A POLICE-OFFICER IN THE PART OF A VALET—THE POLICE-MASTER
KOKOSHKIN—‘DISORDER IN ORDER’—DUBBELT ONCE MORE—THE PASSPORT
A few months before my father’s death Count Orlov was appointed to
succeed Benckendorf. I wrote at the time to Olga Alexandrovna to ask
whether she could procure me a passport for abroad or permission on some
pretext or other to visit Petersburg in order to get one for myself.
My old friend answered that the latter was easier to manage, and a few
days later I received from Orlov the ‘Most High’ permission to visit
Petersburg for a short time to arrange my affairs. My father’s illness,
his death, arranging my affairs in reality, and some months spent in
the country delayed me till winter. At the end of November I set off
for Petersburg, having first sent a petition for a passport to the
governor-general. I knew that he could not grant it because I was still
under _strict_ police supervision, all I wanted was that he should send
on the petition to Petersburg.
On the day of my departure I sent in the morning to get a permit from
the police, but instead of a permit a policeman came to say that there
were certain difficulties and that the local police-superintendent
himself would come to me. He did come, and asking me to see him alone
he mysteriously informed me that five years ago I had been forbidden to
visit Petersburg and without the ‘Most High’ orders he could not sign the
permit.
‘That won’t stand in our way,’ I said, laughing, and took the letter out
of my pocket.
The police-superintendent, greatly astonished, read it, asked permission
to show it to the police-master, and two hours later sent me my permit
and the letter.
I must mention that my police-superintendent carried on half the
conversation in extraordinarily polished French. How mischievous it is
for a police-superintendent, or indeed any Russian policeman, to know
French, he had learnt by very bitter experience.
Some years previously a French traveller, the legitimist Chevalier
Preaux, arrived in Moscow from the Caucasus. He had been in Persia and
in Georgia, had seen a great deal, and was so incautious as to criticise
severely the military operations in the Caucasus, and still more severely
the administration of government there. Afraid that Preaux would say the
same thing in Petersburg, the governor-general of the Caucasus prudently
wrote to the Minister of War that Preaux was a very dangerous military
agent of the French government. Preaux was living quite happily in Moscow
and was very well received by Prince D. V. Golitsyn, when suddenly the
latter received orders to send the Frenchman from Moscow to the frontier
accompanied by a police-officer. To do anything so stupid and so rude is
always more difficult to an acquaintance, and so Golitsyn after two days
of hesitation invited Preaux to his house, and beginning with an eloquent
introduction told him at last that reports of some sort about him,
probably from the Caucasus, had reached the Tsar, who had ordered that he
should leave Russia, that they would, however, give him an escort....
Preaux, incensed, observed to Golitsyn that, seeing that the government
had the right to eject him, he was prepared to go, but that he would not
accept an escort, since he did not consider himself a criminal who needed
to be guarded.
Next day when the police-master came to Preaux the latter met him with a
pistol in his hand and told him point-blank that he would not permit a
police-officer to enter his room or his carriage, and that he would send
the bullet through his head if he attempted to enter by force.
Golitsyn was a very decent man, which made it the more difficult for him;
he sent for Veiller, the French consul, to ask his advice. The latter
found a way out of the difficulty; he asked for a police-officer who
spoke French well and promised to present him to Preaux as a traveller
who begged Preaux for a place in his carriage on condition of paying half
the travelling expenses.
From the consul’s first words Preaux guessed what it meant.
‘I don’t sell seats in my carriage,’ he said to the consul.
‘The man will be in despair.’
‘Very well,’ said Preaux, ‘I will take him for nothing, but he must
undertake a few little services in return; he’s not an ill-humoured
fellow I suppose, if he is I will leave him on the road.’
‘The most obliging man in the world; he will be entirely at your
disposition. I thank you on his behalf.’ And the consul galloped off to
Prince Golitsyn to announce his success.
In the evening Preaux and the _bona fide_ traveller set off. Preaux did
not speak all the way; at the first station he went indoors and lay down
on the sofa. ‘Hey,’ he shouted to his companion, ‘come here and take off
my boots.’ ‘Upon my word, what next?’ ‘I tell you, take off my boots,
or I will turn you out on the road; I am not going to keep you.’ The
police-officer took off the boots. ‘Brush them and polish them!’ ‘That’s
really too much!’ ‘Very well, you can stay here.’ The officer polished
the boots.
At the next station there was the same story with his clothes, and so
Preaux went on tormenting him till they reached the frontier. To console
this martyr of the secret service, the Sovereign’s special attention was
drawn to him and in the end he was made a police-superintendent.
The third day after my arrival in Petersburg the house porter came
to ask me from the local police: ‘With what papers had I come to
Petersburg?’ The only paper I had, the decree concerning my retirement
from the service, I had sent to the governor-general with my petition
for a passport. I gave the house-porter my permit, but he came back
with the remark that it was valid for leaving Moscow but not for
entering Petersburg. Then a police-officer arrived with a summons to the
police-master’s office. I went to Kokoshkin’s office, which was lighted
by lamps though it was daytime, and within an hour he arrived. Kokoshkin
more than other persons of the same order was a servant of the Tsar,
a man in favour, ready to do any dirty job, with no distinct aims, no
conscience, no reflection. He served and made his pile as naturally as
birds sing.
Pokrovsky told Nicholas that Kokoshkin was a terrible bribe-taker. ‘Yes,’
answered Nicholas, ‘but I sleep soundly at night knowing that he is
police-master in Petersburg.’
I looked at him while he was talking to other people.... What a battered
old decrepitly dissolute face he had; he was wearing a curled wig which
was glaringly incongruous with his sunken features and wrinkles.
After conversing with some German women in German and with a familiarity
showing that they were old acquaintances, which was evident, too, from
the way the women laughed and whispered, Kokoshkin came up to me, and
looking down asked in a rather gruff voice: ‘Why, are not you forbidden
to enter Petersburg by the “Most High”?’
‘Yes, but I have a permit.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I have it here.’
‘Show it. How’s this? You are using the same permit twice.’
‘Twice?’
‘I remember that you came before.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘And what is your business here?’
‘I have business with Count Orlov.’
‘Have you been to the Count, then?’
‘No, but I have been to the secret police.’
‘Have you seen Dubbelt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I saw Orlov himself yesterday and he told me that he had sent you
no permit.’
‘You have it in your hand.’
‘God knows when that was written, and the time has passed.’
‘It would be strange on my part to come without permission and begin with
a visit to General Dubbelt.’
‘If you don’t want to get into trouble you will kindly go back, and no
later than within the next twenty-four hours.’
‘I was not proposing to remain here long ... but I must wait for Count
Orlov’s answer.’
‘I cannot give you leave to do so, besides Count Orlov is much displeased
at your coming without permission.’
‘Kindly give me my permit and I will go at once to the Count.’
‘It must remain with me.’
‘But it is a letter to me, addressed to me personally, the only document
on the strength of which I am here.’
‘The document will remain with me as a proof that you have been in
Petersburg. I seriously advise you to go to-morrow that nothing worse may
befall you.’
He nodded and went out. Much good it is talking to them!
The old General Tutchkov had a lawsuit with the Treasury. His village
elder undertook some government contract, he did something dishonest and
made away with the money entrusted to him. The court ordered that the
money should be paid by the landowner who had given the village elder the
authorisation. But no authorisation in regard to the undertaking ever had
been given and Tutchkov stated this in his answer. The case was brought
before the Senate, and the Senate again decided:
‘Inasmuch as retired Lieutenant-General Tutchkov gave an authorisation
...’ and so on. To which Tutchkov again answered: ‘Inasmuch as retired
Lieutenant-General Tutchkov gave no authorisation ...’ and so on. A year
passed, again the police appeared with a stern repetition: ‘Inasmuch
as retired Lieutenant-General, etc.,’ and again the old man wrote the
same answer. I don’t know how this interesting case ended. I left Russia
without waiting for the conclusion.
All that is not at all exceptional but quite the normal thing. Kokoshkin
holds in his hands a document of the genuineness of which he has no
doubt, on which there is a number and date so that it can be easily
verified, in which it is written that I am permitted to visit Petersburg,
and says: ‘Since you have come without permission you must go back,’ and
puts the document in his pocket.
Tchaadayev was right indeed when he said of these gentry: ‘What rogues
they all are!’
I went to the Third Section and told Dubbelt what had happened. He roared
with laughter. ‘What a muddle they always make of everything! Kokoshkin
told the Count you had come without permission and the Count said you
were to be sent away, but I explained the position to him afterwards; you
can stay as long as you like. I’ll have the police written to at once.
But now about your petition; the Count does not think it would be of any
use to ask permission for you to go abroad. The Tsar has refused you
twice, the last time it was Count Strogonov who interceded for you; if he
refuses a third time, you won’t get to the waters during this reign, for
certain.’
‘What am I to do?’ I asked in horror, for the idea of travel and freedom
had taken deep root in my heart.
‘Go to Moscow: the Count will write a private letter to the
governor-general telling him that you want to go abroad for the sake of
your wife’s health, assuring him that he knows nothing but what is good
of you, and asking him whether he thinks it would be possible to relieve
you from police supervision. He can make no answer but “yes” to such a
question. We will report to the Tsar the removal of police supervision,
and then you take a passport for yourself like anybody else, and you can
go to any watering-place you like, and good luck to you.’
All this seemed to me extremely complicated, and indeed I fancied it was
a device simply to get rid of me. They could not refuse me point-blank,
it would have brought down upon them the wrath of Olga Alexandrovna, whom
I visited every day. When once I had left Petersburg I could not come
back again; corresponding with these gentry is a difficult business.
I communicated some part of what I was feeling to Dubbelt; he began
frowning, that is, grinning more than ever with his lips and screwing up
his eyes.
‘General,’ I said in conclusion, ‘I do not know, but the fact is I do not
feel certain that Strogonov’s representation reached the Tsar.’
Dubbelt rang the bell and ordered the papers relating to my case to be
brought, and while waiting for them said to me good-naturedly: ‘The Count
and I are suggesting to you the course of proceeding by which we think
you most likely to get your passport; if you have better means at your
disposal, make use of them, you may be sure that we will not hinder you.’
‘Leonty Vassilyevitch is perfectly right,’ observed a sepulchral voice.
I turned round; beside me, looking older and more grey-headed than ever,
stood Sahtynsky, who had received me five years before in the same Third
Section. ‘I advise you to be guided by his opinion if you want to go.’ I
thanked him.
‘And here’s the case,’ said Dubbelt, taking a thick manuscript from the
hands of a clerk (what would I not have given to read the whole of it! In
1850 I saw my ‘dossier’ in Carlier’s office in Paris; it would have been
interesting to compare them). Turning the pages, he handed it to me open;
there was Benckendorf’s entry after Strogonov’s letter petitioning for
permission for me to go for six months to a watering-place in Germany. On
the margin was written in big letters in pencil: ‘Too soon.’ The pencil
marks were glazed over with varnish, and below was written in ink: ‘“Too
soon,” written by the hand of his Imperial Majesty.—Count A. Benckendorf.’
‘Do you believe now?’ asked Dubbelt.
‘Yes, I do,’ I answered, ‘and I believe in your advice so fully that I
will go to-morrow to Moscow.’
‘Well, you can stay and amuse yourself here a little, the police will not
worry you now, and before you go away, look in and I will tell them to
show you the letter to Shtcherbatov. Good-bye. _Bon voyage_, if we don’t
meet again.’
‘A pleasant journey,’ added Sahtynsky.
We parted, as you see, on friendly terms.
On reaching home I found a summons from the superintendent of the Second
Admiralty Police-Station I believe it was. He asked me when I was going.
‘To-morrow evening.’
‘Upon my word, but I believe, I thought ... the general said to-day. His
Excellency will put it off, of course. But will you allow me to make
certain of it?’
‘Oh yes, oh yes; by the way, give me a permit.’
‘I will write it in the police-station and send it to you in two hours’
time. By what diligence are you thinking of going?’
‘The Serapinsky, if I can get a seat.’
‘Very good, and if you do not succeed in getting a seat kindly let us
know.’
‘With pleasure.’
In the evening the policeman turned up again; the superintendent sent to
tell me that he could not give me the permit, and that I must go at eight
o’clock next morning to the chief police-master’s.
What a plague and what a bore! I did not go at eight o’clock, but
in the course of the morning I looked in at the office of the chief
police-master. The police-station superintendent was there; he said to
me: ‘You cannot go away, there is an order from the Third Section.’
‘What has happened?’
‘I don’t know. The general gave orders you were not to be given a permit.’
‘Does the office-manager know?’
‘Of course he knows,’ and he pointed out to me a colonel in a uniform and
wearing a sword sitting at a big table in another room; I asked him what
was the matter.
‘To be sure,’ he said, ‘there was an order concerning you, and here it
is.’ He read it through and handed it to me. Dubbelt wrote that I had a
perfect right to come to Petersburg and could remain as long as I liked.
‘And is that why you won’t let me go? Excuse me, I can’t help laughing;
yesterday the chief police-master was sending me away against my will,
to-day he is keeping me against my will, and all this on the ground that
the document gives me leave to remain as long as I like.’
The absurdity was so evident that even the colonel-manager laughed.
‘But why should I pay for a place in the diligence twice over? Please
tell them to write me a permit.’
‘I cannot, but I will go and inform the general.’
Kokoshkin told them to write me a permit, and as he walked through the
office said to me reproachfully: ‘It’s beyond anything. First you want to
stay, then you want to go; why, you have been told that you can stay.’
I made no answer.
When we had driven out of the city gates in the evening and I saw once
more the endless plain stretching in all directions, I looked at the sky
and vowed with all my heart never to return to that city of the despotism
of blue, green, and variegated police, of official muddle, of flunkeyish
insolence, of gendarme romance, in which the only civil man was Dubbelt,
and he a chief of the secret police.
Shtcherbatov answered Orlov somewhat reluctantly. He had at that time
a secretary who was not a colonel but a pietist, who hated me for my
articles as an ‘atheist and Hegelian.’ I went myself to talk to him. The
pious secretary, in an oily voice and with Christian unction, told me
that the governor-general knew nothing about me, that he did not doubt my
lofty moral qualities, but that he would have to make inquiries of the
head police-master. He wanted to drag the business out; moreover, this
gentleman did not take bribes. In the Russian service disinterested men
are the most terrible of all; the only ones who do not take bribes in all
simplicity are Germans; if a Russian does not take money he will take it
out in something else and be a villain and a terror into the bargain.
Fortunately the head police-master Luzhin gave me a good character.
Ten days later on returning home I stumbled upon a gendarme at my
door. The appearance of a police-officer in Russia is as bad as a tile
falling upon one’s head, and therefore it was not without a particularly
unpleasant feeling that I waited to hear what he had to say to me; he
handed me an envelope. Count Orlov informed me that his Imperial Majesty
commanded that I should be relieved from police supervision. With that I
received the right to a foreign passport.
‘Rejoice with me, for I am free at last!
Free to set forth to foreign lands at will!
But is it not a dream, deceiving me?
Not so! To-morrow come the post-horses,
And then “vom Ort zu Ort” I’ll gallop on,
Paying for passports what the price may be....
Well, I’ll set forth! And then—what shall I find?
I know not! I have faith! And yet—and yet—
God knows alone what still may be my fate....
With fear and doubt I stand before the gate
Of Europe. And my heart is full
Of hope, of troubled shadowy dreams....
I am in doubt, my friend, you see,
I shake my head despondingly....’
OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.[130]
Six or seven sledges accompanied us as far as Tchorny Gryaz. There for
the last time we clinked glasses and parted, sobbing.
It was evening, the covered sledge crunched through the snow ... you
looked mournfully after us but did not guess that it meant a funeral and
eternal separation. All were there, only one was missing, the nearest of
the near: he was ill, and by his absence, as it were, washed his hands of
my departure.
It was the 21st of January 1847....
The sergeant gave me back our passports: a small, old soldier in a clumsy
casque covered with American leather, carrying a gun of disproportionate
size and weight, lifted the barrier; an Ural Cossack with narrow little
eyes and broad cheek-bones, holding the reins of his little, shaggy,
dishevelled nag, which was covered all over with little icicles, came up
to wish me a happy journey; the pale, thin, dirty little Jewish driver
with rags twisted four times round his neck clambered on the box.
‘Good-bye! Good-bye!’ said our old acquaintance, Karl Ivanovitch, who was
seeing us as far as Taurogen, while Tata’s wet nurse, a handsome peasant
woman, dissolved in tears as she said farewell.
The little Jew whipped up his horses, the sledges moved off. I looked
back, the barrier had been lowered, the wind swept the snow from Russia:
on to the road and blew the tail and mane of the Cossack’s horse to one
side.
The nurse in a sarafan and a sleeveless jacket was still looking after
us and weeping; Sonnenberg, that symbol of the parental home, that comic
figure from the days of childhood, waved his silk handkerchief—all around
was the endless plain of snow.
‘Good-bye, Tatyana! Good-bye, Karl Ivanovitch!’
Here was a milestone and on it, covered with snow, a thin and
single-headed eagle with outspread wings ... and it is so much to the
good that it is one head less.
Appendix
(To Chapter 29)
I
N. H. KETSCHER (1842-1847)
I must speak of Ketscher again, and this time in far more detail. On my
return from exile I found him as before in Moscow—though, indeed, he had
become so rooted in Moscow and so much a part of the life there that I
cannot imagine Moscow without him, or him in any other city. He did try
moving to Petersburg, he could not stand six months of it, threw up his
position and reappeared on the banks of the Neglinny in Bazhanov’s café
to preach free-thought to officers as they played billiards, to teach
actors dramatic art, to translate Shakespeare, and to love and worry his
old friends. It is true that he had now a new circle, _i.e._, the circle
of Byelinsky and Bakunin; but though he lectured them day and night, he
was still heart and soul with us.
He was then going on for forty, but he remained absolutely an old
student. How did that happen? It is just that that we must investigate.
Ketscher is a perfect example of the class of strange personalities that
were developed in the stagnant swamp of the Russia of the Petersburg
period, especially after 1812, who were the consequence of it, the
victims of it, and indirectly the stepping-stones from it to other
things. These people broke away from the wearisome and ignoble common
track and never found one of their own, spent their lives in seeking it
and got no farther than the search. The characteristics of these victims
are very varied; they are not all like Onyegin or Petchorin they are
not all idle and superfluous people; there are people who work hard and
yet accomplish nothing, people who are failures: I have been tempted a
thousand times to describe a whole series of original figures, to draw
striking portraits taken from life, but I have stopped short, overwhelmed
by my material. There is nothing of the herd, of the rank and file
about them; they are of all shapes and figures, but one common feature
or rather one _common misfortune_ connects them all. Looking into the
dark grey background, they see soldiers under the stick, serfs under the
lash, faces that betray a stifled moan, carts on their way to Siberia,
prisoners trudging in the same direction, shaven heads, branded faces,
helmets, epaulettes, plumes ... in short, the Russia of Petersburg. It is
that that torments them; they have neither the strength to accept it nor
to tear themselves away nor to alter things. They try to escape from that
background and cannot—they have no ground under their feet; they try to
cry out against it—they have no voice, nor are there ears to hear them.
It is no wonder that with this loss of balance there are among them
more original and eccentric than practically useful and perseveringly
industrious people, that there is as much that is inharmonious and
senseless in their lives as there is good and humane.
Ketscher’s father was a scientific instrument-maker. He was famed for
his surgical instruments and extreme honesty. He died early, leaving
his widow a large family to bring up and business affairs in confusion.
Consequently there could be in Ketscher’s case no question of real
contact, that is, of direct contact with the simple people such as
is, even in a wealthy household, absorbed with one’s foster-mother’s
milk, with one’s earliest games. The foreign manufacturers and traders,
craftsmen and their employers, make up a narrow circle, cut off by
habits, interests, and everything else both from the lower and the
upper classes of Russia. Often in those circles the family life is pure
and moral in comparison with the savage tyranny and hidden vice of our
merchants, with the sad and dreary drunkenness of our workmen, and with
the narrow, filthy life of our government clerks which rests entirely on
thieving. It is, nevertheless, entirely alien to the world surrounding
it, it is foreign, and from the very first gives a different _pli_ and
different fundamental principles.
Ketscher’s mother was a Russian, and I imagine that it was owing to
that fact that Ketscher did not grow up a foreigner. I do not think she
took any part in the children’s education, but what was of the greatest
consequence was that they were baptized into the Orthodox Church, which
meant that they had no religion whatever. Had they been Lutherans or
Catholics they would have been drawn in the German direction. They would
have gone to one or other _Kirche_, and would insensibly have passed into
its _Gemeinde_, with its alienating and isolating influence, with its
rival coteries and its parochial interests. No one sent Ketscher to the
Russian Church, of course; besides, even if he had been in the habit of
going to it sometimes as a child, it has not the spider-like character of
its sister churches, especially with foreigners.
It must be remembered that the period of which I am speaking knew nothing
of hysterical orthodoxy. The Church, like the State, did not fly to any
weapon for its defence and was not jealous of its rights, perhaps because
no one was attacking them. Every one knew what these two beasts were like
and no one put a finger in the jaws of either. They, for their part, did
not snatch at the strangers within their gates, being doubtful of their
orthodoxy or of their loyalty. When the Chair of Theology was founded in
the Moscow University, old Professor Heym, famous for his lexicons, said
with horror in the university hall: ‘_Es ist ein Ende mit der grossen
Hochschule Ruthenias_.’ Even Magnitsky’s and Runitch’s savage epidemic of
bigotry, senseless, flagrant as it was, and (as always with us) carried
out by spies and policemen, passed over like a malignant storm-cloud,
broke over the people who happened to be on the road, and vanished in
the shape of diverse Fotys and countesses.[131] In the high schools
and boarding-schools the catechism was taught as a form and for the
examinations, which always began with ‘Scripture.’
In due time Ketscher entered the Academy of Medicine and Surgery. That
was also a purely foreign institution and also not particularly orthodox.
One of the lecturers there was Just Christian Loder, the friend of
Goethe and the teacher of Humboldt, one of the pleiades of free and
vigorous thinkers who have raised Germany to a height of which she never
dreamed. For these men science was still a religion and propaganda a
warfare; freedom from the fetters of theology was new for them; they
still remembered the struggle for it, they had faith in their conquest
of it and were proud of it. Loder would never have consented to teach
anatomy according to the catechism of Filaret. Beside him stood Fischer
of Waldheim and the surgeon Hildebrandt, of whom I have spoken in another
place. There was never one word of Russian nor one Russian face in the
Academy, but there were various other German laboratory assistants,
demonstrators, and chemists: everything Russian was thrust into the
background. There is only one exception that we remember, _i.e._,
Detkovsky. Ketscher cherished his memory, and he probably had a good
influence on the students. The medical students, however, made up of two
species, Germans and seminarists, did not even in later days take part in
the common life of the universities, but confined themselves to their own
affairs.
Those affairs seemed of little account to Ketscher, which is the best
proof of his not being a genuine German and not putting his profession
before everything.
His own family circle could have no special attraction for him, and from
early years he had preferred to live apart. The rest of his surroundings
could only repel and jar upon him. He set to reading and re-reading
Schiller.
In later years Ketscher translated the whole of Shakespeare, but Schiller
left indelible traces upon him.
Schiller was exactly the right author for our students. Posa and Max,
Karl Moor and Ferdinand were students, robber-students: it is all the
protest of the first dawn, of the first revolt. More swayed by his
heart than his intellect, Ketscher understood and absorbed the poetical
theorising of Schiller, the revolutionary philosophy in his dialogue, and
there he stopped. He was satisfied: criticism and scepticism were utterly
alien to him.
A few years after his first reading of Schiller he came upon another
gospel and his moral life was determined for ever. Everything else
interested him little and passed without leaving a trace. The revolution
of the ’nineties, that vast, colossal tragedy in the style of Schiller,
with its bloodshed and its side issues, with its gloomy virtues and its
bright ideals, with the same character of dawn and protest, absorbed him
entirely. In this, too, Ketscher did not attempt to analyse. He accepted
the French Revolution as though it were a biblical legend, he believed
in it, he loved its leading figures, he had his personal preferences and
dislikes among them; nothing drew him behind the scenes.
Such he was when I met him at Passek’s in 1831, and such he was when I
parted from him in 1847 on the high road at Tchorny Gryaz.
This—not romantic, but so to speak ethico-political—dreamer could hardly
have found the surroundings he was seeking in the Academy of Medicine
and Surgery of those days. A worm was gnawing at his heart and medical
science could not stifle it. Withdrawing from the persons surrounding
him, he took to living more and more in one of the characters with which
his imagination was filled. Continually coming into contact with very
different interests and petty people, he began to shun society, got
into the way of scowling, telling bitter truths that were uncalled for,
and truths that every one knew, and tried to live like La Fontaine’s
‘Sonderling,’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe’ in Sokolniky. In the little garden
of their house there was an arbour, and here ‘the apothecary Ketscher
took refuge to translate the apothecary Schiller’ as N. A. Polevoy used
to jest in those days. The door of the arbour had no lock and there was
hardly room to turn round in it, but that was just right for him. In the
morning he used to dig in the garden, plant and transplant flowers and
shrubs, treat the poor of his district gratis, correct the proofs of ‘The
Robbers’ and of ‘Fiesco,’ and instead of evening prayers would recite
speeches of Marat and of Robespierre. In fact, if he had worked less with
books and more with his spade, he would have been just what Rousseau
wished every man to be.
Ketscher made our acquaintance through Vadim in 1831. In our circle,
which consisted in those days of Sazonov, the elder Passeks, and two or
three other students, besides Ogaryov and me, he saw the first promise
of the accomplishment of his cherished dreams, the first signs of new
growth on the fields that had been mown so thoroughly in 1826, and so
he attached himself to us. Being older than we, he soon acquired ‘the
rights of censorship’ and would not let us take a step without comments
and sometimes reproofs. He believed that he was a practical man and more
experienced than we; moreover, we liked him, liked him very much in fact.
If any one fell ill, Ketscher was like a sister of mercy, and never
left the invalid till he recovered. When Kolreif, Antonovitch and the
others were arrested, Ketscher was the first to get into the barracks to
see them, did his best to entertain them, lectured them, and went so far
that Lissovsky, the general of the gendarmes, sent for him and impressed
upon him that he must be more careful and must remember his position (he
was an army doctor). When Nadyezhdin, who was theoretically in love,
wanted to be secretly married to a young lady whose parents forbade her
to think of him, Ketscher undertook to assist him and arrange a romantic
elopement, and, wrapped in his celebrated black cloak lined with red, sat
on a seat in the Rozhdestvensky Boulevard with Nadyezhdin waiting for
a secret signal. For a long time they waited in vain; Nadyezhdin grew
weary and disheartened. Ketscher stoically consoled him; despair and
his consolations had a singular effect on Nadyezhdin, he fell asleep.
Ketscher scowled and strode gloomily up and down the boulevard. ‘She
isn’t coming,’ said Nadyezhdin, half asleep, ‘let us go home to bed.’
Ketscher scowled more than ever, shook his head gloomily, and led the
sleepy Nadyezhdin home. When they had gone, the girl came out into the
porch of her house and the signal agreed upon was repeated not once but
a dozen times, and she waited an hour or two; all was quiet and she
more quietly still returned to her room, probably shedding tears but
completely cured of her love for Nadyezhdin. It was a long time before
Ketscher could forgive Nadyezhdin his sleepiness; he would shake his
head, while his lower lip quivered, and say: ‘He did not love her.’
The sympathy Ketscher showed at the time of our imprisonment and at
the time of my marriage has been described already. For the five years
from 1834 to 1840, in which he was almost the only one of our circle
left in Moscow, he represented it with pride and glory, preserving our
tradition, and not changing it in a single detail. So we found him,
some of us in 1840 and some of us in 1842. In us exile, contact with a
different world, reading, and work had made many changes. Ketscher, our
irremovable representative, remained the same as ever. Only instead of
Schiller he was translating Shakespeare.
One of the first things which Ketscher, who was extremely delighted at
having his old friends gathered together again in Moscow, did was to
renew his censorship _morum_—and this was the occasion of the first signs
of friction, which for a long time he failed to notice. His scolding
sometimes angered us, which had never happened in old days, and sometimes
bored us. In the past we had lived at such high pressure and so much
in common that no one had paid attention to little stumbling-blocks in
the pathway. Time, as I have said, had made many changes; character
had developed in different directions—and the part of a kind but
fault-finding uncle was often worse than absurd. Every one tried to turn
it into a jest, to cloak his superfluous candour and critical love under
his friendliness and good intentions, and they made a great mistake.
Yes, what was amiss was that it was necessary to cloak, to explain away,
to practise restraint. If he had been checked from the very first,
those unhappy misunderstandings with which our Moscow life ended at the
beginning of 1847 would never have arisen.
Our new friends, however, were not quite so indulgent as we were, and
even Byelinsky, as intolerant of injustice as Ketscher himself, would
sometimes lose all patience and, though he was very fond of him, would
give him severe lessons, refusing to argue with him for months together.
Cold or indifferent Ketscher never was. He was invariably either
violently aggressive or ardently affectionate, passing rapidly from
being the warmest of friends into being the sternest of judges; this, of
course, made coldness and silence harder for him to bear than anything.
Immediately after a quarrel or a series of violent attacks Ketscher’s
attention was distracted, his anger passed without leaving a trace,
probably he was inwardly dissatisfied with himself, but he never admitted
it; on the contrary, he tried to turn everything into a joke and again
overstepped the limit beyond which a joke ceases to be amusing. It was
the everlasting repetition of the famous ‘gander’ in the reconciliation
of Ivan Ivanovitch with Ivan Nikiforovitch.[132] Every one must have seen
children who once they have yielded to temptation are nervously unable to
stop short of any naughtiness, the conviction that they will be punished
seems to intensify the temptation. Feeling that he had again succeeded
in irritating some one into cold and biting replies, he returned to an
utterly gloomy frame of mind, raised his eyebrows, strode about the room,
became a tragic figure from some play of Schiller’s, a juryman from
the court of Fouquier-Tinville,[133] in a ferocious voice brought out
a series of accusations against all of us, accusations for which there
was not the slightest foundation, convinced himself in the end of their
truth, and, overwhelmed with grief that his friends were such scoundrels,
went morosely home, leaving us dumbfoundered and furious, until wrath
gave way to mercy and we laughed like lunatics.
Early next morning, Ketscher, mild and mournful, was pacing up and down
his room, savagely smoking his pipe, waiting for one of us to come to
scold him and be reconciled. He would make it up, always, of course,
preserving his dignity as of an old, though exacting, uncle. If no one
appeared, Ketscher, concealing a mortal dread in his heart, would go
mournfully to a café in Neglinny Street, or to the bright, peaceful
haven in which he was always met by a good-natured laugh and a friendly
greeting, _i.e._, to M. S. Shtchepkin’s, and there stay till the storm he
had raised abated. He complained of us, of course, to Schtchepkin. The
kind-hearted old man gave him a good scolding, told him that he talked
nonsense, that we were not such miscreants as he made out, and offered to
take him at once to see us. We knew that Ketscher was miserable after his
outbursts, and understood, or rather forgave, the feeling which prevented
him from saying simply and directly that he was wrong and so effacing at
the first word all traces of discord. The ladies, who almost always took
his part, were foremost in making approaches to him. They liked his open
simplicity, which went as far as rudeness (he never spared them), and
regarded it as eccentricity. Their support convinced Ketscher that that
was the way to behave, that it was charming and was, moreover, his duty.
Our quarrels and disputes at Pokrovskoe were sometimes full of absurdity,
and at the same time whole days were overshadowed by them.
‘Why is the coffee not nice?’ I asked Matvey.
‘It has not been properly made,’ answered Ketscher, and suggested that
his method should be tried. The coffee so made was just the same.
‘Bring the spirit-lamp and coffee here. I will make it myself,’ said
Ketscher, and set to work. The coffee was no better, as I observed
to Ketscher. He tried it and, fixing his eyes upon me from under his
spectacles, asked in a voice already a little bit excited: ‘So in your
opinion this coffee is no better?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it is really amazing that even in such a trifle you refuse to
change your opinion.’
‘It is not I, but the coffee.’
‘Really it is beyond anything, this miserable vanity.’
‘Upon my word, I didn’t make the coffee and I didn’t make the
coffee-pot....’
‘I know you, anything to prove your point; what pettiness over the
beastly coffee—it’s hellish vanity!’ He could say no more; heartbroken at
my despotism and vanity in matters of taste, he thrust his cap down on
his head, snatched up a bark basket and went off into the woods. He came
back towards evening, having walked fifteen miles; a successful search
for edible fungi had dispelled his gloomy mood. I, of course, made no
reference to coffee, but paid various civilities to the fungi.
Next morning he tried to raise the coffee question again, but I declined
to take up the challenge.
One of the chief subjects of our disputes was the education of my son.
Education shares the fate of medicine and philosophy: on those subjects
every one in the world has positive and sharply defined opinions, except
the few who have devoted a long and serious study to them. Ask about
the building of a bridge or draining of a swamp, and a man will tell
you frankly that he is not an engineer or an agricultural expert. Begin
talking about dropsy or consumption, he will suggest a remedy, one that
he remembers, has heard spoken of, or that has benefited his uncle. But
in questions of education he goes farther still. ‘That is my principle’
he tells you, ‘and I never depart from it; I don’t like trifling in
matters of education, it is a subject I feel too keenly about.’
What ideas Ketscher was bound to have about education may be gathered to
the minutest detail in the sketch we have given of his character. In this
he was consistent, which is more than can be said of people who discourse
on education as a rule. Ketscher’s ideas were those of Rousseau’s
‘Émile,’ and he firmly believed that the negation of everything which is
done with children now would of itself be excellent education. He wanted
to wrest the child from artificial life and consciously restore him to
a savage condition, to that primitive independence in which equality is
carried so far as to wipe out the distinction between man and the monkey.
We were ourselves not so very far removed from this view, but in him,
like everything that he had once assimilated, it was a fanatical creed
which admitted neither of doubt nor argument. A very real and genuine
need is felt for something very different from the old-fashioned
theological, scholastic, aristocratic education in which dogmatism,
formalism, strained pedantic classicism, and external discipline are
considered of more importance than moral development. Unluckily, in
education as in everything else, the violent and revolutionary method,
while breaking down the old, has given us nothing to replace it. The
wild assumption of the ‘normal man,’ which the followers of Jean Jacques
adopted, cut the child off from his historical surroundings, made him a
foreigner in them, as though education were not the development of the
life of the race in the individual.
The arguments about education were rarely confined to the theoretical
field, the application was too near at hand. My son, at that time seven
or eight years old, was a delicate child, very liable to attacks of fever
and dysentery. This weakness lasted until our visit to Naples, or rather
till we met at Sorrento a doctor of whom we knew nothing, who altered the
whole system of diet and treatment. Ketscher wanted to harden him all at
once like tempered steel. I would not allow it, and he was furious: ‘You
are a conservative,’ he shouted angrily, ‘you are ruining the unfortunate
child, you are turning him into an effeminate little gentleman and at the
same time a slave.’
The child was naughty and shouted when his mother was ill. I checked him:
apart from the plain necessity of doing so, it seemed to me perfectly
right to make him restrain himself for the sake of somebody else, for the
sake of his mother who loved him beyond measure; but Ketscher said to me
gloomily:
‘What right have you to check his shouting? He ought to shout, it is no
life at all. The accursed authority of parents!’
These discussions, however lightly I took them, made our relations
difficult and threatened a serious estrangement between Ketscher and
his friends. If this had come about, he would have been more severely
punished than any one, both because he was very much devoted to us
all and because he did not know how to live alone. His character was
eminently expansive and not at all self-centred. Some one was necessary
to him. His very work was a continual conversation with some one else,
that some one else was Shakespeare. After working the whole morning he
felt dull. In the summer he could walk in the country or work in his
garden; but in winter there was nothing left for him but to put on his
famous cloak or his rough, camel-coloured overcoat and go from near
Sokolniky to us, to Arbat, or to Nikitsky Street.
His captious intolerance was due to the fact that he never had the
intellectual exercise of verifying, analysing, and making problems
clear: for him there were no problems; all was settled and he went
straight forward without looking back. Perhaps if he had been engaged
in practical work this might have been a good thing, but he had none.
Active participation in active affairs was impossible, only the three
uppermost grades in the service take part in them in Russia. And he
transferred his thirst for activity to the private life of his friends.
We were spared by theoretical work from the emptiness which gnawed at his
heart. Ketscher settled all questions summarily, straight off, in one
way or another—which did not matter; having once settled them, he went
on without hesitating at anything, remaining obstinately faithful to his
conviction.
For all that there was no serious estrangement between us till 1846.
Natalie was very fond of Ketscher, he was inseparably connected with
the memory of the 9th of May 1838. She knew that a tender affection lay
hid under his hedgehog-like prickles and was unwilling to see that the
prickles were growing and sending their roots farther and farther down.
A quarrel with Ketscher seemed to her something sinister; she fancied
that if time could file away, and with such a tiny file, one of the
links that had held so firmly throughout our youth, it would next attack
another, and the whole chain would be broken. In the midst of sullen
words and harsh answers I used to see her turn pale and entreat me with
her eyes to stop, she would shake off her momentary vexation and hold out
her hand. Sometimes this touched Ketscher, but he made tremendous efforts
to show that he did not really care, that he was ready to make it up, but
that he would perhaps go on quarrelling.
The dreadful fluctuating relation of bullying affection and yielding
affection might have been prolonged at this stage for years. But new
circumstances which complicated Ketscher’s life brought things to a head.
He had a love affair, as queer as everything else in his life, which made
him settle down quickly in rather clammy domesticity. Ketscher’s life,
which was based on the utmost simplicity, on the elementary requirements
of a student’s Bohemian existence among his comrades, was suddenly
transformed. A woman appeared in his home, or to be more correct a home
appeared because in it there was a woman. Till then no one had conceived
of Ketscher as a domestic character, for in his _chez soi_ he liked
to be irregular in everything, to walk about as he lunched, to smoke
between the soup and the beef, to sleep in any bed but his own, so that
Konstantin Aksakov observed jestingly ‘that Ketscher was distinguished
from the human species by the fact that men dine while Ketscher feeds.’
All at once he had a dwelling, a domestic hearth, a roof of his own!
This was how it happened.
A few years before, Ketscher, as he walked every day between Sokolniky
and Basmanny Street, used to meet a poor, almost destitute little girl.
She used to return that way, tired out and depressed, from some workshop.
She was plain, shy, scared, and pathetic. No one noticed her existence,
no one pitied her. Without parents or relations she had been taken for
the sake of Christian charity into some dissenting community, there grew
up, and left it to go to hard work with no defence or support, alone in
the world. Ketscher got into conversation with her and taught her not
to be afraid of him, questioning her about her sorrowful childhood and
wretched existence. He was the first person in whom she found sympathy
and warmth, and she attached herself to him body and soul. His life
was lonely and cheerless; behind all the noise of suppers with his
friends, of first nights at the Moscow theatres, and of the Bozhanovsky
coffee-house, there was an emptiness in his heart which he would, of
course, not have admitted to himself, but which made itself felt. The
poor, colourless flower fell of itself on his bosom—and he accepted
it, not thinking much about the consequence and probably not attaching
special importance to the incident.
In the best and most progressive men there still exists something akin to
the property qualification for the franchise in their attitude to women,
and there are classes below it which are regarded as naturally destined
to be victims. We have all treated them as of no account, so there is
hardly any one who can dare to throw a stone.
The orphan was passionately devoted to Ketscher. Being brought up in
a dissenting community had left its traces on her: she had gained
from it a capacity for blind faith, for idol-worship, a capacity for
persistent, concentrated fanaticism and boundless devotion. Everything
that she had loved and worshipped, everything she had feared, everything
she had obeyed, Christ and the Mother of God, the holy saints and the
wonder-working ikon—all that she found now in Ketscher, the man who was
the first to pity her, the first to be kind to her. And all this was
half-hidden, half-buried, dared not express itself.
She had a child; she was very ill, the baby died.... The bond which
should have strengthened the tie between them broke it. Ketscher grew
colder to S——, went to see her less often, and then abandoned her
altogether. That this child of nature would not ‘cease to love him
easily’ might have been confidently predicted. What had she left in all
the wide world but her love? There was nothing else but to throw herself
in the river Moskva. The poor girl used to go out when her day’s work
was done, scantily clothed in her poor garments, regardless of rain or
cold, along the road leading to Basmanny Street, and would wait for
hours together to meet him, to watch him pass, and then to weep, to weep
the whole night through; as a rule she hid herself, but sometimes she
bowed and spoke. If he answered kindly, S—— was happy and ran home in
good spirits. Of her ‘misfortune,’ of her love she dared not speak, she
was ashamed. Two years or more passed like this. In silence, without
repining, she endured her fate. In 1845 Ketscher moved to Petersburg.
This was too much for her. Not to see him even in the street, not to
observe him from a distance and watch him pass, to know that he was
hundreds of miles away among strangers and not to know whether he was
well or whether any trouble had befallen him—this she could not bear.
Entirely without means and without assistance, S—— began saving up her
kopecks, devoted all her efforts to this one object, worked for months,
then vanished and made her way somehow or other to Petersburg. There,
tired, thin, and hungry, she went to Ketscher, imploring him not to spurn
her but to take her, telling him that she wanted nothing, that she would
find a corner for herself, would find work and live on bread and water,
if only she could stay in the city where he was and might sometimes see
him. Only then Ketscher fully understood what a heart beat in her bosom.
He was shattered, overwhelmed. Pity, remorse, the consciousness of being
so loved changed his attitude: now she should remain there with him, this
should be her home, he would be her husband, her friend, her protector.
Her dreams had come true; forgotten were the cold autumn nights,
forgotten the terrible journey and the tears of jealousy and bitter sobs:
she was with him and would certainly never be parted from him living.
Before Ketscher came back to Moscow no one knew all this story except
Mihail Semyonovitch Shtchepkin, now it was neither possible nor necessary
to conceal it; we two and all our circle received with open arms this
child of nature who had performed so heroic a feat. And this girl, full
of love for him as she was, did Ketscher an infinite amount of harm with
her absolute devotion and submission. On her lay all the blessing and all
the curse that lies upon the proletariat, especially upon ours.
We in our turn did her almost as much harm as she did Ketscher.
And in both cases it was done in complete ignorance and with the purest
intentions. She completely ruined Ketscher’s life as a child may ruin
a fine engraving with his paint-brush, supposing that he is adorning
it. Between Ketscher and S——, between S—— and our circle, lay a vast,
terrible chasm, steep and precipitous, and with no bridge, no pass to
cross it. We and she belonged to different ages of mankind, to different
geological formations, to different volumes in the history of the world.
We were the children of New Russia fresh from the university and the
academy, we were fascinated by the political splendour of the West and
religiously cherished our infidelity, openly denying the Church, while
she had been brought up in a dissenting community, in a Russia of the
days before Peter, in all the bigotry of sectarianism, with all the
superstitions of a hidden religion, with all the legendary marvels of
old-world Russian life.
Having by an extraordinary effort of will fastened the severed ties
again, she kept tight hold of the knot. Ketscher could not escape
now. But indeed he did not wish to. Blaming himself for the past, he
strove sincerely to efface it; S——’s stupendous effort had won him.
Yielding before it, he knew that he too was making a sacrifice, but,
being an extremely pure and generous nature, he was glad to make it as
an atonement. But he knew only the material side of the sacrifice: the
practical restriction of his freedom. The incongruity of an old student
with Schilleresque dreams living with a woman for whom not merely the
world of Schiller but even the world of reading and writing, of all
secular education, did not exist, never entered his head.
People may say what they like, but the saying _inter pares amicitia_ is
perfectly true and every _mésalliance_ is foredoomed to unhappiness.
A great deal that is stupid, supercilious, and bourgeois is implied
in the saying, but in essence it is true. In the worst of all forms
of inequality, the inequality of culture, there is one salvation: the
education of one person by the other; but for that two rare gifts are
needed: one must know how to educate and the other must know how to be
educated; one must be able to lead, the other to follow.
Far more often the companionship of an undeveloped personality, confined
to the pettiness of personal life with no other interests to engross
the heart, weighs the other down, induces foolishness and fatigue;
imperceptibly he grows petty and narrow, and though he feels ill at
ease, yet, entangled in nets and meshes, he reconciles himself to it.
Sometimes it happens that neither of them yields, and then the marriage
turns into a permanent war, an everlasting duel in which they grow set
and remain for ever in fruitless efforts on the one side to lift up, on
the other to drag down: that is, both trying to defend their several
positions. When their strength is equal, this conflict swallows up their
whole life and the strongest natures are exhausted and sink helpless by
the way. The more cultured nature is the first to succumb, the aesthetic
feelings are deeply wounded by the difference of level. The best moments,
which should be bright and musical, are poisoned by it: expansive natures
passionately desire that all who are near and dear to them should be near
to their thoughts, to their religion; this is taken for intolerance. For
them the proselytism of the home is the continuation of their apostolic
work, their propaganda; their happiness is limited where they are not
understood ... and most often there is no wish to understand them.
To educate a mature woman is a very difficult task; it is especially
difficult in those marriages which are the consequence and not the
commencement of intimate relations. Ties that have been lightly,
frivolously begun rarely rise above the level of the bedroom and the
kitchen. The common roof comes too late for education under it to be
possible; only now and then some misfortune will rouse a soul that sleeps
but is capable of awakening. For the most part _la petite femme_ never
becomes a full-sized one, never becomes wife and sister together; she
either remains mistress and courtesan, or becomes cook and mistress.
Living under the same roof is in itself a terrible thing over which
half the marriages come to ruin. Living cramped up together, people
come too close to each other, see each other too minutely, too much in
deshabille, and gradually petal by petal tear away all the flowers of
the wreath that crowned each with grace and poetry. But similarity of
culture goes a long way to smooth things over. If it is absent and there
is idle leisure, one cannot be for ever babbling nonsense, talking of
housekeeping or paying compliments; and what is to be done with a woman
when she is something between an odalisque and a servant, a creature
bodily near and intellectually remote. She is not wanted by day and she
is for ever on the spot; a man cannot share his interests with her and
she cannot share her gossip with him.
Every uneducated woman living with an educated husband reminds me of
Delilah and Samson, she cuts off his strength and there is no guarding
oneself from her. Between dinner, even if it is late, and bed, even if
one goes to it at ten o’clock, there is an endless period in which one
does not want to go on working and yet is not ready for sleep, when the
linen has been counted and expenses reckoned up. It is in those hours
that the wife drags the husband down into the narrow circle of her
trivialities, into the world of irritable resentments, tittle-tattle, and
spiteful insinuations. This is bound to leave its traces. Relations of
cohabitation between a man and a woman without equality of culture are
sometimes enduring when they rest on convenience, on common housekeeping,
I had almost said on hygiene. Sometimes these working associations are a
mutual help combined with mutual satisfaction; for the most part a wife
is taken as a nurse, as a good housewife _pour avoir un bon pot-au-feu_
as Proudhon said to me. The formula of the old jurisprudence is very
clever, _a mensa et toro_; destroy the common bed and common board and
they will separate with untroubled conscience.
These business-like marriages are scarcely better. The husband is
continually at his work, professional or commercial, at his office, his
counting-house, or his shop. His wife is continually busy with the linen
and the stores. The husband returns tired; everything is ready for him,
and everything goes with the same little even trot, to the gates of the
cemetery to which their parents have preceded them. This is a purely town
phenomenon and it is more often met with in England than anywhere; this
is the petty-bourgeois happiness preached by the moralists of the French
stage and dreamt of by the Germans[134]; different stages of culture
can live together more easily within a year after the man leaves the
university; there is a division of work and precedence given to the man.
The husband, particularly if he has money, becomes what the popular sense
calls him, _mon bourgeois_ of his wife. By this path and, thanks to the
laws of inheritance, it is a path that never gets overgrown with grass,
every woman remains perpetually a _kept woman_, her husband’s if not some
other man’s. She knows this.
‘Dessen Brot man isst,
Dessen Lied man singt.’
But these marriages have a moral unity of their own, they have a
similarity of outlook, a similarity of object. Ketscher himself had no
object and was incapable of being either the ‘bourgeois’ or the tutor.
He could not even struggle with S——, she always gave way. He frightened
her with his loud voice and his grumbling temper. Though her heart
was developed she had a heavy, stubborn intelligence, that stagnancy
of brain which we often meet with in those who are quite unaccustomed
to abstract thought, and which is one of the distinguishing traits
of the period before Peter the Great. United to the man she loved so
intensely, so devotedly, she desired nothing and feared nothing. And
indeed what had she to fear? Poverty? but had she not been poor all
her life, had she not suffered destitution, that humiliating poverty.
Work? but she had toiled from morning till night in a workroom for a few
coppers. Quarrelling, separation? Yes, that last had terrors, and great
terrors too; but she so utterly abandoned all personal will that it was
really difficult to quarrel with her, and ill-humour she would put up
with, maybe she would have put up with blows even, so long as she were
satisfied that he loved her a little and did not want to part with her.
And that he did not want, and there was a fresh reason for not wanting it
on the top of everything else. With the instinct of love S—— understood
it very well. Dimly aware that she could not fully satisfy Ketscher, she
took to making up for what she lacked by continual waiting upon him and
solicitude for him.
Ketscher was over forty. He had not been spoilt in regard to domestic
comfort. He had spent all his life at home as the Kirghiz in his cart,
with no property and no desire to possess it, with no conveniences of
any sort and no craving for them. By degrees everything was changed; he
was surrounded by a network of attention and services, he saw a childish
delight when he was pleased with anything, alarm and tears when he
raised his eyebrows, and this went on every day from morning till night.
Ketscher took to staying at home more often; he was sorry to leave her
continually alone. Besides, it was hard for him not to be struck by the
difference of her absolute submission and our growing opposition. S——
endured his most unjust outbursts with the gentleness of a daughter who,
concealing her tears, smiles to her father and waits _sans rancune_ till
the storm is over. S——, submissive, slavishly meek, trembling, ready to
weep and kiss his hand, had an immense influence on Ketscher. Intolerance
is fostered by giving way to it.
Did not Rousseau’s Thérèse, poor, stupid Thérèse, turn the prophet of
equality into a petty vulgarian, perpetually absorbed in preserving his
own dignity?
S——’s influence on Ketscher showed itself in the way Diderot describes
when he complains of Thérèse. Rousseau was suspicious; Thérèse developed
his suspiciousness into a petty readiness to take offence, and with no
intention of doing so estranged him from his best friends. Remember that
Thérèse could not read properly and could never be taught to read the
time on the clock—which did not prevent her from fostering Rousseau’s
hypochondria till it passed into gloomy madness. In the morning Rousseau
would go to see Baron d’Holbach. A servant would bring in lunch and set
places for three—Holbach, his wife, and Grimm; engaged in conversation,
no one would notice it but Jean Jacques. He would pick up his hat. ‘But
you must stay to lunch,’ Madame d’Holbach would say and order another
place to be laid; but by then it was too late to set things right.
Rousseau, livid with vexation and gloomily cursing the whole human race,
would run home to Thérèse and tell her that no plate was set for him
as a hint for him to go. Such tales were just to her taste, she could
take warm interest in them, they put her on a level with him and indeed
a little above him, and she herself began talking scandal, sometimes
against Madame d’Houdetot, sometimes against David Hume, sometimes
against Diderot. Rousseau would rudely break off all relations, would
write senseless and insulting letters, sometimes calling forth terrible
replies (for instance, from Hume), and withdrew to Montmorency abandoned
by every one, and for lack of human beings cursing the sparrows and the
swallows to whom he threw grain.
Once more:—without equality there can be no real marriage. The wife who
is excluded from all the interests that occupy her husband, who is apart
from them and does not share them, may be a concubine, a housekeeper, a
nurse, but not a wife in the full, honourable sense of the word. Heine
said of his ‘Thérèse’ that she ‘does not know and never will find out
what he wrote about.’ This was thought charming, amusing, and it never
occurred to any one to ask: ‘Why, then, was she his wife?’ Molière, who
read his comedies aloud to his cook, was a hundred times more humane, but
Madame Heine quite unintentionally paid her husband back. During the last
years of his martyred existence she surrounded him with her own friends,
faded _dames aux camellias_ of a past season, grown moral as they grew
wrinkled, and their washed-out, grey-headed adorers.
I do not mean to say that a wife must necessarily do and like what
her husband does and likes. The wife may prefer music and the husband
painting, that does not disturb their equality. I have always thought
that the official trailing of husband and wife about together was
dreadful, absurd, and senseless, and the higher placed they are the more
ludicrous it is. Why should the Empress Eugénie appear at cavalry drill,
and why should Victoria draw her husband to the opening of parliament
with which he had nothing to do? Heine did well not to take his
better-half to the receptions at the Court functions of Weimar. The prose
of their marriage did not lie in that, but in the absence of any common
ground, any common interest to unite them apart from sexual attraction.
I will pass to the harm which we did to poor S——. The mistake we made
was again the mistake of all Utopias and idealisms. When one side of a
question is correctly grasped, no attention is commonly paid to that
to which that side adheres and whether it can be separated from it, no
attention to the vast network of veins connecting the raw flesh with the
whole organism. We still think like Christians that we have but to say to
the lame man: ‘Take up thy bed and walk.’
At one stroke we flung the solitary and half-savage S——, who had seen no
one, from her loneliness into our circle. We liked her originality, we
wanted to preserve it, and we destroyed the last chance of her developing
by removing all desire for improvement, assuring her that she was all
right as she was. But she did not herself care to remain simply as she
was. What was the result? We—revolutionaries, socialists, champions
of the emancipation of women—turned a naïve, devoted, simple-hearted
creature into a Moscow petty-bourgeoise!
Did not the Convention, the Jacobins, and the Commune itself turn France
into a petty-bourgeoise, turn Paris into an _épicier_?
The first house that was opened with love and warm-heartedness to S——
was ours. Natalie went to see her and forcibly brought her to us. For a
year S—— behaved quietly and was shy of strangers; timid and reserved as
before, she was full of the poetical charm of the peasant in a way. There
was not the faintest desire to attract attention by her strangeness; on
the contrary there was the desire to be unnoticed. Like a child or a weak
little wild animal she took refuge under Natalie’s wing; her devotion
in those days knew no bounds. She loved playing with Sasha for hours
together and used to tell him and us details of her childhood, her life
among the _raskolniks_, her suffering as an apprentice, _i.e._, in the
workroom.
She became the plaything of our circle; that, of course, she liked; she
saw that her position, that she herself was original, and from that
time she was lost; no one could have saved her. Natalie alone thought
seriously of her education. S—— did not belong to the common herd; she
had escaped a number of mean defects; she was not fond of fine clothes,
did not care for luxury, for expensive things, nor for money—so long
as Ketscher was satisfied and found nothing wanting she did not mind
about anything else. At first S—— loved to have long, long talks with
Natalie and trusted her, meekly listened to her advice, and tried to
follow it.... But after she had looked about her and was at home in our
circle, perhaps worked up by others who were amused at her oddities,
she began to display a sort of injured antagonism and would answer any
criticism very far from naïvely: ‘Oh, I am such a poor creature, how
could I change or improve? It seems I must go down to my grave just as
silly and foolish.’ In these words there was a note of wounded vanity,
conscious or not conscious. She ceased to feel free with us and came less
and less often to see us. ‘Natalya Alexandrovna, God bless her,’ she
would say, ‘no longer likes poor me.’ It was not natural to Natalie to be
hail-fellow-well-met with everybody or to be effusive like a schoolgirl;
an element of deep serenity and great aesthetic feeling was always
predominant in her. S—— did not understand the value of the difference
between Natalie’s attitude to her and that of others, and forgot who had
been the first to hold out a hand to her and warmly welcome her; with
her Ketscher too drew away from us and grew more and more morose and
irritable.
His suspiciousness greatly increased. In every careless word he saw an
intention, a spiteful motive, a desire to wound, and not to wound him
only but also S——. She for her part wept, complained of her lot, resented
slights to Ketscher, and by the law of moral reverberation his own
suspicions returned to him multiplied tenfold. His scolding affection
began to change into a desire to find us in fault, into a supervision, a
continual espionage, and the petty faults of his friends came more and
more to eclipse all their other qualities in his eyes. Our pure, lofty,
mature circle began to be invaded by the tittle-tattle of servant girls
and the bickerings of provincial government clerks.
Ketscher’s irritability became infectious; continual accusations,
explanations, reconciliations, poisoned our gatherings. This corrosive
dust settled in every crevice and by degrees dissolved the cement that
united so firmly our relations with our friends. We all succumbed to the
influence of gossip. Even Granovsky grew ill-humoured and irritable, took
Ketscher’s part unfairly, and lost his temper. Ketscher used to go to
Granovsky with his accusations against Ogaryov and me. Granovsky did not
believe them, but pitying Ketscher, ‘who is ill, wounded and yet so fond
of you,’ took his side emphatically and was angry with me for want of
tolerance. ‘Why, you know what he is like; it’s an illness. The influence
of S——, who is good-natured but uneducated and tiresome, is driving him
farther and farther in that unfortunate direction.’
To end this melancholy tale I will quote two instances.... They show
vividly how far we had got from the theory of making coffee at Pokrovskoe.
One evening in the spring of 1846 we had five intimate friends with us,
and among them Mihail Semyonovitch Shtchepkin. ‘Have you taken the house
at Sokolovo this year?’ he asked. ‘Not yet,’ I answered, ‘I haven’t the
money and one has to pay the rent in advance.’ ‘Surely you are not going
to stay all the summer in Moscow?’ ‘I shall wait a little, then we shall
see.’ That was all. No one took any notice of this conversation, and
other subjects followed peacefully a second afterwards. We were intending
to go next day after dinner to Kuntsovo, which we had loved from
childhood. Ketscher, Korsh, and Granovsky went with us. The excursion
took place, and everything went well except that Ketscher raised his
eyebrows more gloomily than ever. But in the end we all came in for a
storm.
It was a spring evening, warm but not scorchingly hot; the trees had
only just come out into leaf. We sat in the garden jesting and talking.
All at once Ketscher, who had been silent for half an hour, got up and
stood facing me. With the face of a prosecutor of the Vehme,[135] and
with his lips quivering with indignation, he said: ‘I must say that you
were clever in the way you reminded Mihail Semyonovitch yesterday that he
hadn’t paid you the nine hundred roubles he borrowed from you.’
I really did not understand; especially as I certainly had not thought of
Shtchepkin’s debt for the last four months.
‘It was delicate I must say: the old man has no money now and he is just
going to the Crimea with his immense family, and here you tell him in the
presence of five persons: “I haven’t the money to take a summer villa.”
Ough, how disgusting!’
Ogaryov took my part. Ketscher flew at him and there was no end to the
absurd accusations he brought against him; Granovsky tried to soothe him
but could not and went away together with Korsh before the rest of us. I
felt incensed and humiliated and answered very harshly. Ketscher looked
at me from under his brows and without saying a word went back to Moscow
on foot. We were left alone and in a state of something like pitiful
irritability drove home. I wanted this time to give Ketscher a good
lesson and to drop relations with him for a time, if I did not break them
off altogether. He was penitent and shed tears: Granovsky insisted on our
making peace, talked to Natalie, and was deeply distressed. I made it up,
but not light-heartedly, and said to Granovsky: ‘You see, it will last
for three days.’
That was one pleasure excursion, here is another.
Two months later we were at Sokolovo. Ketscher and S—— were going back
to Moscow in the evening. Ogaryov rode part of the way with them on his
Circassian horse, Kortik. There was no shadow of misunderstanding or
ill-humour.
Ogaryov came back two or three hours later; we laughed together at the
day having passed off so peacefully, and separated for the night.
Next day Granovsky, who had been in Moscow overnight, met me in our park;
he was thoughtful and more melancholy than usual, and at last he told me
he had something on his mind and wanted to talk to me. We went by the
long avenue and sat down on the seat, the view of which is familiar to
every one who has been at Sokolovo.
‘Herzen,’ Granovsky said to me, ‘if only you knew how difficult, how
painful it is to me ... how I love you all in spite of everything, and
I see with horror that everything is dropping to pieces. And now, as
though in mockery, these petty mistakes, damnable carelessness, lack of
delicacy....’
‘But tell me please what has happened,’ I asked, genuinely alarmed.
‘Why, Ketscher is furious with Ogaryov, and indeed, to tell the truth,
it would be hard not to be; I try, I do what I can, but I haven’t the
strength, particularly when people don’t care to do anything themselves.’
‘But what is the matter?’
‘Why, this: yesterday Ogaryov rode part of the way with Ketscher and S——.’
‘It was arranged in my presence, and indeed I saw Ogaryov in the evening
afterwards and he did not say a word.’