
treated as a dangerous political prisoner, and would never again see
the light. In the same ravelin were also two or three men whom, rumour
said, Alexander II., because of what they knew, and what others must
not know, about some palace mystery, ordered to be imprisoned for life.
One of them, adorned with a long grey beard, was lately seen by an
acquaintance of mine in the mysterious fortress.
All these shadows rose before my imagination. But my thoughts fixed
especially on Bakúnin, who, though he had been shut up in an Austrian
fortress, after 1848, for two years chained to the wall, and then
was handed over to Nicholas I. who kept him in this fortress for six
years longer, came out, when the Iron Tsar’s death released him after
an eight years’ imprisonment, fresher and fuller of vigour than his
comrades who had remained at liberty. ‘He has lived it through,’ I said
to myself, ‘and I must, too; I will _not_ succumb here!’
My first movement was to approach the window, which was placed so
high that I could hardly reach it with my lifted hand. It was a long,
low opening, cut in a wall five feet thick, and protected by an iron
grating and a double iron window-frame. At a distance of a dozen yards
from this window I saw the outer wall of the fortress, of immense
thickness, on the top of which I could make out a grey sentry-box. Only
by looking upward could I perceive a bit of the sky.
I made a minute inspection of the room where I had now to spend no one
could say how many years. From the position of the high chimney of the
Mint I guessed that I was in the south-western corner of the fortress,
in a bastion overlooking the Nevá. The building in which I was
incarcerated, however, was not the bastion itself, but what is called
in a fortification a _reduit_; that is, an inner two-storied pentagonal
piece of masonry which rises a little higher than the walls of the
bastion, and is meant to contain two tiers of guns. This room of mine
was a casemate destined for a big gun, and the window was an embrasure.
The rays of the sun could never penetrate it; even in summer they are
lost in the thickness of the wall. The room held an iron bed, a small
oak table, and an oak stool. The floor was covered with painted felt,
and the walls with yellow paper. However, in order to deaden sounds,
the paper was not put on the wall itself; it was pasted upon canvas,
and behind the canvas I discovered a wire grating, back of which was a
layer of felt; only beyond the felt could I reach the stone wall. At
the inner side of the room there was a washstand, and a thick oak door
in which I made out a locked opening, for passing food through, and
a little slit protected by glass and by a shutter from the outside:
this was the ‘Judas,’ through which the prisoner could be spied upon
at every moment. The sentry who stood in the passage frequently lifted
the shutter and looked inside--his boots squeaking as he crept toward
the door. I tried to speak to him; then the eye which I could see
through the slit assumed an expression of terror, and the shutter was
immediately let down, only to be furtively opened a minute or two
later; but I could not get a word of response from the sentry.
Absolute silence reigned all round. I dragged my stool to the window
and looked upon the little bit of sky that I could see; I tried to
catch some sound from the Nevá, or from the town on the opposite side
of the river; but I could not. This dead silence began to oppress me,
and I tried to sing, slowly at first, and louder and louder afterwards.
‘Have I then to say farewell to love for ever’--I caught myself singing
from my favourite opera of Glinka, ‘Ruslán and Ludmíla.’
‘Sir, do not sing, please,’ a bass voice resounded through the
food-window in my door.
‘I _will_ sing, and I shall.’
‘You may not.’
‘I will sing nevertheless.’
Then came the governor, who tried to persuade me that I must not sing,
as it would have to be reported to the commander of the fortress, and
so on.
‘But my throat will become blocked and my lungs become useless if I do
not speak and cannot sing,’ I tried to argue.
‘You had better try to sing in a lower tone, more or less to yourself,’
said the old governor in a supplicatory manner.
But all this was useless. A few days later I had lost all desire to
sing. I tried to do it on principle, but it was of no avail.
‘The main thing,’ I said to myself, ‘is to preserve my physical vigour.
I _will_ not fall ill. Let me imagine myself compelled to spend a
couple of years in a hut in the far north, during an arctic expedition.
I will take plenty of exercise, practise gymnastics, and not let
myself be broken down by my surroundings. Ten steps from one corner
to the other is already something. If I repeat them one hundred and
fifty times, I shall have walked one verst’ (two-thirds of a mile). I
determined to walk every day seven versts--about five miles: two versts
in the morning, two before dinner, two after dinner, and one before
going to sleep. ‘If I put on the table ten cigarettes, and move one of
them each time that I pass the table, I shall easily count the three
hundred times that I must walk up and down. I must walk rapidly, but
turn slowly in the corner to avoid becoming giddy, and turn each time
a different way. Then twice a day I shall practise gymnastics with my
heavy stool.’ I lifted it by one leg, holding it at arm’s length. I
turned it like a wheel, and soon learned to throw it from one hand to
the other, over my head, behind my back, and across my legs.
A few hours after I had been brought into the prison the governor came
to offer me some books, and among them was an old acquaintance and
friend of mine, the first volume of George Lewes’s ‘Physiology,’ in a
Russian translation; but the second volume, which I especially wanted
to read again, was missing. I asked, of course, to have paper, pen,
and ink, but was absolutely refused. Pen and ink are never allowed in
the fortress, unless special permission is obtained from the Emperor
himself. I suffered very much from this forced inactivity, and began
to compose in my imagination a series of novels for popular reading,
taken from Russian history--something like Eugène Sue’s ‘Mystères du
Peuple.’ I made up the plot, the descriptions, the dialogues, and tried
to commit the whole to memory from the beginning to the end. One can
easily imagine how exhausting such a work would have been if I had had
to continue it for more than two or three months.
But my brother Alexander obtained pen and ink for me. One day I was
asked to enter a four-wheeled cab, in company with the same speechless
Georgian gendarme officer of whom I have spoken before. I was taken to
the Third Section, where I was allowed an interview with my brother, in
the presence of two gendarme officers.
Alexander was at Zürich when I was arrested. From early youth he had
longed to go abroad, where men think as they like, read what they
like, and openly express their thoughts. Russian life was hateful to
him. Veracity--absolute veracity--and the most open-hearted frankness
were the dominating features of his character; he could not bear
deceit or even conceit in any form. The absence of free speech in
Russia, the Russian readiness to submit to oppression, the veiled
words to which our writers resort, were utterly repulsive to his
frank and open nature. Soon after my return from Western Europe he
removed to Switzerland, and decided to settle there. After he had lost
his two children--one from cholera in a few hours, and another from
consumption--St. Petersburg became doubly repugnant to him.
My brother did not take part in our work of agitation. He did not
believe in the possibility of a popular uprising, and he conceived
a revolution only as the action of a representative body, like the
National Assembly of France in 1789. As for the socialist agitation, he
understood it when it is conducted by means of public meetings--not as
the secret, minute work of personal propaganda which we were carrying
on. In England he would have sided with John Bright or with the
Chartists. If he had been in Paris during the uprising of June 1848, he
would surely have fought with the last handful of workers behind the
last barricade; but in the preparatory period he would have followed
Louis Blanc or Ledru Rollin.
In Switzerland he settled at Zürich, and his sympathies went with the
moderate wing of the International. Socialist on principle, he carried
out his principles in his most frugal and laborious mode of living,
toiling on passionately at his great scientific work--the main purpose
of his life--a work which was to be a nineteenth-century counter-part
to the famous _Tableau de la Nature_ of the Encyclopædists. He
soon became a close personal friend of the old refugee, Colonel P.
L. Lavróff, with whom he had very much in common in his Kantian
philosophical views.
When he learned about my arrest, Alexander immediately left
everything--the work of his life, the life itself of freedom which was
as necessary for him as free air is necessary for a bird--and returned
to St. Petersburg, which he disliked, only to help me through my
imprisonment.
We were both very much affected at this interview. My brother was
extremely excited. He hated the very sight of the blue uniforms of the
gendarmes--those executioners of all independent thought in Russia--and
expressed his feeling frankly in their presence. As for me, the sight
of him at St. Petersburg filled me with the most dismal apprehensions.
I was happy to see his honest face, his eyes full of love, and to hear
that I should see them once a month; and yet I wished him hundreds of
miles away from that place to which he came free that day, but to which
he would inevitably be brought some night under an escort of gendarmes.
‘Why did you come into the lion’s den? Go back at once!’ my whole inner
self cried; and yet I knew that he would remain as long as I was in
prison.
He understood better than any one else that inactivity would kill me,
and had already made application to obtain for me the permission of
resuming work. The Geographical Society wanted me to finish my book on
the glacial period, and my brother turned the whole scientific world
in St. Petersburg upside down to move it to support his application.
The Academy of Sciences was interested in the matter; and finally, two
or three months after my imprisonment, the governor entered my cell
and announced to me that I was permitted by the Emperor to complete
my report to the Geographical Society, and that I should be allowed
pen and ink for that purpose. ‘Till sunset only,’ he added. Sunset, at
St. Petersburg, is at three in the afternoon, in winter time; but that
could not be helped. ‘Till sunset’ were the words used by Alexander II.
when he granted the permission.