OUR FRIENDS
THE MOSCOW CIRCLE—TABLE TALK—THE WESTERNERS (BOTKIN, RYEDKIN, KRYUKOV,
AND YEVGENY KORSH)—ON THE GRAVE OF A FRIEND
I
With our visit to Pokrovskoe and the quiet summer we spent there begins
the harmonious, mature, and active part of our Moscow life, which lasted
till my father’s death and perhaps until we went abroad.
Our nerves, overstrained in Petersburg and Novgorod, had recovered, our
spiritual storms had subsided. The agonising analysis of ourselves and of
each other, the useless reopening of recent wounds, the incessant going
back to the same painful subjects was over; and our shaken faith in our
own infallibility gave a truer and more earnest character to our lives.
My article _On a Drama_ was the last word of the sickness we had passed
through.
On the external side, the only restriction we suffered from was police
supervision; I cannot say it was very oppressive, but the unpleasant
feeling of a Damocles’ cane wielded by the local police-constable was
very distasteful.
Our new friends received us warmly, far more warmly than two years
before. Foremost among them stood Granovsky, he took the leading place
in those five years. Ogaryov was almost all the time abroad. Granovsky
filled his place for us. To him we are indebted for the happiest moments
of that period. There was a wonderful power of love in his nature. With
many I was more in agreement in opinion, but to him I was nearer—deep
down, somewhere in the soul.
Granovsky and all of us were very busy, all hard at work, one lecturing
in the university, another contributing to reviews and magazines,
another studying Russian history; the first beginnings of all that was
done afterwards date from this period.
By now we were far from being children; in 1842 I was thirty; we knew
only too well where our work was leading us, but we went on. We went
along our chosen path, no longer rashly but deliberately, with the calm,
even step to which experience and family life had trained us. This did
not mean that we had grown old, no, we were still young, and that is
how it was that some coming from the university lecture-room, others
publishing articles or editing newspapers were every day in danger of
being attested, dismissed, exiled.
Such a circle of talented, cultured, many-sided, and pure-hearted people
I have met nowhere since, neither in the highest ranks of the political
nor on the summits of the literary and aristocratic world. Yet I have
travelled a great deal, I have lived everywhere and with all sorts of
people. I have been brought by the revolution into contact with all that
was foremost in culture, and I am honestly bound to say the same thing.
The finished, self-contained personality of the Western European, which
surprises us at first by its specialisation, surprises us later by its
one-sidedness. He is always satisfied with himself, his self-sufficiency
offends us. He never forgets his personal views, his position is
altogether cramped and his morals only appropriate to paltry surroundings.
I do not imagine that men were always like this here; the Western
European is not in a normal condition, _he is moulting_. Unsuccessful
revolutions have turned inwards, none of them have transformed him,
but each has left its trace and confused his ideas, while the natural
historical process has left in the foreground the slimy stratum of
the petty-bourgeois, under which the fossilised aristocratic classes
are buried and the rising masses submerged. Petty-bourgeoisdom is
incompatible with the Russian character—and thank God for it!
Whether it is due to our carelessness, or our lack of moral stability
and of definite work, or our youth in the matter of culture, or the
aristocratic character of our bringing-up, any way we are on the one
hand far more artists in life, and on the other far simpler than Western
Europeans; we have not their specialised knowledge, but on the other hand
we are far more many-sided than they. Persons of culture are not common
amongst us, but their culture is richer, wider in its scope, free from
hedges and barriers. It is quite different in Western Europe.
Talking to the nicest people here[57] you immediately reach
contradictions where there is nothing in common, and it is quite
impossible to convince. In this stubborn obstinacy and instinctive lack
of comprehension you seem to be knocking your head against the limits of
a completed world.
Our theoretical differences, on the contrary, brought more living
interest into our lives, more craving for active exchange of opinions,
kept our minds more vigorous and helped us to progress; we grew in this
friction against each other, and in reality were the stronger for this
co-operation which Proudhon has so superbly described in the sphere of
mechanical labour.
I love to dwell on that time of work in unison, of a full, throbbing
pulse, of harmonious order and manly struggle, on those years in which we
were young for the last time!...
Our little circle met frequently, sometimes at the house of one,
sometimes of another, most often at mine. Together with chat, jests,
supper, and wine, there was the most active, the most rapid exchange of
ideas, of news, and of knowledge; every one handed on what he had read
or learned. Views came out in argument and what had been worked out by
each became the property of all. There was nothing of significance in any
sphere of knowledge, in any literature, or in any art, which did not come
under the notice of some one of us, and was not at once communicated to
all.
It was just this character in our gatherings that dull pedants and
tedious scholars failed to understand. They saw the meat and the bottles,
but they saw nothing else. Feasting goes with fullness of life, ascetic
people are usually dry, egoistic people, we were not monks, we lived on
all sides, and, sitting round the table, gained more in culture and did
no less than those fasting toilers who grub in the backyards of science.
I will not have anything said against you, my friends, nor against that
bright, splendid time; I think of it with more than love, almost with
envy. We were not like the emaciated monks of Zurbaran,[58] we did not
weep over the sins of the world, we only sympathised with its sufferings,
and were ready with a smile for anything, and not depressed with
forebodings of our sacrifices in the future. Ascetics who are for ever
austere have always excited my suspicion; if they are not pretending,
either their mind or their stomach is out of order.
‘You’re right, my friend, you’re right....’
Yes, you were right, Botkin—and far more so than Plato—when you sometimes
taught us, not in gardens and porticos (it is too cold in Russia without
a roof on) but round the friendly dinner-table, that a man may find
‘pantheistic enjoyment’ alike in contemplating the dance of the sea-waves
and of Spanish maidens, in listening to the songs of Schubert and in
sniffing the fragrance of turkey stuffed with truffles.
Listening to your sage words, I appreciated for the first time the
democratic spirit of our language which talks of ‘hearing an odour,’
putting smell on a level with sound.
It was not for nothing that you left your lodging in Moroseika and
learned in Paris to respect the culinary art, and from the banks of the
Guadalquivir the religion not only of feet, but of calves, supreme and
sovereign, _soberana pantorrilla_!
Yet Ryedkin was in Spain—but what good did he get from it? He went to
that land of historical lawlessness for the sake of making juridical
commentaries on Puchta[59] and Savigny.[60] Instead of looking at the
fandango and the bolero, he looked at the rising in Barcelona (which
ended exactly in the same way as every _cachucha_—that is in nothing)
and talked so much about it afterwards that the curator Strogonov shook
his head and began looking at Ryedkin’s lame leg and muttering something
about barricades, as though doubtful whether the radical jurist had
really hurt his leg falling out of the diligence on to the pavement in
loyal Dresden.
‘What disrespect for learning! You know I don’t like such jokes,’ says
Ryedkin severely, not in the least vexed.
‘That m—m—m—ay be so,’ observes Korsh, stammering, ‘but why is it you so
identify yourself with learning that one can’t make fun of you without
insulting it?’
‘Come now, there will be no end to it,’ says Ryedkin, and with the
determination of a man who has read the whole of Roteck[61] attacks the
soup, pelted lightly with Kryukov’s jests—elegantly modelled on an
antique pattern.
But the attention of all has already abandoned them; it is bent upon the
sturgeon, which is expounded by Schtchepkin himself, who has studied the
flesh of contemporary fish more thoroughly than Agassiz did the bones of
antediluvian ones. Botkin glances at the sturgeon, screws up his eyes
and gently shakes his head, not from side to side but backwards and
forwards; only Ketscher, indifferent on principle to the splendours of
this world, lights his pipe and speaks of something else. Do not be angry
with these lines of nonsense; I will not go on with them, they dropped
almost unconsciously from my pen when I thought of our Moscow dinners;
for a minute I forgot both the impossibility of repeating jokes and the
fact that these sketches are living only for me, and for few, very few,
survivors. I feel terrified when I think how short a time ago the path
seemed so long, so very long before us all!...
And now those who have gone rise up before my eyes, not with the cloud
of death about them, but young, full of strength. One of them, like
Stankevitch, died far away from home—I mean E. P. Galahov.
How we used to laugh at his stories! It was not merry laughter, though,
but more like that which Gogol sometimes excites. Jests and witticisms
flashed from Kryukov and from Yevgeny Korsh like sparkling wine,
from their exuberance. There was nothing bright in Galahov’s humour,
it was the humour of a man out of harmony with himself and with his
surroundings, thirsting for peace and serenity, but with no great hope of
finding them.
Having been brought up in the aristocratic fashion, Galahov very early
got into the Izmailovsky Regiment and also left it very early, and then
set to work to educate himself in earnest. With a vigorous, but more
impulsive and passionate than dialectic mind, he tried with petulant
impatience to wring out the truth, and the practical truth too,
immediately applicable to life. He did not notice, as the greater number
of Frenchmen do not, that truth can only be reached by method and remains
inseparable from it; truth as a result is but a truism, a commonplace.
Galahov sought not with modest self-abasement what was to be found, but
sought for a truth that was to be comforting, and it is no wonder that
it eluded his capricious pursuit. He was vexed and angry. People of that
type cannot live in negation, in analysis; dissection is hateful to them,
they seek for something ready-made, complete, creative. What could our
age, and in the reign of Nicholas too, give Galahov?
He rushed hither and thither, knocking at every door, even at the
Catholic Church, but his living soul was revolted by the gloomy twilight,
the damp, grave-like, prison atmosphere of her comfortless crypts.
Leaving the old Catholicism of the Jesuits and the new of Buchez,[62] he
was beginning to approach philosophy, but her cold, inhospitable portals
repelled him, and for several years he found rest in Fourierism.
The ready-made organisation, the obligatory regulations and almost
barrack-like discipline of the phalanstery, though the critical may
find little to like in it, has undoubtedly great attractions for those
tired people who beg almost with tears for Truth to take them in her
arms and lull them to sleep. Fourierism offers a definite aim—work, and
work in common. Men are very often ready to give up their own will for
the sake of being rid of hesitation and uncertainty. This occurs over
and over again in the most ordinary daily affairs. ‘Would you like to
go to the theatre to-day, or drive out of town?’ ‘As you like,’ answers
the other; they don’t know what to do and wait with impatience for some
circumstance to decide for them. This was the groundwork upon which
Cabet’s[63] settlement, the communistic convent, the Stauropigalian and
Icarian communities were formed in America. The restless French workmen,
educated by two revolutions and two reactions, began at last to be
exhausted and to be assailed by doubts, frightened by them; they were
glad of something new, renounced their aimless freedom, and submitted in
Icaria to a strict discipline and subordination which was certainly no
less severe than the monastic rule of the Benedictines.
Galahov was too cultured and independent to be completely lost in
Fourierism, but for some years it attracted him. When I met him in Paris
in 1847 the feeling he cherished for the phalanstery was more like the
tenderness we feel for the school at which we have studied, for the house
in which we have spent some peaceful years, than that which believers
have for their church.
In Paris Galahov was even more charming and original than in Moscow. His
aristocratic character, his generous, chivalrous ideas were wounded at
every step; he looked at the petty-bourgeois world surrounding him there
with the disgust with which fastidious people look at something dirty.
Neither the French nor the Germans impressed him, and he rather looked
down on many of the heroes of the day—with extreme simplicity pointing
out their petty triviality, mercenary views, and insolent conceit. In his
disdain for these people he even displayed a national haughtiness, really
quite foreign to him. Speaking, for instance, of a man whom he greatly
disliked, he would by his expression, by his smile and the screwing up
of his eyes, compress into the one word ‘German’ a whole biography, a
whole physiology, a regular series of the petty, coarse, clumsy failings
especially characteristic of the German race.
Like all nervous people Galahov was very variable; he was sometimes
silent and dreamy, but _par saccades_ would talk freely and with heat,
would carry his listeners away by serious subjects on which he had felt
deeply, and sometimes made them roar with laughter at the unexpected
freakishness of phrase or startling aptness of the pictures he sketched
in two or three strokes.
To repeat the things he said is almost impossible. I will recall as
best I can one of his stories, and that in a brief extract. In Paris
conversation somehow turned on the unpleasant feeling with which we cross
our frontier. Galahov began describing how he had travelled for the last
time to his estate; it was a _chef-d’œuvre_.
‘I drive up to the frontier; rain, sleet, a log painted black and white
lying across the road; we wait, they won’t let us through. I look
out: a Cossack with a pike on horseback comes riding down upon us.
“Your passport, please.” I give it to him and say, “I’ll come to the
guard-house with you, brother, it is very wet here.” “You can’t go there,
sir.” “Why so?” “Kindly wait.” I turned towards the Austrian guard-house,
but that was no good either: another Cossack with the face of a Chinaman
seemed to spring out of the earth. “You can’t go there, sir!” What had
happened? “Kindly wait!” And the rain was pouring and pouring.... All
at once a sergeant shouts from the guard-house: “Lift it up!” There is
a clanking of chains and the striped guillotine begins rising; we drive
under it, the chains clank again and the beam descends. There, I thought,
I am caught. In the guard-house a military clerk is copying out my
passport: “Is this yourself?” he asks. I promptly give him a _zwanziger_.
Then the sergeant comes in; he says nothing, but I make haste and give
him a _zwanziger_. “Everything is correct, you can go on to the Customs.”
I get in, drive off ... only I still fancy they are pursuing me. I
look round—a Cossack with a pike—trot, trot, after me.... “What is it,
brother?” “I am escorting your honour to the Customs.” At the Customs a
clerk in spectacles looks through my books. I give him a _thaler_ and
say, “You needn’t trouble, the books are all scientific, medical!” “To be
sure they are: hey! porter, lock up the box again!” Again a _zwanziger_.
‘They let me go at last. I take a _troika_, we drive past endless fields;
suddenly there is a glow in the distance, it grows redder and redder ...
a fire. “Look,” I say to the driver, “how dreadful!” “It is no matter,”
he answers, “it must be a cottage or a barn burning. Come, come, look
alive, get on!” Two hours later the sky is red on the other side; this
time I do not even ask, comforted by the reflection that it is a hut or a
barn on fire.
‘I came to Moscow from the country in Lent. The snow had almost melted,
the sledge-runners grated on the cobbles, the street lamps were dimly
reflected in the dark pools, and the trace-horse flung up the frozen
mud in large clods straight into one’s face. And what is very queer, as
soon as the spring comes and there are four or five fine days, clouds of
dust appear instead of the mud; the police-master coughs, and standing
anxiously on his droshky points with dissatisfaction at it, while the
policemen bustle about and scatter powdered brick by way of laying the
dust!’
Galahov was extremely absent-minded, and in him absent-mindedness was as
charming a defect as stuttering was in Yevgeny Korsh; sometimes he was
a little vexed, but as a rule he laughed himself at the extraordinary
mistakes into which he was continually falling.
Madame H—— once invited him to an evening party. Galahov went with us
to hear ‘Linda di Chamonix’; after the opera he went to Chevalier’s, and
after spending an hour and a half there drove home, changed his clothes,
and went off to Madame H——’s. There was a candle burning in the vestibule
and some baggage was lying about. He went into the dining-room—there was
no one there; he went into the drawing-room, there he found Madame H——’s
husband, who had just come from Penza and was still in his travelling
clothes. He looked with surprise at Galahov, who inquired what sort of
a journey he had had and quietly sat down in an armchair. He said that
the roads were very bad and that he was very tired. ‘And where is Marya
Dimitryevna?’ asked Galahov. ‘She has been asleep for hours.’ ‘Asleep?
Why, is it so late?’ he asked, beginning to suspect the truth. ‘Four
o’clock,’ answered H——. ‘Four o’clock!’ repeated Galahov. ‘Excuse me, I
only wanted to congratulate you on your safe arrival.’
Another time he came to an evening party at the same house; all the men
were in swallow-tails and the ladies in evening dress. Galahov either
had not received an invitation or had forgotten it, anyway he entered
the drawing-room in his overcoat; he sat down, took a candle, lighted
a cigar, and began talking without observing the visitors or their
costumes. Two hours later he asked me: ‘Are you going anywhere?’ ‘No.’
‘But you are in evening dress?’ I burst out laughing. ‘Ough, how absurd!’
muttered Galahov, snatched up his hat and went away.
When my son was five years old, Galahov brought him for the Christmas
tree a wax doll as tall as the child himself. Galahov sat the doll at the
table and awaited the effect of the surprise. When the Christmas tree was
ready and the doors were opened, Sasha, breathless with joy, moved slowly
about, casting fascinated eyes on the tinsel and candles, but suddenly he
stopped—stood stock still, flushed crimson, and with a roar rushed back.
‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ we all asked; bathed in bitter
tears he only repeated: ‘There is a strange boy there, I don’t want him,
I don’t want him.’ He saw in Galahov’s doll a rival, an _alter ego_, and
was deeply mortified at it, but Galahov was even more deeply mortified;
he caught up the unlucky doll, went home, and for a long time disliked
speaking about it.
The last time I met him was in the autumn of 1847 in Nice. The Italian
movement was working up just then: he was carried away by it. In spite
of his ironical attitude he kept romantic hopes and still eagerly ran
after convictions. Our long conversations, our arguments led me to
think of recording them. _From the Other Shore_ begins with one of our
conversations. I read the beginning of it to Galahov; he was then very
ill, visibly wasting away and on the brink of the grave. Not long before
his death he sent me in Paris a long letter full of interest. It is a
pity that I have not got it, I would have published extracts from it.
From his grave I pass to another, fresher and even more dear.
II
ON THE GRAVE OF A FRIEND
‘_Generous and pure in spirit with a heart_
_Tender as a caress.... And friendship with him_
_Lives in my memory like a fairy tale._’
... In 1840 when I was passing through Moscow I met Granovsky[64] for
the first time. He had only just come back from foreign parts and been
appointed to the Chair of History in the university. He attracted me by
his noble, thoughtful appearance, his melancholy eyes under overhanging
brows, and mournfully good-natured smile; in those days his hair was
long, and he was wearing a dark blue Berlin overcoat of a peculiar cut,
with velvet revers and cloth fastenings. His features, dress, dark
hair—all gave so much grace and elegance to his figure as he stood at the
dividing line between youth and a richly developing manhood, that even a
man not easily enthusiastic could not have remained indifferent to him.
I have always respected beauty, and looked upon it as a talent and a
strength.
I had but a passing glimpse of him then, and carried away with me to
Vladimir a noble image, and a conviction, perhaps founded on it, that
he would one day be my friend. My presentiment did not deceive me. Two
years later, after I had been in Petersburg and, at the end of my second
exile, returned to live in Moscow, a close and deep friendship was formed
between us.
Granovsky was gifted with an amazing tact of the heart. His whole nature
was so remote from the irritability of diffidence, from pretentiousness,
so clear, so candid, that he was extraordinarily easy to get on with.
He did not oppress me with his friendship, and his love was deep and
equally free from jealous exactingness and unconcerned indifference. I
do not remember that Granovsky ever touched roughly or awkwardly upon
those delicate ‘capillary tissues’ that shrink from light and noise and
exist in every man who has really lived. That was why one was not afraid
to speak to him of the things of which it is hard to speak even with
those most near and dear, whom one trusts completely though some scarcely
audible chords in them are not tuned to the same pitch.
In contact with his loving, serene, and indulgent spirit all the angular
discords vanished, the voice of over-sensitive vanity was almost mute.
He was a uniting link for many things and many people among us, and
often brought together in their sympathy with him whole circles mutually
hostile, and friends on the brink of separation. Granovsky and Byelinsky,
completely unlike each other, were among the noblest and most remarkable
figures of our circle.
Towards the end of the oppressive period from which Russia is now
emerging, when everything was crushed to the earth, when only the voice
of official infamy dared make itself heard, when literature had been
brought to a standstill, and instead of humane learning a theory of
slavery was taught, when the censorship shook its head over the parables
of Christ and blotted out Krylov’s _Fables_—in those days, if one saw
Granovsky on the lecture platform one’s spirit was comforted. ‘All is not
lost yet if he still goes on speaking,’ every one thought, and breathed
more freely.
And yet Granovsky was not a fighter like Byelinsky, nor a dialectician
like Bakunin. His strength lay not in keen polemic nor in bold
denunciation, but just in positive moral influence, in the absolute
confidence which he inspired, in the artistic completeness of his nature,
the calm serenity of his spirit, the purity of his character, and in his
constant and profound protest against the existing order in Russia. Not
only his words were effective but also his silence; his thought, denied
free utterance, came out to plainly in his face that it was hard not to
read it, especially in a land in which a narrow despotism has trained
us all to guess and to divine the hidden word. In the gloomy years of
persecution from 1848 down to the death of Nicholas, Granovsky succeeded,
not only in keeping his chair in the university, but also his independent
views—and that because a feminine delicacy, a softness of expression,
and the reconciling power of which we have spoken were harmoniously
combined with chivalrous courage and the complete devotion of passionate
conviction.
Granovsky reminds me of a number of the reflectively calm preachers and
revolutionaries of the reformation—not those fierce, turbulent spirits
who ‘feel their life fully in their wroth’ like Luther, but the serene,
mild reformers who put the crown of glory on their heads as simply as the
crown of thorns. Their gentleness nothing can ruffle, they go forward
with firm step but with no loud tramping of feet; judges fear these men,
they are ill at ease with them; their smile of reconciliation leaves a
sting in their torturer’s conscience.
Such was Coligny himself, such were the best of the Girondists; and
certainly Granovsky in all the harmonious moulding of his soul, in his
romantic bent, in his dislike of extremes, might more readily have
been a Huguenot or a Girondist than an Anabaptist or a follower of the
Montagnards.
Granovsky’s influence on the university, and on the whole of the younger
generation, was immense, and outlived him; he left a long streak of light
behind him. I look with peculiar tenderness at the books dedicated to his
memory by his former students, at the warm, enthusiastic lines about him
in their prefaces and in magazine articles, at the good, youthful desire
to connect their new work with the spirit of that friend, to touch gently
on his grave as they begin, to claim their intellectual pedigree from him.
Granovsky’s development had been different from ours. Educated in Oryol,
he went to the Petersburg University. As he received but little money
from his father he was obliged from a very early age to write ‘to order’
for the papers. He and his friend Yevgeny Korsh, whom he met in his
university days and with whom he maintained the closest friendship up to
his death, used to work for Senkovsky, who needed fresh energies and
inexperienced lads in order to transform their conscientious work into
the effervescing wine of ‘The Library of Good Reading.’
There was no tempestuous period of passion and dissipation in his life.
When he had taken his degree the Institute of Pedagogy sent him to
Germany.
In Berlin Granovsky met Stankevitch, and that was the most important
event of his youth.
Any one who knew them both would understand how immediately Granovsky and
Stankevitch must have rushed at each other. There was in them so much
that was similar, in character, in tendency, in age ... and each bore
within him the fatal seed of premature death. But mere resemblance is not
enough to give men this close intimacy, this enduring sense of kinship.
Only that love is deep and lasting in which each completes the other: for
active love difference is as necessary as resemblance; without it the
feeling is lifeless and passive and passes into a mere habit.
There was a vast difference in the abilities of the two young men and in
the direction of their energies. Stankevitch, from early years trained
by the Hegelian dialectic, had a conspicuous talent for speculative
thought, and if he brought the aesthetic element into his thinking,
he certainly brought philosophy as much into aesthetics. Granovsky,
who had deep sympathy with the intellectual tendencies of the day, had
neither love nor talent for abstract thought. His choice of history as
his chief pursuit showed a clear understanding of his own vocation. He
would never have made either a metaphysician or a remarkable naturalist.
He could never have endured the passionless impartiality of logic, nor
the passionless objectivity of nature; he could not have renounced
everything for the sake of thought, nor have renounced himself for the
sake of observation; the doings of men, on the contrary, interested him
keenly. And, indeed, is not history the same thought and the same nature
expressed in a different form? Granovsky thought in history, learned from
history, and later on made propaganda through history, while Stankevitch
in a natural and poetic way communicated to him, not only the theory of
contemporary learning but also its method.
Pedants who estimate the value of thought by the sweat and labour it has
cost will doubt this.... But, we would ask them, what about Proudhon
and Byelinsky? Had not they a better grasp even of Hegel’s method than
all the scholastics who studied it until they went bald and wrinkled?
And yet neither of them knew German, neither of them had read one of
Hegel’s works, nor one of the dissertations of his followers of the left
or right wing, but had only talked sometimes about his method with his
disciples.... Granovsky’s life in Berlin with Stankevitch was, to judge
from the stories of the one and the letters of the other, one of the
most radiant periods of his existence, in which the exuberance of youth,
of energy, of the first passionate impulses, of fun and irony without
malice, went hand in hand with earnest intellectual work, all warmed and
fostered by a deep, ardent friendship such as is only found in youth.
Two years later they were separated. Granovsky went to Moscow to take
the Chair of History at the university; Stankevitch went to Italy for
his health and died of consumption. The death of Stankevitch was a
great shock to Granovsky. Long afterwards in my presence he received a
medallion of his dead friend; I have rarely seen such quiet, speechless,
overwhelming sorrow.
It happened soon after his marriage. The harmony that surrounded his new
life with peace and calm was overcast with mourning. It was long before
the traces of it passed away—indeed, I do not know whether they ever
passed entirely.
His wife was very young and hardly yet formed; she retained that peculiar
element of youthful awkwardness, even of the apathy which is not
infrequently met with in young girls with flaxen hair, especially if they
are of German descent. These natures, often gifted and strong, cannot
readily come to full consciousness when they awaken. The shock that had
awakened the young girl had been so tender and so free from pain and
conflict, had come so early that she had scarcely noticed it. Her blood
still flowed slowly and serenely.
Granovsky’s love for her was a quiet, gentle affection, rather deep and
tender than passionate. There was something serene and touchingly calm in
the atmosphere of their youthful household. It did the heart good to see
at times beside Granovsky engrossed in his work the tall, willowy figure
of his silent companion, deeply in love and happy. Looking at them, I
used to think of the serene chaste families of the early Protestants who
fearlessly sang forbidden psalms, ready to go hand in hand, calmly and
firmly, to face the inquisitor.
They seemed to me like brother and sister, the more so as they had no
children.
We quickly became friends and saw each other almost every day; we sat
through the nights until dawn talking of one thing and another.... It
is in those wasted hours and through them that people grow together
inseparably and irrevocably.
It is dreadful and painful to me to think that later on Granovsky and
I were for a long time at variance over theoretical convictions. To us
they were not something extraneous but the real foundation of our lives.
But I hasten to add that if time proved that we could think differently,
could fail to understand and could wound each other, time has also proved
with redoubled force later on that we could neither part nor cease to be
friends, that even death could not divide us.
It is true that, much later, a streak of bitterness was added to a
theoretical difference between Granovsky and Ogaryov, who loved each
other ardently and deeply, but we shall see that it too was, though late,
completely effaced.
As for our disputes Granovsky himself put an end to them; he concluded
a letter from Moscow to me in Geneva on August 25th, 1849, with the
following words. With pride and reverence I repeat them: ‘What was best
and strongest in my soul has gone into my affection for you two (that
is Ogaryov and me). There is in it something of passion which set me
weeping in 1846 and blaming myself for being unable to break a tie which
apparently could not last. Almost with despair I discovered that you were
bound fast to my soul with threads which I could not cut without tearing
away the living flesh. This interval has not been profitless to me. I
have come out of it victorious over the _worse side_ of myself. _Of the
romanticism for which you blamed me not a trace is left._ On the other
hand, all that was romantic in my very nature has gone into my personal
attachments. Do you remember my letter about your _Krupov_? It was
written on a night that I well remember. A black shroud dropped off my
soul, your image rose up before me in all its brightness, and I stretched
out my hand to you in Paris as lightly and lovingly as I held it out in
the happy holy minutes of our life in Moscow. It is not your talent only
that had so great an effect on me. That play brought all of you back to
me with a rush. Once you wounded me by saying: “Don’t build anything on
the personal, believe only in the universal,” while I always laid so much
stress on the personal. But for me personal and universal are blended in
you, that is why I love you so warmly and completely.’
Let these lines be remembered when my account of our difference is
read....
At the end of 1843 I published my articles on ‘Dilettantism in Learning.’
Their success was a source of childlike pleasure to Granovsky. He used
to go from house to house with _Notes of the Fatherland_, used to read
them aloud himself with comments, and was seriously vexed if anybody did
not like them. After that it was my lot to see Granovsky’s success, and
a success of a very different order. I am speaking of his first public
lectures on the ‘Mediaeval History of France and England.’
‘Granovsky’s lectures,’ Tchaadayev said to me as we came away from
the third or fourth, out of a lecture-hall packed to overflowing with
ladies and all the aristocratic society of Moscow, ‘are of historical
significance.’ I entirely agreed with him. Granovsky turned the
lecture-hall into a drawing-room, a place for meeting, for social
intercourse of the _beau monde_. To do this he did not deck out history
in lace and gauze, quite the contrary; his language was severe, extremely
grave, full of force, daring, and poetry, which roused his hearers and
had a powerful effect on them. His boldness passed without provoking
interference, not from any compromises he made but from the mildness
of expression which was natural to him, from the absence of sentences
_à la française_, putting big dots on tiny i’s like the moral after a
fable. As he laid the events of history before his audience, grouping
them artistically, he spoke _in them_ so that the thought unuttered, but
perfectly clear, was the more readily assimilated by his hearers that it
seemed to be their own thought.
The end of the first lecture was the scene of a regular ovation, a thing
unheard of in Moscow University. When at the end, deeply moved, he
thanked the audience, every one leapt up in a sort of delirium, ladies
waved their handkerchiefs, others rushed to the platform, pressed his
hands, asked for his portrait. I myself saw young men with flushed cheeks
shouting through their tears: ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ There was no possibility
of getting out. Granovsky, pale as a sheet, stood with his arms folded
and his head a little bent; he wanted to say a few words more but could
not. The applause, the shouting, the fury of approbation was redoubled,
the students ranged themselves on each side of the stairs and left the
general public to make a noise in the lecture-room. Granovsky made
his way, exhausted, to the council-room; a few minutes later he was
seen leaving it, and again there was endless applause; he turned with
a deprecating gesture, and, ready to drop with emotion, went into the
office. There I flung myself on his neck and we wept in silence....
Tears as happy flowed down my cheeks when the hero Ciceruacchio,[65]
in the Coliseum, glorified by the last rays of the setting sun,
dedicated his youthful son to the Roman people, who had risen in armed
insurrection, a few months before they both fell shot without trial by
the armed assassins of the graceless youth[66] who wore the crown!
Yes, those were precious tears; the first, born of my faith in Russia,
the second, of my faith in the Revolution!
Where is that Revolution? Where is Granovsky? Gone together with the boy
with the black curls, and the broad-shouldered _popolano_, and the others
who were so near and dear. Faith in Russia is still left. Surely it will
not be my lot to lose that also?
And why did a blind chance carry off Granovsky, that noble worker, that
deeply suffering spirit, on the very threshold of a new age for Russia,
as yet obscure but different, anyway? Why did not fate let him breathe
that fresh air of which we have a breath and which does not smell so
strongly of the torture-chamber and the barracks?
The news of his death was a terrible blow to me. I was on my way to the
railway station at Richmond when the letter was given me. I read it as I
walked along and literally did not at first understand it. I got into the
railway carriage. I did not want to read the letter again, I was afraid
of it. Strangers with stupid, ugly faces kept coming in and going out,
the engine whistled, I looked at it all and thought: ‘But it is absurd!
What? That man in all the flower of his age, he whose smile, whose glance
is before my eyes now—he no more?...’ I was overcome by a heavy torpor
and I felt horribly cold. In London I met A. Talandier; after greeting
him I said I had a letter with bad news, and as though I had only just
heard it, I could not restrain my tears.
We had had little intercourse in later days, but I needed to know that
there, far away in our native land, that man was living!
Without him Moscow was empty, another tie was snapped!... Shall I alone,
far away from all, ever be able to visit his grave—it has hidden as much
strength, as much of the future, as many thoughts, as much love and life,
as another, not quite unknown to him, which I have visited!
Here I add some lines of mournful reconciliation which are so precious to
me that I have begged them as a gift for our memoirs.
TO A DEAD FRIEND
‘Amid the burial urns and stones
Upon that gloomy Autumn day,
Uneven, damp, and freshly strewn
The new-made grave before me lay.
The gifts of love, the gifts of grief,
Placed by thy pupils’ hands were seen:
Fresh wreaths bestowed with tender care
Of fragrant flowers and foliage green,
Above it, stretching, dark and grim,
Reflecting the Autumnal mood,
The ancient guardians of the graves,
The pine-trees, cold, indifferent, stood.
The river, lapping at the banks
With trackless waves went, flowing, by,
Without a pause, without an end,
On, on,—into eternity.
...
Thy tenderness was lost to me:
For years our lives were spent apart,
And the last greeting from thy lips
I did not hear, to rend my heart.
Our angry silence kept so long
Perchance was bitter grief to thee,
And I was powerless to forget
Thy deep, unmeant offence to me.
My error I could not confess,
We each were sure that we were wronged,
And when I hastened to thy side,
To bare my heart before thee, longed,
That my repentance thou should’st learn
And grant me pardon in return,
It was too late....
Upon that day
In gloomy Autumn did I grieve
Beside thy new-made grave alone,
And could not make myself believe....
And shall I see my friend no more?
And shall thine eyes be closed for aye?
Thy voice be hushed in sorrow’s hour?
Shall no word speed me on my way,
No fond embrace, when I depart?
And will thy loving heart not learn
The true devotion of my heart?
’Tis over now, for ever gone—
The fearful truth I cannot flee,
Some words distracted, vague and wild
Fall from my lips, unmeaningly,
My body trembles like a leaf,
Some words of sad reproach I hear,
With bitter sobs my breast is rent,
My heart is numb with grief and fear,
The blood is freezing in my veins,
Oh, let me breathe! Oh, give me light!
What fearful dream oppresses me?
What frenzied vision haunts my sight?
...
But I survived. Mid work and leisure
From day to day my life I spend,
But in my heart the grief still lingers,
And tears with laughter closely blend.
One souvenir alone is left me:
His picture as he lay at rest,
I gaze upon it: Oh, my brother,
Thine image lives within my breast!
And suddenly the thought arrests me:
’Tis but a passing dream, this pain,
He does but sleep, serenely smiling,
To-morrow he will wake again.
His noble voice, upraised, will newly
The sacred gifts to youth impart,
The spirit free, the faith undaunted,
To stir the mind and fire the heart.
But once again, that sad remembrance ...
The funeral urns, thy new-made bed,
The flowers and foliage strewn upon it,
The grim custodians at its head ...
The river lapping at the banks
With trackless waves, that passes by,
Without a pause, without an end,
On, on—into eternity....’[67]
Granovsky was not persecuted; the lawless cruelty of Nicholas’s agents
halted before his glance of mournful reproach. He died surrounded by the
love of the younger generation, the sympathy of all cultivated Russia,
recognised even by his enemies. Nevertheless I adhere to my expression,
yes, he knew great suffering. Not chains of iron alone wear life away;
in the one letter Tchaadayev wrote to me abroad (July 1851), he speaks of
the way he is perishing, growing feeble and with rapid steps approaching
the end—‘not from the oppression against which men revolt, but from that
which they endure with a touching resignation, and which for that very
reason is even more fatal.’
Before me lie three or four letters which I received from Granovsky in
later years; what a consuming deadly sadness there is in every line!
‘Our position,’ he writes in 1850, ‘grows more insufferable every
day. Every progressive movement in Western Europe is followed by some
repressive measure here. People are being denounced by thousands. They
have twice been getting up a case against me during the last three
months. But what does personal danger matter in comparison with the
universal oppression and suffering? It has been proposed to shut the
universities, but for the present they have confined themselves to the
following measures: they have raised the students’ fees, and diminished
their number by a law according to which no more than three hundred
must be attending a university. In Moscow there are fourteen hundred
university students, so we must expel twelve hundred to have the right
to admit a hundred new ones. The Institute of Nobility is closed; many
institutions are threatened with the same fate, the Lyceum for instance.
Despotism is crying aloud that it cannot make terms with enlightenment.
New programmes have been drawn up for the Cadet Schools. The Jesuits
might envy the military pedagogue who drew up the programme. The priest
is instructed to instil into the cadets that the greatness of Christ
lies pre-eminently in submission to authority. He is depicted as a
model of submission and discipline. The teacher of history is to unmask
the trumpery virtues of the ancient republics and to bring out the
grandeur—not yet grasped by historians—of the Roman Empire, which lacked
but one thing, the hereditary character!...
‘It is enough to drive one mad. It is a blessing for Byelinsky that he
died in time. Many decent people have sunk into despair and look with
blank apathy at what is being done—when will this world fall to pieces?
‘I have made up my mind not to resign, but to wait at my post what the
fates bring me. I can do a little; let them turn me out themselves.
‘... Yesterday the news came of Galahov’s death, and the other day there
was a rumour that you were dead too. When they told me that I almost
burst out laughing. Though after all why shouldn’t you die? It would be
no more stupid than the rest.’
In the autumn of 1853 he writes:
‘My heart aches at the thought of what we were in old days’ (_i.e._, when
I was there) ‘and what we have become now. We drink our wine from old
habit, but there is no gladness in our hearts; only at the thought of you
my spirit renews its youth. My best, most comforting dream now is to see
you once again—and even that is not likely to come true.’
He ends one of his last letters like this: ‘On all sides a low vague
murmur can be heard, but where is there strength? where is there
resistance? It is bitter, brother,—and there is no escape in this life.’
In our North the savage autocracy wears men out quickly. With a pang of
dread I look back—it is like a battlefield, there lie the dead and the
maimed....
Granovsky was not alone, he was one of a group of young professors who
came back from Germany while we were in exile. They did a great deal
for the advancement of the Moscow University. History will not forget
them. Men of conscientious erudition, they were pupils of Hegel, Gantz,
Ritter, and others, just at the period when the dry bones of dialectic
began to be clothed with flesh, when learning ceased to consider itself
antagonistic to life, when Gantz used to come to his lectures not with
an ancient folio in his hand, but with the latest number of a review
from Paris or London. They were trying at that time to solve historical
questions of the day by the dialectic method; it was an impossible task,
but it put the facts in a clearer light.
Our professors brought with them their cherished dreams, their ardent
faith in learning, and in men; they preserved all the fire of youth, and
the lecturer’s chair was for them a sacred lectern from which they were
called to preach the truth. They took their stand in the lecture-room
not as mere professional savants, but as missionaries of the religion of
humanity.
And what has become of that Pleiades of young professors, including the
best of them, Granovsky? Dear Kryukov, brilliant, intelligent, learned,
died at thirty-five. Petcherin, the Hellenistic scholar, struggled and
struggled in the terrible conditions of Russian life, till, unable to
endure it, he went away without aim, without means, ill and shattered, to
foreign lands, wandered homeless and forlorn, became a Jesuit priest and
is burning Protestant Bibles in Ireland. Ryedkin became a secular monk,
serves in the Ministry of Home Affairs, and writes divinely inspired
articles, interspersed with texts. Krylov—but enough. _La toile! La
toile!_