‘I was so excited yesterday that I did not say all I wanted, but confined
myself to a mere expression of gratitude in the name of _coming_ Russia,
no less persecuted than Poland; in the name of the Russia that is dying
in the fortresses and mines and living in the consciousness of the
awakening people with their ideal of the indissoluble connection of Land
and Freedom, and in the minority that is persecuted for having given
expression to this instinct of the people.
‘Our far-away friends will hear with joy your words of sympathy; they
need them; rarely are garlands flung upon their agonies; the shadow of
the crimes that are being committed in Poland falls upon us all.
‘In reality I do not regret that I added nothing to my words of
gratitude. What could I add? A toast to Italy? But was not our whole
gathering in honour of Italy? What I was feeling could hardly have been
put into such a speech. I looked at you both, listened to you with a
youthful feeling of devotion no longer appropriate to my age, and seeing
how you, the two great leaders of the peoples, greeted the rise of
dawning Russia, I blessed you under our modest roof.
‘I owe to you the best day of my winter, a day of untroubled serenity,
and for that I embrace you once more with ardent gratitude, with deep
love, and boundless respect.
‘_April 18, 1864_, ELMFIELD HOUSE, TEDDINGTON.’
[25] As though Garibaldi had asked for money for himself! I need hardly
say he refused the dowry given by the English aristocracy on such absurd
conditions, to the extreme mortification of the police newspapers which
had been reckoning up the shillings and pence he would be carrying away
to Caprera.—(_Author’s Note._)
[26] French Minister for foreign affairs under Napoleon the Third.
[27] In Pushkin’s poem ‘The Fountain of Bahtchisaray’ the lines occur:—
‘I know how to use a dagger,
I was born near the Caucasus.’—(_Translator’s Notes._)
[28] An Italian village where in 1859 the Austrians were defeated by the
French and Piedmontese.—(_Translator’s Note._)
[29] That is, of the Secret Police.—(_Translator’s Note._)
[30] A Russian town on the Roumanian frontier.—(_Translator’s Note._)
[31] Extremely hard-working young men often end by becoming followers of
Petrashev; they might be described as the top class of our historical
development in education.—(_Author’s Note._)
[32] A district in Bukovina settled by Russian raskolniks.—(_Translator’s
Note._)
[33] And this was the awful Tulcea agency with connections with the
revolution all over the world, inciting the villages with money from
Mazzini’s funds, a menacing danger two years after it had ceased to
exist, and even now flourishing in the literature of the detectives and
of Katkov’s Police News!—(_Author’s Note._)
[34] Their vanity was not so great as it was touchy and irritable,
and above all, unrestrained in words. They could conceal neither
their envy nor a special kind of irritable insistence on respectful
recognition of the position they ascribed to themselves, at the same
time that they looked down on everything and were perpetually jeering
at one another—which was why their friendships never lasted more than a
month.—(_Author’s Note._)
[35] At that very time in Petersburg and Moscow, and even in Kazan and
Harkov, there were circles being formed among the university youth who
devoted themselves in earnest to the study of science, especially among
the medical students. They worked honestly and conscientiously, but, cut
off from active participation in the questions of the day, they were not
forced to leave Russia and we scarcely knew anything of them.—(_Author’s
Note._)
[36] A character in Gogol’s _Dead Souls_.—(_Translator’s Note._)
[37] Under this pseudonym Bakunin published articles on the Reaction in
Germany in the _Jahrbücher_ of 1842, which were brought out under the
editorship of Ruge.—(_Translator’s Note._)
[38] ‘Tell Caussidière,’ I said in jest to his friends, ‘that the
difference between Bakunin and him is that Caussidière, too, is a
splendid fellow, but it would be better to shoot him the day before
the revolution.’ Later on in London, in the year 1854, I reminded him
of this. The prefect in exile merely smote with his huge fist upon his
mighty chest with the force with which piles are driven into the earth,
and said: ‘I carry Bakunin’s image here, here.’—(_Author’s Note._)
[39] The word means ‘thimble’ in Russian.—(_Translator’s Note._)
[40] Herzen’s daughter by Madame Tutchkov-Ogaryov, born
1858.—(_Translator’s Note._)
[41] Bakunin received no dowry with his wife.—(_Author’s Note._)
[42] The country between the lower Niemen and the Windau, the inhabitants
of which are closely related to the Lithuanians, and from the fourteenth
century were included in Lithuania.—(_Translator’s Note._)
[43] ‘Slava’ is the Russian for ‘glory.’—(_Translator’s Note._)
[44] ‘I have come to ask your advice,’ a youthful Georgian, who looked
like a young tiger, said to me one day, ‘I want to give Skaryatin a
thrashing.’
‘No doubt you know that when Charles V. was in Rome, et cetera....’ ‘I
know, I know; for God’s sake don’t tell me!’