When the doors of the Tsar’s study had been shut upon Karazin he still
made an effort to write to the Tsar, taking advantage of the privilege
that had been accorded him. But the Marquis von Posa had no further
interest for the crowned Don Carlos; moreover, Alexander was now
engrossed and absorbed by questions of far different importance, European
questions; he was measuring himself against Napoleon, and blundering into
the war which was to end in our defeat at Austerlitz.
Karazin, too, began to be engrossed with other tasks; like a rejected
lover, he flung himself _par dépit amoureux_ into amazingly many-sided
activities. His ardent, restless brain was filled with ideas floating
by in rapid succession—political plans, agricultural projects, learned
theories, machines, observation, apparatuses, new and improved methods of
distillery and of leather tanning, horticultural experiments with foreign
seeds, easy ways of drying and preserving fruit, and so on. War broke
out: Karazin wrote on the methods of increasing the output of saltpetre,
he preserved meat, and at the same time was engaged in founding stations
for meteorological observations in Russia. He absolutely clearly
formulated in 1808 the scientific needs of that department, which have
not been satisfied to this day, investigated the possibility of utilising
the electricity in the atmosphere, founded a technological society in
Ukraine, looked after his Harkov university, and so on.
But his chief thought, his chief anxiety, the leading note of his life,
lay not in these things. While he was improving distilleries and trying
to utilise the electricity of the atmosphere, Karazin was passionately
watching other events and seeking other means of averting the storm. And
meanwhile time was passing and passing.
Alexander had been reigning now for twenty years; all sorts of things
had happened since, with tears in his eyes, he had read Karazin’s letter
... Tilsit and 1812 ... Moscow and Paris, the Congress of Vienna and St.
Helena. Public opinion, stirred by so many shots and shocks, had moved
forward while the Government had fallen back. Alexander had not carried
out his promises. Dissatisfaction was growing. The people, who had given
so much blood and received in return a manifesto written in Shishkov’s
prose, murmured against the new levy of recruits, the more as there was
talk of a senseless war in support of the Austrian yoke in Italy, of a
repetition of the futile campaign of Suvorov.
The younger men of energy and education looked on sullenly. Karazin saw
it all, but still believed that Alexander could and would prevent the
gathering storm.
At the beginning of 1820 the Tsar forgave Karazin’s father-in-law some
government debt. Karazin asked permission to offer his thanks in person,
but was refused. He wrote a letter to the Tsar, in which among other
things he said:—
‘I am not going to write anything special, but I only beg you, gracious
Sovereign, ask Count Viktor Pavlovitch[105] for the note of some pages
I wrote for him on the 31st of March, apropos of a conversation with
him, and also Prince Vyazemsky for the letter written to him from his
Masalsky estate by the merchant Rogov on the 1st of April, which he
read to me the other day. One cannot without horror see the striking
similarity of the thoughts of a man (so far removed from me in every
respect) with my thoughts and with all that has been filling my soul
continually since the year 1817, when I had the audacity to reveal
the same in my letter from Ukraine to Your Majesty. One cannot help
remembering that just in the same way warnings from the well-disposed
resounded from various parts of France before the coming of the fatal
revolution, and that in just the same way they were neglected! “_Il est
singulier que dans ce siècle de lumières, les souverains ne voient venir
l’orage que quand il éclate_,” Napoleon said to Las Cases[106] on the
Island of St. Helena. Such striking agreement in the views of different
minds that have nothing in common between them deserves attention. There
_must_ be something true in them; and the more so as similar feelings
have been for some time past apparent in private conversations in both
Petersburg and Moscow! It is quite enough if there are grounds for one
half, for a fraction of what is thought!’
‘... Time,’ he says in a note given at the Tsar’s command to V. P.
Kotchubey—‘time will strengthen the weakened framework of our State; time
will replace the _religious_ reverence for the Throne by another founded
on the laws....
‘Of course it may linger on a year or two, perhaps more, but it is
just for that reason I am writing now, it is for that reason that I am
disregarding myself entirely. My fate is bound to be either exile beyond
Lake Baikal, while there is still power to exile, or death with a weapon
in my hand defending to the last the entrance to the Tsar’s apartments.
Only then I shall write no more.’
Karazin beseeches the Tsar not to believe the sayings with which the
governors meet him that ‘All is well, all is as before....’
‘A great change,’ he says, ‘has taken place and is daily taking place in
men’s minds....’
In the Semyonovsky mutiny, in which he justifies the soldiers and admires
them, he sees distinctly ‘the first step of the ladder which the spirit
of the age is raising for us.’