Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

The Bell Tower of San Marco

‘“Be fruitful and multiply!’ Can that really be all that’s bequeathed to us? Why even the mice and Koch’s microbes honor this behest. But man is infinitely greater than his physical self. And how can you reduce all of me, all my untapped resources, the yearning to accomplish something important, essential, that serves mankind, my people, my country—to propagation!”

That is what Lydia Kochetkova writes in October 1898, to her future husband, Fritz Brupbacher.

I first came across this remarkable love story when I was collecting material for my Russian Switzerland. Six thousand letters and postcards are preserved in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

Seventeen years of a broken era are captured in this correspondence.

Brupbacher was almost unknown in Russia, and not even a footnote in Switzerland, yet against the dull background of Swiss politicians, he stood out for an ‘un-Swiss’ trait—his inability to compromise. A doctor in a working class district of Zurich, a deputy to the city council, a dedicated internationalist, essayist, socialist, he was expelled from the Swiss Socialist Party during World War I for his pacifism. Though a founder of the Swiss Communist Party, in 1932 he was also expelled from its ranks for excoriating Stalin. An author of socialist brochures and engaging memoirs, he had a true command of the language, and before his death in January 1945 at age 70, he regretted not having become a writer.

It’s interesting that on the initiative of this very Fritz Brupbacher, a memorial plaque to Lenin was mounted on Spiegelgasse 14. Fritz knew Lenin and many other Russian revolutionaries, both sung and unsung.

As a medical student in 1897 in Zurich, Fritz met a Russian girl and fell in love. She became his wife. In his memoirs, “60 Years as a Heretic,” published in 1935, he said of this union, “I was married to the Russian Revolution.”

Lydia Kochetkova was 25 when she met Brupbacher. Born in Samara, she attended courses for women in Petersburg given by Lesgaft, a famous physician, then studied in Berlin, Geneva, and Berne. It was in Zurich that she took her MD and found the love of her life.

“A doctor—that’s a path, not a goal,” Lydia writes in an early letter, pointing out to Fritz the difference between Swiss and Russian medical students. “My goal is revolution.”

Lydia’s idol was Vera Figner, a physician and member of the People’s Will Party, following whose example Lydia came to medical school in Switzerland. In her memoirs, Figner sheds light on the special way Russian students saw their future profession—a doctor could spread propaganda freely among the people.

The Russian air was filled with revolutionary ideals then. As for the Kochetkov family, they had their own special involvement with the revolutionaries. Though almost nothing is known of Lydia’s father, who died early, her letters reveal that from childhood she was intrigued with the stories of her mother, Anastasia Ivanovna, a native of Irkutsk. She told of how, as a starry-eyed schoolgirl, the great iconoclast Prince Kropotkin, then still a tsar’s officer, asked for her hand, and how her parents refused him. The young Anastasia, who was close to revolutionary circles and herself at one time under secret surveillance, was courted by two prominent members of the People’s Will Party, Lazarev and Shishko. As émigrés in Switzerland, these two influenced Lydia to join its successor, the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Even before meeting Fritz, Lydia had a clear purpose in life. “I’m ready to sacrifice everything I have for the sake of my people.”

It’s no small wonder this Russian woman impressed the young Helvetian. Fritz recalls, “The Russian students despised us Swiss medical students who aimed for a solid profession and a solid income. In Lydia’s eyes, the Swiss, just like the other Western Europeans, had, on the whole, many failings: narrow-mindedness, a fixation on material values, opportunism, crassness and egoism. The Swiss student had his eye on dividends and a profitable marriage, the Russian on altering the world. She infected me with Socialism, had me reading certain books, took me to meetings. I was so dazzled by her and her burning faith in the socialist ideal I was ready to follow her anywhere.”

A fascination with socialist thinking and the allure of all things Russian were intertwined in his feelings for Lydia. “This Russian woman was for me a complete revelation, a bundle of passion, raw emotions and rare power. Our differences showed up everywhere, everyday, in the way we spoke, and thought, in the smallest detail, even how we prepared for exams: the Swiss took this fortress over a long-month’s siege, the Russians—in a head-on attack.”

Many years later, when he was trying to make sense of this faith in Socialism gripping the Russian youth, Fritz writes, “For her the people and love of the people was like a religion. But you couldn’t say the word ‘religion’ in her presence. She longed for martyrdom—to be exiled to Siberia or, better still, end up on the gallows. These young Russians were like the early Christians, marching to their execution with tears of joy.”

Fritz described the ‘altar’ in her tiny room—engravings and photographs of revolutionary martyrs such as Countess Sophia Perovskaya, Vera Figner, and other female terrorists.

“Socialism for the Russians,” we read further in his memoirs, “really meant a loss of one’s ego through self-abnegation. Everything else was secondary. It was a passion to live for others. Lydia sacrificed her interest in the natural sciences to become a doctor, live among the common people, and devote herself to them. She abhorred tsarism. Her models were the regicides of the Perovskaya circle. This fervor, felt at the core, for self-sacrifice to an idea, this desire to efface her ego confused me and at the same time held something magical for one about whom the world said, ‘Without money, there are no Helvetians.’”

The two were thrust together by their love despite all their emotional and cultural differences.

In her letter of 25 July, 1899 she writes, “Don’t worry that I fell in love with you because you became a socialist. If Socialism were all that counted here, I would have fallen in love with some like-minded fellow like Bebel, not you. Your conversion removed any possible obstacle to our love. Ever since you became a socialist I forget you’re a socialist and I love you because I love you. I’m so happy.”

And in another letter of the same year, “My sweetheart! I love you precisely because you’re not at all like a Swiss! I could never fall in love with one of those philistines who just think of their own little house and vegetable garden! Right away I sensed in you one of us.”

Living in the same city and meeting often, they wrote each other daily, and even several times a day.

Now with a medical degree, Fritz opened a practice in Aussersihl, a working class district of Zurich, and became active politically. The workers elected him their deputy to the city council. Lydia too finished her university course and it was time to think about their life together.

He proposed marriage, but the young woman had neither the intention nor the wish to tie her fate to Switzerland. She saw herself as a doctor in the Russian backwoods. The two were in a quandary—both wanted to fight for Socialism, he in his homeland among the Zurich workers, she in Russia among the peasants. And yet both wanted to be together.

To make matters worse, Lydia’s views on the family as a social institution were unconventional. “The very word marriage disgusts me,” Lydia writes in November 1900. “You and I are a new kind of people, we’re the future, and our relations will be the kind these philistines just don’t know about. I hate their phony marriage! Everything will be different with us!”

The couple entered into a nuptial agreement that was unusual for its time: they allowed each other the freedom to choose where they wanted to live and agreed not to have children.

“Their marriages are a lie. Our marriage is a protest,” she writes to her fiancé. “We’re going against the current. My sweetheart, I’m proud of you! I’m proud of us! Your love is the most wonderful, the most precious thing I have.”

But despite this declaration, she asserts the opposite in the very same letter. “Yet there exists something stronger and greater than love for an individual.”

Her parents’ marriage told on Lydia’s feelings. “I know the family can destroy the self. My own mother is a great or better still, pitiful example of this. She was crushed by her marriage. A girl with ideals turned into a bourgeois, idle madam, frittering away her life at resorts. Without a higher calling. Her children grew up, went their way, and she was left with an emptiness within and without.

In Lydia’s imagination the traditional family presented itself as the source of human unhappiness. “Even as a child I heard my mother say her marriage made her miserable. Though it was for love, she came to hate her husband, saw in her children the cause of her unhappiness, and felt her spark was snuffed out. She never tired of repeating that her children tied her hands and that because of them she couldn’t realize her potential.”

Lydia had strained relations with her mother and brother Vyacheslav. Anastasia Ivanovna lived mostly abroad on funds left by her husband. Lydia branded her a “social wastrel,” although she, in turn, was supported by money her mother sent her regularly. “Sure, she’s smart, energetic, and capable. But what use is this to mankind? Sure, she increased the earth’s population by two, but that happened against her will. Why did she show up on this planet anyway? Was it for spa treatments?”

And again about her mother. “What terrible words I’m about to write—I find my mother despicable and more than anything in the world don’t want to be like her. My poor mama! What happened to you? Why? My life won’t be like yours.”

Fritz recalls, “The first male she became aware of was her father, who remained fixed in her mind as a repulsive drunk. Her memories of childhood were of endless family scandals and humiliations of her mother. Lydia cut herself off from her brother Vyacheslav as well, because he didn’t share her revolutionary ideals. She saw no good in her family. At bottom she was very lonely.”

In a later letter, sent in December 1913, Lydia writes, “You talk about the importance of love in childhood. That’s so true! I never had a loving person by my side. My mama, my brother, the nurse—they never were really close to me. I never had a true friend. All of them were surrogates, people who pretended to be close but who never really were. But I wanted to be loved so much! And no one but you was ever really interested in what was happening to me inside.”

The couple often discussed their decision not to have children.

“Having children,” Lydia argues, “puts an end to all my dreams of a real and productive life. Sooner or later I have to make a choice between children and the realization of my ideals. One or the other must be sacrificed. And besides, if I’m prepared to give my life, how can I leave a child in this world? Who will take care of it?”

She tried to find reasons for not having children and she succeeded: “How can we bring them into the world the way it is. We’ll be ashamed to look them in the eye. First the world needs to be changed. Fritz, my love, I so want to be a mother, but I can’t even consider it. I must say no to it and sacrifice a child to something far more significant.”

Physical intimacy too was troublesome. She confesses her fear of the carnal. “My dear, I love you but I can’t open up to you. Each time something stops me. I want to hold you close, but something keeps me back. I implore you to be patient!”

Typically, Fritz reined in his feelings, but an Amsterdam archive contains his diary with his innermost thoughts, as in the entry of 30 June, 1901. “This is insane. I can’t live without her any more. Lydia’s my future, my life. Without her my whole existence counts for nothing. I never knew what love was before. Being intimate is a big problem for us, but I’m ready to wait as long as it takes to help her. She’s tormented. She recoils from the physical. She hates ‘human flesh.’ She hinted that something terrible had happened to her, perhaps when she was growing up, something connected to a man’s violence. Today she said it’s hard to overcome what she sees as man’s animal nature, but she’ll make an effort for my sake. I want this too but I’m afraid I’ll turn out to be for her this very same animal. And that’s exactly what I don’t want!”

The discussion on physical intimacy went on for months, but they couldn’t come to a decision. Over and over again she writes, “It’s just instinct. We must suppress the animal in us, because we’re people and not animals. But I love you and see how you’re suffering. What you want will definitely happen, just give me time, my beloved!”

The moment came when she had to decide whether to stay with Fritz or leave for Russia to fulfill her dream. She vacillates. “My sweetheart! I feel love for you in every cell of my body! Sometimes such a wave of feeling sweeps over me I could give up everything that was important to me and become your wife, give you children, look after the house, make sure your shirts are clean and ironed! But then suddenly I’ll realize, as if doused with a bucket of ice water, that it’s you who’ll fall out of love with me first because it won’t be me anymore.”

The couple was officially married in the Zurich town hall and her final decision about leaving was delayed until their honeymoon. In July, 1902, they left for Italy. From Milan they went on to Venice. Fritz hoped the very atmosphere of this city of lovers would help them.

On 14 July, the day before their arrival, the Bell Tower of San Marco, the famous tower on the Piazza San Marco, symbol of Venice, collapsed. Fritz notes in his diary, “Should I take this as a sign? As a bad omen of our family life for the century to come? Maybe the 20^th century really began with this catastrophe and not with a calendar date. It’s amazing no one was hurt. Maybe that’s a sign too! If only this century goes down as the happiest for mankind!”

They would return to this trip often in their letters.

Among Fritz’s writings in the Amsterdam archive is a manuscript of an unfinished, 25 page novel, The Bell Tower of San Marco. The main characters, a young couple, journey to Venice, a city which should become their paradise, but where they land in the hell of a tangled relationship.

Fritz’s diary entries express despair. “What terrible words—wife, husband. Newlyweds. Can this be us? It’s like we’re actors in some trashy play. Venice! It’s the fashion for newlyweds to come here and swoon at these elegant decorations. Suddenly I’m sick of everything, most of all these masked gondoliers! This place was invented so that visitors pretend they’re happy just because they came here. But the locals sell them this happiness. It’s disgusting!”

The next morning he writes, “Had a terrible night. Lydia’s impossible. I’m impossible. I blame only myself. We’re in heaven, but we feel ourselves banished. She said she wouldn’t be at breakfast. I’m sitting alone on the terrace looking at the lagoon. Some sparrows are going after something on the table. I have to keep waving them away. There’s a dead pigeon on the shore. A gull’s picking at its guts. Why did I expect to find happiness in Venice? With each passing day I love Lydia more and more.”

Out of this trip came a resolve that each would fight for a bright future for their own people, in their own country and, as far as possible, meet every year.

In Petersburg, Lydia passed her State exam, which allowed her to practice medicine throughout the Russian empire. She was sent to the Smolensk region, in the village of Krapivnya, 45 versts from the railway station. Finally her dream of serving the people was about to come true.

But then reality quickly sobered her up.

“40 miserable hovels, cheap vodka that’s government-subsidized, a church, and two peasants dead drunk in a snowdrift. There’s nothing else out here. A doctor’s called only for an autopsy or a recruitment exam. They doctor themselves. It’s barbaric. There’s no concept of hygiene, let alone order and keeping things neat and clean. Everything is swarming with parasites. Fleas, lice, roaches everywhere. You can’t prescribe enemas for children or douches for women because the peasants have neither money nor the desire to buy these things. They’re not even sold at the grocery or the State store that’s only stocked with cheap vodka. No other stores around for a good 100 versts. No one knows about a knife and fork here, and they eat without plates—everyone just spoons out something from a pot at the same time and mothers give their children chewed food from their mouth. No wonder that fighting infections under such conditions turns into a bitter comedy. Syphilis is everywhere. Adults and children, men and women have genital warts. Trachoma is epidemic. Everyone’s infecting each other. It’s impossible to stop it. You can imagine how helpless I feel. Yesterday a peasant came with his son. The boy had chopped off his finger with an axe. Instead of keeping the wound clean, the father wound a spider web from the stove corner around the stump. Now I’m afraid the boy will get blood poisoning.”

Well, very likely the only surprising thing for the readers of today in these letters was how the post office functioned. Letters from St. Petersburg to Zurich arrived in all of three days and from Krapivnya in less than a week.

The Zurich student who dreamed of serving her people met this people head on for the first time and was full of disappointment. Most of all she’s appalled by the coarseness and cruelty of Russian life.

“You put me and my work on a pedestal, because you’re so far away and can’t even imagine what I’m up against every day!” she tells Fritz in the spring of 1903. “Neither civilization nor Christianity has reached these people yet. You should see how savagely they go at each other when they’re drunk. How they beat up their wives and children!”

Once, in a weak moment she writes, “I remember your green lamp, your eyes, beard, your books, your pipe. I see you filling it and blowing smoke at the ceiling. If only I could be with you now. I blame myself for upsetting you instead of being affectionate when we were together.”

At this time Lydia’s mother was living in Lausanne, sending her money and begging her to return to Switzerland. Lydia wouldn’t hear of it. “I’m having a hard time, but that’s exactly why I’ll stay here. To spite her! Leaving, giving up—that’s admitting defeat. I’ll fight on!”

The steady flow of letters with Fritz helped her in this struggle.

In the letters, Fritz gave Lydia full support, but in his diary he was more honest with himself, revealing his doubts.

“There’s theory and then there’s practice. In theory, of course, I’m for sexual equality and independence of partners. I’d even sign that marriage contract of ours again. But how far we are from real life! How painful it is to live apart! I can’t go on this way. It’s night. At night I’m no fighter but the most ordinary fellow. I want a family, a home, a child—only I’m afraid to say it openly. Then, after a sleepless night and a moment’s drifting off before dawn, morning comes. And I take myself in hand. Again I’m ready to push ahead. And my Lydia helps me. Our letters give us both strength.” A few days later there’s another entry on what keeps haunting him. “By day there are my patients. They need me. Then there are meetings, speeches, the city council, time with the workers—I write an article—but in the evening, at night, I sink into a funk. I want so much to press her to me, embrace her, make love to her!”

And again he’s of two minds. “Lydia and I promised each other we’d bear together the whole weight of our common cause, to renounce our petty world for the sake of a greater one, our personal life for the sake of humanity. And I will keep my word.”

Their long separation took its toll. The question of faithfulness crops up.

“The only important thing is whether you love me,” Lydia claims. “Because while you love me, I need you to be faithful. But if you fall out of love with me, then you’re free. I won’t need you to be faithful any longer.”

They kept writing about how they couldn’t wait to see each other and finally, in June 1903, after working a year in the backwoods of Smolensk, Lydia traveled to her husband in Switzerland. However, subsequent letters suggest they both weren’t exactly ecstatic about this long awaited tryst.

En route to Zurich, she sent him a post card from Moscow. “It’s so wonderful I’m on the way to see you! That’s the greatest happiness I can imagine!” Departing Zurich in the fall she writes, “My darling, why are our meetings filled more with sadness than joy? I’m despicable. Just like that I can turn, without knowing why, become vulgar, rigid, even cruel, and all this towards those most close to me. I hurt them for no reason and then I regret it and cry. Forgive me, my beloved! Forgive me!”

Fritz notes in his diary, August 1903: “How can that be? To love someone from afar is one thing, but to love a real person right next to you, that’s something else. It seems like we’re very close in our letters, but when we meet we draw apart. Why is that? I don’t understand. It pains me. We’re better off in letters than in real life. Maybe that’s why she didn’t stay in Zurich and left for a resort in Marbach? Maybe her health was only an excuse? I’m beginning to think we’re actually both afraid of our meetings. We take refuge in our letters. They’re our escape from the impossibility of being either together or apart.”

In the fall Lydia returned to Russia, now settling in as a local doctor in the village of Aleksandrovo, 12 versts from the town of Sudogda in Vladimir Oblast.

The impressions of the new locale and work hardly differed from what was in her letter from Krapivnya. “The outpatient department is past description—cramped, dirty, squalid. I’m here alone for 150 villages in the area. I can’t sleep at night for the hordes of bloodthirsty bugs. A chicken that flew in the window broke the mirror so now I don’t even know what I look like. Maybe that’s for the best. They don’t trust me. An old woman treats a hernia in the old way by biting people. Vodka takes care of all other ills. They pour it on wounds and sores and in the eyes for trachoma.”

Fritz complained of the difficulty of getting the Swiss workers interested in Socialism, to which she replies, “Everything you say about your workers is pure Eldorado compared to what’s going on here. It’s hard enough for an educated person to go out among the people, but if it’s the Russian people, then that requires eternal optimism. And it’s especially difficult for someone who’s lived so long in Europe.”

Each new letter brought fresh doubts about herself and the wisdom of her choice. “I keep asking myself if I’m capable at all of practicing medicine. I sit by myself and cry my eyes out. My sole consolation is writing you about it. My beloved, if it weren’t for you I couldn’t go on.”

In October an accident occurred for which she blamed herself and which strongly affected how the peasants saw her. “I poisoned someone. An 80 year old man got drunk and since the liquor store was already closed and you couldn’t get your hands on vodka anywhere, he drank up the vial of medicine I had given him. Atropine eye drops. Tomorrow’s the funeral. Now his children and the whole village hate me. They stood under my window, screaming curses and threats. Again they’re all getting drunk and again at night I’ll try to fall asleep and tremble from fear.”

In another letter she told how a drunk was pestering her and how she had to grab an ax in self-defense. “He sobered up in a flash. But now I have to go to sleep with an ax by my bed because the lock’s loose.”

Again she’s plagued by uncertainty. “I remember how I dreamed in Zurich of the great goal of working among the people for the people, of sacrificing myself for them. This isn’t the same people they meant when they said Socialism lives in the heart of our people. So where is this Russian people. Take me to them!”

After working a year and a half in Vladimir Oblast, Lydia decided she must dedicate herself fully to the revolution.

“The more frustrated I am in what I’m doing, the more my hatred grows. It’s impossible to create anything here. It’s all a waste. One must first destroy this system which keeps people from living as humans. These people are like animals because they don’t know another way. Life in Russia corrupts them. You can’t survive here without the basest instincts. Remember we studied this! It’s natural selection. Here only the lowlife and parasites survive, the blockheads and boors. We need to alter life itself, down to the bare bones. This whole rotten system has to go. Yes, I hate this unjust world. Now my direction is clear!”

Thus, Lydia resolved to become a professional revolutionary.

“My darling,” she writes in late 1904. “Once again I feel strength and confidence in myself and my future. All the hesitations and depression are in the past. I often revisit in memory our Venice and the countless times I asked myself if I acted wisely then. And now I’m happy I made the right choice. And I know, my beloved, that you’ll support me.”

The following year, with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War and growing mass restlessness, Lydia decided she must take her place among those leading the Russian people against tsarism. She traveled to Switzerland, home to the headquarters of all the radical parties, and on the road from Petersburg sent Fritz an ebullient letter. “There’s revolution in the air at last! We, the entire Russian intelligentsia, believe and hope the Japanese will give it to the Russians. A defeat will shake the people’s trust in the government. All around us is discontent and a weakening State. Great moments in history come only once in a lifetime. Glorious revolutions only once in a century. What bliss to live to see it, to prepare it, to be part of it! Long live the revolution!”

She was closest to the Socialist Revolutionary Party and spent almost all of 1905 in Geneva, renting a room in the very same building that housed their headquarters. She met Party leaders and waited impatiently to return to her homeland with an important assignment. She frequented the circle of known revolutionaries, was friends with the radicals Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Vera Figner, and also got to know Vladimir Burtsev, activist and scholar, who would expose the double agent Yevno Azef. Burtsev really impressed her and she didn’t suspect the role he’d play in her fate. She was 33. She was happy to find her life’s purpose. Her letters to Zurich expressed this delight in her upcoming work and a twinge of sadness that she hadn’t as yet been sent to Russia.

Finally, when the revolution was already losing steam, she traveled to Saratov, assigned to resurrect the crippled Party organization and oversee the spread of revolutionary propaganda. She was also to supervise the preparation for land expropriations and peasant revolts. The Party directives called for immediate initiation of local riots, which would boil over into a full-blown revolution. From 1906 to 1908, Lydia was the Party representative in the Saratov province.

At first her letters from this place on the Volga were optimistic. Party membership inspired her. “It’s so important to feel yourself a part of something big, important, and meaningful. I’m happy as I never was before. If I pay for this for my life, that’s a small price to pay for what I now feel.”

The chance to be rid of one’s ego, to give it up, to meld into a great communal endeavor, gave meaning to her existence. She thought she had found what she was striving for all these years. “My family is my comrades. No matter where I am, I’m part of one great family—the Party. Most likely in this sense of belonging, of kinship, I’ve finally discovered what I was looking for all my life.”

As had Fritz, she compared this experience to a religious ecstasy. “Yes, indeed we truly resemble first century Christians—the same firm faith in the approaching, joyous salvation of the world, the same readiness to sacrifice, the same denial of the ego, of the philistine, of material things, of children, of everything that detracts from the grand idea. The difference being that religion is a lie and revolution, the truth!”

In a letter of 2 May, 1906, she described a boat trip along the Volga for an International Workers’ Day picnic on an island. “We returned at night. There was a huge moon, and my darling, I suddenly remembered our Venice and that moon of ours! And what an aching sadness welled up in me. I burst into tears. My comrades began to make fun of me and we broke into revolutionary songs. I tingled from tip to toe! My beloved! We’re so far from one another! And so close!”

At the end of May she reported excitedly about an assassination attempt on the Saratov prison’s warden. But in her next letter she sounded pensive. The accused, a 17-year-old apprentice to a metal worker in the railroad shops where Lydia’s comrades distributed proclamations, had failed. “Shatalov, the warden, recovered and got promoted and went to work for Prime Minister Stolypin. The prison has a new warden. They hung the boy. So now I can’t stop thinking—is this why that child was born and lived out his 17 years? He’s truly a hero and won’t be forgotten by progressive Russia. One day they’ll erect a monument to him, but I can’t bear to think of his last moments before the gallows. And what if he repented of his act? How terrible it was then for him to die!”

Still, in the following letter, Lydia cast off all her doubts. Her conscience troubled her for being a crybaby and that her faith was shaken. Once again she threw herself into revolutionary work. In the summer of 1906, she was sent by the Party to spread propaganda in the Atkarsk district of Saratov province. She was able to regulate the publication and distribution of leaflets and then became involved in the delivery of weapons and the organization of expropriations.

On 1 October, 1906, Lydia, euphoric, writes to Zurich from Atkarsk about the destruction of landed estates. “Expropriations going on throughout the whole province! Our people are the most marvelous on earth! Its soul is as close to Kropotkin’s anarchism as they come. Total disregard for the law, no understanding whatsoever of this word. The expropriations proceed so simply, with the effortlessness of those who have no compunctions when it comes to property, theirs and others, only communist instincts.”

But soon after, her disenchantment deepened. By the minute she awaited the start of a universal revolution. Her task was to organize militant peasant divisions and stir up revolts, but not only didn’t the revolution take hold, on the contrary, it burned out. Prime Minister Stolypin instilled order with his ruthless measures and formulated reforms. Because of the work of double agents, they arrested revolutionaries en masse.

“The snow’s gone,” she writes in March 1907, “but instead of revolts, they’re sowing. And my heart tells me that this year there won’t be any revolution! Our program—a call for local uprisings—that’s one thing. But it seems peasant life is another story. The moment the sowing or harvest of the crop begins, the peasant loses all revolutionary zeal. Everyone, young and old, is out in the fields. All they really care about is daily survival, the here and now, not the visionary socialist republic of tomorrow.”

She began to reflect on Russian women, simple peasants, whom it was necessary to awaken to the struggle against tsarism. “I compare myself with these peasant women. They have no time to think about saving mankind, no time to worry about the people’s happiness. They have to save their own family, their children, to think about how to feed them. I want to invest all of me into trying to free them, but a doubt creeps in—what if they don’t need any part of me altogether? What sad thoughts come to me in these sleepless nights.”

In one of her next letters she talks about how the peasants confuse expropriation with looting. “They take away everything bit by bit to their homes, and the estates look like barbarians had been there. I was on such an estate—everything plundered, the pierced eyes in portraits, piles of excrement everywhere, in the most conceivable and inconceivable places. My God, how come there’s so much excrement coming from my people? I see our revolution completely differently.”

More and more she’s repelled by the brutality of events. In October of that year she writes, “They slaughtered the landowner’s entire family—two kids, a boy and a girl. Not even the doctor who was with them was spared, nor the French governess, who, by the way, came from Switzerland. I try to tell myself that that’s the way it must be, that without blood and violence there are no great revolutions. But the whole point is that I must keep convincing myself. It’s so hard for me, my beloved! People carry such hatred! And now a firing squad has come from Saratov, killing peasants from the neighboring village, not really caring who’s guilty and who isn’t. And all around the hatred is growing. And again I need to tell myself we’re living in the most wonderful, uplifting times, and that this violence will be the last.”

Her apprehension about the expropriations intensified. “If this violence floods the whole country, it will be hard to stop it. For that you need even more violence. It’s horrible!”

Lydia traveled several times to Europe during her three year stay in Saratov province. In 1908, for instance, under the pseudonym Volgina, she cast the deciding vote from the Saratov organization in the Party conference in London, even making a speech there. Each time she made a trip to Switzerland and reunited with her husband, but their meetings were becoming all too brief.

In Fritz’s diary of 1908 we read of Lydia’s visit to Zurich. “We’re growing further and further apart. Again I told her I want to finally be together, that I’m prepared to work in Russia and even study Russian. After all, the great Swiss doctor Friedrich Erismann went off to claim his wife in Moscow and started a clinic there. I’m not the first or the last. We talked again about a child. The kind of marriage we have can’t go on. Her reaction: ‘“Family happiness is not for revolutionaries.’”

The ultimate unmasking of the double agent Azef not only reverberated throughout the whole Socialist Revolutionary Party, but shook Lydia’s seemingly indestructible faith in the cause of the revolution itself. Party activity practically stopped. Former comrades began to suspect each other of provocation. For Lydia, working in such circumstances became impossible and futile.

“You can’t do something if you don’t believe you’ll succeed,” she writes in 1909 from Atkarsk to Zurich. “The Party’s falling apart. Party work has stalled. Its very heart has been pierced—everyone sees only provocation in everything, no one believes anyone. What am I doing here? There are no cultured people in Atkarsk, just philistines, and you can’t really call them people. You can only find the proletariat in the big cities. Here it’s all darkness, boredom, poverty, drunkenness, right wing nationalists, filth, in a nutshell, the Russian province, which it seems you have to either blow up or escape. It’s impossible to live here. I feel old, look terrible, my hair’s getting grey. I’m wrinkled. Life’s passing me by. In three years of daily labor I’ve not brought my dream of my country’s and my people’s great future even a jot closer, not matter how I’ve tried. Among my comrades there’s constant squabbling, mutual distrust and hatred. They hate their own more than they do strangers. I have to be an arbiter in their tedious Party trials. And I’m horrified that my love for this family, which I believed I finally found, is disappearing. I can’t believe these embittered, useless people are my family.”

She lost faith not only in her Party comrades but in the peasants. “It all boils down to the fact that they don’t need any revolution. What they’re after is the good life, dull but comfortable. To fire them up for revolution you don’t need drunken pillages, but a war. And not with Japan, but something real and big that rocks the government to its very foundations, so that trouble and hatred comes to each home, so that each peasant gets a rifle. Only then can the revolution blow up Russia. But will there be that revolution of which we dreamed, which we prepared, for whose sake we sacrificed ourselves and everyone around?”

Lydia sank into a deep depression.

“I’m still stuck here, waiting for something, but my escape from this hateful town, where nothing happens and will never happen, is long overdue. I’m like Firs who’s left behind in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard—everyone’s gone, but they forgot me.”

She tried again to go on with her medical practice, but couldn’t. “I have no medical books here, and not enough experience. I didn’t turn out a revolutionary or a doctor. I’m left with nothing.”

Profoundly distraught, she traveled again to Switzerland in early 1909. “Maybe, it’s not at all about the people’s happiness or revolution, maybe, I simply wanted to be happy in the one life given me and was ready to sacrifice myself for the sake of personal happiness? So then, how can we call it a ‘sacrifice’? Sometimes it seems I got all knotted up in myself, in my life—in everything. Fritz, my beloved, I’m in a bad way. Really bad. I mean emotionally. As for my body, it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

Lydia Kochetkova went for the last time to Switzerland for treatment and again stayed at the Marbach sanatorium on Lake Boden. But the stay was brief. Flight from herself became a way of life. She couldn’t explain to Fritz her decision to return to Russia. Nor, it seems, to herself. After visiting his wife in the sanatorium, Fritz writes, “Lydia can’t possibly get back to herself after all that’s happened in the last years. She looks terrible.”

In any event, on 1 July, 1909, Lydia Petrovna Kochetkova crossed the border of the Russian empire and was arrested on the spot.

Following a brief imprisonment, she was exiled for three years to Arkhangelsk province, initially to the village of Ustvashka. In her first letters from there one can still detect a note of pride. For the Russian intellectuals, arrest, hard labor or exile traditionally served as a kind of Communion. But all too soon her tone changed.

“I have much time now to reflect on my life,” she writes in September, 1909, from Ustvashka. “Here it’s the same as all over Russia—dirt, backwardness, drunkenness, violence. The other day a neighbor stabbed his wife. Each year, in every village, someone gets killed. We worshiped the people, but they’re werewolves. Why love them? And the exiles are contentious, hostile, and hate each other. There’s not a drop of faith left in me, least of all in the revolution. Actually I feel only dread. What if the revolution really happened? We made the mess and it’s for our children and grandchildren to clean it up. Sometimes I think it’s just as well I have no child. You see, I’m not in a very good mood. My letters to you are all I can hold on to. I’m drowning.”

In the winter she was transferred to Pinega, where she contracted typhus. Fritz rushed off to her in this remote exile. He traveled through Moscow and Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, and from there six more days by sled.

And again, as so often before, their time together brought no joy. When he left she wrote, “Why do we love each other more when we’re apart? Tell me!”

We know from Fritz’ diary that for him this visit was a turning point in his relationship to his wife.

On route to Moscow he makes this entry: “I no longer have any illusions. We do not have and cannot have any real closeness—letters are one thing—but life’s something completely different. We’re close only with thousands of kilometers between us. Probably Lydia’s a certain kind of woman—a woman wired for self destruction and not the continuation of life. All her life she’s been destroying herself and dragging down everyone around her. Once she and I read Russian novels about superfluous people. She’s one of them. I can’t bear it. I’m a part of life and life’s a part of me. I must give her up. I’ve never felt such bitterness and such pain.”

Then and there he sent a letter from Moscow telling her he wanted to break off the relationship. “Lydia, I’m beside myself. I have to let you go and follow my own path. I’m healthy, not old yet. I want a nest, comfort, a family. At night I want to come home. We’ll never have this together. We have to let each other go.”

Fritz asked for a divorce. She agreed but kept writing to him because these letters were the last thing left to her. This blow coincided with another blow of fate from which she was unable to recover.

It came out in Pinega that Burstev, whom Lydia had greatly admired, circulated a letter abroad accusing her of being a provocateur and working for the tsarist secret police.

“I can only think of how vile people are,” she tells Fritz in despair. “I would have born everything from my enemies. But to be knocked down by my own kind? I thought I had found a family among my comrades, but instead I found treachery and slander. My whole life is destroyed, everything I held sacred—sullied and debased. As if my very soul were trampled and smeared. I can’t go on. I don’t want to. I’ve nothing left to believe in. I do not want to and cannot go on.”

Lydia begged her former husband to contact Burtsev in Paris and clear up this monstrous misunderstanding. Fritz wrote to him, but it’s not known if Burstev ever answered.

She felt cornered. “People shun me like a leper. All the exiles turn away from me. Around me there’s only contempt and hatred. How can one live when everyone hates you? But maybe this hatred is a punishment for the hatred I felt for my enemies. So now I’m for my comrades the enemy. What should I do? Should I forgive everyone everything? No, I can’t do that. Anyhow, I have no strength left for forgiveness or hate. Should I hang myself? But that won’t prove my innocence.”

She resolved to break for good with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had been her faith and truth.

After exile there was no place for her to go. She had no home. No one was waiting for her anywhere. In 1911 she arrived in Moscow from Pinega and stayed at her estranged brother Vyacheslav’s, with whom she had once broken all ties. Her mother was living there too.

Lydia continued sending anguished letters to Zurich.

With each letter she seemed to be closing the door on her life.

“Life passes and I still don’t know why I came into this world. I gave nothing to anyone. I’m worthless. I lost faith in myself. I don’t belong among people. Not even the closest ones. I start the day trading curses with my mother. And my brother. And his wife. With my mother it hurts the most. There’s no bridge between us, not even the tiniest sliver. Loneliness. Old age. I’m 40, but I look 60. She’s 60 and looks every bit 80. How awful when it suddenly hits you that at least she has me and Vyacheslav, distant and alien, but still her own children. But what and whom do I have? No one. And there’ll be no one any more. My one wish is to crawl away as far as possible from people and quietly croak.”

In another letter, sent in the fall of 1913, she tried to make sense of her past, to sort out important moments in her life, and again reminded him of Venice. “My love, I cannot describe to you the state I’m in. I’m the most wretched person on earth. I never thought that one could be that wretched. The only thing I had was you, our love, that gift which I received and spurned. Then, in Venice it was all still possible. I committed an error. Everything I chose over life with my beloved turned out a lie. Everything is a lie. Lofty ideas are a lie. The revolution is a lie. The people are a lie. All the beautiful words are a lie, a lie, a lie. Yet I blame no one. Only I am responsible for my wasted life. Then, in Venice, it was still possible to change everything. Or was it already impossible? I don’t know. I don’t know anything more. I no longer exist. The sooner I die, the better. My body still drags around from inertia, but the soul’s gone. It’s long dead. Do you know what my ideal is now? To disappear quietly, unnoticed, so that I leave nothing, not even my corpse.”

She continued writing to him for some time, but he rarely answered. Most likely these letters are all that is left of her.

Their correspondence broke off during the First World War.

Nothing is known of Lydia Petrovna Kochetkova’s death.

This is from the last available letter.

“My darling! Do you know what I regret most of all? I could have given you all the fullness of my love, but I gave you nothing but pain. Forgive me, if you can. And my heart cries out at the thought that my highest calling was just that—to give you my affection and tenderness, but instead I squandered my worthless life on phantoms.”