Childhood, Youth and Exile

T H E WO R L D'S C L A S S I C S

CHILDHOOD, YOUTIJ AND EXILE

ALEXANDER HERZEN (1812-70) was bor n in Moscow, an illegitimate ch ild of an aristocrat. He early chose a socialist path, an d becam e the greatest social thinker that Russia has ever produced. His view s led h im into exile within Russia in 1835, an d in 1847 lie left hi s ct>untry for goo d, living thereafter mainly in Lon don. Herzen's major work is his memoirs , My Past and Thoughts, which Isaiah Berlin ha s calle d 'an autobiography of the first order of genius .. . a ma jor classic, comparable in scope with War and Peace'; and he has described th is translation of its first two parts by J. D. Duff as 'among the best ren derings of Russian prose into English to be found anywhere' .

J. D. DuFF (186o-I940) was a Classical Fellow of Trinit y College, Cambri dge, an d is best known for his e dition of Juvenal.

I SArAH BERLIN is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Oth er essays by him on Her zen appear in his Russian Thinkers an d Against the Current. He has also written an int ro duction to Herzen's From the Other Shore an d The Russian People and Socialism (Oxford, 1979: Oxford Un iversit y Press ).

THE WORLD'S CLASSICS

ALEXANDER HERZEN

Childhood, Youth and Exile

PARTS I AND II OF

My Past and Thoughts

il'ranslated from the Russian by

J.D. DUFF

With an introduction by

ISAIAH BERLIN

Oxford New York Toronto Melbourne

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1980

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, OxfordoJa. 6op OXFORD LONDON GLASGOW

NEW YORK TORONI'O MELBOURNE WELLINGTON

IWALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE 1AKARTA HONG KONG TOKYO

DELHI BOMBAY CALCUITA MADRAS KARACHI NAIROBI DARES SALAAM CAPE TOWN

Introduction copyright Isaiah Berlin 1956

Translation first published 1923 by Yale University Press 08

The Memoirs of Alexander H erzen, Parts I and U

Introduction first published by Encounter Ltd, May 1956

Introduction and translation first published as a World's Classks paperback, 1980

All rights reserved. No part of this publ/catl•n may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, In any farm or by any means, electronic, mechonlcal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University �

This book is sold subject to the condition that It shall not, by w.zy a/trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise drculated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that In whkh It Is published and without a similar condition including this condition being Imposed on the subsequent purchaser

British Library Cataloguing In PubllcaJion Data Herzen, AleXlUider

Childhood, youth and exile. -(The world's ciiJssica).

J. Herzen, AleXlUider

2. Intellectuals - Russia - Biography I. Title

891.7'8'308

DK209.6.H4

79-4I036

ISBN 0.19-28IS05-9

Printed In Great Britain by

Hazell Watson & Viney Limited

AJ-Iesbur;y, Bucks

CONTENTS

Note on the Translator by P. W. Duff

vii

Translator's Foreword by J. D. Duff

ix

Introduction by Isaiah Berlin

:xili

PART I: N U R S E RY AND UNIVERSITY

1812-1834

C H A P T E R I

3

My Nurse and the Grande Armee- Moscow in Flames- My Father and Napoleon - General Ilovaysky - A Journey with French Prisoners - Patriotism - Calot - Property Managed in Common- The Division- The Senator

C H A P T E R II

20

Gossip of Nurses and Conversation of Generals - A False Position - Boredom - The Servants' Hall - Two Germans -

Lessons and Reading- Catechism and the Gospel C H APT E R III

43

Death of Alexander I - The Fourteenth of December - Moral Awakening- Bouchot - My Cousin

C H A P T E R IV

6o

My Friend Nick and the Sparrow Hills

C H A P T E R V

66

Details of Horne Life - Men of the Eighteenth Century in Russia - A Day at Home - Guests and Visitors -Sonnenberg - Servants

C H A P T E R VI

84

The Kremlin Offices - Moscow University - The Chemist -

The Cholera - Filaret - Passek

C H APT E R VII

122

End of College Life -The 'Schiller' Stage - Youth - The Artistic Life- Saint-Simonianism and N.Polevoy - Polezhayev

vi

C O N T E NTS

PA R T II: P R I S O N AND E X I L E

1834-1838

C H A P T E R I

143

A Prophecy -Ogarev's t Arrest - The Fires - A Moscow Liberal- Mikhail Orlov - The Churchyard CH A P T E R I I

152

Arrest - The Independent Witness - A Police-Station -

Patriarchal Justice

C H A P T E R I I I

157

Under the Belfry- A Travelled Policeman - The Incendiaries C H A P T E R I V

166

The Krutitsky Barracks - A Policeman's Story - The Officers C H A P T E R V

173

The Enquiry - Golitsyn Senior - Golitsyn Junior - General Staal- The Sentence- Sokolovsky

C H A P T E R V I

187

E xile - A Chief Constable-The Volga- Perm C H A P T E R V I I

200

Vyatka - The Office and Dinner-table of His Excellency -

Tyufyayev

C H A P T E R V I II

217

Officials - Siberian Governors - A Bird of Prey - A Gentle Judge - An Inspector Roasted - The Tatar - A Boy of the Female Sex - The Potato Revolt- Russian Justice C H A P T E R IX

Alexander Vitberg

C H A P T E R X

254

The Crown Prince at Vyatka- The Fall of Tyufyayev - Transferred to Vladimir- The Inspector's Enquiry C H A P T E R X I

The Beginning of my Life at Vladimir

1. 'e' is used to represent the sound 'yo', and always receives th e stress, thus: Ogary6v.

THE TRANSLATOR

JAMES DuFF DuFF was hom on 20 November 186o, the son of a retired army officer living in Aberdeenshire. He and his twin brother were among the first boys at Fettes College, Edinburgh. He carne as a scholar to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1 878, and was elected a Classical Fellow in 1 883. Teaching Latin and Greek at Trinity, and also at Girton, was the main work of his life; and he is best known to classical scholars for what A. E. Housman praised as his 'unpretending school edition' of JuvenaL

He was over forty when he taught himself Russian, in order to read in the original the novels of Tolstoy and especially Turgenev, which he had greatly admired in French translations. He never visited Russia, but had Russian friends, with whom he talked and corresponded in their own language : notably Aleksandra Grigory·

evna Pashkova, the wife of a Russian land-owner, whose two sons were Trinity undergraduates.

His admiration for the autobiographical writings of Sergei Aksakov led him to translate them, in three volumes: Years of Childhood, A Russian Gentleman, and A Russian Schoolboy, published by Edward Arnold in 1916 and 1917, and later re-published by Oxford University Press in The World's Classics. A Russian Schoolboy was reissued in a larger format by Oxford University Press in 1978.

The idea of translating Alexander Herzen's My Past and Thoughts seems to have come from George Parrnly Day, of the Yale University Press; and the translation, here reissued, was first published by that press in 1923, as The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, Parts I and II.

The translator died on 25 April 1940·

October 1978

P. W.D U FF

TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

1

AL E X A N D E R HE R ZE N was born in Moscow on 25 March 181 2,1

six months before Napoleon arrived at the gates of the city with what was left of his Grand Army. He died in Paris on 9 January 1870. Down to his thirty-fifth year he lived in Russia, often in places selected for his residence by the GoveiDlllent; he left Russia, never to return, on 10 January 1847.

He was the elder son of Ivan Yakovlev, a Russian noble, and Luiza Haag, a German girl from Stuttgart. It was a runaway match; and as the Lutheran marriage ceremony was not supplemented in Russia, the child was illegitimate. 'Herzen' was a name invented for him by his parents. Surnames, however, are little used in Russian society; and the boy would generally be called, from his own Christian name and his father's, Alexander Ivanovich.

His parents lived together in Moscow, and he lived with them and was brought up much like other sons of rich nobles. It was quite in Herzen's power to lead a life of selfish ease and luxury; but he early chose a different path and followed it to the end. Yet this consistent champion of the poor and humble was himself a typical aristocrat - generous, indeed, and stoical in misfortune, but bold to rashness and proud as Lucifer.

The story of his early life is told fully in these pages - his soli·

tary boyhood and romantic friendship with his cousin, Nikolay Ogarev, his keen enjoyment of College life, and the beginning of his long warfare with the police· of that other aristocrat, Nicholas, Tsar of all the Russias, who was just as much in earnest as Herzen but kept a different object in view.

Charged with socialistic propaganda, Herzen spent nine months of 1834-5 in a Moscow prison and was then sent, by way of punishment, to Vyatka. The exiles were often men of exceptional ability, and the GoveiDlllent made use of their talents. So Herzen was employed for three years in compiling statistics and organising an exhibition at Vyatka. He was then allowed to move to Vladimir, near Moscow, where he edited the official gazette; and here, on 9 May 1838, he married his cousin, Natalya Za�arin, a natural daughter of one of his uncles. Receiving per·

1. The dates given here are those of the Russian calendar.

X

J. D . D U FF

mission in 1839 to live, under supervision of the police, where he pleased, he spent some time in Moscow and Petersburg, but he was again arrested on a charge of disaffection and sent off this time to Novgorod, where he served in the Government offices for nearly three years. In 1842 he was allowed to retire from his duties and to settle with his wife and family in Moscow. In 1846 his father's death made hini a rich man.

For twelve years past, Herzen, when he was not in prison, had lived the life of a ticket-of-leave man. He was naturally anxious to get away from Russia; but a passport was indispensable, and the Government would not give hini a passport. At last the difficulties were overcome; and at the beginning of 1847 Herzen, with his wife and children and widowed mother, left Russia for ever.

Twenty-three years, almost to a day, remained for hini to live.

The first part of that time was spent in France, Italy, and Switzerland; but the suburbs of London, Putney and Primrose Hill, were his most permanent place of residence. He was safe there from the Russian police; but he did not like London. He spoke English very badly;2 he made few acquaintances there; and he writes with some asperity of the people and their habits.

His own family party was soon broken up by death. In November 185 1, his mother and his little son, Nikolay (still called Kolya) were drowned in an accident to the boat which was bringing them from Marseilles to Nice, where Herzen and his wife were expecting them. The shock proved fatal to his wife: she died at Nice in the spring of 1852. The three surviving children were not of an age to be companions to hini.

For many years after the coup d' &tat of Louis Napoleon, Herzen, who owned a house in Paris, was forbidden to live in France. He settled in London and was joined there by Ogarev, the friend of his childhood. Together they started a printing press, in order to produce the kind of literature which Nicholas and his police were trying to stamp out in Russia. In 1857, after the death of the great Autocrat, they began to issue a fortnightly paper, called Kolokol (The Bell); and this Bell, probably inaudible in London, made an astonishing noise in Russia. Its circulation and influence there were unexampled: it is said that the new Tsar, Alexander, was one 2. Herzen is mentioned in letters of Mrs She notes (1) that

his English was

and (1) that of

the exiles who carne

to Cheyne Walk he was

only one who had money.

TR A N S L A TO R 'S FO R E WO R D

xi

of its regular readers. Alexander and Herzen had met long before, at Vyatka. 19 February 1861, when Alexander published the edict abolishing slavery throughout his dominions, must have been one of the brightest days in Herzen's life. There was little brightness in the nine years that remained. When Poland revolted in 1863, he lost his subscribers and his popularity by his courageous refusal to echo the prevailing feeling of his countrymen ; and he gave men inferior to himself, such as Ogarev and Bakunin. too much influence over his journal.

He was on a visit to Paris, when he died rather suddenly of inflammation of the lungs on 9 January 1870. At Nice there is a statue of Herzen on the grave where he and his wife are buried.

2

The collected Russian edition of Herzen's works - no edition was permitted by the censorship till 1905 - extends to seven thick volumes.3 These are: one volume of fiction; one of letters addressed to his future wife; two of memoirs; and tlrree of what may be called political journalism.

About 1842 he began to publish articles on scientific and social subjects in magazines whose precarious activity was constantly interrupted or arrested by ilie censorship. His chief novel, Who Is At Fault?, was written in 1846. From the time when he left Russia he was constantly writing on European politics and the shifting fortunes of the cause which he had at heart. When he was publishing his Russian newspaper in London, first The Pole-Star and then The Bell, he wrote most of the matter himself.

To readers who are not countrymen or contemporaries of Herzen's, the Memoirs are certainly the most interesting part of his production. They paint for us an astonishing picture of Russian life under the grim rule of Nicholas, the life of the rich man in Moscow, and the life of ilie exile near the Ural Mountains ; and they are crowded wiili figures and incidents which would be incredible if one were not convinced of the narrator's veracity. Herzen is a supreme master of that superb instrument, the Russian language. With a force of intellect entirely out of Boswell's reach, he has Boswell's power of dramatic presentation : his characters, from the Tsar himself to the humblest old woman, live and move 3· [This edition has now been superseded by a thirty-volume edition published between 1954 and 1966.]

xii

J. D . D U FF

before you on the printed page. His satire is as keen as Heine's, and he is much more in earnest. Nor has any writer more power to wring the heart by pictures of human suffering and endurance.

The Memoirs have, indeed, one fault - that they are too discursive, and that successive episodes are not always clearly connected or well proportioned. But this is mainly due to the circumstances in which they were produced. Different parts were written at considerable intervals and published separately. The narrative is much more continuous in the earlier parts: indeed, Part V is merely a collection of fragments. But Herzen's Memoirs are among the noblest monuments of Russian literature.

3

The Memoirs, called by Herzen himself My Past and Thoughts, are divided into five Parts. This translation, made six years ago from the Petersburg edition of 1913, contains Parts I and II. These were written in London in 1 852-3, and printed in London, at 36

Regent's Square, in the Russian journal called The Pole-Star.

Part I has not, I believe, been translated into English before. A translation of Part II was published in London during the Crimean war;4 but this was evidently taken from a German version by someone whose knowledge of German was inadequate. The German translation of the Memoirs by Dr Buek s seems to me very good; but it is defective : whole chapters of the original are omitted without warning.

To make the narrative easier to follow, I have divided it up into numbered sections, which Herzen himself did not use. I have added a few footnotes.

5 June 1923

J.D . D U FF

4·

Exile in Siberia, by Alexander Herzen (London, 1855; Hurst and

Herzen was not responsible for the misleading title, which caused him some annoyance.

5· Erinnerungen von Alexander Herzen, by Dr Otto Buek (Berlin, 1907).

INTR ODUCTION

ISAIAH BERLIN

1

AL EX A N D ER HERZEN is the most arresting Russian political writer in the nineteenth century. No good biographies of him exist, perhaps because his own autobiography is a great literary masterpiece. It is not widely known in English-speaking countries, and that for no good reason, for it has been translated into English, the first two Parts magnificently by J. D. Dufl',l and the whole adequately by Constance Garnett; unlike some works of political and literary genius, it is, even in translation, marvellously readable.

In some respects, it resembles Goethe's Dichtung und W ahrheit more than any other book. For it is not a collection of wholly personal memoirs and political reflections. It is an amalgam of personal detail, descriptions of political and social life in various countries, of opinions, personalities, outlooks, accounts of the author's youth and early manhood in Russia, historical essays, notes of journeys in,Europe, France, Switzerland, Italy, of Paris and Rome during the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 (these last are incomparable, and the best personal documents about these events that we possess), discussions of political leaders, and of the aims and purposes of various parties. All this is interspersed with a variety of comment, pungent observation, sharp and spontaneous, occasionally malicious, vignettes of individuals, of the character of peoples, analyses of economic and social facts, discussions and epigrams about the future and past of Europe and about the author's own hopes and fears for Russia ; and interwoven with this is a detailed and poignant account of Herzen's personal tragedy, perhaps the most extraordinary self-revelation on the part of a sensitive and fastidious man ever written down for tlle benefit of tlle general public.

1- The translation published in this volume as Childhood, Youth and Exile. The present essay originated as the last of the four Northcliffe lectures for 1954, delivered at University College, London, and is reprinted here, with minor changes, from the version published in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London, 1978: Hogarth Press).

xiv

I S A I A H B E R L I N

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was born in Moscow in 1812, not long before the capture of the dty by Napoleon, the illegitinlate son of Ivan Yakovlev, a rich and well-born Russian gentleman, descended from a cadet branch of the Romanovs, a morose, difficult, possessive, distinguished and civilised man, who bullied hiS

son, loved hini deeply, embittered his life, and had an enormous influence upon him both by attraction and repulsion. His mother, luiza Haag, was a mild German lady from Stuttgart in Wiirttemberg, the daughter of a minor official. Ivan Yakovlev had met her while travelling abroad, but never married her. He took her to Moscow, established her as mistress of his household, and called his son Herzen in token, as it were, of the fact that he was the child of his heart, but not legitimately born and therefore not entitled to bear his name.

The fact that Herzen was not born in wedlock probably had a considerable effect on his character, and may have made him more rebellious than he might otherwise have been. He received the regular education of a rich young nobleman, went to the University of Moscow, and there early asserted his vivid, original, impulsive character. He was born (in later years he constantly came back to this) into the generation of what in Russia came to be called lishnie lyudi, 'superfluous men', with whom Turgenev's early novels are so largely concerned.

These young men have a place of their own in the history of European culture in the nineteenth century. They belonged to the class of those who are by birth aristocratic, but who themselves go over to some freer and more radical mode of thought and of action.

There is something singularly attractive about men who retained, throughout life, the manners, the texture of being, the habits and style of a civilised and refined milieu. Such men exercise a peculiar kind of personal freedom which combines spontaneity with distinction. Their minds see large and generous horizons, and, above all, reveal a unique intellectual gaiety of a kind that aristocratic education tends to produce. At the same tinle, tlley are intellectually on the side of everything that is new, progressive, rebellious, young, untried, of that which is about to come into being, of the open sea whether or not there is land that lies beyond. To this type belong those intermediate figures, like Mirabeau, Charles James Fox, Franklin Roosevelt, who live near the frontier that divides old from new, between the douceur de la vie which is about to

IN TR O D U C T I O N

XV

pass and the tantalising future, the dangerous new age that they themselves do much to bring into being.

2

Herzen belonged to this milieu. In his autobiography he has des·

cribed what it was like to be this kind of man in a suffocating society, where there was no opportunity of putting to use one's natural gifts, what it meant to be excited by novel ideas which carne drifting in from all kinds of sources, from classical texts and the old Utopias of the West, from French social preachers and German philosophers, from books, journals, casual conversations, only to remember that the milieu in which one lived made it absurd even to begin to dream of creating in one's own country those harmless and moderate institutions which had long become forms of life in the civilised West.

This normally led to one of two results: either the young enthusiast simply subsided, and came to terms with reality, and becarne a wistful, gently frustrated landowner, who lived on his estate, turned the pages of serious periodicals imported from Petersburg or abroad, and occasionally introduced new pieces of agricultural machinery or some other ingenious device which had caught his fancy in England or in France. Such enthusiasts would endlessly discuss the need for this or that change, but always with the melancholy implication that little or nothin'g could or would be done; or, alternatively, they would give in entirely and fall into a species of gloom or stupor or violent despair, becoming selfdevouring neurotics, destructive personalities slowly poisoning both themselves and the life round them.

Herzen was resolved to escape from both these familiar predicaments. He was determined that of him, at any rate, nobody would say that he had done nothing in the world, that he had offered no resistance and collapsed. When he finally emigrated from Russia in 1847 it was to devote himself to a life of activity. His education was that of a dilettante. Like most young men brought up in an aristocratic milieu, he had been taught to be too many things to too many men, to reflect too many aspects of life, and situations, to be able to concentrate sufficiently upon any one particular activity, any one fixed design.

Herzen was well aware of this. He talks wistfully about the good fortunes of those who enter peacefully upon some steady,

xvi

I S A I A H B E R L I N

fixed profession, untroubled by the many countless alternatives open to gifted and often idealistic young men who have been taught too much, are too rich, and are offered altogether too wide an opportunity of doing too many things, and who, consequently, begin, and are bored, and go back and start down a new path, and in the end lose their way and drift aimlessly and achieve nothing.

This was a very characteristic piece of self-analysis: filled with the idealism of his generation in Russia that both sprang from and fed the growing sense of guilt towards 'the people', Herzen was passionately anxious to do something memorable for himself and his country. This anxiety remained with him all his life. Driven by it he became, as everyone knows who has any acquaintance with the modem history of Russia, perhaps the greatest of European publicists of his day, and founded the first free - that is to say, anti-tsarist - Russian press in Europe, thereby laying the foundation of revolutionary agitation in his country.

In his most celebrated periodical, which he called The Bell (Kolokol), he dealt with anything that seemed to be of topical interest. He exposed, he denounced, he derided, he preached, he became a kind of Russian Voltaire of the mid-nineteenth century.

He was a journalist of genius, and his articles, written with brilliance, gaiety and passion. although, of course, officially forbidden, circulated in Russia and were read by radicals and conservatives alike. Indeed it was said that the Emperor himself read them; certainly some among his officials did so; during the heyday of his fame Herzen exercised a genuine influence within Russia itself -

an unheard of phenomenon for an emigre - by exposing abuses, naming names, but, above all, by appealing to liberal sentiment which had not completely died, even at the very heart of the tsarist bureaucracy, at any rate during the 185os and 186os.

3

Unlike many who find themselves only on paper, or on a public platform, Herzen was an entrancing talker. Probably the best description of him is to be found in an essay by his friend Annenkov entitled 'A Remarkable Decade'. It was written some twenty years after the events that it records.

I must own [Annenkov wrote] that I was puzzled and overwhelmed, when I first came to know Herzen - by this extraordinary mind

I NTR ODUCT I O N

xvii

which darted from one topic to another with unbelievable swiftness, with inexhaustible wit and brilliance; which could see in the tum of somebody's talk, in some simple incident, in some abstract idea, that vivid feature which gives expression and life. He had a most astonishing capacity for instantaneous, unexpected juxtaposition of quite dissimilar things, and this gift he had in a very high degree, fed as it was by the powers of the most subtle observation and a very solid fund of encyclopedic knowledge. He had it to such a degree that, in the end, his listeners were sometimes exhausted by the inextinguishable fireworks of his speech, the inexhaustible fantasy and invention, a kind of prodigal opulence of intellect which astonished his audience.

After the always ardent but remorselessly severe Belinsky, the glancing, gleaming, perpetually changing and often paradoxical and irritating, always wonderfully clever, talk of Herzen demanded of those who were with him not only intense concentration, but also perpetual alertness, because you had always to be prepared to respond instantly. On the other hand, nothing cheap or tawdry could stand even half an hour of contact with him. All pretentiousness, all pompousness, all pedantic self-importance, simply fled from him or melted like wax before a fire. I knew people, many of them what are called serious and practical men, who could not bear Herzen's presence. On the other hand, there were others ... who gave him the most blind and passionate adoration . . •

He had a natural gift for criticism - a capacity for exposing and denouncing the dark sides of life. And he showed this trait very early, during the Moscow period of his life of which I am speaking.

Even then Herzen's mind was in the highest degree rebellious and unmanageable, with a kind of innate, organic detestation of anything which seemed to him to be an accepted opinion sanctified by general silence about some unverified fact. In such cases the predatory powers of his intellect would rise up in force and come into the open, sharp, cunning, resourceful.

He lived in Moscow ... still unknown to the public, but in his own familiar circle he was already known as a witty and a dangerous observer of his friends. Of course, he could not altogether conceal the fact that he kept secret dossiers, secret protocols of his own, about his dearest friends and distant acquaintances within the privacy ofhis own thoughts. People who stood by his side, all innocence and trustfulness, were invariably amazed, and sometimes extremely annoyed, when they suddenly came on one or other side of this involuntary activity of his mind. Strangely enough, Herzen combined with this the tenderest, most loving relations with his chosen intimates, although even they could never escape his pungent analyses. This is explained

xviii

IS A I A H B E R L I N

b y another side o f his character. As i f to restore the equilibrium of his moral organism, nature took care to place in his soul one unshakeable belief, one unconquerable inclination. Herzen believed in the noble instincts of the human heart. His analysis grew silent and reverent before the instinctive impulses of the moral organism as the sole, indubitable truth of existence. He admired anything which he thought to be a noble or passionate impulse, however mistaken; and he never amused himself at its expense.

This ambivalent, contradictory play of his nature -suspicion and denial on the one hand and blind faith on the other -often led to perplexity and misunderstandings between him and his friends, and sometimes to quarrels and scenes. But it is precisely in this crucible of argument, in its flames, that up to the very day of his departure for Europe, people's devotion to him used to be tested and strengthened instead of disintegrating. And this is perfectly intelligible. In all that Herzen did and all that Herzen thought at this time there never was the slightest trace of anything false, no malignant feeling nourished in darkness, no calculation, no treachery. On the contrary, the whole of him was always there, in every one of his words and deeds. And there was another reason which made one sometimes forgive him even insults, a reason which may seem unplausible to people who did not know him.

With all this proud, strong, energetic intellect, Herzen had a wholly gentle, amiable, almost feminine character. Beneath the stem outward aspect of the sceptic, the satirist, under the cover of a most unceremonious, and exceedingly umeticent humour, there dwelt the heart of a child. He had a curious, angular kind of charm, an angular kind of delicacy • • . [but it was given] particularly to those who were beginning, who were seeking after something, people who were trying out their powers. They found a source of strength and confidence in his advice. He took them into the most intimate communion with himself and with his ideas - which, nevertheless, did not stop him, at times, from using his full destructive, analytic powers, from performing exceedingly painful, psychological experiments on these very same people at the very same time.

This vivid and sympathetic vignette tallies with the descriptions left to us by Turgenev, Belinsky and others of Herzen's friends.

It is borne out, above all, by the impression which the reader gains if he reads his own prose, his essays or the autobiographical memoirs collected under the title My Past and Thoughts. The impression that it leaves is not conveyed even by Annenkov's devoted words.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

xix

4

The chief influence on Herzen as a young man in Moscow University, as upon all the young Russian intellectuals of his time, was of course that of Hegel. But although he was a fairly orthodox Hegelian in his early years, he turned his Hegelianism into something peculiar, personal to himself, very dissimilar from the theoretical conclusions which the more serious-minded and pedantic of his contemporaries deduced from that celebrated doctrine.

The chief effect upon him of Hegelianism seems to have been the belief that no specific theory or single doctrine, no one interpretation of life, above all, no simple, coherent, well-constructed schema - neither the great French mechanistic models of the eighteenth century, nor the romantic German edifices of the nineteenth, nor the visions of the great Utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, nor the socialist programmes of Cabet or Leroux or Louis Blanc - could conceivably be true solutions to real problems, at least not in the form in which they were preached.

He was sceptical if only because he believed (whether or not he derived this view from Hegel) that there could not in principle be any simple or final answer to any genuine human problem; that if a question was serious and indeed agonising, the answer could never be clear-cut and neat. Above all, it could never consist in some symmetrical set of conclusions, drawn by deductive means from a collection of self-evident axioms.

This disbelief begins in Herzen's early, forgotten essays which he wrote at the beginning of the 184os, on what he called dilettantism and Buddhism in science; where he distinguishes two kinds of intellectual personality, against both of which he inveighs. One is that of the casual amateur who never sees the trees for the wood; who is terrified, Herzen tells us, of losing his own precious individuality in too much pedantic preoccupation with actual, detailed facts, and therefore always skims over the surface without developing a capacity for real knowledge; who looks at the facts, as it were, through a kind of telescope, with the result that nothing ever gets articulated save enormous, sonorous generalisations floating at random like so many balloons.

The other kind of student - the Buddhist - is the person who escapes from the wood by frantic absorption in the trees; who becomes an intense student of some tiny set of isolated facts, which

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he views through more and more powerful misroscopes. Although such a man might be deeply learned in some particular branch of knowledge, almost invariably - and particularly if he is a German (and almost all Herzen's gibes and insults are directed against the hated Germans, and that despite the fact that he was half German himself) - he becomes intolerably tedious, pompous and blindly philistine; above all, always repellent as a human being.

Between these poles it is necessary to find some compromise, and Herzen believed that if one studied life in a sober, detached, and objective manner, one might perhaps be able to create some kind of tension, a sort of dialectical compromise, between these opposite ideals; for if neither of them can be realised fully and equally, neither of them should be altogether deserted; only thus could human beings be made capable of understanding life in some profounder fashion than if they committed themselves recklessly to one or the other of the two extremes.

This ideal of detachment, moderation, compromise, dispassionate objectivity which Herzen at this early period of his life was preaching, was something deeply incompatible with his temperament. And indeed, not long after, he bursts forth with a great paean to partiality. He declares that he knows that this will not be well received. There are certain concepts which simply are not received in good society - rather like people who have disgraced themselves in some appalling way. Partiality is not something which is well thought of in comparison, for example, with abstract justice. Nevertheless, nobody has ever said anything worth saying unless he was deeply and passionately partial.

.

There follows a long and typically Russian diatribe against the chilliness, meanness, impossibility and undesirability of remaining objective, of being detached, of not committing oneself, of not plunging into the stream of life. The passionate voice of his friend Belinsky is suddenly audible in Herzen's writings in this phase of his development.

s

The fundamental thesis which emerges at this time, and is then developed throughout his later life with marvellous poetry and imagination, is the terrible power over human lives of ideological abstractions (I say poetry advisedly; for as Dostoevsky in later

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years very truly said, whatever else might be said about Herzen, he was certainly a Russian poet; which saved him in the eyes of this jaundiced but, at times, uncannily penetrating critic: Herzen's views or mode of life naturally found little favour in his eyes).

Herzen declares that any attempt to explain human conduct in terms of, or to dedicate human being to the service of, any abstraction, be it never so noble - justice, progress, nationality - even if preached by impeccable altruists like Mazzini or Louis Blanc or Mill, always leads in the end to victimisation and human sacrifice.

Men are not simple enough, human lives and relationships are too complex for standard formulas and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal, be the motives for doing it never so lofty, always lead in the end to a terrible maiming of human beings, to political vivisection on an ever increasing scale. The process culminates in the liberation of some only at the price of enslavement of others, and the replacing of an old tyranny with a new and sometimes far more hideous one - by the imposition of the slavery of universal socialism, for example, as a remedy for the slavery of the universal Roman Church.

There is a typical piece of dialogue between Herzen and Louis Blanc, the French socialist (whom he respected greatly), which Herzen quotes, and which shows the kind of levity with which Herzen sometimes expressed his deepest convictions. The conversation is described as having taken place in London somewhere in the early 5os. One day Louis Blanc observed to Herzen that human life was a great social duty, that man must always sacrifice himself to society.

'Why?' I asked suddenly.

'How do you mean "Why?" [said Louis Blanc] -but surely the whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'

'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices and nobody enjoys himseH.'

'You are playing with words.'

'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied, laughing.

In this gay and apparently casual passage, Herzen embodies his central principle- that the goal of life is life itself, that to sacrifice the present to some vague and unpredictable future is a form of

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delusion which leads t o the destruction of all that alone i s valuable in rr.en and societies - to the gratuitous sacrifice of the flesh and blood of live human beings upon the altar of idealised abstractions.

Herzen is revolted by the central substance of what was being preached by some of the best and purest-hearted men of his time, particularly by socialists and utilitarians, namely, that vast suffering in the present must be undergone for the sake of an ineffable felicity in the future, that thousands of innocent men may be forced to die that millions might be happy- battle cries that were common even in those days, and of which a great deal more has been heard since. The notion that there is a splendid future in store for humanity, that it is guaranteed by history, and that it justifies the most appalling cruelties in the present - this familiar piece of political eschatology, based on belief in inevitable progress, seemed to him a fatal doctrine directed against human life.

The profoundest and most sustained - and the most brilliantly written - of all Herzen's statements on this topic is to be found in the volume of essays which he called From the Other Shore, and wrote as a memorial to his disillusionment with the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849. This great polemical masterpiece is Herzen's profession of faith and his political testament. Its tone and content are well conveyed in the characteristic (and celebrated) passage in which he declares that one generation must not be condemned to the role of beir.g a mere means to the welfare of its remote descendants, which is in any case none too certain. A distant goal is a cheat and a deception. Real goals must be closer than that - 'at the very least the labourer's wage or pleasure in work performed'. The end of each generation is itself- each life has its own unique experience; the fulfilment of its wants creates new needs, claims, new forms of life. Nature, he declares (perhaps under the influence of Schiller), is careless of human beings and their needs, and crushes them heedlessly. Has history a plan, a libretto? If it did 'it would lose all interest, become . • • boring, ludicrous'. There are no timetables, no cosmic patterns; there is only the 'flow of life', passion, will, improvisation; sometimes roads exist, sometimes not; where there is no road 'genius will blast a path'.

But what if someone were to ask, 'Supposing all this is suddenly brought to an end? Supposing a comet strikes us and brings to an end life on earth? Will history not be meaningless? Will all this

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talk suddenly end in nothing? Will it not be a cruel mockery of all our efforts, all our blood and sweat and tears, if it all ends in some sudden, unexplained brute fashion with some mysterious, totally unexplained event?' Herzen replies that to think in these terms is a great vulgarity, the vulgarity of mere numbers. The death of a single human being is no less absurd and unintelligible than the death of the entire human race; it is a mystery we accept; merely to multiply it enormously and ask 'Supposing millions of human beings die?' does not make it more mysterious or more frightening.

In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber endless possibilities and forces, and in suitable conditions • • • they develop, and will develop furiously. They may fill a world, or they may fall by the roadside. They may take a new direction. They may stop. They may collapse . • • Nature is perfectly indifferent to what happens . • •

[But then, you may ask,] what is all this for? The life -of people becomes a pointless game . . • Men build something with pebbles and sand only to see it all collapse again; and human creatures crawl out from underneath the ruins and again start clearing spaces and build huts of moss and planks and broken capitals and, after centuries of endless labour, it all collapses again. Not in vain did Shakespeare say that history was a tedious tale told by an idiot . • •

. • . [To this I reply that] you are like ••. those very sensitive people who shed a tear whenever they recollect that 'man is born but to die'. To look at the end and not at the action itself is a cardinal error.

Of what use to the flower is its bright magnificent bloom? Or this intoxicating scent, since it will only pass away? • . . None at all. But nature is not so miserly. She does not disdain what is transient, what is only in the present. At every point she achieves all she can achieve

• . . Who will find fault with nature because flowers bloom in the morning and die at night, because she has not given the rose or the lily the hardness of flint? And this miserable pedestrian principle we wish to transfer to the world of history . . • Life has no obligation to realise the fantasies and ideas [of civilisation] • • • Life loves novelty . . •

. . . History seldom repeats itself, it uses every accident, simultaneously knocks at a thousand doors • • • doors which may open • • . who knows?

And again:

Human beings have an instinctive passion to preserve anything they like. Man is born and therefore wishes to live for ever. Man falls in

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love and wishes to be loved, and loved for ever a s in the very first moment of his avowal . . . but life . . . gives no guarantees. Life does not ensure existence, nor pleasure; she does not answer for their continuance . . . Every historical moment is full and is beautiful, is self-contained in its own fashion. Every year has its own spring and its own summer, its own winter and autumn, its own storms and fair weather. Every period is new, fresh, filled with its own hopes and carries within itself its own joys and sorrows. The present belongs to it. But human beings are not content with this, they must needs own the future too . . .

What is the purpose of the song the singer sings? . . . If you look beyond your pleasure in it for something else, for some other goal, the moment will come when the singer stops and then you will only have memories and vain regrets . . . because, instead of listening, you were waiting for something else . . . You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life. What is this goal for which you [he means Mazzini and the liberals and the socialists] are seeking -is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To ·whom was the order given? Is it something inevitable? or not? If it is, are we simply puppets? . . . Are we morally free or are we wheels within a machine? I would rather think of life, and therefore of history, as a goal attained, not as a means to something else.

And:

We think that the purpose of the child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life is death.

6

This is Herzen's central political and social thesis, and it enters henceforth into the stream of Russian radical thought as an antidote to the exaggerated utilitarianism of which its adversaries have so often accused it. The purpose of the singer is the song, and the purpose of life is to be lived. Everything passes, but what passes may sometimes reward the pilgrim for all his sufferings.

Goethe has told us that there can be no guarantee, no security.

Man could be content with the present. But he is not. He rejects beauty, he rejects fulfilment today, because he must own the future also. That is Herzen's answer to all those who, like Mazzini, or the socialists of his time, called for supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the sake of nationality, or human civilisation,

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or socialism, or justice, or humanity - if not in the present, then in the future.

Herzen rejects this violently. The purpose of the struggle for liberty is not liberty tomorrow, it is liberty today, the liberty of living individuals with their own individual ends, the ends for which they move and fight and perhaps die, ends which are sacred to them. To crush their freedom, their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some vague felictty in the future which cannot be guaranteed, about which we know nothing, which is simply the product of some enormous metaphysical construction that itself rests upon sand, for which there is no logical, or empirical, or any other rational guarantee - to do that is in the first place blind, because the future is uncertain ; and in the second place vicious, because it offends against the only moral values we know ; because it tramples on human demands in the name of abstractions - freedom, happiness, juctice - fanatical generalisations, mystical sounds, idolised sets of words. 'Why is liberty valuable ? Because it is an end in itself, because it is what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to perform an act of human sacrifice.'

This is Herzen's ultimate sermon, and from this he develops the corollary that one of the deepest of modem disasters is to be caught up in abstractions instead of realities. And this he maintains not merely against the W estern socialists and liberals among whom he lived (let alone the enemy - priests or conservatives) but even more again his own close friend Bakunin who persisted in trying to stir up violent rebellion, involving torture and martyrdom, for the sake of dim, confused and distant goals. For Herzen, one of the greatest of sins that any human being can perpetrate is to seek to transfer moral responsibility from his own shoulders to those of an unpredictable future order, and, in the name of something which may never happen, perpetrate crimes today which no one would deny to be monstrous if they were performed for some egoistic purpose, and do not seem so only because they are sanctified by faith in some remote and intangible Utopia.

For all his hatred of despotism, and in particular of the Russian regime, Herzen was all his life convinced that equally fatal dangers threatened from his own socialist and revolutionary allies. He believed this because there was a time when, with his friend, the critic Belinsky, he too had believed that a simple solution was feasible ; that some great system - a world adumbrated by Saint-C.Y.E.-2

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Simon o r by Proudhon - did provide it : that if one regulated social life rationally and put it in order, and created a clear and tidy organisation, human problems could be finally resolved.

Dostoevsky once said of Belinsky that his socialism was nothing but a simple belief in a marvellous life of 'unheard-of splendour, on new and . . . adamantine foundations'. Because Herzen had himself once believed in these foundations (although never with simple and absolute faith) and because this belief came toppling down and was utterly destroyed in the fearful cataclysms of 1848

and 1849 in which almost every one of his idols proved to have feet of day, he denounces his own past with peculiarly intense indignation : we call upon the masses, he writes, to rise and crush the tyrants. But the masses are indifferent to individual freedom and independence, and suspicious of talent : 'they want a . _ .

government to rule for their benefit, and not . . . against it. But to govern themselves doesn't enter their heads.' 'It is not enough to despise the Crown ; one must not be filled with awe before the Phrygian Cap . . • '. He speaks with bitter scorn about monolithic oppressive communist idylls, about the barbarous 'equality of penal servitude', about the 'forced labour' of socialists like Cabet, about barbarians marching to destroy.

Who will finish us off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre or the wild barbarism of communism, the bloody sabre, or the red flag? . . .

. . . Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempest dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift . . .

[Our] institutions . . . will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be

!i'quidated . . . I am sorry [for the death of civilisation] . But the masses will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave nothing but tears, want, ignorance and humiliation.

He is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too. He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards self-expression on the part of other

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human beings too. He calls this Petrograndism - the methods of Peter the Great. He admires Peter the Great. He admires him because he did at least overthrow the feudal rigidity, the dark night, as he thinks of it, of medieval Russia. He admires the Jacobins because the Jacobins dared to do something instead of nothing. Yet he is clearly aware, and became more and more so the longer he lived (he says all this with arresting clarity in his open letters To an Old Comrade - Bakunin - written in the late 1 86os), that Petrograndism, the behaviour of Attila, the behaviour of the Committee of Public Safety in 1792 - the use of methods which presuppose the possibility of simple and radical solutions -

always in the end lead to oppression, bloodshed and collapse. He declares that whatever the justification in earlier and more innocent ages of acts inspired by fanatical faith, nobody has any right to act in this fashion who has lived through the nineteenth century and has seen what human beings are really made of - the complex, crooked texture of men and institutions. Progress must adjust itself to the actual pace of historical change, to the actual economic and social needs of society, because to suppress the bour·

geoisie by violent revolution - and there was nothing he despised more than the bourgeoisie, and the mean, grasping, philistine financial bourgeoisie of Paris most of all - before its historical role has been played out, would merely mean that the bourgeois spirit and bourgeois forms would persist into the new social order. 'They want, without altering the walls [of the prison] , to give them a new function, as if a plan for a jail could be used for a free existence.' Houses for free men cannot be built by specialists in prison architecture. And who shall say that history has proved that Herzen was mistaken ?

7

His loathing of the bourgeoisie is frantic, yet he does not want a violent cataclysm. He thinks that it may be inevitable, that it may come, but he is frightened of it. The bourgeoisie seems to him like a collection of Figaros, but Figaros grow fat and prosperous. He declares that, in the eighteenth century, Figaro wore a livery, a mark of servitude to be sure, but still something different from, detach·

able from, his skin ; the skin, at least, was that of a palpitating, rebellious human being. But today Figaro has won. Figaro has become a millionaire. He is judge, oommander-in-chief, president

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of the republic. Figaro now dominates the world, and, alas, the livery is no longer a mere livery. It has become part of his skin.

It cannot be taken off; it has become part of his living flesh.

Everything that was repellent and degrading in the eighteenth century, against which the noble revolutionaries had protested, has grown into the intrinsic texture of the mean middle-class beings who now dominate us. And yet we must wait. Simply to cut off their heads, as Bakunin wanted, can only lead to a new tyranny and a new slavery, to the rule of the revolted minorities over majorities, or worse still, the rule of majorities - monolithic majorities - over minorities, the rule of what John Stuart Mill, in Herzen's view with justice, called conglomerated mediocrity.

Herzen's values are undisguised; he likes only the style of free beings, only what is large, generous, uncalculating. He admires pride, independence, resistance to tyrants ; he admires Pushkin because he was defiant ; he admires Lermontov because he dared to suffer and to hate; he even approves of the Slavophils, his reactionary opponents, because at least they detested authority, at least they would not let the Germans in. He admfres Belinsky because he was incorruptible, and 'told the truth in the face of the arrayed battalions of German academic or political authority. The dogmas of socialism seem to him no less stifling than those of capitalism or of the Middle Ages or of �he early Christians.

What he hated most of all was the despotism of formulas - the submission of human beings to arrangements arrived at by deduction from some kind of a priori principles which had no foundation in actual experience. That is why he feared the new liberators so deeply. 'If only people wanted,' he says, ' . . . instead of liberating humanity, to liberate themselves, they would do much for . . . the liberation of man.' He knew that his own perpetual plea for more individual freedom contained the seeds of social atomisation, that a compromise had to be found between the two great social needs

- for organisation and for individual freedom - some unstable equilibrium that would preserve a minimal area within which the individual could express himself and not be utterly pulverised, and he utters a great appeal for what he calls the value of egoism.

He declares that one of the great dangers to our society is that individuals will be tamed and suppressed disinterestedly by idealists in the name of altruism, in the name of measures designed to make the majority happy. The new liberators may well resemble

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the inquisitors of the past, who drove herds of innocent Spaniards, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen, Italians to the autos-da-f€, and

'then went home peacefully with a quiet conscience, with the feeling that they had done their duty, with the smell of roasting flesh still in their nostrils', and slept - the sleep of the innocent after a day's work well done. Egoism is not to be condemned without qualification. Egoism is not a vice. Egoism gleams in the eye of an animal. Moralists bravely thunder against it, instead of building on it. What moralists try to deny is the great, inner citadel of human dignity. 'They want . . . to make men tearful, sentimental, insipid, kindly creatures, asking to be made slaves . . . But to tear egoism from a man's heart is to rob him of his living principles, of the yeast and salt of his personality.' Fortunately this is impossible.

Of course it is sometimes suicidal to try to assert oneself. One cannot try to go up a staircase down which an army is trying to march. That is done by tyrants, conservatives, fools and criminals.

'Destroy a man's altruism, and you get a savage orang-utan, but if you destroy his egoism you generate a tame monkey.'

Human problems are too complex to demand simple solutions.

Even the peasant commune in Russia, in which Herzen believed so deeply as a 'lightning conductor', because he believed that peasants in Russia at least had not been infected by the distorting, urban vices of the European proletariat and the European bourgeoisie even the peasant commune did not, after all, as he points out, preserve Russia from slavery. Liberty is not to the taste of the majority - only of the educated. There are no guaranteed methods, no sure paths to social welfare. We must try to do our best ; and it is always possible that we shall fail.

8

The heart of the thought is the notion that the basic problems are perhaps not soluble at all, that all one can do is to try to solve them, but that there is no guarantee, either in socialist nostrums or in any other human construction, no guarantee that happiness or a rational life can be attained, in private or in public life. This curious combination of idealism and scepticism - not unlike, for all his vehemence, the outlook of Erasmus, Montaigne, Montesquieu runs through all his writings.

Herzen wrote novels, but they are largely forgotten, because he was not a born novelist. His stories are greatly inferior to those of

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his friend, Turgenev, but they have something in common with them. For in Turgenev's novels, too, you will find that human problems are not treated as if they were soluble. Bazarov in Fathers and Children suffers and dies ; Lavretsky in A House of Gentlefolk is left in melancholy uncertainty at the end of the novel, not because something had not been done which could have been done, not because there is a solution round the comer which someone simply had not thought of, or had refused to apply, but because, as Kant once said, 'from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made'. Everything is partly the fault of circumstance, partly the fault of the individual character, partly in the nature of life itself. This must be faced, it must be stated, and it is a vulgarity and, at times, a crime to believe that permanent solutions are always possible.

Herzen wrote a novel called Who Is At Fault? about a typical tragic triangle in which one of the 'superfluous men' whom I mentioned earlier falls in love with a lady in a provincial town who is married to a virtuous, idealistic, but dull and naive husband. It is not a good novel, and its plot is not worth recounting, but the main point, and what is most characteristic of Herzen, is that the situation possesses, in principle, no solution. The lover is left broken-hearted, the wife falls ill and probably dies, the husband contemplates suicide. It sounds like a typically gloomy, morbidly self-centred, caricature of the Russian novel. But it is not. It rests on an exceedingly delicate, precise, and at times profound description of an emotional and psychological situation to which the theories of a Stendhal, the method of a Flaubert, the depth and moral insight of a George Eliot are inapplicable because they are seen to be too literary, derived from obsessive ideas, ethical doctrines not fitted to the chaos of life.

9

At the heart of Herzen's outlook (and of Turgenev's too) is the notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems, and, therefore, of the absurdity of trying to solve them by means of political or sociological instruments. But the difference between Herzen and Turgenev is this. Turgenev is, in his innermost being, not indeed heartless but a cool, detached, at times slightly mocking observer who looks upon the tragedies of life from a comparatively remote point of view ; oscillating between one vantage point and

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another, between the claims of society and of the individual. the claims of love and of daily life; between heroic virtue and realistic scepticism, the morality of Hamlet and the morality of Don Quixote, the necessity for efficient political organisation and the necessity for individual self-expression; remaining suspended in a state of agreeable indecision, sympathetic melancholy, ironical, free from cynicism and sentimentality, perceptive, scrupulously truthful and uncommitted. Turgenev neither quite believed nor quite disbelieved in a deity, personal or impersonal; religion is for him a normal ingredient of life, like love, or egoism, or the sense of pleasure. He enjoyed remaining in an intermediate position, he enjoyed almost too much his lack of will to believe, and because he stood aside, because he contemplated in tranquillity, he was able to produce great literary masterpieces of a finished kind, rounded stories told in peaceful retrospect with well-constructed beginnings, middles and ends. He detached his art from himself; he did not, as a human being, deeply care about solutions; he saw life with a peculiar chilliness, which infuriated both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and he achieved the exquisite perspective of an artist who treats his material from a certain distance. There is a chasm between him and his material, within which alone his particular kind of poetical creation is possible.

Herzen, on the contrary, cared far too violently. He was looking for solutions for himself, for his own personal life. His novels were certainly failures. He obtrudes himself too vehemently into them, himself and his agonised point of view. On the other hand, his autobiographical sketches, when he writes openly about himself and about his friends, when he speaks about his own life in Italy, in France, in Switzerland, in England, have a kind of palpitating directness, a sense of first-handness and reality, which no other writer in the nineteenth century begins to convey. His reminiscences are a work of critical and descriptive genius with the power of absolute self-revelation that only an astonishingly imaginative, impressionable, perpetually reacting personality, with an exceptional sense both of the noble and the ludicrous, and a rare freedom from vanity and doctrine, could have attained. As a writer of memoirs he is unequalled. His sketches of England, or rather of himself in England, are better than Heine's or Taine's. To demonstrate this one need only read his wonderful account of English political trials, or how j udges, for example, looked to him when

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they sat i n court trying foreign conspirators for having fought a fatal duel in Windsor Park. He gives a vivid and entertaining description of bombastic French demagogues and gloomy French fanatics, and of the impassable gulf which divides this agitated and slightly grotesque emigre society from the dull, frigid, and undignified institutions of mid-Victorian England, typified by the figure of the presiding judge at the Old Bailey, who looks like the wolf in Red Riding Hood, in his white wig, his long skirts, with his sharp little wolf-like face, thin lips, sharp teeth, and harsh little words that come with an air of specious benevolence from the face encased in disarming feminine curls - giving the impression of a sweet, grandmotherly, old lady, belied by the small gleaming eyes and the dry, acrid, malicious judicial humour.

He paints classical portraits of German exiles, whom he detested, of Italian and Polish revolutionaries, whom he admired, and gives little sketches of the differences between the nations, such as the English and the French, each of which regards itself as the greatest nation on earth, and will not yield an inch, and does not begin to understand the other's ideals - the French with their gregariousness, their lucidity, their didacticism, their neat formal gardens, as against the English with their solitudes and dark suppressed romanticism, and the tangled undergrowth of their ancient, illogical, but profoundly civilised and humane institutions. And there are the Germans, who regard themselves, he declares, as an inferior fruit of the tree of which the English are the superior products, and come to England, and after three days 'say

"yes" instead of "ja" ; and "well" where it is not required'. It is invariably for the Germans that both he and Bakunin reserved their sharpest taunts, not so much from personal dislike as because the Germans to them seemed to stand for all that was middle-class, cramping, philistine and boorish, the sordid despotism of grey and small-minded sergeants, aesthetically more disgusting than the generous, magnificent tyrannies of great conquerors of history.

Where they are stopped by their conscience, we are stopped by a policemen. Our weakness is arithmetical, and so we yield ; their weakness is an algebraic weakness, it is part of the formula itself.

This was echoed by Bakunin, a decade later : When an Englishman or an American says 'I am an Englishman', 'I am an American', they are saying 'I am a free man' ; when a German

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says 'I am German' he is saying ' . . . my Emperor is stronger than all the other Emperors, and the German soldier who is strangling me will strangle you all . . . •.

This kind of sweeping prejudice, these diatribes against entire nations and classes, are characteristic of a good many Russian writers of this period. They are often ill-founded, unjust and violently exaggerated, but they are the authentic expression of an indignant reaction against an oppressive milieu, and of a genuine and highly personal moral vision which makes them lively reading even now.

10

His irreverence and the irony, the disbelief in final solutions, the conviction that human beings are complex and fragile, and that there is value in the very irregularity of their structure which is violated by attempts to force it into patterns or strait-jackets - this and the irrepressible pleasure in exploding all cut and dried social and political schemata which serious-minded and pedantic saviours of mankind, both radical and conservative, were perpetually manufacturing, inevitably made Herzen unpopular among the earnest and the devout of all camps. In this respect he resembled his sceptical friend Turgenev, who could not, and had no wish to, resist the desire to tell the truth, however 'unscientific' - to say something psychologically telling, even though it might not fit in with some generally accepted, enlightened system of ideas. Neither accepted the view that because he was on the side of progress or revolution he was under a sacred obligation to suppress the truth, or to pretend to think that it was simpler than it was, or that certain solutions would work although it seemed patently improbable that they could, simply because to speak otherwise might give aid and comfort to the enemy.

This detachment from party and doctrine, and the tendency to utter independent and sometimes disconcerting judgements, brought violent criticism on both Herzen and Turgenev, and made their position difficult. When Turgenev wrote Fathers and Children, he was duly attacked both from the right and fro�¥ the left, because neither was clear which side he was supporting. This indeterminate quality particularly irritated the 'new' young men in Russia, who assailed him bitterly for being too liberal, too

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civilised, too ironical, too sceptical, for undermining noble idealism by the perpetual oscillation of political feelings, by excessive selfexamination, by not engaging himself and declaring war upon the enemy, and perpetrating instead what amounted to a succession of evasions and minor treacheries. Their hostility was directed at all the 'men of the 40s', and in particular at Herzen, who was rightly looked on as their most brilliant and most formidable representative. His answer to the stem, brutal young revolutionaries of the 186os is exceedingly characteristic. The new revolutionaries had attacked him for nostalgic love of an older style of life, for being a gentleman, for being rich, for living in comfort, for sitting in London and observing the Russian revolutionary struggle from afar, for being a member of a generation which had merely talked in the salons, and speculated and philosophised, when all round them was squalor and misery, bitterness and injustice; for not seeking salvation in some serious, manual labour - in cutting down a tree, or making a pair of boots, or doing something 'concrete' and real in order to identify hinlself with the suffering masses, instead of endless brave talk in the drawing-rooiUS of wealthy ladies with other well-educated, nobly-born, equally feckless young men - self-indulgence and escapism, deliberate blindness to the horrors and agonies of their world.

Herzen understood his opponents, and declined to compromise.

He admits that he cannot help preferring cleanliness to dirt; decency, elegance, beauty, comfort, to violence and austerity, good literature to bad, poetry to prose. Despite his alleged cynicism and

'aestheticism', he declines to admit that only scoundrels can achieve things, that in order to achieve a revolution that will liberate mankind and create a new and nobler form of life on earili one must be unkempt, dirty, brutal and violent, and trample with hob-nailed boots on civilisation and the rights of men. He does not believe this, and sees no reason why he should believe it.

As for the new generation of revolutionaries, they are not sprung from nothing : they are the fault of his generation, which begat them by its idle talk in the 184os. These are men who come to avenge the world against the men of the 40s - 'the syphilis of our revolutionary passions'. The new generation will say to the old : ' "you are hypocrites, we will be cynics ; you spoke like moralists, we shall speak like scoundrels ; you were civil to your superiors, rude to your inferiors; we shall be rude to all; you bow

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XXXV

without feeling respect, we shall push and jostle and make no apologies . . . " • He says in effect : Organised hooliganism can solve nothing. Unless civilisation - the recognition of the difference of good and bad, noble and ignoble, worthy and unworthy - is pre

�erved, unless there are some people who are both fastidious and fearless, and are free to say what they want to say, and do not sacrifice their lives upon some large, nameless altar, and sink themselves into a vast, impersonal, grey mass of barbarians marching to destroy, what is the point of the revolution ? It may come whether we like it or not. But why should we welcome, still less work for, the victory of the barbarians who will sweep away the wicked old world only to leave ruins and misery on which nothing but a new despotism can be built ? The 'vast bill of indictment which Russian literature has been drafting against Russian life'

does not demand a new philistinism in place of the old. 'Sorrow, scepticism, irony . . . the three strings of the Russian lyre' are closer to reality than the crude and vulgar optimism of the new materialists.

1 1

Herzen's most constant goal is the preservation of individual liberty. That is the purpose of the guerrilla war which, as he once wrote to Mazzini, he had fought from his earliest youth. What made him unique in the nineteenth century is the complexity of his vision, the degree to which he understood the causes and nature of conflicting ideals simpler and more fundamental than his own. He understood what made - and what in a measure justified

- radicals and revolutionaries : ::nd at the same time he grasped the frightening consequences of their doctrines. He was in full sympathy with, and had a profound psychological understanding of, what it was that gave the Jacobins their severe and noble grandeur, and endowed them with a moral magnificence which raised them above the horizon of that older world which he found so attractive and which they had ruthlessly crushed. He understood only too well the misery, the oppression, the suffocation, the appalling inhumanity, the bitter cries for justice on the part of the crushed elements of the population under the ancien regime, and at the same time he knew that the new world which had risen to avenge these wrongs must, if it was given its head, create its own excesses and drive millions of human beings to useless mutual extermina-

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tion. Herzen's sense o f reality, in particular o f the need for, and the price of, revolution, is unique in his own, and perhaps in any age. His sense of the critical moral and political issues of his time is a good deal more specific and concrete than that of the majority of the professional philosophers of the nineteeth century, who tended to try to derive general principles from observation of their society, and to recommend solutions which are deduced by rational methods from premises formulated in terms of the tidy categories in which they sought to arrange opinions, principles and forms of conduct. Herzen was a publicist and an essayist whom his early Hegelian training had not ruined : he had acquired no taste for academic classifications : he had a unique insight into the 'inner feel' of social and political predicaments : and with it a remarkable power of analysis and exposition. Consequently he understood and stated the case, both emotional and intellectual, for violent revolution, for saying that a pair of boots were of more value than all the plays of Shakespeare (as the 'nihilistic' critic Pisarev once said in a rhetorical moment), for denouncing liberalism and parliamentarism, which offered the masses votes and slogans when what they needed was food, shelter, clothing ; and understood no less vividly and clearly the aesthetic and. even moral value of civilisations which rest upon slavery, where a minority produces divine masterpieces, and only a small number of persons have the freedom and the self

This curious ambivalence, the alternation of indignant championship of revolution and democracy against the smug denundation of them by liberals and conservatives, with no less passionate attacks upon revolutionaries in the name of free individuals ; the defence of the claims of life and art, human decency, equality and dignity, with the advocacy of a society in which human beings shall not exploit or trample on one another even in the name of justice or progress or civilisation or democracy or other abstractions - this war on two, and often more, fronts, wherever and whoever the enemies of freedom might tum out to be - makes Herzen the most realistic, sensitive, penetrating and convincing witness to the sodal life and the social issues of his own time. His greatest gift is that of untrammelled understanding : he understood the value of the so-called 'superfluous' Russian idealists

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:xxxvii

of the 40s because they were exceptionally free, and morally attractive, and formed the most imaginative, spontaneous, gifted, civilised and interesting society which he had ever known. At the same time he understands the protest against it of the exasperated, deeply earnest, revoltes young radicals, repelled by what seemed to them gay and irresponsible chatter among a group of aristo-

. cratic �aneurs, unaware of the mounting resentment of the sullen mass of the oppressed peasants and lower officials that would one day sweep them and their world away in a tidal wave of violent, blind, but justified hatred which it is the business of true revolutionaries to foment and direct. Herzen understood this conflict, and his autobiography conveys the tension between individuals and classes, personalities and opinions both in Russia and in the West, with marvellous vividness and precision.

My Past and Thoughts is dominated by no single clear purpose, it is not committed to a thesis ; its author was not enslaved by any formula or any political doctrine, and for this reason, it remains a profound and living masterpiece, and Herzen's greatest title to immortality. He possesses other claims : his political and social views were arrestingly original, if only because he was among the very few thinkers of his time who in principle rejected all general solutions, and grasped, as very few thinkers have ever done, the crucial distinction between words that are about words, and words that are about persons or things in the real world. Nevertheless it is as a writer that he survives. His autobiography is one of the great monuments to Russian literary and psychological genius, worthy to stand beside the great novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy.

Like War and Peace, like Fathers and Children, it is wonderfully readable, and, save in inferior translation, not dated, not Victorian, still astonishingly contemporary in feeling.

One of the elements in political genius is a sensibility to characteristics and processes in society while they are still in embryo and invisible to the naked eye. Herzen possessed this capacity to a high degree, but he viewed the approaching cataclysm neither with the savage exultation of Marx or Bakunin nor with the pessimistic detachment of Burckhardt or Tocqueville. Like Proudhon he believed the destruction of individual freedom to be neither desirable nor inevitable, but, unlike him, as being highly probable, unless it was averted by deliberate human effort. The strong tradition of libertarian humanism in Russian socialism, defeated only in October

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1 9 1 7, derives from his writings. His analysis of the forces a t work in his day, of the individuals in whom they were embodied, of the moral presupposition of their creeds and words, and of his own principles, remains to this day one of the most penetrating, moving, and morally formidable indictments of the great evils which have grown to maturity in our own time.

I S A I A H B E R L I N

PART I

N URSERY AND UNIVERSITY

1812-1834

C H A P T E R I

My Nurse and the Grande: Armce - Moscow in Flames -My Father and Napoleon - General Ilovaysky - A Journey with French Prisoners - Patriotism - Calot - Property Managed in Co=on - The Division - The Senator

1

'O H, please, Nurse, tell me again how the French came to Moscow ! ' This was a constant petition of mine, as I stretched myself out in my crib with the cloth border to prevent my falling out, and nestled down under the warm quilt.

My old nurse, Vera Artamonovna, was just as eager to repeat her favourite story as I was to hear it ; but her regular reply was :

'You've heard that old story ever so often before, and besides it's time for you to go to sleep ; you had better rise earlier tomorrow.'

'Oh, but please tell me just a little - how you heard the news, and how it all began.'

'Well, it began this way. You know how your papa puts off always. The packing went on and on till at last it was done. Everyone said it was high time to be off ; there was nothing to keep us and hardly a soul left in Moscow. But no ! He was always discussing with your uncle Pavel 1 about travelling together, and they were never both ready on the same day. But at last our things were packed, the carriage was ready, and the travellers had just sat down to lunch, when the head cook came into the dining-room as white as a sheet and reported that the enemy had entered the city at the Dragomilovsky Gate. Our hearts went down into our boots, and we prayed that the power of the Cross might be on our side. All was confusion, and, while we were bustling to and fro and crying out, suddenly we saw a regiment of dragoons galloping down the street ; they wore strange helmets with horses' tails tied on behind. They had dosed all the city gates ; so there was your papa in a pretty mess, and you with him ! You were still with your fostermother, Darya ; you were very small and weak then.'

And I smiled, with pride and pleasure at the thought that I had taken a part in the Great War.

'At first, all went reasonably well, during the first days at least.

1 . Pavel lvanovich Golokhvastov, who had married my father's youngest sister.

4

C H I L DH O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

From time to time two or three soldiers would come into the house and ask for something to drink ; of course we gave them a glass apiece, and then they would go away and salute quite politely as well. But then, you see, when the fires began and got worse and worse, there was terrible disorder, and pillage began and every sort of horror. We were living in a wing of the Princess's house, and the house caught fire. Then your uncle Pavel invited us to move to his house, which was built of stone and very strong and stood far back in a courtyard. So we set off, masters and servants together - there was no thought of distinctions at such a time. When we got into the boulevard, the trees on each side were beginning to bum. At last we reached your uncle's house, and it was actually blazing, with the fire spouting out of every window.

Your uncle could not believe his eyes ; he stood rooted to the ground.

'Behind the house, as you know, there is a big garden, and we went there, hoping to be safe. We sat down sadly enough on some benches that were there, when suddenly a band of drunken soldiers carne in and one of them began to strip your uncle of a fur coat he had put on for the journey. But the old gentleman resisted, and the soldier pulled out his dirk and struck him in the face ; and your uncle kept the scar to his dying day. The other soldiers set upon us, and one of them snatched you from the arms of your foster-mother, and undid your clothes, to see if there were any notes or jewels hidden there ; when he found nothing, the mean fellow tore the clothes on purpose and then left you alone.

'As soon as they had gone, a great misfortune happened. You remember our servant Platon, who was sent to serve in the Army ?

He was always fond of the bottle and had had too much to drink that day. He had got hold of a sword and was walking about with it tied round his waist. The day before the enemy carne, Count Rostopchin distributed arms of all kinds to the people at the Arsenal, and Platon had provided himself with a sword. Towards evening, a dragoon rode into the court-yard and tried to take a horse that was standing near the stable ; but Platon flew at him, caught hold of the bridle, and said : "The horse is ours ; you shan't have it." The dragoon pointed a pistol at him, but it can't have been loaded. Your father saw what was happening and called out :

"leave that horse alone, Platon ! Don't you interfere." But it was no good : Platon pulled out his sword and struck the soldier over

N U R S E R Y A N D U N I V E R S I T Y

5

the head; the man reeled under the blow, and Platon struck him again and again. We thought we were doomed now ; for, if his comrades saw him, they would kill us. When the dragoon fell off, Platon caught hold of his legs and threw him into a limepit, though the poor wretch was still breathing ; the man's horse never moved but beat the ground with its hoof, as if it understood ; our people shut it up in the stable, and it must have been burnt to death there.

'We all cleared out of the court as soon as we could ; the fires everywhere grew worse and worse. Tired and hungry, we went into a house that had not caught fire, and threw ourselves down to rest ; but, before an hour had passed, our servants in the street were calling out : "Come out ! come out ! Fire, fire I " I took a piece of oilcloth off the billiard table, to wrap you up from the night air. We got as far as the Tversky Square, and the Frenchmen were putting out the fires there, because one of their great generals was living in the Governor's house in the square ; we sat down as we were on the street; there were sentries moving all about and other soldiers on horseback. You were crying terribly; your foster-mother had no more milk, and none of us had even a piece of bread. But Natalya Konstantinovna was with us then, and she was afraid of nothing. She saw some soldiers eating in a comer ; she took you in her arms and went straight off, and showed you to them. "The baby wants mange:r," she said. At first they looked angrily at her and said, "Alle:z, al!e:z!" Then she called them every bad name she could think of; and they did not understand a word, but they laughed heartily and gave her some bread soaked in water for you and a crust for herself. Early next morning an officer came and collected all the men, and your father too, and took them off to put out the fires round about ; he left the women only, and your uncle who had been wounded. We stayed there alone till evening ; we just sat there and cried. But at dark your father came back, and an officer with him.'

2

But allow me to take the place of my old nurse and to continue her story.

When my father had finished his duties as a fireman, he met a squadron of Italian cavalry near the Monastery of the Passion. He went up to the officer in command, spoke to him in Italian, and

6

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

explained the plight of his family. When the Italian heard his native language - Ia sua dolce favella - he promised to speak to the Duke of Treviso,2 and to post a sentinel at once, in order to prevent a repetition of the wild scenes which had taken place in my uncle's garden. He gave orders to this effect to an officer, and sent him off with my father. When he heard that none of the party had eaten any food for two days, the officer took us all off to a grocer's shop ; it had been wrecked and the floor was covered with choice tea and coffee, and 8eaps of dates, raisins, and almonds ; our servants filled their pockets, and of dessert at least we had abundance. The sen·

tinel proved to be of no little service : again and again, bands of soldiers were inclined to give trouble to the wretched party of women and servants, camping in a comer of the square, but an order from our protector made them pass on at once.

Mortier, who remembered having met my father in Paris, reported the facts to Napoleon, and Napoleon ordered him to be presented the next day. And so my father, a great stickler for propriety and the rules of etiquette, presented himself, at the Emperor's summons, in the throne-room of the Kremlin, wearing an old blue shooting-jacket with brass buttons, no wig, boots which had not been cleaned for several days, grimy linen, and a beard of two days' growth.

Their conversation - how often I heard it repeated I - is reproduced accurately enough in the French history of Baron Fain and the Russian history of Danilevsky.

Napoleon began with those customary phrases, abrupt remarks, and laconic aphorisms to which it was the custom for thirty-five years to attribute some profound significance, until it was dis·

covered that they generally meant very little. He then abused Rostopchin for the fires, and said it was mere vandalism ; he declared, as always, that he loved peace above all things and that he was fighting England, not Russia; he claimed credit for having placed a guard over the Foundling Hospital and the Uspensky Cathedral ; and he complained of the Emperor Alexander : 'My desire for peace is kept from His Majesty by the people round him,'

he said.

My father remarked that it was rather the business of the con·

queror to make proposals of peace.

2.. Mortier (1 768-183 5), one of Napoleon's marshals, bore this title.

N U R S E R Y A N D U N I V E R S I T Y

7

'I have done my best. I have sent messages to Kutuzov,3 but he will hear of no discussions whatever and does not acquaint his master with my proposals. I am not to blame - if they want war they shall have it ! '

When this play-acting was done, my father asked for a safe conduct to leave Moscow.

'I have ordered that no passes be given. Why do you want to go ? What are you afraid of ? I have ordered the markets to be opened.'

Apparently the Emperor did not realise that, though open markets are a convenience, so is a shut house, and that to live in the open street among French soldiers was not an attractive prospect for a Russian gentleman and his family.

When my father pointed this out, Napoleon thought for a little and then asked abruptly :

'Will you undertake to hand to the Tsar a letter from me ? On that condition, I will order a pass to be made out for you and all your family.'

'I would accept Your Majesty's proposal,' said my father, 'but it is difficult for me to guarantee success.'

'Will you give me your word of honour, that you will use all possible means to deliver my letter with your own hands ?'

'I pledge you my honour, Sir.'

'That is enough. I shall send for you. Is there anything you need ? '

'Nothing, except a roof t o shelter m y family till w e leave.'

'The Duke of Treviso will do what he can.' Mortier did in fact provide a room in the Governor's palace, and ordered that we should be supplied with provisions; and his maitre d'hotel sent us wine as well. After several days Mortier summoned my father at four in the morning, and sent him off to the Kremlin.

By this time the conflagration had spread to a frightful extent; the atmosphere, heated red-hot and darkened by smoke, was intolerable. Napoleon was dressed already and walking about the room, angry and uneasy; he was beginning to realise that his withered laurels would soon be frozen, and that a jest would not serve, as it had in Egypt, to get him out of this embarrassment.

His plan of campaign was ill-conceived, and all except Napoleon 3· The Russian commander-in-chief.

8

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

knew it - Ney, Narbonne, Berthier, and even officers o f n o mark or position; to all criticisms his reply was the magic word 'Moscow' ; and, when he reached Moscow, he too discovered the truth.

When my father entered the room, Napoleon took a sealed letter from a table, gave it to him, and said by way of dismissal, 'I rely upon your word of honour.' The address of the envelope ran thus : A mon frere l'empereur Alexandre.

The safe conduct given to my father is preserved to this day : it is signed by the Duke of Treviso and countersigned below by lesseps, chief of police at Moscow. Some strangers, hearing of our good fortune, begged my father to take them with him, under the pretext that they were servants or relations ; and they joined our party. An open carriage was provided for my mother and nurse, and for my wounded uncle ; the rest walked. A party of cavalry escorted us ; when the rear of the Russian Army carne in sight, they wished us good fortune and galloped back again to Moscow.

The strange party of refugees was surrounded a moment later by Cossacks, who took us to headquarters. The generals in command were Wintsengerode and llovaysky.

When the former was told of the letter, he told my father that he would send him at once, with two dragoons, to see the Tsar at Petersburg.

'What is to become of your party ?' asked the Cossack general, llovaysky. 'They can't possibly stay here, within rifle-shot of the troops ; there may be some hot fighting any day.' My father asked that we might be sent, if possible, to his Yaroslavl estate; and he added that he was abiolutely penniless at the time.

'That does not matter : we can settle accounts later,' said the General ; 'and don't be uneasy : I give you my promise that they shall be sent.'

While my father was sent off to Petersburg on a courier's cart, llovaysky procured an old rattle-trap of a carriage for us, and sent us and a party of French prisoners to the next town, under an escort of Cossacks ; he provided us with money for posting as far as Yaroslavl, and, in general� did all that he could for us in a time of war and confusion.

This was my first long journey in Russia; my second was not attended by either French cavalry or Ural Cossacks or prisoners of war ; the whole party consisted of myself and a drunk police-officer sitting beside me in the carriage.

N U R S E R Y A N D U N I V E R S I T Y

9

3

My father was taken straight to Arakcheyev's4 house and detained there. When the Minister asked for the letter, my father said that he had given his word of honour to deliver it in person. The Minister then promised to consult the Tsar, and informed him next day in writing, that he himself was commissioned by the Tsar to receive the letter and present it at once. For the letter he gave a receipt, which also has been preserved. For about a month my father was under arrest in Arakcheyev's house; no friend might see him, and his only visitor was S. Shishkov, whom the Tsar sent to ask for details about the burning of Moscow, the entry of the French, and the interview with Napoleon. No eye-witness of these events had reached Petersburg except my father. At last he was told that the Tsar ordered him to be set at liberty ; he was exCUlied, on the ground of necessity, for having accepted a safe-conduct from the French authorities ; but he was ordered to leave Petersburg at once, without having communication with anyone, except that he was allowed to say goodbye to his elder brother.

When he reached at nightfall the little village where we were, my father found us in a peasant's cottage ; there was no manorhouse on that estate. I was sleeping on a settle near the window; the window would not shut tight, and the snow, drifting through the crack, had covered part of a stool, and lay, without melting, on the window-sill.

All were in great distress and confusion, and especially my mother. One morning, some days before my father arrived, the head man of the village came hurriedly into the cottage where she was living, and made signs to her that she was to follow him. My mother could not speak a word of Russian at that time ; she could only make out that the man was speaking of my uncle Pavel ; she did not know what to think; it came into her head that the people had murdered him or wished to murder first him and then her.

She took me in her arms and followed the head man, more dead than alive, and shaking all over. She entered the cottage occupied by my uncle ; he was actually dead, and his body lay near a table at which he had begun to shave; a stroke of paralysis had killed him instantly.

4· This minister was the real ruler of Russia till the death of Alexander in 1825.

10

C H I L D H O O D, YOUTH AND E X I L E

My mother was only seventeen then, and her feelings may be imagined. She was surrounded by half-savage bearded men, dressed in sheepskins and speaking a language to her utterly incomprehensible ; she was living in a small, smoke-grimed peasant's cottage ; and it was the month of November in the terrible winter of 18 1 2. My uncle had been her one support, and she spent days and night in tears for his loss. But those 'savages' pitied her with all their heart ; their simple kindness never failed her, and their head man sent his son again and again to the town, to fetch raisins and gingerbreads, apples and biscuits, to tempt her to eat.

Fifteen years later, this man was still living and sometimes paid us a visit at Moscow. The little hair he had left was then white as snow. My mother used to give him tea and talk over that winter of 181 2 ; she reminded him how frightened she was of him, and how the pair of them, entirely unintelligible to one another, made the arrangements about my uncle's funeral. The old man continued to call my mother Yuliza Ivanovna (her name was Luiza) ; and he always boasted that I was quite willing to go to him and not in the least afraid of his long beard.

We travelled by stages to Tver and finally to Moscow, which we reached after about a year. At the same time, a brother of my father's returned from Sweden and settled down in the same house with us. Formerly ambassador in Westphalia, he had been sent on some mission to the court of Bemadotte.

4

I still remember dimly the traces of the great fire, which were visible even in the early 20s - big houses with the roof gone and window-frames burnt out, heaps of fallen masonry, empty spaces fenced off from the street, remnants of stoves and chimneys sticking up out of them.

Stories of the Great Fire, the battle of Borodino, the crossing of the Berezina, and the taking of Paris - these took the place of cradle-song and fairy-tale to me, they were my Iliad and Odyssey.

My mother and our servants, my father and my old nurse, were never tired of going back to that terrible time, which was still so recent and had been brought home to them so painfully. Later, our officers began to return from foreign service to Moscow. Men who had served in former days with my father in the Guards and had taken a glorious part in the fierce contest of the immediate past,

NUR S E R Y A N D UN I V E R S I T Y

1 1

were often a t our house ; and t o them i t was a relief from their toils and dangers to tell them over again. That was indeed the most brilliant epoch in the history of Petersburg : the consciousness of power breathed new life into Russia ; business and care were, so to speak, put off till the sober morrow, and all the world was determined to make merry today and celebrate the victory.

At this time I heard even more than my old nurse could tell me about the war. I liked especially to listen to the stories of Count Miloradovich ;5 I often lay at his back on the long sofa, while he described and acted scenes of the campaign, and his lively narrative and loud laugh were very attractive to me. More than once I fell asleep in that position.

These surroundings naturally developed my patriotic feelings to an extreme degree, and I was resolved to enter the Army. But an exclusive feeling of nationality is never productive of good, and it landed me in the following scrape. One of our guests was Count Quinsonas, a French emigre and a general in the Russian army.

An out-and-out royalist, he had been present at the famous dinner where the King�s Bodyguards trampled on the national cockade and Marie Antoinette drank confusion to the Revolution.6 He was now a grey-haired old man, tall and slight, a perfect gentleman and the pink of politeness. A peerage was awaiting him at Paris ; he had been there already to congratulate Louis XVIII on his accession, and had returned to Russia to sell his estates. As ill luck would have it, I was present when this politest of generals in the Russian service began to speak about the war.

'But you, surely, were fighting against us,' I said very innocently.

'Non, mon petit, non ! J'etais dans l'armee russe.'

'What ! ' said I, 'you a Frenchman and fighting on our side I That's impossible.'

My father gave me a reproving look and tried to talk of something else. But the Frenchman saved the situation nobly : he turned to my father and said, 'I like to see s�ach patriotic feeling.'

But my father did not like to see it, and scolded me severely when our guest had gone. 'You see what comes of rushing into things which you don't and can't understand : the Count served our

;. Mikhail Miloradovich (177o-182;), a famous commander who lost his life in suppressing the Decembrist revolution, December 182;.

6. This dinner took place at Versailles, on 1 October 1789.

C.Y.E.-3

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

Emperor out o f loyalty to his own sovereign.' That was, as my father said, beyond my powers of comprehension.

s

My father had lived twelve years abroad, and his brother still longer ; and they tried to organise their household, to some extent, on a foreign plan; yet it was to retain all the conveniences of Russian life and not to cost much. This plan was not realised ; pErhaps their measures were unskilful, or perhaps the old traditions of Russian country life were too strong for habits acquired abroad.

They shared their land in common and managed it jointly, and a swarm of servants inhabited the ground floor of their house in town; in fact, all the elements of disorder were present.

I was under the charge of two nurses, one Russian and the other German. Vera Artamonovna and Mme Proveau were two very good-natured women, but I got weary of watching them all day, as they knitted stockings and wrangled together. So, whenever I could, I escaped to the part of the house occupied by the Senator my uncle, the former ambassador, was now a Senator' and was generally called by this title - and there I found my only friend, my uncle's valet, Calot.

I have seldom met so kind and gentle a creature as this man.

Utterly solitary in Russia, separated from all his own belongings, and hardly able to speak our language, he had a woman's tenderness for me. I spent whole hours in his room, and, though I was often mischievous and troublesome, he bore it all with a goodnatured smile. He cut out all kinds of marvels for me in cardboard, and carved me many toys of wood ; and how I loved him in return I In the evenings he used to take picture-books from the library and bring them up to my nursery - The Travels of Gmelin and Pallas, and another thick book called The World in Pictures, which I liked so much and looked at so long, that the leather binding got worn out : for two hours together Calot would show me the same pictures and repeat the same explanations for the thousandth time.

Before my birthday party, Calot shut himself up in his room, and I could hear mysterious sounds of a hammer and other tools 7· The Senate was not a deliberate body hut a Supreme Court of Justice.

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1 3

issuing from it. He often walked quickly through the passage, carrying a glue-pot or something wrapped up in paper, but each tinte he left his room locked. I knew he was preparing some surprise for me, and my curiosity may be imagined. I sent the servant's children to act as spies, but Calot was not to be caught napping. We even managed to make a small hole in the staircase, through which we could look down into the room ; but we could see nothing but the top of the window and the portrait of Frederick the Great, with his long nose and a large star on his breast, looking like a sick vulture. At last the noises stopped, and the room was unlocked - but it looked just as before, except for snippings of gilt and coloured paper on the floor. I was devoured by curiosity ; but Calot wore a pretence of solemnity on his features and never touched the ticklish subject.

I was still suffering agonies of impatience when the great day arrived. I awoke at six, to wonder what Calot had in store for me ; at eight Calot himself appeared, wearing a white tie and white waistcoat under his blue livery, but his hands were empty ! I wondered how it would all end, and whether he had spoilt what he was making. The day went on, and the usual presents were forthcoming : my aunt's footman had brought me an expensive toy wrapped up in a napkin, and my uncle, the Senator, had been generous also, but I was too restless, in expectation of the surprise, to enjoy my happiness.

Then, when I was not thinking of it, after dinner or perhaps after tea, my nurse said to me : 'Go downstairs for a moment, there is someone there asking for you.' 'At last ! ' I thought, and down the bannisters I slid on my arms. The drawing-room door flew open ; I heard music and saw a transparency representing my initials ; then some little boys, disguised as Turks, offered me sweets ; and this was followed by a puppet-show and parlour fireworks. Calot was very hot and very busy ; he kept everything going and was quite as excited as I was myself.

No presents could rank with this entertainment. I never cared much for things ; the bump of acquisitiveness was never, at any age, highly developed in me. The satisfaction of my curiosity, the abundance of candles, the silver paper, the smell of gunpowder nothing was wanting but a companion of my own age. But I spent all my childhood in solitude and consequently was not exacting on that score.

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6

My father had another brother, the oldest of the three ; but he was not even on speaking terms with his two juniors. In spite of this, they all took a share in the management of the family property, which really meant that they combined to ruin it. This triple management by owners at variance with one another was the height of absurdity. Two of them were always thwarting their senior's plans, and he did the same for them. The head men of the villages and the serfs were utterly bamboozled : one landlord required carts to convey his household, the second demanded hay, and the third, firewood ; each of the three issued orders, and sent his man of business to see that they were carried out. If the eldest brother appointed a bailiff, the other two dismissed the man in a month on some absurd pretext, and appointed another, who was promptly disowned by their senior. As a natural result, there were spies and favourites, to carry slanders and false reports, while, at the bottom of this system, the wretched serfs, finding neither justice nor protection and harassed by a diversity of masters, were worked twice as hard and found it impossible to satisfy such unreasonable demands.

As a consequence of this quarrel between brothers, they lost a great lawsuit in which the law was on their side. Though their interests were identical, they could never settle on a common course of procedure, and their opponents naturally took advantage of this state of affairs. They lost a large and valuable property in this way; and the Court also condemned each brother to pay damages to the amount of JO,ooo roubles. This lesson opened their eyes for the first time, and they determined to divide the family estates between them. Preliminary discussions went on for nearly a year ; the land was divided into three fairly even parts, and chance was to decide to whom each should fall. My father and the Senator paid a visit to their brother, whom they had not seen for several years, in order to talk things over and be reconciled ; and then it was noised abroad that he would return the visit and the business would be finally settled on that occasion. The report of this visit spread uneasiness and dismay throughout our household.

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1 5

7

My uncle was one of those monsters of eccentricity which only Russia and the conditions of Russian society can produce. A man of good natural parts, he spent his whole life in committing follies which often rose to the dignity of crimes. Though he was well educated after the French fashion and had read much, his time was spent in profligacy or mere idleness, and this went on till his death.

In youth he served, like his brothers, in the Guards and was aidede-camp in some capacity to Potemkin ;8 next, he served on a diplomatic mission, and, on his return to Petersburg, was appointed to a post in the Ecclesiastical Court. But no association either with diplomatists or priests could tame that wild character. He was dismissed from his post, for quarrelling with the Bishops ; and he was forbidden to reside in Petersburg, because he gave, or tried to give, a box on the ear to a guest at an official dinner given by the Governor of the city. He retired to his estate at Tambov, and there he was nearly murdered by his serfs for interference with their daughters and for acts of cruelty ; he owed his life to his coachman and the speed of his horses.

After this experience he settled in Moscow. Disowned by his relations and by people in general, he lived quite alone in a large house on the Tver Boulevard, bullying his servants in town and ruining his serfs in the country. He collected a large library and a whole harem of country girls, and kept both these departments under lock and key. Totally unoccupied and inordinately vain, he sought distraction in collecting things for which he had no use, and in litigation, which proved even more expensive. He carried on his lawsuits with passionate eagerness. One of these suits was about an Amati :fiddle ; it lasted thirty years, and he won it in the end. He won another case for the possession of a party-wall between two houses : it cost him extraordinary exertions, and he gained nothing by owning the wall. After his retirement, he used to follow in the Gazette the promotions of his contemporaries in the public service ; and, whenever one of them received an Order, he bought the star and placed it on his table, as a painful reminder of the distinctions he might have gained.

His brothers and sisters feared him and had no intercourse with 8. Grigory Potemkin (1736--91), minister and favourite of the Empress Catherine.

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him o f any kind ; our servants would not walk past his house, for fear of meeting him, and turned pale at the sight of him ; the women dreaded his insolent persecution, and the domestic servants had prayer offered in church that they might never serve him.

8

Such was the alarming character of our expected visitor. From early morning all the inmates of our house were keenly excited.

I had never seen the black sheep mys,elf, though I was born in his house, which was occupied by my' father on his return from foreign parts ; I was very anxious to see him, and I was also afraid, though I don't know what I was afraid of.

Other visitors came before him - my father's oldest nephew, two intimate friends, .and a lawyer, a stout good-natured man who perspired freely. For two hours they all sat in silent expectation, till at last the butler came in, and, with a voice that seemed somehow unnatural, announced the arrival of our kinsman. 'Bring him in,' said the Senator, in obvious agitation ; my father began to take snuff, the nephew straightened his tie, and the lawyer turned to one side and cleared his throat. I was told to go upstairs, but I remained in the next room, shaking all over.

The uncle advanced at a slow and dignified pace, and my father and the Senator went to meet him. He was carrying an icon 9 with both arms stretched out before him, in the way that icons are carried at weddings and funerals ; he turned towards his brothers and in a nasal drawl addressed them as follows :

'This is the icon with which our father blessed me on his deathbed, and he then charged me and my late brother, Peter, to take his place and care for you two. If our father could know how you have behaved to your elder brother . • . '.

'Come, mon che:r frere:,' said my father, in his voice of studied indifference, 'you have little to boast about on that score yourself. These references to the past are painful for you and for us, and we had better drop them.'

'What do you mean ? Did you invite me here for this ?'

shouted the pious brother, and he dashed the icon down with such violence that the silver frame rang loudly on the floor. Now the Senator began, and he shouted still louder ; but at this point I rushed upstairs, just waiting long enough to see the nephew and 9· A sacred picture.

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the lawyer, as much alarmed as I was, beating a retreat to the balcony.

What then took place, I cannot tell. The servants had all hid for safety and could give no information ; and neither my father nor the Senator ever alluded to the scene in my presence. The noise grew less by degrees, and the division of the land was carried out, but whether then or later, I do not know.

What fell to my father was Vasilevskoye, a large estate near Moscow. We spent all the following summer there; and during that time the Senator bought a house for himself in the Arhat quarter of Moscow, so that, when we returned alone to our big house, we found it empty and dead. Soon after, my father also bought a new house in Moscow.

When the Senator left us, he took with him, in the first place, my friend Calot, and, in the second place, all that gave life in our establishment. He alone could check my father's tendency to morbid depression, which now had room to develop and assert itself fully. Our new house was not cheerful : it reminded one of a prison or hospital. The ground-floor rooms were vaulted; the thick walls made the windows look like the embrasures of a fortress ; and the house was surrounded on all sides by a uselessly large courtyard.

The real wonder was, not that the Senator left us, but that he was able to stay so long under one roof with my father. I have seldom seen two men more unlike in character.

9

My uncle was a kind-hearted man, who loved movement and excitement. His whole life was spent in an artificial world, a world of diplomats and lords-in-waiting, and he never guessed that there is a different world which comes nearer to the reality of things. And yet he was not merely a spectator of all that happened between 1 789 and 1 8 1 5, but was personally involved in that mighty drama.

Count Vorontsov sent him to England, to learn from lord Grenville what 'General Buonaparte' was up to, after he left the army of Egypt. He was in Paris at the time of Napoleon's coronation.

In 181 1 Napoleon ordered him to be detained and arrested at Cassel, where he was minister at the court of King Jerome 10 -

10. Jerome Bonaparte (1784-186o) was King of Westphalia from 1807 to 1813.

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'Emperor Jerome', a s my father used to say when h e was annoyed.

In fact, he witnessed each scene of that tremendous spectacle ; but, somehow, it seemed not to impress him in the right way.

When captain in the Guards, he was sent on a mission to london. Paul, who was then Tsar, noticed this when he read the roster, and ordered that he should report himself at once in Petersburg. The attache sailed by the first ship and appeared on parade.

'Do you want to stay in london ? ' Paul asked in his hoarse voice.

'If Your Majesty is graciously pleased to allow it,' answered the captain.

'Go back at once ! ' the hoarse voice replied ; and the young officer sailed, without even seeing his family in Moscow.

While he served as ambassador, diplomatic questions were settled by bayonets and cannon-balls ; and his diplomatic career came to an end at the Congress of Vienna, that great :field-day for all the diplomats of Europe. On his return to Russia, he was created a lord-in-waiting at Moscow - a capital which has no Court. Then he was elected to the Senate, though he knew nothing of law or Russian judicial procedure ; he served on the Widows'

and Orphans' Board, and was a governor of hospitals and other public institutions. All these duties he performed with a zeal that was probably superfluous, a love of his own way that was certainly harmful, and an integrity that passed wholly unnoticed.

He was never to be found at home. He tired out a team of four strong horses every morning, and another in the afternoon. He never missed a meeting of the Senate; twice a week he attended the Widows' Board; and there were also his hospitals and schools.

Besides all this, he was never absent from the theatre when a French play was given, and he was driven to the English Club on three days of every week. He had no time to be bored - always busy with one of his many occupations, perpetually on the way to some engagement, and his life rolled along on easy springs in a world of :files and official envelopes.

To the age of seventy he kept the health of youth. He was always to be seen at every great ball or dinner ; he figured at speech-days and meetings of public bodies ; whatever their objects might be - agriculture or medicine, :fire insurance or natural science - it was all one to him ; and, besides all this (perhaps be-

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cause of this), he kept to old age some measure of humanity and warmth of heart.

10

It is impossible to conceive a greater contrast to all this than my father. My uncle was perpetually active and perpetually cheerful, an occasional visitor at his own house. But my father hardly ever went out of doors, hated all the world of official business, and was hard to please and out of humour. We had our eight horses too, but our stable was a kind of hospital for cripples ; my father kept them partly for the sake of appearance, and partly that the two coachmen and two postilions might have some other occupation, as well as going to fetch newspapers and arranging cockfights, which last amusement they carried on with much success in the space between the coach-house and the neighbours' yard.

My father did not remain long in the public service. Brought up by a French tutor in the house of a pious aunt, he entered the Guards as a sergeant at sixteen and retired as a captain when Paul became Tsar. In 1801 he went abroad and wandered about from one foreign country to another till the end of 1 8 u . He returned to Russia with my mother three months before I was born ; the year after the burning of Moscow he spent in the Government of Tver, and then settled down permanently in Moscow, where he led by choice a solitary and monotonous life. His brother's lively temperament was distasteful to him.

After the Senator had left it, the whole house assumed a more and more gloomy aspect. The walls, the furniture, the servants -

every thing and person had a furtive and dissatisfied appearance ; and of course my father himself was more dissatisfied than anyone else. The artificial stillness, the hushed voices and noiseless steps of the servants, were no sign of devotion, but of repression and fear. Nothing was ever moved in the rooms : the same books lay on the same tables, with the same markers in them, for five or six years together. In my father's bedroom and study the furniture was never shifted and the windows never opened, not once in a twelvemonth. When he went to the country, he regularly took the key of his rooms in his pocket, lest the servants should take it into their heads to scour the floors or to clean the walls in his absence.

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CHA P T E R I I

Gossip o f Nurses and Conversation of Generals - A False Position -

Boredom - The Servants' Hall -Two Germans -Lessons and Reading

Catechism and the Gospel

U N T I L I was ten, I noticed nothing strange or peculiar in my position.1 To me it seemed simple and natural that I was living in my father's house, where I had to be quiet in the rooms inhabited by him, though in my mother's part of the house I could shout and make a noise to my heart's content. The Senator gave me toys and spoilt me ; Calot was my faithful slave ; Vera Artamonovna bathed me, dressed me, and put me to bed ; and Mme Proveau took me out for walks and spoke German to me. All went on with perfect regularity ; and yet I began to feel puzzled.

My attention was caught by some casual remarks incautiously dropped. Old Mme Proveau and the household in general were devoted to my mother, but feared and disliked my father. The disputes which sometimes took place between my parents were often the subject of discussion between my nurses, and they always took my mother's side.

It was true that my mother's life was no bed of roses. An exceedingly kind-hearted woman, but not strong-willed, she was utterly crushed by my father ; and, as often happens with weak

:haracters, she was apt to carry on a desperate opposition in natters of no importance. Unfortunately, in these trifles my father was almost always in the right, and so he triumphed in the end.

Mme Proveau would start a conversation in this style : 'In her place, I declare I would be off at once and go back to Germany.

The dullness of the life is fit to kill one; no enjoyment and nothing but grumbling and unpleasantness.'

'You're quite right,' said Vera Artamonovna ; 'but she's tied hand and foot by someone' - and she would point her knittingneedles at me. 'She can't take him with her, and to leave him here alone in a house like ours would be too much even for one not his mother.'

1. Herzen's parents were never married with the Russian rites, and he bore throughout life a name which was not his father's.

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Children in general find out more than people think. They are easily put off, and forget for a time, but they persist in returning to the subject, especially if it is mysterious or alarming ; and by their questions they get at the truth with surprising perseverance and ingenuity.

Once my curiosity was aroused, I soon learned all the details of my parents' marriage - how my mother made up her mind to elope, how she was concealed in the Russian embassy at Cassel by my uncle's connivance, and then crossed the frontier disguised as a boy; and all this I found out without asking a single question.

The first result of these discoveries was to lessen my attachment to my father, owing to the disputes of which I have spoken already. I had witnessed them before, but had taken them as a matter of course. The whole household, not excluding the Senator, were afraid of my father, and he spared no one his reproofs ; and I was so accustomed to this, that I saw nothing strange in these quarrels with my mother. But now I began to take a different view of the matter, and the thought that I was to some extent responsible threw a dark shadow sometimes over my childhood.

A second thought which took root in my mind at that time was this - that I was much less dependent on my father than most children are on their parents ; and this independence, though it existed only in my own imagination, gave me pleasure.

2

Two or three years after this, two old brother-officers of my father's were at our house one evening - General Essen, the Governor of Orenburg, and General Bakhmetev, who lost a leg at Borodino and was later Lieutenant-Governor of Bessarabia. My room was next the drawing-room where they were sitting. My father happened to mention that he had been speaking to Prince Yusupov with regard to my future; he wished me to enter the Civil Service.

'There's no time to lose,' he added ; 'as you know, he must serve a long time before he gets any decent post.'

'It is a strange notion of yours,' said Essen good-humouredly,

'to tum the boy into a clerk. Leave it to me ; let me enroll him in the Ural Cossacks ; he will soon get his commission, which is the main thing, and then he can forge ahead like the rest of us.'

But my father would not agree : he said that everything military

22

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was distasteful t o him, that he hoped in time t o get m e a diplomatic post in some warm climate, where he would go himself to end his days.

Bakhmetev had taken little part in the conversation; but now he got up on his crutches and said :

'In my opinion, you ought to think twice before you reject Essen's advice. If you don't fancy Orenburg, the boy can enlist here just as well. You and I are old friends, and I always speak my mind to you. You will do no good to the young man himself and no service to the country by sending him to the University and on to the Civil Service. He is clearly in a false position, and nothing but the Army can put that right and open up a career for him from the first. Any dangerous notions will settle down before he gets the command of a regiment. Discipline works wonders, and his future will depend on himself. You say that he's clever ; but you don't suppose that all officers in the Army are fools ? Think of yourself and me and our lot generally. There is only one possible objection - that he may have to serve some time before he gets his commission ; but that's the very point in which we can help you.'

This conversation was as valuable to me as the casual remarks of my nurses. I was now thirteen ; and these lessons, which I turned over and over and pondered in my heart for weeks and months in complete solitude, bore their fruit. I had formerly dreamt, as boys always do, of military service and fine uniforms, and had nearly wept because my father wished to make a civilian of me ; but this conversation at once cooled my enthusiasm, and by degrees - for it took time - I rooted out of my mjnd every atom of my passion for stripes and epaulettes and aiguillettes. There was, it is true, one relapse, when a cousin, who was at school in Moscow and sometimes came to our house on holidays, got a commission in a cavalry regiment. After joining his regiment, he paid a visit to Moscow and stayed some days with us. My heart beat fast, when I saw him in all his finery, carrying his sabre and wearing the shako held at a becoming angle by the chin-strap. He was sixteen but not tall for his age ; and next morning I put on his uniform, sabre, shako, and all, and looked at myself in the glass. How magnificent I seemed to myself, in the blue jacket with scarlet facings ! What a contrast between this gorgeous finery and the plain cloth jacket and duck trousers which I wore at home I My cousin's visit weakened for a time the effect of what the

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23

generals had said ; but, before long, circumstances gave me a fresh and final distaste for a soldier's uniform.

By pondering over my 'false position', I was brought to much the same conclusion as by the talk of the two nurses. I felt less dependence on society (of which, however, I knew nothing), and I believed that I must rely mainly on my own efforts. I said to myself with childish arrogance that General Bakhmetev and his brother-officers should hear of me some day.

In view of all this, it may be imagined what a weary and monotonous existence I led in the strange monastic seclusion of my home. There was no encouragement for me, and no variety ; my father, who showed no fondness for me after I was ten, was almost always displeased with me ; I had no companions. My teachers came and went ; I saw them to the door, and then stole off to play with the servants' children, which was strictly forbidden. At other times I wandered about the large gloomy rooms, where the windows were shut all day and the lights burnt dim in the evening ; I either did nothing or read any books I could lay hands on.

My only other occupation I found in the servants' hall and the maids' room ; they gave me real live pleasure. There I found perfect freedom ; I took a side in disputes ; together with my friends downstairs, I discussed their doings and gave my advice ; and though I knew all their secrets, I never once betr;�yed them by a slip of the tongue in the drawing-room.

3

This is a subject on which I must dwell for a little. I should say that I do not in general mean to avoid digressions and disquisitions ; every conversation is full of them, and so is life itself.

As a rule, children are attached to servants. Parents, especially Russian parents, forbid this intimacy, but the children do not obey orders, because they are bored in the drawing-room and happy in the pantry. In this case, as in a thousand others, parents don't know what they are doing. I find it impossible to imagine that our servants' hall was a worse place for children than our morningroom or sinoking-room. It is true that children pick up coarse expressions and bad manners in the company of servants ; but in the drawing-room they learn coarse ideas and bad feelings.

The mere order to keep at a distance from people with whom the children are in constant relations, is in itself revolting.

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

Much is said in Russia about the profound immorality of servants, especially of serfs. It is true that they are not distinguished by exemplary strictness of conduct. Their low stage of moral development is proved by the mere fact that they put up with so much and protest so seldom. But that is not the question. I should like to know what class in Russia is less depraved than the servant class. Certainly not the nobles, nor the officials. The clergy, perhaps ?

What makes the reader laugh ?

Possibly the peasants, but no others, might have some claim to superiority.

The difference between the class of nobles and the class of servants is not great. I hate, especially since the calamities of the year 1848, democrats who flatter the mob, but I hate still more aristocrats who slander the people. By representing those who serve them as profligate animals, slave-owners throw dust in the eyes of others and stifle the protests of their own consciences. In few cases are we better than the common people, but we express our feelings with more consideration, and we are cleverer at concealing selfish and evil passions ; our desires are not so coarse or so obvious, owing to the easiness of satisfying them and the habitual absence of self-restraint; we are merely richer, better fed, and therefore more difficult to please. When Count Almaviva named to the barber of Seville all the qualifications he required in a servant, Figaro said with a sigh, 'If a servant must possess all these merits, it will be hard to find masters who are fit for a servant's place.'

In Russia in general, moral corruption is not deep. It might truly enough be called savage, dirty, noisy, coarse, disorderly, shameless ; but it is mainly on the surface. The clergy, in the concealment of their houses, eat and drink to excess with the merchant class.

The nobles get drunk in the light of day, gamble recklessly, strike their men-servants and run after the maids, mismanage their affairs and fail even worse as husbands and fathers. The official class are as bad in a dirtier way ; they curry favour, besides, with their superiors and they are all petty thieves. The nobles do really steal less : they take openly what does not belong to them, though without prejudice to other methods, when circumstances are favourable.

All these amiable weaknesses occur in a coarser form among ser-

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25

vants - that class of 'officials' who are beneath the fourteenth grade - those 'courtiers' who belong, not to the Tsar, but to the landowners.2 But how they, as a class, are worse than others, I have no idea.

When I run over my recollections on the subject - and for twenty-five years I was well acquainted, not only with our own servants, but with those of my uncle and several neighbours - I remember nothing specially vicious in their conduct. Petty thefts there were, no doubt ; but it is hard to pass sentence in this case, because ordinary ideas are perverted by an unnatural status : the human chattel is on easy terms with the chattels that are inanimate, and shows no particular respect for his master's property.

One ought, in justice, to exclude exceptional cases - casual favourites, either men or women, who bask in their master's smiles and carry tales against the rest; and besides, their behaviour is exemplary, for they never get drunk in the daytime and never pawn their clothes at the public-house.

The misconduct of most servants is of a simple kind and turns on trifles - a glass of spirits or a bottle of beer, a chat over a pipe, absence from the house without leave, quarrels which sometimes proceed as far as blows, or deception of their master when he requires of them more than man can perform. They are as ignorant as the peasants but more sophisticated ; and this, together with their servile condition, accounts for much that is perverted and distorted in their character ; but, in spite of all this, they remain grown-up children, like the American negroes. Trifles make them laugh or weep ; their desires are limited and deserve to be called simple and natural rather than vicious.

Spirits and tea, the public-house and the tea-shop - these are the invariable vices of a servant in Russia. For them he steals ; because of them he is poor; for their sake he endures persecution and punishment and leaves his wife and children to beggary. Nothing is easier than to sit, like Father Matthew,3 in the seat of judgement and condemn drunkenness, while you are yourself intoxicated 2. In Russia civil-service officials (chinovniki) are divided into fourteen classes. Nobles are called dvoryane, and servants attached to a landowner's house dvorovye ; Herzen plays on the likeness of the two names.

3· An Irish priest who preached temperance in the middle of the nineteenth century.

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with sobriety ; nothing simpler than t o sit a t your own tea-table and marvel at servants, because they will go to the tea-shop instead of drinking their tea at home, where it would cost them less-Strong drink stupifies a man and makes it possible for him to forget ; it gives him an artificial cheerfulness, an artificial excitement ; and the pleasure of this state is increased by the low level of civilisation and the narrow empty life to which these men are confined. A servant is a slave who may be sold, a slave condemned to perpetual service in the pantry and perpetual poverty : how can such a man do otherwise than drink? He drinks too much when he gets the chance, because he cannot drink every day ; this was pointed out by Senkovsky in one of his books fifteen years ago. In Italy and the south of France, there are no drunkards, because there is abundance of wine. And the explanation of the savage drunkenness among English workmen is just the same. These men are broken in a hopeless and ill-matched struggle against hunger and beggary ; after all their efforts, they have found everywhere a leaden vault above their heads, and a sullen opposition which has cast them down into the nether darkness of society and condemned them to a life of endless toil - toil without an object and equally destructive of mind and body. What wonder that such a man, after working six days . as a lever or wheel or spring or screw, breaks out on Saturday night, like a savage, from the factory which is his prison, and drinks till he is dead drunk ? His exhaustion shortens the process, and it is complete in half an hour.

Moralists would do better to order 'Scotch' or 'Irish' for themselves, and hold their tongues ; or else their inhuman philanthropy many evoke formidable replies.

To a servant, tea drunk in a tea-shop is quite a different thing.

Tea at home is not really tea : everything there reminds him that he is a servant - the pantry is dirty, he has to put the samovar4 on the table himself, his cup has lost its handle, his master's bell may ring at any moment. In the tea-shop he is a free man, a master ; the table is laid and the lamps lit for him ; for him the waiter hurries in with the tray, the cups shine, and the teapot glitters ; he gives orders, and other people obey him ; he feels happy and calls boldly for some cheap caviare or pastry to eat with his tea.

In all this there is more of childlike simplicity than of miscon-4· An urn with a central receptacle to hold hot charcoal : tea in Russia is regularly accompanied by a samovar.

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2 7

duct. Impressions take hold of them quickly but throw out no roots ; their minds are continually occupied - if one can call it occupation - with casual objects, trifling desires, and petty aims.

A childish belief in the marvellous turns a grown man into a coward, and the same belief consoles him in his darkest hours. I witnessed the death of several of my father's servants, and I was astonished. One could see then that their whole life had been spent, like a child's, without fears for the future, and that no great sins lay heavy on their souls ; even if there had been anything of the kind, a few minutes with the priest were enough to put all to rights.

It is on this resemblance between children and servants that their mutual attachment is based. Children resent the indulgent superiority of grown-up people ; they are clever enough to understand that servants treat them with more respect and take them seriously. For this reason, they enjoy a game of bezique with the maids much more than with visitors. Visitors play out of indulgence and to amuse the child : they let him win, or tease him, and stop when they feel inclined : but the maid plays just as much for her own amusement ; and thus the game gains in interest.

Servants have a very strong atta,chment to children; and this is not servility at all - it is a mutual alliance, with weakness and simplicity on both sides.

4

In former days there existed - it still exists in Turkey - a feudal bond of affection between the Russian landowner and his household servants. But the race of such servants, devoted to the family as a family, is now extinct with us. The reason of this is obvious.

The landowner has ceased to believe in his own authority ; he does not believe that he will answer, at the dreadful Day of Judgement, for his treatment of his people ; and he abuses his power for his own advantage. The servant does not believe in his inferiority ; he endures oppression, not as a punishment or trial inflicted by God, but merely because he is defenceless.

But I knew, in my young days, two or three specimens of that boundless loyalty which old gentlemen of seventy sometimes recall with a sigh : they speak of the wonderful zeal and devotion of their servants, but they never mention the return which they and their fathers made to that faithfulness.

28

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

There was Andrey Stepanov, whom I knew a s a decrepit old man, spending his last days, on very short commons, on an estate belonging to my uncle, the Senator.

When my father and uncle were young men in the Army, he was their valet, a kind, honest, sober man, who guessed what his young masters wanted - and they wanted a good deal - by a mere look at their faces ; I know this from themselves. Later he was in charge of an estate near Moscow. The war of 1812 cut him off at once from all communications ; the village was burnt down, and he lived on there alone and without money, and finally sold some wood, to save himself from starvation. When my uncle returned to Russia, he went into the estate accounts and discovered the sale of wood. Punishment followed : the man was disgraced and removed from his office, though he was old and burdened with a family. We often passed through the village where he lived and spent a day or two there; and the old man, now paralysed and walking on crutches, never failed to visit us, in order to make his bow to my father and talk to him.

I was deeply touched by the simple devotion of his language and by his miserable appearance; I remember the tufts of hair, between yellow and white, which covered both sides of his bare scalp.

'They tell me, Sir,' he said once to my father, 'that your brother has received another Order. I am getting old, batyushka, and shall soon give back my soul to God ; but I wish God would suffer me to see your brother wearing his Order ; just once before I die, I would like to see him with his ribbon and all his glory.'

My eyes were on the old man, and everything about him showed that he was speaking the truth - his expression as frank as a child's, his bent figure, his crooked face, dim eyes, and feeble voice. There was no falsehood or flattery there : he did really wish to see, once more before he died, the man who, for fourteen years, had never forgiven him for that wood ! Should I call him a saint or a madman ? Are there any who attain to sanctity, except madmen ?

But this form of idolatory is unknown to the rising generation; and, if there are cases of serfs who refuse emancipation, it is due either to mere indolence or selfish considerations. This is a worse condition of things, I admit, but it brings us nearer the end. The serfs of today may wish to see something round their master's

N U R S E R Y A N D U N I V E R S I T Y

29

neck ; but you may feel sure that it is not the ribbon of any Order of Chivalry I

s

This seems an opportunity to give some general account of the treatment shown to servants in our household.

Neither my father nor my uncle was specially tyrannical, at least in the way of corporal punishment. My uncle, being hot·

tempered and impatient, was often rough and unjust to servants ; but he thought so little about them and came in contact with them so seldom, that each side knew little of the other. My father wore them out by his fads : he could never pass over a look or a word or a movement without improving the occasion ; and a Russian often resents this treatment more than blows or bad language.

Corporal punishment was almost unknown with us ; and the two or three cases in which it was resorted to were so exceptional, that they formed the subject of conversation for whole months downstairs ; it should also be said that the offences which provoked it were serious.

A commoner form of punishment was compulsory enlistment in the Army, which was intensely dreaded by all the young men·

servants. They preferred to remain serfs, without family or kin, rather than carry the knapsack for twenty years. I was strongly affected by those horrible scenes : at the summons of the landowner, a file of military police would appear like thieves in the night and seize their victim without warning ; the bailiff would explain that the master had given orders the night before for the man to be sent to the recruiting office; and then the victim, through his tears, tried to strike an attitude, while the women wept, and all the people gave him presents, and I too gave what I could, very likely a sixpenny necktie.

I remember too an occasion when a village elder spent some money due from peasants to their master, and my father ordered his beard to be shaved off, by way of punishment. This form of penalty puzzled me, but I was impressed by the man's appearance : he was sixty years old, and he wept profusely, bowing to the ground and offering to repay the money and a hundred roubles more, if only he might escape the shame of losing his beard.

While my uncle lived with us, there were regularly about sixty

30

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

servants belonging to the house, of whom nearly half were women; but the married women might give all their time to their own families ; there were five or six house-maids always employed, and laundry-maids, but the latter never came upstairs. To these must be added the boys and girls who were being taught housework, which meant that they were learning to be lazy and tell lies and drink spirits.

As a feature of those times, it will not, I think, be superfluous to say something of the wages paid to servants. They got five roubles a month, afterwards raised to six, for board-wages ; women got a rouble less, and children over ten half that amount. The servants clubbed together for their food, and made no complaint of insufficiency, which proves that food cost wonderfully little. The highest wages paid were 100 roubles a year ; others got fifty, and some thirty. Boys under eighteen got no wages. Then our servants were supplied with clothes, overcoats, shirts, sheets, coverlets, towels, and mattresses of sail-cloth ; the boys who got no wages received a sum of money for the bath-house and to pay the priest in Lent -

purification of body and soul was thus provided for. Taking every·

thing into account, a servant cost about 300 roubles a year ; if we add his share of medical attendance and drugs and the articles of consumption which came in carts from the landlord's estates in embarrassing amount, even then the figure will not be higher than 350 roubles. In Paris or London a servant costs four times as much.

Slave-owners generally reckon 'insurance' among the privileges of their slaves, i.e., the wife and children are maintained by the master, and the slave himself, in old age, will get a bare pittance in some comer of the estate. Certainly this should be taken into account, but the value of it is considerably lessened by the constant fear of corporal punishment and the impossibility of rising higher in the social scale.

My own eyes have shown me beyond all doubt, how the horrible consciousness of their enslaved condition torments and poisons the existence of servants in Russia, how it oppresses and stupefies their minds. The peasants, especially those who pay obrok,5 are less con·

scious of personal want of freedom ; it is possible for them not to believe, to some extent, in their complete slavery. But in the other 5· Obrok is money paid by a serf to his master in lieu of personal service ; such a serf might carry on a trade or business of his own and was liable to no other burdens than the obrok.

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3 1

case, when a man sits all day on a dirty bench in the pantry, or stands at a table holding a plate, there is no possible room for doubt.

There are, of course, people who enjoy this life as if it were their native element ; people whose mind has never been aroused from slumber, who have acquired a taste for their occupation, and perform its duties with a kind of artistic satisfaction.

6

Our old footman, Bakay, an exceedingly interesting character, was an instance of this kind. A tall man of athletic build, with large and dignified features, and an air of the profoundest reflection, he lived to old age in the belief that a footman's place is one of singular dignity.

This respectable old man was constantly out of temper or halfdrunk, or both together. He idealised the duties of his office and attributed to them a solemn importance. He could lower the steps of a carriage with a peculiarly loud rattle; when he banged a carriage-door he made more noise than the report of a gun. He stood on the rumble surly and straight, and, every time that a hole in the road gave him a jolt, he called out to the coachman,

'Easy there I ' in a deep voice of displeasure, though the hole was by that time five yards behind the carriage.

His chief occupation, other than going out with the carriage, was self-imposed. It consisted in training the pantry-boys in the standard of manners demanded by the servants' hall. As long as he was sober, this went well enough ; but when he was affected by liquor, he was severe and exacting beyond belief. I sometimes tried to protect my young friends, but my authority had little weight with the Roman firmness of Bakay : he would open the door that led to the drawing-room, with the words : 'This is not your place. I beg you to go, or I shall carry you out.' Not a movement, not a word, on the part of the boys, did he let pass unrebuked; and he often accompanied his words with a smack on the head, or a painful fillip, which he inflicted by an ingenious and spring-like manipulation of his finger and thumb.

When he had at last driven the boys from the room and was left alone, he transferred his attentions to his only friend, a large Newfoundland dog called Macbeth, whom he fed and brushed and petted and loved. After sitting alone for a few minutes, he would

32

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g o down t o the courtyard and invite Macbeth t o join him in the pantry. Then he began to talk to his friend : 'Fo9lish brute ! What makes you sit outside in the frost, when there's warmth in here ?

Well, what are you staring at ? Can't you answer ? ' and the questtions were generally followed by a smack on the head. Macbeth occasionally growled at his benefactor ; and then Bakay reproved him, with no weak fondness : 'Do what you like for a dog, a dog it still remains : it shows its teeth at you, with never a thought of who you are. But for me, the fleas would eat you up ! ' And then, hurt by his friend's ingratitude, he would take snuff angrily and throw what was left on his fingers at Macbeth's nose. The dog would sneeze, make incredibly awkward attempts to get the snuff out of his eyes with his paw, rise in high dudgeon from the bench, and begin scratching at the door. Bakay opened the door and dismissed the dog with a kick and a final word of reproach. At this point the pantry-boys generally came back, and the sound of his knuckles on their heads began again.

We had another dog before Macbeth, a setter called Bertha.

When she became very ill, Bakay put her on his bed and nursed her for some weeks. Early one morning I went into the servants'

hall. Bakay tried to say something, but his voice broke and a large tear rolled down his cheek - the dog was dead. There is another fact for the student of human nature. I don't at all suppose that he hated the pantry-boys either ; but he had a surly temper which was made worse by drinking bad spirits and unconsciously affected by his surroundings.

7

Such men as Bakay hugged their chains, but there were others : there passes through my memory a sad procession of hopeless sufferers and martyrs. My uncle had a cook of remarkable skill in his business, a hard-working and sober man who made his way upwards. The Tsar had a famous French chef at the time and my uncle contrived to secure for his servant admission to the imperial kitchens. After this instruction, the man was engaged by the English Club at Moscow, made money, married, and lived like a gentleman ; but, with the noose of serfdom still round his neck, he could never sleep easy or enjoy his position.

Alexey - that was his name - at last plucked up courage, had prayers said to Our Lady of Iberia, and called on my uncle and

N U R S E R Y A N D U N I V E R S I TY

3 3

offered 5 ,ooo roubles for his freedom. But his master was proud of the cook as his property - he was proud of another man, a painter, for just the same reason - and therefore he refused the money, promising the cook to give him his freedom in his will, without any payment.

This was a frightful blow to the man. He became depressed ; the expression of his features changed ; his hair turned grey, and, being a Russian, he took to the bottle. He became careless about his work, and the English Club dismissed him. Then he was engaged by the Princess Trubetskoy and she persecuted him by her petty meanness. Alexey was a lover of fine phrases ; and once, when he was insulted by her beyond bearing, he drew himself up and said in his nasal voice, 'What a stormy soul inhabits Your Serene Highness's body I ' The Princess was furious : she dismissed the man and wrote, as a Russian great lady would, to my uncle to complain of his servant. My uncle would rather have done nothing, but, out of politeness to the lady, he sent for the cook and scolded him, and told him to go and beg pardon of the Princess.

But, instead of going there, he went to the public-house. Within a year he was utterly ruined : all the money he had saved for his freedom was gone, and even his last kitchen-apron. He fought with his wife, and she with him, till at last she went into service as a nurse away from Moscow. Nothing was heard of him for a long time. At last a policeman brought him to our house. a wild and ragged figure. He had no place of abode and wandered from one drink-shop to another. The police had picked him up in the street and demanded that his master should take him in hand. My uncle was vexed and, perhaps, repentant : he received the man kindly enough and gave him a room to live in. Alexey went on drinking ; when he was drunk, he was noisy and fancied he was writing poetry ; and he really had some imaginative gift but no control over it. We were in the country at the time, and my uncle sent the man to us, fancying that my father would have some control over him. But the man was too far gone. His case revealed to me the concentrated ill-feeling and hatred which a serf cherishes in his heart against his masters : he gnashed his teeth as he spoke, and used gestures which, especially as coming from a cook, were ominous. My presence did not prevent him from speaking freely; he was fond of me, and often patted my shoulder as he said, 'This is a sound branch of a rotten tree I '

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When m y uncle died, m y father gave Alexey his freedom at once. But this was too late : it only meant washing our hands of him, and he simply vanished from sight.

8

There was another victim of the system whom I cannot but recall together with Alexey. My uncle had a servant of thirty-five who acted as a clerk. My father's oldest brother, who died in 1813, intending to start a cottage hospital, placed this man, Tolochanov, when he was a boy, with a doctor, in order to learn the business of a dresser. The doctor got permission for him to attend lectures at the College of Medicine ; the young man showed ability, learned Latin and German, and practised with some success. When he was twenty-five, he fell in love with the daughter of an officer, concealed his position from her, and married her. The deception could not be kept up for long : my uncle died, and the wife was horrified to discover that she, as well as her husband, was a serf. The 'Senator', their new owner, put no pressure on them at all - he had a real affection for young Tolochanov - but the wife could not pardon the deception : she quarrelled with him and finally eloped with another man. Tolochanov must have been very fond of her : he fell into a state of depression which bordered on insanity ; he spent his nights in drunken carouses, and, having no money of his own, made free with what belonged to his master. Then, when he saw he could not balance his accounts, he took poison, on the last day of the year 1821.

My uncle was away from home. I was present when Tolochanov came into the room and told my father he had come to say goodbye ; he also gave me a message for my uncle, that he had spent the missing money.

'You're drunk,' said my father; 'go and sleep it off.'

'My sleep will last a long time,' said the doctor. 'I only ask you not to think ill of my memory.'

The man's composure frightened my father : he looked at him attentively and asked : 'What's the matter with you ? Are you wandering ?'

'No, Sir; I have only swallowed a dose of arsenic.'

The doctor and police were summoned, milk and emetics were administered. When the voiniting began, he tried to keep it back

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35

and said : 'You stop where you are ! I did not swallow you, to bring you up again.' When the poison began to work more strongly, I heard his groans and the agonised voice in which he said again and again, 'It hums, it burns like fire ! ' Someone advised that the priest should he sent for ; but he refused, and told Calot that he knew too much anatomy to believe in a life beyond the grave. At twelve at night he spoke to the doctor : he asked the time, in German, and then said, 'Time to wish you a Happy New Year ! ' and then he died.

In the morning I went hastily to the little wing, used as a bathhouse, where Tolochanov had been taken. The body was lying on a table in the attitude in which he died ; he was wearing a coat, but the necktie had been removed and the chest was bare ; the features were terribly distorted and even blackened. It was the first dead body I had ever seen ; and I ran out, nearly fainting. The toys and picture-book which I had got as New Year's presents could not comfort me : I still saw before me the blackened features of Tolochanov, and heard his cry, 'It burns like fire ! '

To end this sad subject, I shall say only one thing more : the society of servants had no really had influence on me. On the contrary, it implanted in me, in early years, a rooted hatred for slavery and oppression in all their manifestations. When I had been naughty as a child and my nurse, Vera Artamonovna, wished to he very cutting, she used to say, 'Wait a hit, and you will he exactly like the rest, when you grow up and become a master ! ' I felt this to he a grevious insult. Well, the old woman may rest in peace - whatever I became, I did not become 'exactly like the rest'.

9

I had one other distraction, as well as the servants' hall, and in this I met at least with no opposition. I loved reading as much as I disliked my lessons. Indeed, my passion for desultory reading was one of the main difficulties in the way of serious study. For example, I detested, then as now, the theoretical study of languages ; hut I was very quick in making out the meaning more or less and acquiring the rudiments of conversation ; and there I stopped, because that was all I needed.

My father and my uncle had a fairly large library, consisting of French books of the eighteenth century. The hooks lay about C.Y.E .-4.

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

in heaps i n a damp unused room on the ground floor o f the house. Calot kept the key and I was free to rummage as much as I pleased in this literary lumber-room. I read and read with no interruptions. My father approved for two reasons : in the first place, I would learn French quicker ; and besides I was kept occupied, sitting quietly in a comer. I must add that I did not display all the books I read openly on the table : some of them I kept secreted in a cupboard.

But what books did I read ? Novels, of course, and plays. I read through fifteen volumes, each of which contained three or four plays, French or Russian. As well as French novels, my mother had novels by Auguste Lafontaine and Kotzebue's comedies ; and I read them all twice over. I cannot say that the novels had much effect on me. As boys do, I pounced on all the ambiguous passages and disorderly scenes, but they did not interest me specially.

A far greater influence was exercised over my mind by a play which I loved passionately and read over twenty times, though it was in a Russian translation - The Marriage of Figaro. I was in love with Cherubino and the Countess ; nay more, I myself was Cherubino ; I felt strong emotion as I read it and was conscious of some new sensation which I could not at all understand. I was charmed with the scene where the page is dressed up as a woman, and passionately desired to have a ribbon belonging to someone, in order to hide it in my breast and kiss it when no one was looking. As a matter of fact, no female society came in my way at that age.

I only remember two schoolgirls who paid us occasional Sunday visits. The younger was sixteen and strikingly beautiful. I became confused whenever she entered the room ; I never dared to address her, or to go beyond stolen glances at her beautiful dark eyes and dark curls. I never spoke a word of this to anyone, and my first love-pangs passed off unknown even to her who caused them.

When I met her years afterwards, my heart beat fast and I remembered how I had worshipped her beauty at twelve years old.

I forgot to say that Werther interested me almost as much as The Marriage of Figaro ; half of the story I could not understand and skipped, in my eagerness to reach the final catastrophe ; but over that I wept quite wildly. When I was at Vladimir in 1839•

the same book happened to come into my hands, and I told my

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37

wife how I used to cry over it as a boy. Then I began to read the last letters to her; and when I reached the familiar passage, the tears flowed fast and I had to stop.

I cannot say that my father put any special pressure upon me before I was fourteen; but the whole atmosphere of our house was stifling to a live young creature. Side by side with complete indifference about my moral welfare, an excessive degree of importance was attached to bodily health ; and I was terribly worried by precautions against chills and unwholesome food, and the fuss that was made over a trifling cold in the head. In winter I was kept indoors for weeks at a time, and, if a drive was permitted, I had to wear warm boots, comforters, and so on. The rooms were kept unbearably hot with stoves. This treatment must have made me feeble and delicate, had I not inherited from my mother the toughest of constitutions. She, on her part, shared none of these prejudices, and in her part of the house I might do all the things which were forbidden when I was with my father.

Without rivalry and without encouragement or approval, my studies made little progress. For want of proper system and supervision, I took things easy and thought to dispense with hard work by means of memory and a lively imagination. My teachers too, as a matter of course, were under no supervision ; when once the fees were settled, provided they were punctual in coming to the house and leaving it, they might go on for years, without giving any account of what they were doing.

10

One of the queerest incidents of my early education was when a French actor, Dales, was invited to give me lessons in elocution.

'People pay no attention to it nowadays,' my father said to me,

'but your brother Alexander practised Le Recit de Theramene 6

every evening for six months with Aufraine, the actor, and never reached the perfection which his teacher desired.'

So I began to learn elocution.

'I suppose, M. Dales,' my father once said to him, 'you could give lessons in dancing too.'

Dales was a stout old gentleman of over sixty ; with a profound consciousness of his own merits but an equally profound sense of modesty, he answered that he could not judge of his own 6. From Racine's Phedre.

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

talents, but that h e often gave hints to the ballet-dancers a t the Opera.

'Just as I supposed,' remarked my father, offering him his snuffbox open - a favour he would never have shown to a Russian or German tutor. 'I should be much obliged if you would make him dance a little after the declamation ; he is so stiff.'

'Monsieur le comte peut disposer de moi.'

And then my father, who was a passionate lover of Paris, began to recall the foyer of the Opera-house as it was in 1810, the debut of Mile George and the later years of Mile Mars/ and asked many questions about cafes and theatres.

And now you must imagine my small room on a dismal winter evening, with the water running down the frozen windows over the sandbags, two tallow candles burning on the table, and us two face to face. On the stage Dales spoke in a fairly natural voice, but, in giving a lesson, he thought himself bound to get away as far as possible from nature. He recited Racine in a sing·

song voice, and made a parting, like the parting of an English·

man's back hair, at the caesura of each line, so that every verse came out in two pieces like a broken stick.

Meanwhile he made the gestures of a man who has fallen into the water and cannot swim. He made me repeat each verse several times and constantly shook his head : 'Not right at all !

Listen to me ! "Je crains Dieu, cher Abner" - now came the part·

ing ; he closed his eyes, shook his head slightly, and added, repelling the waves with a languid movement of the arm, "et n'ai point d'autre crainte." ' 8

Then the old gentleman, who 'feared nothing but God', would look at his watch, put away his books, and take hold of a chair.

This chair was my partner.

Is it surprising that I never learned to dance ? These lessons did not last long : within a fortnight they were brought to an end by a very tragic event.

I was at the theatre with my uncle, and the overture was played several times without the curtain rising. The front rows, wishing to show their familiarity with Paris customs, began to 7· George (1 787-1867) was the chief actress in tragedy, and Mars (1 779-1 847) the chief actress in comedy, on the Paris stage of their time.

8. From Racine's Athali&.

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make the noise which is made in Paris by the back rows -only. A manager came out in front of the curtain ; he bowed to the left, he bowed to the right, he bowed to the front, and then he said : 'We ask for all the indulgence of the audience ; a terrible misfortune has befallen us : Dales, a member of our company' - and here the manager's speech was interrupted by genuine tears - 'has been found dead in his room, poisoned by the fumes from the stove.'

Such were the forcible means by which the Russian system of ventilation delivered me from lessons in elocution, from spouting Racine, and from dancing a solo with the partner who boasted four legs carved in mahogany.

1 1

When I was twelve, I was transferred from the hands of women to those of men ; and, about that time, my father made two unsuccessful attempts to put a German in charge of me.

'A German in charge of children' is neither a tutor nor a dyadka 9 - it is quite a profession by itself. He does not teach or dress the children himself, but sees that they are dressed and taught ; he watches over their health, takes them out for walks, and talks whatever nonsense he pleases, provided that it is in German. If there is a tutor in the house, the German is his inferior ; but he takes precedence of the dyadka, if there is one. The visiting teachers, if they come late from unforeseen causes, or leave too early owing to circumstances beyond their control, are polite to the German ; and, though quite uneducated, he begins to think himself a man of learning. The governesses make use of the German to do all sorts of errands for them, but never permit any attentions on his part, unless they suffer from positive deformity, and see no prospect of any other admirers. When boys are fourteen they go off to the German's room to smoke on the sly, and he allows it, because he needs powerful assistance if he is to keep his place. Indeed, the common practice is to dismiss him at this period, after thanking him in the presence of the boys and presenting him with a watch. If he is tired of taking children out and receiving reprimands when they catch cold or stain their clothes, then the 'German in charge of children' be-9· A dyadka (literally 'uncle') is a man-servant put in charge of his young master.

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

comes a German without qualification : h e starts a small shop where he sells amber mouth-pieces, eau-de-cologne, and cigars to his former charges, and performs secret services for them of another kind.

The first German attached to my person was a native of Silesia, and his name was Jokisch ; in my opinion, his name alone was a sufficient disqualification. He was a tall, bald man, who professed a knowledge of agriculture, and I believe that this fact induced my father to take him ; but his chief distinction was his extreme need of soap and water. I looked with aversion at the Silesian giant, and only consented to walk about with him in the parks and gardens on condition that he told me improper stories, which I retailed in the servants' hall. He did not survive more than a year ; he was guilty of some misconduct on our country estate, and a gardener tried to kill him with a scythe ; and this made my father order him to clear out.

His successor was Fedor Karlovich, a soldier (probably a deserter) from Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel, who was remarkable for his beautiful handwriting and excessive stupidity. He had filled a similar post twice already, and had gained some experience, so that he gave himself the airs of a tutor ; also, he spoke French, mispronouncing 'j' as 'sh' and misplacing the accents.10

I had no kind of respect for him, but poisoned every moment of his existence, especially after I was convinced that, in spite of all my efforts, he was unable to understand either decimal fractions or the rule of three. In most boys' hearts there is a good deal that is ruthless and even cruel ; and I persecuted the Jager of W olfenbiittel unmercifully with sums in proportion. I was so much interested by this, that, though I did not often speak on such subjects to my father, I solemnly informed hlm of the stupidity of Fedor Karlovich.

He once boasted to me of a new frock-coat, dark blue with gold buttons, and I actually saw him once wearing it; he was going to a wedding, and the coat, though it was too large for him, really had gold buttons. But the boy who waited on the German in·

formed me that the garment was borrowed from a friend who kept a perfumer's shop. Without the least feeling of pity, I 1 0 . The English speak French even worse than the Germans ; but 1

they merely mutilate the language, whereas the German vulgarises it.

(Author's note.)

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attacked my victim, and asked bluntly where his blue coat was.

'There is a great deal of moth in this house, and I have given it to a tailor whom I know to keep it safe for me.'

'Where does the tailor live ?;

'What business is that of yours ?'

'Why not say ?'

'People should mind their own business.'

'Oh, very well. But my birthday is next week, and, to please me, you might get the blue coat from the tailor for that day.'

'No, I won't ; you don't deserve it, after your rudeness.'

I held up a threatening finger at him. But the final blow to the German's position took place as follows. He must needs boast one day, in the presence of Bouchot, my French tutor, that he had fought at Waterloo and that the Germans had given the French a terrible mauling. Bouchot merely looked at him and took snuff with such a formidable air that the conqueror of Napoleon was rather taken aback. Bouchot left the room, leaning ·angrily on his knotted stick, and he never afterwards called the man by any other name than le soldat de V ilain-ton.11 I did not know then that this pun is the property of Beranger, and I was exceedingly delighted by Bouchot's cleverness.

At last this comrade of Blucher's left our house, after a quarrel with my father; and I was not troubled further with Germans.

During the time of the warrior from Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel, I sometimes visited a family of boys, who were also under the charge of a German ; and we took long walks together. The two Germans were friends. But, when my German departed, I was left once more in complete solitude. I disliked it and tried hard to escape from it, but without success. As I was powerless to overcome my father's wishes, I should, perhaps, have been crushed by this kind of life ; but I was soon saved by a new form of mental activity, and by two new acquaintances, of whom I shall speak in the next chapter. I am sure that it never once occurred to my father what sort of life he was forcing me to lead ; or else he would not have vetoed my very innocent wishes and the very natural requests which I put to him.

He let me go occasionally to the French Theatre with my uncle.

This was a supreme enjoyment to me. I was passionately fond of the theatre; but even this treat cost me as much pain as pleasure.

u. i.e., Wellington.

C H I L D H O O D, Y O U T H A N D E X I L E

M y uncle often arrived when the play was half over ; and, as he was always engaged for some party, he often took me out before the end. The theatre was quite close to our house; but I was strictly forbidden by my father to come horne alone.

1 2

I was about fifteen when my father summoned a priest to the house to teach me as much Divinity as was required for entrance at the University. I had read Voltaire before I ever opened the Catechism. In the business of education, religion is less obtrusive in Russia than in any other country ; and this is, of course, a very good thing. A priest is always paid half the usual fee for lessons in Divinity; and, if the same priest also teaches Latin, he actually gets more for a Latin lesson than for instruction in the Catechism.