THE COUP D’ÉTAT—THE PROCUREUR OF THE LATE REPUBLIC—THE VOICE OF THE COW
IN THE WILDERNESS—BANISHMENT OF THE PROCUREUR—ORDER AND CIVILISATION
TRIUMPHANT
‘Vive la mort, _friends! And a happy new year! Now we shall be
consistent, now we shall not be false to our own ideas, shall not be
terrified at the realisation of what we have foreseen, shall not abjure
the knowledge we have reached by the path of tribulation. Now we shall be
strong and stand up for our convictions._
‘_We saw death approaching long ago; we may grieve, we may feel sympathy,
but we cannot be surprised, we cannot be despairing or downcast. Quite
the contrary, we ought to lift up our heads, we are justified. We have
been called birds of ill omen invoking disaster, we have been reproached
for heresy, for ignorance of the people, for proud isolation, for
childish resentment, while we have only been guilty of seeing the truth
and speaking it openly. Our words, which are still the same, are now the
consolation, the encouragement of those who are terrified by the events
in Paris._’—(‘Letters from France and Italy,’ No. 14. Nice, December 31,
1851.)
One morning (I remember it was the 4th of December) our cook, Pasquale
Rocca, came in to me, and with a look of pleasure announced that
flysheets were being sold in the streets with the news that ‘Buonaparte
has dismissed the Assembly and appointed a red government.’ Who were the
zealous servants of Napoleon who spread such rumours among the people
even outside France (Nice was at that time Italian), I do not know; but
what numbers there must have been of agents of all sorts, political
stokers, whipping the public up end raising the temperature, since there
were enough of them even for Nice!
An hour later Vogt, Hoetsky, Mathieu, and others turned up: all were
surprised ... Mathieu, a typical specimen of a French revolutionary, was
beside himself.
Bald, with a skull the shape of a walnut—that is, a typically Gallic
skull, not spacious but obstinate—with a big, dark, unkempt beard, a
rather good-natured expression, and little eyes, Mathieu was like a
prophet, like a crazy saint, like an augur, and like his bird. He was
a lawyer, and in the happy days of the February republic had been a
_procureur_ or a deputy _procureur_ somewhere. He was a revolutionary to
the tips of his finger-nails; he gave himself up to the revolution as
people give themselves up to religion, with implicit faith, never dared
either to understand or to doubt or to be over-subtle, but loved and
believed, called Ledru-Rollin ‘Ledru,’ and Louis Blanc simply ‘Blanc,’
used the word _citoyen_ whenever he could, and was perpetually conspiring.
On receiving the news of the 2nd of December he disappeared, and returned
two days later completely convinced that France was rising, _que cela
chauffe_, and especially in the south, in the department of Var near
Draguignan. The great thing to be done was to enter into relations with
the leaders of the insurrection.... He had seen some of them, and had
settled with them overnight, passing through Var, to collect trustworthy
and important persons together at a certain spot, for consultation....
But that the gendarmes might not get wind of it, it was settled on both
sides to give as a signal the moo of a cow. If things went well, Orsini
meant to bring all his friends, and, though not quite confident that
Mathieu’s view of the position was correct, he set off with him to cross
the frontier. Orsini came back shaking his head, though, true to his
revolutionary and somewhat _condottieri_ temperament, he proceeded to
prepare his comrades and collect arms. Mathieu vanished.
Twenty-four hours later, Rocca woke me at four o’clock in the morning:
‘Two gentlemen just arrived from a journey; they urgently want to see
you, they say. One of them gave me this note.’ ‘_Citoyen_, for God’s sake
give bearer three or four hundred francs at once, if possible; urgently
necessary.—MATHIEU.’
I snatched up the money and went downstairs: two remarkable individuals
were sitting in the half-dark by the window; accustomed as I am to all
the uniforms of revolution, I was yet struck by the appearance of my
visitors. Both were covered with mud and clay to their knees; one was
wearing a thick red woollen scarf; both had shabby overcoats, a sash
round their waistcoats, and big pistols in the sash; and the rest was as
usual—unkempt shocks of hair, big beards, and tiny pipes. One of them,
beginning with the word _citoyen_, delivered a speech in which he touched
upon my civic virtues and the money expected by Mathieu. I gave him the
money. ‘Is he in safety?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ answered his ambassador; ‘we’re
going to join him at once on the other side of the Var. He is buying a
boat.’
‘A boat! what for?’
‘Citoyen Mathieu has the whole plan for landing—the infamous coward of a
boatman would not let us have the boat on credit....’
‘What, a landing in France ... with one boat...?’
‘It is a secret, _citoyen_, for the time.’
‘_Comme de raison._’
‘Would you like a receipt?’
‘Oh, no need of that!’
Next day Mathieu himself appeared, also muddy to the ears, and worn out
with fatigue; he had been mooing like a cow all night, had several times
fancied he heard an answer, went towards it, and found a real bull or a
cow. Orsini, who had been waiting somewhere for him for ten hours at a
stretch, also came back. The difference between them was that Orsini,
washed, and as always, dressed neatly and tastefully, looked like a
man who had just walked out of his bedroom; while Mathieu bore all the
outward signs of destroying the peace of the state, and attempting to
raise a rebellion. Then the boat question had to be considered. Trouble
is never far off, and he might easily ruin half a dozen of his own
countrymen and half a dozen of the Italians. To stop or dissuade him was
impossible. The leaders who had come to me in the night appeared with
him; one might be certain that he would compromise not only the French
but all of us in Nice. Hoetsky undertook to manage him, and did so like
an artist.
Hoetsky’s window, with a little balcony, looked straight out on the
sea-shore. In the morning he saw Mathieu wandering with a mysterious air
along the beach.... Hoetsky began making signs to him; Mathieu saw them
and signed that he would come to him presently; but Hoetsky, assuming
an air of the most terrible alarm, telegraphed to him with his fingers
that danger was imminent, and insisted on his coming up to the balcony at
once. Mathieu, looking round him, stole up on tiptoe. ‘You don’t know?’
Hoetsky asked him. ‘What?’ ‘A squadron of French gendarmes has come into
Nice.’ ‘You don’t say so!’
‘Sh—sh—sh.... They are looking for you and your friends. They mean to
make a house-to-house search among us—you will be caught at once; don’t
go out into the street.’
‘_Violation du territoire_ ... I shall protest.’
‘Of course; only, now you must escape.’
‘I will go to Ste. Hélène, to Herzen’s.’
‘You must be mad! That’s simply giving yourself up to them. His villa is
on the frontier, with a huge garden, and no one will even know that you
have been arrested—besides, Rocca saw two gendarmes at the gate, even
yesterday.’
Mathieu sank into thought.
‘Go by sea to Vogt’s, hide there for the time, and he, by the way, will
give you the best advice.’
Mathieu went by the sea-coast—that is, twice as far round—to Vogt’s,
and began telling him word for word his conversation with Hoetsky. Vogt
instantly grasped the position and observed to him: ‘The great thing,
dear Mathieu, is not to lose one instant. Within two hours you must go
to Turin: the diligence passes the other side of the hill; I will take a
seat, and take you there by the path.’
‘I’ll run home for my things ...’ and the _procureur_ of the republic was
a little flustered.
‘That’s even worse than going to Herzen’s. Why, you must be
crazy—gendarmes, agents, spies, I don’t know what, are after you ... and
you want to run home to kiss your fat Provençale! What a Celadon![89]
Porter!’ shouted Vogt (his house-porter was a minute German, a killing
person, very much like a coffee-pot that had not been washed for months,
and absolutely devoted to Vogt). ‘Make haste and write that you want a
shirt, handkerchiefs, clothes; he’ll fetch them, and if you like bring
your Dulcinea too so that you may kiss and weep to your heart’s content.’
Mathieu was so overcome with feeling that he embraced Vogt.
Hoetsky arrived. ‘Make haste, make haste!’ he said with an ominous air.
Meanwhile the porter came back, his Dulcinea came also—they had only to
wait for the diligence to come into sight beyond the hill. The seat had
been taken.
‘I suppose you are cutting up rotten dogs or rabbits again?’ Hoetsky
asked Vogt; ‘_quel chien de métier...!_’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Upon my soul, the stench in your room is like the catacombs at Naples.’
‘I notice it myself, but I can’t make it out; it comes from the
corner.... There must be a dead rat under the floor—it’s an awful stink,’
and he picked up Mathieu’s overcoat lying on a chair. It appeared that
the smell came from the overcoat.
‘What the devil have you got in your overcoat?’ Vogt asked him.
‘Nothing!’
‘Oh, it must be my fault,’ observed Dulcinea, blushing, ‘I put a pound of
Limburg cheese, _un peu trop fait_, in his pocket for the journey.’
‘I congratulate your neighbours in the diligence,’ shouted Vogt, laughing
as no one else in the world can laugh.
‘Well, it’s time to start—march!’
And Hoetsky and Vogt saw the agitator off on his way to Turin.
In Turin Mathieu presented himself before the Minister of the Interior
with a protest. The latter received him with irritation and laughter.
‘How could you imagine that French gendarmes could arrest people in the
kingdom of Sardinia? You must be unwell.’
Mathieu referred to the testimony of Vogt and Hoetsky.
‘Your friends,’ said the Minister, ‘have been having a joke at your
expense.’
Mathieu wrote to Vogt; he reeled off a string of nonsense, I do not know
what, in answer. But Mathieu was offended, particularly with Hoetsky, and
a few weeks later wrote a letter to me in which, among other things, he
said: ‘You, _citoyen_, alone among these gentlemen, took no part in this
treacherous intrigue against me....’
What adds to the characteristic oddity of the affair is that there was
a very serious rising in Var, that masses of the population really did
revolt, and that the rising was suppressed with the habitual French
bloodthirstiness. How was it Mathieu and his bodyguard, for all their
zeal and their mooing, did not know how to get in contact with the
rebels? No one suspects him or his comrades of intentionally going to
mess about in the mud and not wanting to go where there was danger—far
from it. That is not in the spirit of the French, of whom Delphine Gay
said that ‘they are afraid of everything except bullets,’ and still less
in the spirit _de la démocratie militante_ and the red republic.... Why
did Mathieu go to the right when the revolting peasants were on the left?
A few days later—like yellow leaves driven before the wind—the luckless
victims of the suppressed rising began streaming into Nice. There were
so many of them that the Piedmont government allowed them to remain for
a time in a sort of bivouac or gypsy camp near the town. How many ruined
fortunes and privations have we seen in these camps!—that is the horrible
side behind the scenes of civil wars; usually concealed behind the big
framework and gay scene-painting of such events as the 2nd of December.
Here were simple peasants, gloomily pining for home, for their land, and
naïvely saying: ‘We are not rebels at all—and not “_partageux_”; we tried
to defend public order as good citizens: _ce sont ces coquins_ who called
us out’ (_i.e._ the officials, mayors, and gendarmes)—‘they were false
to their oath and their duty, and must we now die of hunger in a foreign
land or face a court-martial?... Where’s the justice in that?’
And indeed, a _coup d’état_ like the 2nd of December destroys more than
men: it destroys all morality, every conception of good and evil in a
whole population; it is a lesson of corruption which cannot pass without
effect. Among them were soldiers too, _troupiers_, in a permanent state
of wonder at finding themselves, contrary to all discipline and their
captains’ orders, on a different side from their flag and their regiment.
The number of these was not great, however. There were also simple
bourgeois of humble means, who never make the same repulsive impression
on me as the more pretentious—pitiful, narrow-minded people, they had
somehow, in the midst of the petty cheating of trade, laboriously
assimilated two or three notions or half-notions of their duties, and
they had risen in defence of them when they saw their holy things
trampled upon.
‘It is the triumph of egoism,’ they said; ‘yes, yes, of egoism, and where
there is egoism there is vice; every one ought to do his duty without
egoism.’
There were, too, of course, town workmen, the real genuine element of
revolution, striving to obtain _la sociale_ by decree—and to pay out the
bourgeois and the aristocrat as they paid them out.
Of course, among them there were wounded, terribly wounded, too. I
remember two middle-aged peasants who had crawled, leaving a track of
blood, from the frontier to a suburb where the inhabitants picked them up
half dead. A gendarme had been chasing them, and, seeing the frontier was
not far off, he fired at one and shattered his shoulder.... The wounded
man still ran on.... The gendarme fired once more, the wounded man fell;
then he galloped after the other and overtook him, first with a bullet
and then himself. The second wounded man surrendered; the gendarme tied
him in haste to his horse, and all at once missed the first man ...
he had crawled to a copse and started running.... To overtake him on
horseback was difficult, especially with the other wounded man; to leave
the horse behind impossible.... The gendarme shot his prisoner ‘_à bout
portant_’ from the top of his head downwards; the man fell unconscious:
the bullet tore open the whole right side of his face, splintering the
bones. When he came to himself there was no one there; he made his way
along familiar paths trodden by the smugglers as far as Var, and crossed
it and passed through it almost bleeding to death; there he found his
comrade utterly exhausted, and with him succeeded in _surviving_ as
far as the first houses of Ste. Hélène. There, as I have said, the
inhabitants took care of them. The first man said that after being shot
he had hidden in some bushes, that afterwards he had heard voices, that
the pursuing gendarmes had probably come upon others and so made off.
How zealous are the French police!
This example was followed by the zealous _maires_ and their deputies,
the _procureurs_ of the _republic_ and prefects; the zeal was displayed
in the elections and counting of votes: all this was typically French,
and familiar to everybody. I will only say that in remote parts the
steps taken for attaining an immense majority at the polls were of a
rustic simplicity. On the farther side of the Var, in the first village,
the _maire_ and brigadier of gendarmes sat beside the urns and looked
at every ballot-paper any one put in, saying on the spot that they
would make mince-meat of any rebel. The government voting-papers were
printed on special paper—so it worked out that there were in the whole
village only some five or six bold, unruly spirits who voted against the
plebiscite; the rest, and with them the whole of France, voted for the
Empire _in spe_.
_SECTION TWO_
RUSSIAN SHADOWS
I
N. I. SAZONOV
Sazonov, Bakunin, Paris. Those names, those men, that city, take me back
... back into the far-away past, to the days of youthful conspiracies, to
the days of the cult of philosophy and the worship of revolution.
My youth with each is too precious for me not to pause over it.... With
Sazonov, early in the ’thirties, I shared our boyish dreams of a plot _à
la_ Rienzi ... with Bakunin, ten years later, in the sweat of my brains,
I mastered Hegel.
Of Bakunin I have spoken already and shall have much more yet to say.
His striking personality, his eccentric and vigorous appearance,
everywhere—in the circle of Moscow youth, in the lecture-room of the
Berlin University, among Weitling’s communists, and Caussidière’s
Montagnards—his speeches in Prague, his leadership in Dresden, his trial,
imprisonment, sentence to death, torture in Austria, deportation to
Russia—where he vanished behind the terrible walls of the Alexeyevsky
Ravelin—make of him one of those individual figures which neither the
contemporary world nor history can overlook.
That man had within him the latent power of a colossal activity for
which there was no demand. Bakunin was capable of becoming an agitator,
a tribune, a preacher, the head of a party or of a sect, an arch heretic
or a fighter. Put him down anywhere you like, at any extreme point—an
Anabaptist, a Jacobin, a comrade of Anacharsis Cloots or a friend of
Gracchus Babeuf—and he would have won over the masses and shaken the
destinies of nations.
‘But here under the yoke of Tsars,’
a Columbus without an America or a ship, after against his will
serving two years in the artillery and two more in the ranks of Moscow
Hegelianism, he made haste to leave the country in which an idea is
persecuted as an evil intention, and an independent word as an offence
against social morality.
After tearing himself from Russia in 1840, he did not return there until
a picket of Austrian dragoons handed him over to a Russian officer of
gendarmes in 1849.
The worshippers of teleology, the charming fatalists of rationalism, are
still surprised at the provident appropriateness with which great talents
and leaders appear as soon as there is a need for them; forgetting
how many germs perish, are stifled without seeing the light, how many
faculties and powers waste away because they are not wanted.
Sazonov’s example is still more striking. Sazonov has passed without
leaving a trace, and his death has been as unnoticed as the whole of his
life. He died without carrying out one of the hopes that his friends
built upon him.
It is easy to say he was to blame for his fate; but how can we weigh
or appraise how much of the blame rests on the man and how much on his
environment?
The age of Nicholas was a soul-destroying age; it murdered not only with
labour in the mines and ‘white straps,’ but with its stifling, degrading
atmosphere, with its, so to say, negative blows.
To deliver the funeral oration over the submerged beings of that period,
worn out with striving to drag our ship off the sandbanks where it has
foundered so deeply, is my speciality. For them I play the part of
Domazhirov, the old retired orderly of Prozorovsky’s, now forgotten by
everybody, but at one time a familiar figure in Moscow. With a powdered
head, wearing a light green uniform of the days of Paul, he used to turn
up at all the funerals in which a bishop officiated, and, taking the
foremost place, led the procession, imagining that he was doing something
important.
... In our second year at the university—that is, in the autumn of
1831—in the lecture-room of the faculty of physics and mathematics,
Ogaryov and I met, among our new comrades, two with whom we became
particularly intimate.
Our likings, our sympathies and antipathies, were all derived from the
same source. We were fanatics and lads: learning, art, connections, home,
and social position, everything was subordinated to one idea and one
religion. Wherever there was an opening for appeal and propaganda, there
we were on the spot with all our heart and understanding, persistently,
indefatigably, devoting time, work, and even efforts to please.
We went into the lecture-room with the firm determination of founding
in it the nucleus of a society in the image and semblance of the
Decembrists, and so sought proselytes and followers. The first of our
comrades to understand this clearly was Sazonov; we found him completely
prepared, and at once made friends. He gave us his hand with full
understanding, and next day brought us another student.
Sazonov had conspicuous gifts and conspicuous pride. He was eighteen or
rather less, but in spite of that he had studied a great deal and had
read everything in the world. He tried to dominate his comrades, and put
no one on a level with himself. That was why he was more respected than
loved by them. His friend, as handsome and soft as a girl, seemed asking
sympathy and support; full of love and devotion, fresh from under his
mother’s wing, with noble impulses and half-childish dreams, he longed
for warmth and tenderness, he clung to us and gave himself up entirely to
us and our idea—his was the character of Vladimir Lensky, the character
of Venevitinov.
... The day on which we sat side by side on one of the benches of the
amphitheatre, glanced at each other with the full consciousness of our
dedication to our league, our secret, our readiness to face death, our
faith in the sacredness of our cause—and glanced with loving pride at the
multitude of handsome young heads about us, as at a band of brothers—was
a great day in our life. We gave each other our hands and _à la lettre_
went out to preach freedom and struggle in all the four quarters of our
youthful ‘universe,’ like the four deacons who go on Easter Day with the
Four Gospels in their hands.
We preached in every place at every time ... exactly what it was we
preached it is hard to say. Our ideas were vague: we preached the
Decembrists and the French Revolution, then advocated St. Simonism
and the same revolution; we advocated a constitution and a republic,
the reading of political works and the concentration of forces in one
society. Most of all we preached hatred for every form of violence, for
every sort of arbitrary tyranny practised by governments.
Our society in reality was never formed; but our propaganda sent down
deep roots in all the faculties, and extended far beyond the university
walls.
Since those days our propaganda has gone on uninterrupted, all our lives,
from university lecture-room to London printing-press. Our whole life has
been the carrying out of our boyish programme as far as lay in our power.
It is not hard to follow the connecting thread through the questions we
have touched upon, through the interests aroused by us, in journals,
in lectures, in literary circles.... Though it took different forms
and developed, our propaganda remained true to itself and retained its
individual character in every surrounding.
Punishment lifted us up and gave us the prestige of prison and exile. We
came back to Moscow, ‘authorities’ at five-and-twenty. We were joined by
Byelinsky, Granovsky, and Bakunin, while through our articles in _Notes
on the Fatherland_ we ourselves joined the Petersburg movement of the
Lyceum students and the young literary men. The Petrashev group were our
younger brothers as the Decembrists were our elder ones. To be silent
about the importance of our circle because I belonged to it would be
hypocritical and stupid. Quite the contrary: whenever in my memoirs I
come upon those days, on old friends of the ’thirties and the ’forties, I
purposely pause and speak regardless of repetition if only I can make the
younger generation better acquainted with them. It does not know them,
it has forgotten them, it does not care for them, and denounces them as
unpractical and unbusinesslike, as men who did not know so well where
they were going; it is angry with them, and rejects them wholesale as out
of date, as idle and superfluous men, as fantastic dreamers, forgetting
that the value of men of the past, their significance and the hall-mark
of them, depends less on the comparison of the sum of knowledge, and
the manner of formulating problems of the old period and of the new,
than on the energy and strength they brought to their solution. I have
a desperate longing to save the younger generation from the ingratitude
of history, and even from the mistakes of history. It is time for the
fathers to cease devouring their children like Saturn, but it is time
for the children, too, to cease following the example of the natives of
Kamschatka, who kill off their old people.
Boldly, and with full conviction, I say once more of our comrades of
those days ‘that they were a wonderful set of young men, that such a
circle of talented, pure-hearted, cultured, intelligent, and devoted men
I have never met,’ and I have wandered pretty widely about the world
among all classes, and especially the revolutionary ones. I am not only
speaking of my own circle of intimate friends; I am bound to say the same
thing as emphatically of Stankevitch’s circle and the Slavophils. Young
men, horror-stricken by the infamies of the life about them, surrounded
by gloom and oppressive misery, gave up all and went in search of a way
out. They sacrificed everything that others strive after—social position,
wealth, everything which the traditional life offered them, to which
environment and example drew them, to which their family urged them—for
the sake of their convictions, and they remained true to them. Such men
cannot be simply put on the archives and forgotten.
They are persecuted, arrested, put under police supervision,
exiled, dragged from place to place, overwhelmed with insults and
humiliations—they remain the same: ten years pass—they are still the
same: twenty, thirty years pass—they are still the same. I demand that a
recognition be accorded them and justice be done to them.
To this simple demand I have heard a strange objection, and more than
once, too: ‘You, and even more the Decembristi, were the dilettanti
of revolutionary ideas; interest in the cause was for you a luxury,
something romantic; you say yourselves that you all _sacrificed_ social
position; you had means, so for you the revolution was not a question
of bread and butter and of human existence, the question of life and
death....’
‘I imagine,’ I answered once, ‘that for those who were executed it
was....’
‘Anyway, they were not momentous, inevitable questions for you. You like
to be revolutionaries, and that of course is better than if you like to
be senators or governors; for us the struggle with the existing order is
not a matter of choice, it is due to _our_ social position. Between you
and us there is the difference between the man who has fallen into the
water and the man who is bathing; both have to swim, but one does it from
necessity and the other for pleasure.’
To refuse recognition to men because they have done from inner impulse
what others _are going_ to do from necessity is remarkably like the
monastic asceticism which only attaches value to duties the fulfilment of
which is very disgusting.
Extreme views of this sort easily take root among us; and though the
roots do not go deep, they are as hard to eradicate as horse-radish.
We are greatly given to theoretical pedantry and argumentativeness.
This German propensity is in us associated with a special national
element—which we might call the Araktcheyev element—a ruthlessness, a
passionate rigidity, and an eagerness to despatch our victims. To satisfy
his grenadier ideal, Araktcheyev flogged living peasants to death; we
flog to death ideas, arts, humanity, past leaders, anything you like. In
dauntless array we advance step by step to the limit and overshoot it,
never sinning against logic but only against _truth_; unaware, we go on
further and further, forgetting that real sense and real understanding of
life are shown precisely in stopping short before the extreme ... that
is the _halte_ of moderation, of truth, of beauty, that is the perfect
balance of the organism.
The oligarchic pretension of the have-nots to be the exclusive sufferers
from the social system and to possess a monopoly of the feeling of social
injustice is as unjust as all forms of exclusiveness and monopoly.
Neither through Christian mercy nor through democratic envy will you
ever get beyond charity and violent spoliation, the division of property
and universal poverty. In the Church it has remained a theme for rhetoric
and a sentimental exercise in compassion; in the ultra-democrats, as
Proudhon has observed, it is confined to the feeling of envy and hatred;
and in neither case has it gone on to any constructive ideas, to any
practical result.
In what way are men to blame who understood the pain of the sufferers
before they themselves did, and showed it them, and, what was more, the
way of escape too? It was not through starvation that St. Simon the
descendant of Charlemagne, and Robert Owen the manufacturer, either of
them became apostles of socialism.
This view will not persist; it lacks warmth, goodness, breadth. I should
not have referred to it if these critics had not included on their black
lists, not only our names, but those of the men who sowed the first seeds
of all that has come up and will come up—the Decembrists whom we so
deeply honour.
This digression is hardly in place here.
Sazonov was, in fact, an idle man, and wasted immense abilities;
frittering his life away in all sorts of trivialities abroad, he was lost
like a soldier taken prisoner in his first battle and never able to get
home again.
When we were arrested in 1834 and clapped into prison, Sazonov and
Ketscher were, by some miracle, untouched. They both lived almost
uninterruptedly in Moscow, and talked a great deal but wrote little, and
no letters of theirs were found in the possession of any of us. We were
sent into exile; Sazonov’s mother succeeded in getting a passport for him
to go to Italy. His going abroad and being separated from us may have
laid the foundation of all that followed in his life, which was that of a
star with no fixed orbit, falling and leaving no trace.
A year later he returned to Moscow; it was just at one of the most
stifling and oppressive periods of the last reign. In Moscow he was met
by a dead level calm, nowhere a shade of sympathy, nowhere a word of
life. We, in the _reserves_ of exile, were cherishing our past life, were
living in hope and memory, were working and learning something of the
coarse realities of provincial existence.
In Moscow everything reminded Sazonov of our absence. Of his old friends,
the only one on the spot was Ketscher, with whom Sazonov, a man of stiff
and aristocratic manners, was less able to be intimate than with any
of the rest. Ketscher, as we have said, was an intellectual savage—a
cultured one, a pioneer from Fenimore Cooper, returning intentionally to
the primeval state of the human race, rude on principle, slovenly through
theory, a student of five-and-thirty in the part of a Schilleresque
youth. Sazonov struggled on and on in Moscow—he was consumed by boredom,
he had no motive for work, for activity. He tried moving to Petersburg;
that was even worse: _à la longue_ he could not stand it, and went to
Paris with no definite plan. Those were the days when France and Paris
still had a spell of magic for us. Our tourists glided over the polished
surface of French life, knowing nothing of its rough side, and were in
raptures over everything—over the liberal speeches, over the songs of
Béranger and the caricatures of Philipon. It was the same with Sazonov.
But he found nothing to do there either. Noisy, lively idleness succeeded
to his life of dumbness and oppression. In Russia he had been bound hand
and foot, here he was a stranger to every one and everything. Another
long series of years of aimless excitement and over-stimulated nerves
began for him in Paris. He was incapable of concentrating, of devoting
himself to intellectual work without waiting for some impelling force
from outside; it was not in his character. The impersonal interest in
science was not strong enough in him; he was looking for some activity,
and would have been ready for any amount of work so long as it was
conspicuous, so long as it could be rapidly applied and realised in
practice—and it must have been, too, with noise and acclamation, amidst
applause and the outcry of his enemies. Not finding such work, he flung
himself into the dissipations of Paris.
... Yet his eyes, too, glowed and filled with tears at the memories of
our dreams as students. In the recesses of his deeply wounded vanity
there still was faith that the revolution in Russia was close at hand,
and that he was called to play a great part in it. It seemed as though
he were carousing only _meanwhile_, in the wearisome suspense of waiting
for the great work before him, and were convinced that one fine evening
he would be summoned from the table in the Café Anglais and borne off
to govern Russia.... He kept intent watch on what was being done, and
impatiently awaited the moment when he would have to take part in earnest
and utter the last decisive word.
After my first noisy days in Paris, more serious conversation began,
and at once it was evident that we were tuned to very different keys.
Sazonov and Bakunin were (like Wysocki and the members of the Polish
Central Committee later on) displeased that the news I brought was more
concerning the literary and university world than political spheres. They
were expecting to be told about parties, secret societies, ministerial
crises (under Nicholas!), the opposition (in 1847!), while I talked about
professorships, about Granovsky’s public lectures, about Byelinsky’s
articles, about the state of mind of the students and even of the
seminarists. They had been too long divorced from Russian life, and had
entered too thoroughly into the interests of the ‘all-world’ revolution
and French problems to remember that among us the appearance of _Dead
Souls_ was an event of far more consequence than the appointment of a
couple of Paskevitches as field-marshals and a couple of Filarets as
metropolitans. With no Russian books and papers and no regular means of
communication, they judged of everything in Russia theoretically and from
memory, which throws an artificial light on everything far away.
The difference of our views almost led to a breach between us. It
happened like this. On the day before Byelinsky left Paris we saw him
home in the evening, and went for a walk in the Champs-Élysées. I saw
with terrible clearness that all was over for Byelinsky, that I was
pressing his hand for the last time. The mighty, passionate fighter had
burnt himself out, death had laid its unmistakable imprint on his face,
wan with suffering; he was in acute consumption, but still full of holy
energy and holy indignation, still full of his agonising, angry love
for Russia. I had a lump in my throat and for a long time I walked in
silence, when the unlucky argument which had been ten times already _sur
le tapis_ was renewed once more.
‘It is a pity,’ observed Sazonov, ‘that Byelinsky has had no career but
journalistic work, and under the censorship, too.’
‘I think it is hard to reproach him, of all people, for doing little,’ I
answered.
‘Well, with abilities like his he might in other circumstances and in
another field have done rather more....’
I felt vexed and wounded. ‘But do tell me, please, you now, who are
not under the censorship, who are so full of faith in yourselves, so
full of strength and talent, what have you done? Or what are you doing?
Surely you don’t imagine that walking from one end of Paris to the other
every day to discuss the boundaries of Poland and Russia with Sluzalski
or Chotkewicz is doing something? Or that your talks in cafés and at
home, where five fools listen and understand nothing, while another five
understand nothing and talk, is doing something?’
‘Wait a bit, wait a bit,’ said Sazonov, by now considerably nettled: ‘you
forget our position.’
‘What position? You have been living here for years in freedom, in no
dire extremity: what more do you want? Positions are created. Strong men
make themselves acknowledged and force themselves in. Come, come: one
critical article of Byelinsky’s is of far more value for the younger
generation than playing at being conspirators and politicians. You are
living in a sort of delirium and somnambulism, in a perpetual optical
illusion with which you deceive your own eyes....’
I was particularly irritated at the time by the two different standards
which not only Sazonov but Russians in general applied in appreciating
people. Their severe criticism of their own people was transformed into
slavish worship before French celebrities. It was annoying to see our
friends kow-tow before those champion babblers, who flung them a word,
a phrase, a commonplace, uttered with _vitesse accélérée_; and the more
meekly the Russians behaved, the more they blushed and tried to conceal
their idols’ ignorance (as tender parents and sensitive husbands do),
the more the latter gave themselves airs and swaggered before their
hyperborean Anarchases.[90]
Sazonov even as a student in Russia had been fond of surrounding
himself with a retinue of all sorts of mediocrities, who listened to
him and followed his lead; and here, too, he was surrounded by all
sorts of _lazzarone_ of the literary haunts, feeble in mind and body,
penny-a-liners, journalistic scavengers such as the gaunt Jules Vécourt,
the half-crazy Tardif de Melot, the unknown but great poet Bouilhet;[91]
in his chorus, too, were the most narrow-minded Poles, followers of
Towjanski, and dull-witted German atheists. How it was they did not bore
him is his secret. He almost always brought one or two attendants from
his chorus even when he came to me, although I was always bored by them
and did not conceal the fact. It seemed particularly odd, too, that he
himself was in the position of a Jules Vécourt in his relation to the
Marrasts, the Ribeyrolles,[92] and even lesser celebrities.
All this is not quite intelligible for contemporary visitors to Paris. It
must not be forgotten that the present Paris is not the _real_ Paris, but
a new one.
Having become a sort of gathering-place for the whole world Paris has
ceased to be a pre-eminently French city. In old days all France was in
Paris, and nothing besides; now all Europe is there, and the two Americas
besides, but there is less of itself: it has become merged in its
function of a world-hotel, a caravanserai, and has lost its individual
personality, which once inspired ardent love and burning hate, boundless
respect and unlimited aversion.
I need hardly say that the attitude of foreigners to modern Paris has
changed. The Allied troops who bivouacked in the Place de la Révolution
knew that they had taken a foreign town. The tourist who puts up there
now regards Paris as his own; he buys it, he plays with it, and knows
very well that he is essential to Paris, and that the old Babylon has
rigged herself out, rouged and powdered, not for her own sake but for his.
In 1847 I found still the old Paris—moreover, Paris with a quickened
pulse, that had been singing Béranger’s songs, with the chorus ‘_Vive la
réforme!_’ changed unawares into ‘_Vive la République!_’
Russians still in those days lived in Paris with an ever-present sense of
thankfulness to Providence (and to the regular despatch of remittances)
that they were living in it, that they were strolling in the Palais
Royal and visiting French people. They frankly worshipped lions and
lionesses of every description—celebrated doctors and dancing-girls, the
dentist Désirabode and the mad Ma-Pa, and all the literary charlatans and
political jugglers of the day.
I hate the systematic, _prémédité_ insolence which is the fashion among
us. I recognise in it the family traits of the old bullying and arrogance
of our officers and landowners, adapted to the manners of Vassilyevsky
Island and its streets. But it must not be forgotten that our cringing
before West European authorities has come out of the same barracks, the
same government offices, the same antechambers, though it has come out
of the other door and is addressed to the grand gentleman, the office
chief or the commanding officer. In our lack of anything whatever to
which to do homage, except brute force and its symbols, stars and ranks
in the service, the craving for some table of grades of merit is easy
to understand; but, on the other hand, to what men have not the best of
our contemporaries bowed down with tender devotion! Even before Werder
and Ruge, those mighty dullards of Hegelianism. From this reverence for
Germans it may easily be gathered how far they went in their attitude
to Frenchmen, to men who are really remarkable—to Pierre Leroux, for
instance, or George Sand herself....
I am ashamed that I was at first carried away, and thought that to talk
in a café with the historian of the _Ten Years_,[93] or at Bakunin’s
with Proudhon, was something like a promotion, an honour; but in me all
attempts at idolatry and fetish-worship do not last long, and very soon
give way to complete scepticism.
Three months after I arrived in Paris I began strenuously attacking this
form of snobbery, and it was just when my opposition to it was at its
height that the argument about Byelinsky took place. Bakunin, with his
usual good-heartedness, half assented and laughed; but Sazonov resented
it, and continued to regard me as a profane outsider in questions of
practical politics. Shortly afterwards I confirmed him in this conviction.
The revolution of February was a complete triumph for him; his
journalistic friends received posts in the government, thrones were
tottering and leaning for support on poets and doctors. German
princelings were asking advice and help from professors and journalists,
who only the day before had been persecuted. The Liberals taught them how
to fit their narrow crowns on more firmly, that they might not be carried
off by the rising hurricane. Sazonov wrote to me in Rome, letter after
letter, urging me to come _home_, to Paris, to the one and indivisible
republic.
On my return from Italy I found Sazonov preoccupied. Bakunin was not
there; he had already gone off to stir up the Western Slavs.
‘You don’t mean to say,’ Sazonov said to me at our first interview, ‘that
you don’t see that our _time has come_?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The Russian Government is in an _impasse_.’
‘Why! what has happened? A republic has not been proclaimed in the
Peter-Paul Fortress, has it?’
‘_Entendons-nous_, I don’t imagine that we shall have a twenty-fourth
of February to-morrow in Russia. No, but the state of public opinion,
the torrent of liberal ideas, Austria broken to pieces, Prussia with
a constitution, will force the men about the Winter Palace to think a
little. They cannot do less than dole out some sort of constitution,
_un simulacre de charte_: well, and with that,’ he added with a certain
impressiveness, ‘they must have a liberal, cultured ministry who can
speak the language of to-day. Have you thought of that?’
‘No!’
‘You queer fellow! Where are they going to get cultured ministers?’
‘Oh, they’ll find them right enough if they want them; but I fancy they
won’t look for them.’
‘This scepticism is quite out of place now; _history is being made_, and
very rapidly too. Think a minute—the government will have no choice but
to appeal to _us_.’
I looked at him, trying to make out whether he was joking. His face was
quite serious, it looked a little flushed and nervous with excitement.
‘You mean literally to _us_?’
‘Whether to us personally or to our circle does not matter. But just
think again: to whom else can they turn?’
‘Which portfolio will you undertake?’
‘It’s silly of you to laugh. It’s our misfortune that we don’t know
how to take advantage of opportunities, _ni se faire valoir_. You keep
thinking about your little articles: articles are all very well, but
times are changed now; one day in power is worth more than a whole volume
of them.’
Sazonov looked with compassion on my unpracticalness, and at last found
less sceptical people who put faith in his approaching advent to power.
At the end of 1848, two or three German refugees were very regular
visitors at the little evening gatherings that were held at Sazonov’s.
Among them was an Austrian lieutenant who had distinguished himself as
a staff-officer under Messenhauser.[94] Once as he was going out at two
o’clock at night in a heavy downpour of rain, the officer complained of
his hard lot, reflecting on the considerable distance between the Rue
Blanche and the Quartier Latin.
‘Why were you forced to trudge all that way in such weather?’
‘Of course, I was not forced; but, you know, Herr von Sessanoff is vexed
if one does not turn up, and I believe that we ought to maintain good
relations with him. You know better than I do that with his talent and
intellect ... with the position he occupies in his party, what he may
rise to be in the coming revolution in Russia....’
‘Well, Sazonov,’ I said to him next day, ‘you have found Archimedes’
point; there is a man who believes in your future portfolio, and that man
is Lieutenant So-and-So.’
Time passed, the revolution in Russia did not come off, and no one sent
envoys to fetch us home. The sinister days of June had come; Sazonov
undertook to write a leading article for the _Epoch_. He spent a long
time working at it; read aloud a few fragments, made corrections and
alterations, and only just finished it by the winter. He thought it
essential ‘to explain the last revolution to Russia.’ ‘Do not expect
me,’ he wrote at the beginning, ‘to describe events; others will do that
better than I could. I am giving you the significance, the idea of the
revolution which has taken place.’ Humble work was not enough for him;
whenever he did take up the pen, he wanted to do something extraordinary,
something momentous; his mind was always haunted by Tchaadayev’s letter.
The article reached Petersburg, was read in friendly circles, and made no
impression.
In the summer of 1848, Sazonov founded an International Club. To it he
brought all his Tardifs, Germans, and Messianists. With a beaming face he
walked up and down the empty room in a dark blue dress-suit. He opened
the International Club with a speech addressed to five or six listeners
(of whom I was one[95]) by way of audience, the rest of the party being
on the platform in the capacity of committee. Sazonov was followed by
Tardif de Melot, a dishevelled figure looking half-asleep, who stood up
and boomed off a poem in honour of the Club.
Sazonov frowned, but it was too late to stop the poet.
‘_Worcel, Sassonoff, Elinski, Del Balzo, Léonard...._
_Et vous tous...._’
Tardif de Melot bawled with a sort of ecstatic exasperation, unaware of
the laughter.
Two or three days afterwards Sazonov sent me one thousand copies of the
programme of the opening ceremony; with that the Club ended. Only later
on we heard that one of the representatives of humanity, who at that
congress represented Spain in particular, and delivered a speech in which
he called the executive power _potence ehécoutive_, supposing that was
French, narrowly escaped the gallows in England and was sentenced to
penal servitude for forging some document.
The failure to become a minister and the collapse of the Club were
followed by more modest but far more possible attempts as a journalist.
When _La Tribune des Peuples_ was established with Mickiewicz as chief
editor, Sazonov took a leading position on the paper, wrote two or three
very good articles ... and then ceased, and before the failure of the
_Tribune_—that is, before the 13th of June 1849—he was on bad terms
with all the staff. To him it all seemed petty and poor, _il se sentait
dérogé_, was vexed at it, finished nothing, dropped what he had begun and
flung aside what was half done.
In 1849 I suggested to Proudhon to give the post of foreign editor of the
_Voix du Peuple_ to Sazonov. With his knowledge of four languages, of
literature, of politics, of the history of all the European nations, and
his wide acquaintance with political parties, he might have done wonders
for the French with this part of the paper. Proudhon had nothing to do
with the internal arrangements of the foreign news department, it was
in my hands, but I could do nothing from Geneva. A month later Sazonov
handed the foreign editorship to Hoetsky and severed his connection with
the paper. ‘I have a great respect for Proudhon,’ he wrote to me in
Geneva, ‘but there is not room on one journal for two such personalities
as mine and his.’
A year later Sazonov joined _La Réforme_, then being revived by the
followers of Mazzini. Lamennais was the chief editor. But on that paper
also there was not room for two great men. Sazonov worked on it for three
months, and then threw up _La Réforme_. With Proudhon he had fortunately
parted peacefully, but he quarrelled with Lamennais. Sazonov charged the
niggardly old man with using the funds of the paper for his personal
ends. Lamennais, recalling the habits of his clerical youth, resorted
to what is the _ultima ratio_ in Western Europe, and spread concerning
Sazonov the suggestion that he might be an agent of the Russian
Government.
The last time I saw Sazonov was in Switzerland in 1851. He had been
deported from France, and was living in Geneva. This was at the very
greyest, most oppressive period; a brutal reaction was triumphant
everywhere. Sazonov’s faith in France and in the coming change in the
ministry in Petersburg was shaken. He was bored and worried by his
idle life, did not succeed with any work, caught at everything without
perseverance, lost his temper, and drank. Moreover, the life of petty
cares and the everlasting struggle with creditors, the effort to obtain
money, together with the talent for flinging it away and the incapacity
for ordering his life, brought a great deal of nervous irritability and
dismal prose into Sazonov’s daily existence; by then his life of reckless
gaiety was no longer an enjoyment but a habit, while in old days he
really had known how to enjoy himself.
A few words about his domestic life will not be out of place, especially
as it was distinguished by the same note of gay recklessness, and was not
without its striking contrasts in colour.
In the early years of his Parisian life Sazonov met a wealthy widow, and
his connection with her drew him still further into a life of luxury. She
went off to Russia, leaving him plenty of money and their daughter to
bring up. The widow had scarcely had time to reach Petersburg when her
place was filled by a buxom Italian with a voice at which the walls of
Jericho would have fallen once more.
Two or three years later the widow took it into her head to pay her
friend and her daughter a quite unexpected visit. She was struck by the
Italian woman.
‘What person is this?’ she asked, scanning her from head to foot.
‘Lili’s nurse, and a very good one.’
‘But how can she teach her to speak French with such an accent? That’s a
pity. I had better find a Parisian and you get rid of this one.’
‘_Mais, ma chère_....’
‘_Mais, mon cher_ ...’ and the widow took her daughter away.
This was not only an emotional but a financial crisis. Sazonov was
far from being poor; his sisters sent him twenty thousand francs a
year from the revenue of his estate. But, being accustomed to spend
it recklessly, he did not think of diminishing his establishment, but
resorted to borrowing. He borrowed right and left, got what he could from
Russia out of his sisters, borrowed from friends and enemies, borrowed
from money-lenders, from fools, from Russians and non-Russians. For a
long time he managed and kept afloat in this way, but at last got into
trouble, and was thrown into Clichy, as I have mentioned already.
It was during this period that his elder sister’s husband died. Hearing
that their brother was in prison, the two sisters came to get him out.
As is always the case, they knew nothing of the manner of life of their
Nikolinka. The two sisters adored him, regarded him as a genius, and were
impatiently awaiting the moment when he would appear to the world in all
his power and glory.
They were met by various disillusionments which surprised them the more
as they were so unexpected. On the morning after their arrival, taking
with them Count Chotkewicz, a friend of Sazonov’s, with them, they went
to buy him out as a surprise. Chotkewicz left them in the carriage and
went away promising to return in a minute with their brother. Hour after
hour passed, Nikolinka did not appear ... no doubt the formalities take
a long time, thought the ladies waiting wearily in the cab.... At last
Chotkewicz ran up alone, flushed in the face, and smelling strongly of
spirituous liquor. He announced that Sazonov would be with them directly;
that he was just giving a farewell lunch to his companions and treating
them to wine; that this was the usual thing. This was rather a stab to
the tender hearts of the fair travellers ... but ... but here at last
their Nikolinka, solid, stout, and perspiring, flung himself into their
arms, and they set off homewards satisfied and happy.
They had heard something ... about some Italian woman ... an ardent
daughter of Italy, unable to resist the genius from the hyperborean
north, who had been enchanted by her southern voice and the fire of her
eyes.... Blushing and abashed, they indicated the timid desire to make
her acquaintance. He agreed to everything, and went home. Two days later
the sisters planned a second surprise for their brother, which was even
less successful than the first.
At eleven o’clock one hot morning the sisters set off to have a look at
this Francesca da Rimini and her _ménage_ with Nikolinka. The younger
sister opened the door, and stopped short.... In the small drawing-room
Sazonov was sitting on the carpeted floor in extreme deshabille,
and beside him the stout Signora P., scantily veiled in a light
dressing-gown. The signora was laughing with the full force of her lusty
Italian lungs at something Nikolinka was telling her. Beside them stood a
pail of ice, and in it, tilted on one side, was a bottle of champagne.
What happened next I do not know, but the effect produced was strong and
lasting. The younger sister came to consult me about this incident, of
which she spoke with tears and sobs. I tried to comfort her by assurances
that the first days after Clichy were different from the average.
All this was followed by a prosaic move into smaller lodgings.... The
valet, who was a master at putting on a cravat of impenetrably solid silk
and adroitly sticking a pearl pin into it, was dismissed, and after him
the pin itself appeared in a shop window.
So passed another five years. Sazonov went to Paris from Switzerland, and
then went back again from Paris to Switzerland. To get rid of the buxom
Italian, he devised the most original plan—he married her and then left
her.
Something had come between us; he did not treat me openly in a matter
that was very dear to my heart. I could not get over it.
Meantime a new epoch was beginning for Russia, Sazonov was eager to take
part in it: wrote articles[96] that were unsuccessful, tried to return
to Russia and did not succeed, and finally left Paris. For a long while
nothing was heard of him.
One day a Russian who had just come from Switzerland to London said to
me: ‘An old friend of yours was buried the day before I left Geneva.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Sazonov; and only fancy, there was not one Russian at his funeral.’
And it sent a stab to my heart to think with remorse that I had abandoned
him for so long....
(_Written in 1863._)
II
THE ENGELSONS
They are both dead. He was not more than thirty-five; she was younger.
He died ten years ago in Jersey: his coffin was followed to the grave by
his widow, his child, and a sturdily built, dishevelled-looking old man
with large, marked, rough features; in his face were mingled genius and
frenzy, fanaticism and irony, the intensity of an Old Testament prophet
and a Jacobin of the year 1793. That old man was Pierre Leroux.
She died at the beginning of 1865 in Spain. I heard of her death a few
months later.
I have not heard where the child is.
The man of whom I am speaking was once near and dear to me; he first
tended deep wounds when they were fresh; he was a brother, a sister to
me. She, scarcely knowing what she was doing, estranged him from me. He
became my enemy....
The news of her death brought them back to my memory again....
I took up the manuscript I had written about them in 1859, and read it
through by way of psalter over the dead.
For a long time I hesitated whether to print it or not, and only lately
decided to do so. My intention is good, and my story is true. I do not
want to cast reproaches on their grave, but together with the reader to
trace once again, in fresh instances, the intricate, morbid warping of
character in the last generation under Nicholas.
CHÂTEAU BOISSIÈRE, _December 31, 1865_.
I
At the beginning of 1850 a Russian arrived in Nice with his wife. They
were pointed out to me on the parade. They both belonged to the class who
were waiting for the turn of the tide: he was thin, pale, consumptive,
with reddish fair hair; she was a beauty who had faded early, worn-out,
half-shattered, exhausted.
A doctor living in the household of a Russian lady told me that the fair
gentleman had been a Lyceum student, that he was reading _Vom andern
Ufer_, that he had been mixed up in the Petrashev case, and consequently
wished to make my acquaintance. I answered that I was always glad to meet
a good Russian, especially a Lyceum student, and one who had had a hand
in a case of which I knew little, but which had been for me like the
olive branch brought by the dove to Noah’s ark.
Some days passed without my seeing either the doctor or the new Russian.
Suddenly between nine and ten one evening a card was brought me; it was
he. Karl Vogt and I were sitting in the dining-room. I told the servant
to ask the visitor upstairs into the drawing-room, and went upstairs
before the rest. There I found him, pale, trembling, apparently in a
feverish condition. He could scarcely tell me his name; when he was a
little calmer, he jumped up from his chair, rushed at me, kissed me
effusively, and before I could quite recover myself, with the words, ‘So
at last I am really seeing you,’ he kissed my hand. ‘What are you about?
Upon my soul!’ I said, but by then he was in tears.
I looked at him in perplexity; was this nervous instability or simply
madness?
Apologising and showering compliments on me, he told me with
extraordinary rapidity and much gesticulation that I had saved his life,
and this was how. Desperate with acute depression in Petersburg, expelled
from the Lyceum for some nonsense or other, disgusted with a job in the
service which he had been obliged to accept, and seeing no solution
for himself personally, nor for things in general, he had made up his
mind to poison himself, and a few hours before carrying out his design
went wandering aimlessly about the streets: came to Izler’s and picked
up a volume of the _Notes of the Fatherland_. My article, ‘A propos of
a Drama,’ was in it. Reading it gradually absorbed his attention; he
felt better, he felt ashamed of having so weakly given in to sorrow and
despair when public interests were springing up on all sides and calling
for all who were young, for all who had strength, and instead of taking
poison Engelson asked for half a bottle of madeira, read the article over
again, and from that time became my ardent admirer.
He sat on till late at night, and went away asking leave to come again
soon. Through his tangled talk, continually interspersed with anecdotes
and digressions, one could see a richly endowed brain, unmistakable
dialectic ability, and, still more clearly, something warped and
distorted that flung him from one extreme to the other, from an
indignation intensified by sorrow, and made poignant by misfortune, to
ironical clowning, from tears to affectation.
He left me with a strange impression. At first I did not quite believe in
him, then I was tired by him—he seemed to affect one’s nerves too much;
but by degrees I grew used to his oddities, and was glad of an original
person to break the monotonous boredom induced by the vast majority of
Western Europeans.
Engelson had read a great deal and studied a great deal, he was a
linguist and a philologist, and brought into everything the scepticism
with which we are so familiar, and which exacts so high a price for the
pain it leaves. In old days they would have said of him that he had read
himself silly. His over-stimulated intellectual activity was too much for
the strength of his frail organism. Wine, with which he conquered fatigue
and stimulated himself, fanned his thoughts and imagination into long,
bright tongues of fire, that were rapidly consuming his sick body.
His disorderly living and drinking, his perpetual, irritable mental
activity, his conspicuous many-sidedness and his conspicuous futility,
his utter idleness, his extreme violence of feeling and extreme apathy,
vividly recalled the past to me, in spite of the immense difference
between all this and our old ways in Moscow. Again I heard the sounds not
only of my own language but of my own thought. He had been a witness of
the reign of terror in Petersburg after 1848, and he knew the literary
circles. Entirely cut off from Russia as I was at that time, I listened
greedily to his accounts.
We took to seeing each other often, nearly every evening.
His wife, too, was a strange creature. Her face, by nature handsome,
was racked by neuralgic pains and a sort of restless anxiety. She was a
Russified-Norwegian, and spoke Russian with a slight accent which suited
her. As a rule she was more silent and reserved than he. Their home life
was not cheerful: there was something nervous, _unheimlich_, strained,
about them; there was something lacking in their life, and something
superfluous in it, and one felt this continually like electricity, unseen
and menacing, in the air.
I often found them in the large room which served them as bedroom and
sitting-room in the hotel, in a state of utter prostration. She, with
tear-stained eyes, helpless in one corner; he pale as death, with white
lips, distraught, and silent in the other.... So they would sit at times
for whole hours, whole days together, and that a few yards from the dark
blue Mediterranean, from groves of orange-trees, to which everything—the
sapphire sky and the bright noisy gaiety of southern life—invited
one. They did not actually quarrel; it was not a case of jealousy nor
estrangement, nor any tangible cause, indeed.... He would suddenly get
up, go to her, fall on his knees and sometimes with sobs repeat: ‘I have
been your ruin, my child, your ruin!’ and she would weep and believe that
he had been her ruin. ‘When shall I die and leave him in freedom?’ she
used to say to me.
All this was new to me, and I felt so sorry for them that I wanted to cry
with them, and even more to say to them: ‘Oh, come, come, you are not
so miserable and not so bad, you are both splendid people; let us take
a boat and drown sorrow in the dark blue sea.’ I did do this sometimes,
and succeeded in drawing them out of themselves. But by next morning the
paroxysm would return.... They were somehow so on each other’s nerves,
and had reached such an hysterical _impasse_, that the slightest word
destroyed the harmony and, as it were, called up furies again from the
bottom of their hearts.
I sometimes fancied that, continually tearing open their wounds, they
found a sort of stinging enjoyment in the pain; that this gnawing at
each other had become necessary to them, like vodka or pickle. But
unfortunately the physique of both was unmistakably beginning to be
exhausted; they were on the high road to the lunatic asylum or the grave.
Her mind, by no means without talents, was undisciplined and at the same
time depraved; her character was far more complex, and in a certain
sense she had far more fortitude and strength than he had. Moreover, she
had not a shade of the unity, the consistency, that unhappy consistency
which he retained even in the most violent extremes and the sharpest
contradictions. In her, side by side with her despair, her desire to
die, her habit of moaning and groaning, there was a thirst for worldly
pleasures and a concealed coquetry, a love for dress and luxury, denied
as it were intentionally, to spite herself. She was always dressed
becomingly and with taste. She longed to be an emancipated woman
according to the ideas of the period, and the victim of an immense,
original, psychic unhappiness, like George Sand’s heroines ... but her
old accustomed, traditional life dragged her like a heavy weight towards
quite a different sphere.
What gave poetic charm to Engelson, and did much to make up for his
defects, and what served as a safety-valve for himself, she could
not understand. She could not follow his racing thought, his rapid
transitions from despair to wit and laughter, from candid mirth to
candid tears. She lagged behind, losing the thread, distracted.... His
caricatures of his own gloomy thoughts were beyond her comprehension.
When Engelson, after a perfect feast of puns and jokes, mockery and
teasing, getting more and more into the spirit of the thing, began acting
regular scenes at which one could only laugh helplessly, she would go out
of the room, exasperated; she was offended at ‘his unseemly behaviour
before outsiders.’ He usually noticed this, and as nothing could stop him
when once he was set going, he would play the fool more extravagantly
than ever, and then waltz round with her and ask her with glowing cheeks
and perspiring brows: ‘_Ach, mein lieber Gott, Alexandra Christianovna,
war es denn nicht respectabel?_’ She would weep more than ever, till he
suddenly changed, grew gloomy and morose, drank glass after glass of
brandy, and went home, or simply fell asleep upon the sofa.
Next day I had to reconcile them and make the peace, and he so earnestly
kissed her hands and so funnily asked to be forgiven his sins, that even
she could not restrain herself sometimes and laughed with us.
I must explain in what these performances, which were such a source of
woe to poor Alexandra Christianovna, consisted. Engelson’s comic talent
was unmistakable and immense; such biting satire was never equalled by
Levassor, hardly by Grasso at his best, and Gorbunov in some of his
stories. Moreover, half of it was improvised; he would bring in additions
and variations while preserving the same framework. If he had cared
to train and develop this gift, he would certainly have been in the
foremost ranks of _satirical_ comedians, but Engelson never trained nor
developed anything in himself. Talents shot up like vigorous wild plants
and were choked in his unstable soul, both by domestic cares which took
up half his time, and by his habit of catching at everything in the world
from philology and chemistry to political economy and philosophy. In
this respect Engelson was a typical Russian, although his father was of
Finnish extraction.
He acted everything in the world—officials and Russian gentlemen, priests
and police-constables; but the best of his performances were concerned
with Nicholas, for whom he had a profound, sincere, and active hatred.
He would take a chair _à la_ Napoleon, sit astride it, and sternly ride
up to a corps on parade ... epaulettes, hats, casques shaking all round
him ... it is Nicholas at a review; he is moved to wrath, and, turning
his horse, says to the commanding officer, ‘Bad’; the commanding officer
listens with reverent awe, looks after Nicholas, and then, dropping his
voice and gasping with fury, whispers to the general of the division:
‘You appear, your Excellency, to be busy about something else and not
your duties. What a wretched division! what regimental commanders! I’ll
teach them.’
The general of the division turns redder and redder, and pounces on the
first colonel he comes across, and so from one grade to the next, with
incredibly true, almost imperceptible nuances, the Imperial ‘bad’ passes
down to the sergeant, at whom the squadron commanding officer swears like
a trooper, and who, without answering, pokes the scabbard of his sword
with all his might into the ribs of the nearest soldier, who has done
nothing.
Engelson would portray with amazing fidelity, not only the
characteristics of each rank, but also each man’s movement as he tugged
at his horse in his fury and then raged at it for not standing still.
Another performance was of a more peaceful kind. The Emperor Nicholas
is dancing the French quadrille. _Vis-à-vis_ is a foreign diplomat, on
one side a general, stiff as on parade, on the other a civilian grandee.
This was a perfect _chef-d’œuvre_. Engelson would take one of us for his
partner. The flower of it all was Nicholas—playing the autocratic Tsar
over the quadrille, the conscious firmness of every step, the brilliant
perfection of each movement, together with the indulgent and gracious
glance at his partner, which is transformed at once into a command to the
general, and warning not to forget himself to the civilian gentleman.
To describe this in words is impossible. The general, who, rigidly
erect, with his elbows a little rounded, with strained attention walks
in time through the figures under the stern observation of his gracious
monarch, and the distracted civilian with his legs shaking under him from
terror, with a smile on his face and almost a tear in his eye—all this
was performed so that a man who had never seen Nicholas could thoroughly
grasp the agonising ordeal of an imperial quadrille, and the danger of
having the Most High as a _vis-à-vis_. I forgot to say that the foreign
diplomat was the only one who danced with studied negligence and great
finish, concealing the uncomfortable feeling of uneasiness of which the
most valiant is conscious when he has a lighted cigar close to a barrel
of gunpowder.
But although Engelson’s grimacing and foolery roused his wife’s
indignation, it does not follow that there was any more unison or harmony
about her; quite the contrary, there was an absolute chaos in her head,
that was destructive of all order, of all consistency, and made her
impossible to cope with. In her case I learnt for the first time how
little you can do with logic in discussion with a woman, especially
when the discussion relates to practical affairs. In Engelson the lack
of harmony was like the mental confusion after a fire, after a funeral,
after a crime perhaps; but in her case it was like an untidy room in
which everything is flung about higgledy-piggledy—children’s toys,
a wedding dress, a prayer-book, a novel of George Sand’s, slippers,
flowers, plates. In her half-conscious ideas and half-undermined beliefs,
in her claims to an impossible freedom and to independence of all
customary external bonds, there was something suggestive of a child of
eight, a girl of eighteen, and an old woman of eighty. Many times I told
her that. And, strange to say, even her face was prematurely faded; it
looked old from the absence of some of her teeth, and at the same time it
retained a childish expression.
Engelson was entirely to blame for the chaos in her mind.
His wife was the spoilt child of a mother who had adored her. An elderly,
phlegmatic official of Swedish origin sought her in marriage when she was
eighteen. In a moment of childish caprice and vexation with her mother,
she agreed to marry him. She wanted to be her own mistress and sit at the
head of the table.
When the honeymoon of freedom, visits, and fine clothes was over, the
bride was insufferably bored; although her husband behaved with strict
propriety, took her to the theatre and arranged evening tea-parties
for her, she had an aversion for him; she struggled with him for three
or four years, grew tired of it, and went back to her mother. They
were divorced. Her mother died, and she was left alone, suffering and
melancholy, with her health prematurely broken in the struggle with her
absurd marriage, with emptiness and hunger in her heart and an idle brain.
It was just at this time that Engelson was expelled from the Lyceum. He
was nervous, irritable, and, with a passionate yearning for love and a
morbid lack of confidence in himself, was consumed by _amour-propre_....
He had made her acquaintance while her mother was living, and they became
great friends after her death. It would have been strange if he had not
fallen in love with her. Whether the feeling were likely to be lasting or
not, he was bound to love her passionately; everything helped to bring
this about ... the fact that she was a woman without a husband, a widow
and not a widow, a bride and not a bride, and that she was pining for
something, was in love with another man, and made miserable by her love.
This other was an ‘energetic young fellow,’ an officer and a literary
man, but a desperate gambler. They quarrelled over this invincible
passion for play; later on, he shot himself.
Engelson never left her side; he comforted her, amused her, occupied her.
It was his first and last love. She wanted to study, or rather to learn
without studying; he undertook to be her Mentor—she asked for books.
The first book Engelson gave her was Feuerbach’s _Das Wesen des
Christenthums_. He took the place of commentator, and day by day he
pulled from under the feet of his Héloïse, who could not step on firm
ground for the Chinese shoes of her early Christian training, the prop by
means of which she might somehow have kept her balance.
Emancipation from the traditional morality, said Goethe, never leads to
good unless the mind has grown strong; indeed, only reason is worthy to
replace the religion of duty. Here was a woman sleeping the deep slumber
of moral security, lulled by traditions and full of the dreams natural
to a patriarchal soul, tinged with Christianity, tinged with romantic
and moral notions; and Engelson tried to educate her at one blow on the
method of English nurses, who, when the baby screams from stomach-ache,
pour a glass of gin into its mouth. He flung into her immature, childish
conceptions a rankling ferment with which men are rarely equal to coping,
which he himself could not cope with but only understand.
Overwhelmed by the overthrow of all her moral conceptions and all her
religious convictions, and finding in Engelson himself nothing but doubt,
nothing but irony and denial of the old, she lost the only compass, the
only guide she had left, and was like a boat adrift at sea, twisting and
turning without a rudder. The equilibrium arrived at by life itself,
resting—like the opposite weights of a pendulum—on absurdities which
exclude each other and are maintained by so doing, was broken.
She flung herself into reading with avidity, understanding and not
understanding, and mixing up the philosophy of her nurses with the
philosophy of Hegel, sentimental socialism with the economic conceptions
of conventional housekeeping. With all that, her health grew worse,
boredom and misery continued; she pined and grew thin, had a desperate
longing to go abroad, and was afraid of persecutions and enemies of some
sort.
After a prolonged struggle, Engelson, rallying all his forces, said to
her: ‘You want to travel; how can you go alone?... You will meet with all
sorts of unpleasantness, you will be lost without a friend, without a
protector with the right to protect you. You know that I would lay down
my life for you ... give me your hand—I will care for you, soothe you,
watch over you.... I will be your father, your mother, your nurse, and
your husband, but it must be legally. I will be with you, near you....’
This was said by a man under thirty, and passionately in love. She was
touched, and accepted him as her husband unconditionally. A short time
afterwards they went abroad.
Such was the past of my new acquaintances. When Engelson told me all
this, when he bitterly complained that this marriage had been the ruin
of them both, and I saw for myself how they were fretting away in a
sort of moral furnace which they intentionally fanned, I came to the
conviction that this unhappiness was due to their having known too little
of each other beforehand, their being too closely bound together now,
their having built their life too much on personal feeling, and their
putting too much faith in being husband and wife. If they could have
parted, each might have sighed in freedom, have grown calm, and perhaps
begun to blossom afresh. Time would have shown whether they were really
so necessary to each other; in any case, the delirium would have been
broken for a time without catastrophe. I did not conceal my opinion from
Engelson; he agreed with me. But all this was a _mirage_; in reality he
had not the strength to leave her, nor she to take the plunge.... They
secretly _wanted_ to hover on the brink of these resolutions without
carrying them into execution.
My view was too sane and simple to be correct in regard to such
intricately pathological characters and such sick nerves.
II
The type to which Engelson belonged was at that time rather new to me.
At the beginning of the ’forties I had seen such a type only in embryo.
It developed in Petersburg towards the end of Byelinsky’s career, and
was formed after I left and before Tchernyshevsky appeared. It was the
type of the Petrashev group and their friends. That group was made up of
young and gifted men, extremely intelligent and extremely cultured, but
nervous, morbid, and warped by their surroundings. Among them there was
no example of striking stupidity, no one who wrote ungrammatically—those
types belong to quite a different period; but in them there was something
degenerate, abnormal.
The followers of Petrashev made a bold and ardent dash into activity, and
astonished all Russia by the _Dictionary of Foreign Words_. The intense
mental activity of the ’forties was their heritage, and they passed
straight from German philosophy into Fourier’s phalanstery, into becoming
followers of Kant.
Surrounded by petty and worthless people, proud of the attentions of
the police, and conscious of their own superiority, from the very time
they left school they prized too highly their negative achievement, or
rather their possible achievement. This led to immoderate vanity—not that
youthful healthy vanity becoming in a lad who dreams of a great future,
becoming in a man in the fulness of his powers and in the fulness of
activity, not that which in old days has led men to perform miracles
of daring and to endure chains and death for the sake of glory, but,
on the contrary, a morbid vanity, hindering all work through its vast
pretensions, irritable, ready to take offence, conceited to the point of
rudeness, and at the same time diffident.
Between their pretensions and their appreciation by their neighbours the
distance was immeasurable. Society will not accept blank cheques for
the future, but insists on work being completed before giving personal
recognition. They had little power of hard work and perseverance;
they only had enough of each for understanding and assimilating what
had been worked out by others. They wanted to have harvests for the
intention of sowing, and to be rewarded for having their granaries full.
‘The insulting way in which they were overlooked by society’ worried
them, made them unjust to others, and reduced them to despair and
_Fratzenhaftigkeit_.
In the person of Engelson I studied the difference between that
generation and our own. Later on I met many men not so talented, not
so cultured, but with the same obviously morbid warp in all their
composition.
A terrible sin lies at the door of the government of Nicholas in this
moral destruction of a generation, in this spiritual depraving of its
children. The wonder is that the strong and healthy, though warped, still
survived. Every one knows the celebrated list of instructions to teachers
in the Cadet Corps. In the Lyceum things were better, but of late years
it, too, had incurred the hatred of Nicholas. The whole system of
government education lay in instilling the religion of obedience, leading
up to power as its reward. The feelings of the young, naturally radiant,
were coarsely driven inwards, and replaced by ambition and jealous,
envious rivalry. What did not perish came out sick, deranged.... Together
with burning pride, they were inoculated with a sort of spiritlessness,
a sense of impotence, of fatigue before beginning work. Young men
became hypochondriacal, suspicious, tired before they were twenty. They
were all tainted with the passion for introspection, self-analysis,
self-accusation; they scrupulously believed their psychic experiences,
and loved making endless confessions and giving descriptions of neurotic
incidents of their lives. In later years it happened to me several times
to receive the confessions not only of men but of women belonging to this
category. After watching with sympathy their remorse, their pathological
self-castigation, which approached gross calumny upon themselves, I at
last came to the conviction that this was only one of the forms of the
same vanity. One had but to cease protesting and sympathising and to
agree with the repentant sinners, to see how readily malignant and how
mercilessly vindictive these Magdalens—of both sexes—became. With them,
like the Christian priest before the mighty of this world, you are only
privileged solemnly to absolve their sins and to keep silent.
These nervous people, though excessively ready to take offence,
shuddering like a sensitive plant at the faintest rough handling,
are incredibly harsh in their own language. As a rule, when it came
to revenging themselves, there was no moderation in their language—a
terrible defect of taste, which betrays a profound contempt for the
person addressed and an insulting indulgence for self. This lack of
restraint among Russians comes from the homes of landowners, from
government offices and army barracks; but how is it that it has survived
and developed in the younger generation whilst skipping ours? That is a
psychological problem.