Next day Troshtchinsky announced to the Tsar that he had brought the
author of the letter, that he was a clerk in one of the offices of his
department, called Vassily Nazarovitch Karazin. The Tsar, dismissing
Troshtchinsky, invited Karazin into his study, and as soon as he was
alone with him asked:—
‘You wrote that letter to me?’
‘Pardon, my Sovereign,’ answered Karazin.
‘Let me embrace you for it, I thank you; I should be glad if I had more
subjects like you. Continue always to speak as frankly to me, continue
always to tell me the truth!’
The Tsar pressed him to his heart, and Karazin, sobbing like a child,
flung himself at his feet with the words: ‘I swear that I will always
tell you the truth.’
Alexander made him sit down, had a long conversation with him, bade him
write directly to him, the doors of his study were to be open to him....
‘Als der Marquis weggegangen, empfing ich den Befehl ihn
künftighin unangemeldet vorzulassen.’
Our Marquis von Posa had begun his political career two years before.
At five-and-twenty he had left the army. Well educated, of an unusually
many-sided culture, he said good-bye to the Semyonovsky Regiment in order
to study Russia and devote himself to the exact sciences. This was at
the time when the frenzy of Paul’s reign was at its height. When the
young man had looked into the position of luckless Russia, scourged at
random by her torturer, he was overcome by such horror, such loathing,
such despair, that he made up his mind at all costs to go away to another
country. Foreign passports were forbidden. Karazin could not obtain
permission to go. He determined to get over the frontier without a
passport. As he was crossing the Niemen, he was caught by the dragoons
and brought to Kovno. Karazin’s fate seemed inevitable. He clutched at
the most risky and incredible means of saving himself, and it saved him.
Before the official report had been despatched, he sent on the 14th of
August 1798, by express messenger, the following letter to Paul:—
‘SIRE,—A luckless criminal makes bold to write to Thee, a
criminal against Thy commands, O Sovereign Ruler of Russia,
not against honour, conscience, religion, or the laws of his
country. Deign to listen before condemning. And may one ray of
Thy clear vision be shed upon me before the lightnings of Thy
wrath consume me!
‘I have tried to leave my country, the great land of Thy
sovereign rule; I have transgressed Thy Will, doubly expressed,
that is, for the whole people and for me personally. On the
night of the third of this month, while crossing the Niemen to
Kovno, I was seized by a patrol of the Ekaterininsky Grenadier
Regiment; the official report will reach Thee shortly.
‘No doubt information will be collected about me in St.
Petersburg, where I have spent a short time, and in the
province of Ukraine, where I was born and have my estates. I
make bold to assure Thee beforehand that they will in no wise
prove me guilty. I had no need to take refuge in flight. It
will be the only weapon for my prosecutors.
‘Receive my confession: I wanted to escape from Thy rule,
dreading its cruelty. Many examples, carried by rumour over the
expanse of Thy Empire, in all likelihood exaggerated tenfold by
rumour, terrified my thoughts and my imagination day and night.
I knew of no guilt in myself. In the solitude of my country
life I could have neither opportunity nor occasion to offend
Thee. But even the free turn of my thoughts might be a crime....
‘Now it is in Thy power to punish me—and justify my fears—or
to forgive and make me shed tears of repentance that I have
cherished thoughts so false of a great and merciful Sovereign.’
It was not often Paul’s lot to read such letters. The horror of
his despotism, which had compelled the young man to flee, and the
simple-hearted confession of it, took Paul by surprise. Standing in the
third position of dancing, and leaning with intentional awkwardness on
his cane, Paul said in his husky voice to the _criminal_ who was brought
before him: ‘I will show you, young man, that you are mistaken, that
service in Russia under my rule may not be so bad; in whose department
would you like to serve?’ Though Karazin’s design to escape over the
frontier was no proof of a very strong desire to test the charms of
service under Paul, there was no discussing the question. Karazin
mentioned Troshtchinsky. Paul commanded that he should be given a post
and left in peace.
For Alexander such a man was a treasure, and it seemed as though
he understood that. Karazin’s inexhaustible energy and his broad
scientific education were striking. He was an astronomer and a chemist,
a statistician, a scientific agriculturalist, not a rhetorician like
Karamzin, nor a pedant like Speransky, but a living man, who brought into
every question a quite new point of view and advised exactly what was
needed.
At first the Emperor was continually sending for him and writing notes
to him with his own hand.[91] The intoxication of success increased
Karazin’s energy tenfold; he drew up programmes of reform, among others
the plan of a Ministry of Education, sent in a note concerning the
_eradication of slavery_ (that is, of serfdom), in which he says plainly
that after the nobles had been set free by special decree[92] it was the
peasants’ turn; at the same time, he wrote about elementary schools,
himself composed two catechisms, one secular, one religious, and all at
once, in the very heyday of his favour, asked for leave and was lost in
his native district in Little Russia. It must not be imagined that he
went for a rest to gather fresh energy; such men are never tired. No, he
returned to Petersburg a few weeks later with six hundred and eighteen
thousand roubles which he had wrung by tears and entreaties from the
nobles and merchants of Harkov and Poltava for founding a university
in Harkov. The Tsar wanted to reward him for it, but Karazin refused.
‘I have been on my knees, Sire, before the nobles and the merchants, I
entreated the money from them with tears, and I will not have it said
that I did all that hoping to gain a reward.’ Alexander was pleased with
him and everything went well, but already a hostile force could be
discerned which at times rolled a log under the wheel, at times put on
the brake....
The plan for a Ministry of Education was ratified, but by now it was
not the same; the scheme of the Harkov university was ratified too,
but Karazin’s colossal plans were narrowed down to the commonplace
proportions of a German provincial _Hochschule_. Karazin was dreaming
of a great educational centre, not only for all Little Russia, but also
for the south-eastern Slavs and even the Greeks. He wanted to attract
to it the greatest celebrities of the world of learning. Laplace and
Fichte agreed to go at his invitation, but the Government found them too
expensive.
Scarcely noticing the failure of his success, Karazin summoned from
foreign lands to Harkov at his own expense thirty-two families of
printers, bookbinders and other workmen, visited the palace of the
widowed Empress, wrote for her treatises concerning female education,
articles on pedagogy, and so on. This did not in the least distract
him from carrying out other commissions of Alexander’s and persisting
with other labours he had undertaken. In a little more than two years
he had, in addition to all we have mentioned, already succeeded in
writing constitutions for an academy, for universities and for various
educational institutions, collecting materials for the history of finance
and for the history of medicine in Russia, superintending the collecting
of the first statistical information, and bringing the State archives
into order.
In 1804 Karazin returned from an inquiry which he had been conducting, in
combination with Derzhavin, into the doings of the Governor Lopuhin. The
misdeeds of this man, who was under powerful protection, were laid bare.
Lopuhin was put on his trial. All that remained to do was to reward the
investigators; but by now the rope that had been allowed Marquis von
Posa was almost at its end.
Unaware of anything, he presented himself before the Tsar. The Tsar
received him with knitted brows. Karazin stood as though struck by a
thunderbolt.
‘You brag of my letters?’
‘Sire....’ But the Tsar would not let him answer.
‘Other people know what I have written to you alone and have shown to no
one. You can go.’
Karazin withdrew, and all was over between them. Karazin asked to be
relieved of his duties; the Tsar accepted his request.
And so in 1804 the Emperor did not know that the contents of letters
become known through the Post Office.
One cannot help recalling the melancholy anecdote that used to be told by
N. I. Turgenev, that at some congress Alexander, receiving the petition
of a peasant who had been sold by his owner, asked Turgenev: ‘Surely the
law does not permit the sale of men apart from land, and the sale of
serfs individually?’ Turgenev, who knew the chaotic state of the law on
that subject, tried to take advantage of the question to abolish such
sale of serfs, and of course did not succeed. After the sitting of the
Council at which Turgenev spoke heatedly on the subject, V. P. Kotchubey
went up to him, and, smiling bitterly, said: ‘And do you imagine that
anything will come of this?... What you should rather be surprised at is
that after reigning twenty years the Tsar does not even know that serfs
are sold individually in Russia!’
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