When in 1826 Yakubovitch saw Prince Obolensky with a beard and wearing
the greatcoat of a soldier, he could not help exclaiming: ‘Well,
Obolensky, if I am like Stenka Razin, you certainly must be like Vanka
Kain!...[110]’ Then the officer came up, the convicts were put in fetters
and sent to Siberia to penal servitude.
The common people did not recognise the likeness, and dense crowds of
them looked on indifferently in Nizhni-Novgorod as the fettered prisoners
were driven by at the time of the fair. Perhaps they were thinking: ‘Our
poor dears go there _on foot_, but here the gentry are driven by the
gendarmes!’
But on the other side of the Ural Mountains lies a mournful equality
in face of penal servitude and in face of hopeless misery. Everything
is changed. The petty official whom we knew here as a heartless, dirty
bribe-taker, at Irkutsk, in a voice trembling with tears, begs the
exiles to accept a gift of money from him; the rude Cossacks who escort
them leave them in peace and freedom so far as they can; the merchants
entertain them on their way. On the further side of Lake Baikal some of
them stopped at the ford at Verhno-Udinsk; the inhabitants learnt who
they were, and an old man at once sent them by his grandson a basket of
white rolls, while he hobbled out himself to talk to them of the region
beyond the Baikal and to question them about the wide world.
While Prince Obolensky was still at the Usolsky Works, he went out early
in the morning to the place where he had been told to chop down trees.
While he was at work, a man appeared out of the forest, looked at him
intently with a friendly air, and then went on his way. In the evening,
as he was going home, Obolensky met him again; he made signs to him and
pointed to the forest. Next morning he came out from the bushes again
and signed to Obolensky to follow him. Obolensky went. Leading him away
into the forest, he stopped and said to him solemnly: ‘We have long known
of your coming. We have been told of you in the prophecy of Ezekiel. We
have been expecting you, there are many of us here, rely upon us, we will
not betray you!’ It was an exiled Duhobor.
Obolensky had for a long time been fretted by the desire for news of
his own people through Princess Trubetskoy who had come to Irkutsk. He
had no means of forwarding a letter to her. Obolensky asked the help of
the Duhobor. The latter did not waste time in deliberation. ‘At dusk
to-morrow,’ he said, ‘I will be at a certain spot. Bring me the letter,
it shall be taken....’ Obolensky gave him the letter, and the same night
the man set off for Irkutsk; two days later the answer was in Obolensky’s
hands.
What would have happened if he had been caught?
Among comrades one does not count the risk.
The Duhobor paid the people’s debt for Radishtchev.
And so in the forests and mines of Siberia the Russia of Petersburg, of
the landowners, of the officials, of the officers, and the Russia of the
ignorant peasants of the village, both exiled and fettered, both with an
axe in the belt, both leaning on the spade, both wiping away the sweat,
looked each other for the first time in the face, and recognised the
long-forgotten traits of kinship.
It is time that this should take place in the light of day, aloud,
openly, everywhere.
It is time that the nobility, artificially raised into a different
channel by the German engineers, should mingle with the surrounding sea.
Fountains are no marvel now, and Samson’s spout of water from the lion’s
mouth is no wonder beside the infinity of the rippling sea.
The Peterhof fête is over, the court masque in fancy dress is played
out, the lamps are smoking and going out, the fountains have almost run
dry—let us go home.
‘All that is so, but ... but ... would it not be better to raise the
people?’ Perhaps; only it is as well to grasp that the one sure method
of doing so is the method of torture, the method of Peter the Great, of
Biron, of Araktcheyev. That is why the Emperor Alexander accomplished
nothing with the Karazins and the Speranskys—but when he got to
Araktcheyey, he did not give him up again.
There are too many of the common people for it to be really possible to
raise them all to the fourteenth grade,[111] and indeed every people
has a strongly defined physiological character which even foreign
conquest rarely changes. So long as we take the common people as clay
and ourselves as sculptors, and from our sublime height mould it into a
statue _à l’antique_, in the French style, in the English manner, or on
the German model, we shall find nothing in the people except stubborn
indifference or mortifyingly passive obedience.
The pedagogic method of our civilising reformers is a bad one. It starts
from the fundamental principle that we know everything and the peasantry
knows nothing: as though we had taught the peasant his right to the land,
communal ownership, organisation, the artel and the mir.
It goes without saying that we can teach the peasantry a great deal, but
there is a great deal that we have to learn from it and to study in it.
We have theories, absorbed by us and representing the worked-out results
of European culture. To determine which to apply, and how to fit them
to our national existence, it is not enough to translate word for word;
the lexicon is not enough. One must try in the first place to do with it
what social thinkers are trying to do in Western Europe—to make their
institutions comprehensible to them.
The common people cling obstinately to their habits—they believe in them;
but we cling as obstinately to our theories and we believe in them, and,
what is more, imagine that we know them to be true, that the reality
is so. Passing on after a fashion what we have learnt out of books in
conventional language, we see with despair that the common people do not
understand us, and we bewail the stupidity of the people, just as the
schoolboy will blush for poor relations, because they do not know when
to put ‘i’ and when ‘y,’ but never troubles to wonder why two different
letters should be used for the same sound.
Genuinely desirous of the good of the people, we look for remedies for
their ailments in foreign pharmacopœias; there the herbs are foreign, but
it is easier to find them in a book than in the fields. We easily and
consistently become liberals, constitutionalists, democrats, Jacobins,
but not Russians, believers in the common people. All these political
shades one can acquire from books: all that is understood, explained and
written, printed, bound.... But here one must go without a track....
The life of Russia is like the forest in which Dante lost his way, and
the wild beasts that are in it are worse than the Florentine ones, but
there is no Virgil to show the way; there were some Moscow Susanins,[112]
but even those led one to the graveyard instead of to the peasants’
cottage....
Without knowing the people we may oppress the people, we may enslave
them, we may conquer them, but we cannot set them free.
Without the help of the people they will be freed neither by the Tsar
with his clerks, nor the nobility with the Tsar, nor the nobility without
the Tsar.
What is happening now in Russia ought to open the eyes of the blind.
The peasantry have borne the terrible burden of serfdom without ever
acknowledging its lawfulness; seeing the force opposed to them they have
remained dumb. But as soon as others attempted in their own way to set
them free, they passed from murmuring, from passive resistance, almost to
open mutiny, and yet they are obviously better off now. What new signs do
the reformers wait for?
Only the man who when called to action understands the life of the
people while keeping what science has given him; only one who voices its
strivings and founds on the realisation of them his work for the common
cause, will be the bridegroom that is to come.
This lesson is repeated to us alike by the mournful figure of Alexander
with his crown; by Radishtchev with his glass of poison; by Karazin
flying through the Winter Palace like a burning meteor; by Speransky who
shone for years together with a glimmer like moonshine, with no warmth,
no colour; and by our holy martyrs of the Fourteenth of December.
Who will be the predestined saviour?
Will it be an emperor who, renouncing all the traditions of the
Petersburg Government, combines in himself Tsar and Stenka Razin? Will
it be another Pestel? Or another Emelyan Pugatchov, Cossack, Tsar and
heretic? Or will it be a prophet and a peasant, like Antony Bezdninsky?
It is hard to tell: these are details, _des détails_ as the French say.
Who ever it may be, it is our task to meet him with warm welcome!