Childhood, Youth and Exile

My father looked upon religion as one of the indispensable attributes of a gentleman. It was necessary to accept Holy Scripture without discussion, because mere intellect is powerless in that department, and the subject is only made darker by human logic. It was necessary to submit to such rites as were required by the Church into which you were born ; but you must avoid excessive piety, which is suitable for women of advanced age but improper for a man. Was he himself a believer ? I imagine that he believed to some extent, from habit, from a sense of decency, and just in case -. But he never himself observed any of the rules laid down by the Church, excusing himself on the plea of bad health. He hardly ever admitted a priest to his presence, or asked him to repeat a psalm while waiting in the empty drawing-room for the five-rouble note which was his fee. In winter he excused himself on the plea that the priest and his clerk brought in so much cold air with them that he always caught cold in consequence. In the country, he went to church and received the priest at his house ; but this was not due to religious feeling but rather a concession to the ideas of society and the wishes of Government.

My mother was a Lutheran, and, as such, a degree more religious. Once or twice a month she went on Sundays to her place of worship - her Kirche, as Bakay persisted in calling it, and I, for want of occupation, went with her. I learned there to imitate with great perfection the flowery style of the German pastors, and I had not lost this art when I carne to manhood.

My father always made me keep Lent. I rather dreaded con-

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fession, and church ceremonies in general were impressive and awful to me. The Communion Service caused me real fear ; but 1

shall not call that religious feeling : it was the fear which is always inspired by the unintelligible and mysterious, especially when solemn importance is attached to the mystery. When Easter brought the end of the Fast, I ate all the Easter dishes - dyed eggs, currant loaf, and consecrated cakes, and thought no more about religion for the rest of the year.

Yet I often read the Gospel, both in Slavonic and in Luther's translation, and loved it. I read it without notes of any kind and could not understand all of it, but I felt a deep and sincere reverence for the book. In my early youth, I was often attracted by the Voltairian point of view - mockery and irony were to my taste; but I don't remember ever taking up the Gospel with indifference or hostility. This has accompanied me throughout life : at all ages and in all variety of circumstances, I have gone back to the reading of the Gospel, and every time its contents have brought down peace and gentleness into my heart.

When-the priest began to give me lessons, he was astonished, not merely at my general knowledge of the Gospel but also at my power of quoting texts accurately. 'But', he used to say, 'the Lord God, who has opened the mind, has not yet opened the heart.'

My theological instructor shrugged his shoulders and was surprised by the inconsistency he found in me ; still he was satisfied with me, because he thought I should be able to pass my examination.

A religion of a different kind was soon to take possession of my heart and mind.

CHAPTER III

Death of Alexander I - The Fourteenth of December - Moral Awakening - Bouchot - My Cousin 1

O N E winter evening my uncle came to our house at an unusual hour. He looked anxious and walked with a quick step to my father's study, after signing to me to stay in the drawing-room.

Fortunately, I was not obliged to puzzle my head long over

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the mystery. The door o f the servants' hall opened a little way, and a red face, half hidden by the wolf-fur of a livery coat, invited me to approach ; it was my uncle's footman, and I hastened to the door.

'Have you not heard ?' he asked.

'Heard what ?'

'The Tsar is dead. He died at Taganrog.'

I was impressed by the news : I had never before thought of the possibility of his death. I had been brought up in great reverence for Alexander, and I thought with sorrow how I had seen him not long before in Moscow. We were out walking when we met him outside the Tver Gate; he was riding slowly, accompanied by two or three high officers, on his way back from manoeuvres. His face was attractive, the features gentle and rounded, and his expression was weary and sad. When he caught us up, I took off my hat; he smiled and bowed to me.

Confused ideas were still simmering in my head ; the shops were selling pictures of the new Tsar, Constantine ; notices about the oath of allegiance were circulating ; and good citizens were making haste to take the oath - when suddenly a report spread that the Crown Prince had abdicated. Immediately afterwards, the same footman, a great lover of political news, with abundant opportunities for collecting it from the servants of senators and lawyers - less lucky than the horses which rested for half the day, he accompanied his master in his rounds from morning till night - informed me that there was a revolution in Petersburg and that cannon were firing in the capital.

On the evening of the next day, Count Komarovsky, a high officer of the police, was at our house, and told us of the band of revolutionaries in the Cathedral Square, the cavalry charge, and the death of Miloradovich.1

Then followed the arrests - 'They have taken so-and-so' ; 'They have caught so-and-so' ; 'They have arrested so-and-so in the country.' Parents trembled in fear for their sons ; the sky was covered over with black clouds.

During the reign of Alexander, political persecution was rare : 1 . When Nicholas became Emperor in place of his brother Constantine, the revolt of the Decembrists took place in Petersburg on 14 December 1825. Five of the conspirators were afterwards hanged, and over a hundred banished to Siberia.

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it is true that he exiled Pushkin for his verses, and Labzin, the secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, for proposing that the imperial coachman should be elected a member,2 but there was no systematic persecution. The secret police had not swollen to its later proportions : it was merely an office, presided over by de Sanglin, a freethinking old gentleman and a sayer of good things, in the manner of the French writer, �tienne de Jouy. Under Nicholas, de Sanglin himself came under police supervision and passed for a liberal, though he remained precisely what he had always been ; but this fact alone serves to mark the difference between the two reigns.

The tone of society changed visibly; and the rapid demoralisation proved too clearly how little the feeling of personal dignity is developed among the Russian aristocracy. Except the women, no one dared to show sympathy or to plead earnestly in favour of relations and friends, whose hands they had grasped yesterday but who had been arrested before morning dawned. On the contrary, men became zealots for tyranny, some to gain their own ends, while others were even worse, because they had nothing to gain by subservience.

Women alone were not guilty of this shameful denial of their dear ones. By the Cross none but women were standing ; and by the blood-stained guillotine there were women too - a Lucile Desmoulins, that Ophelia of the French Revolution, wandering near the fatal axe and waiting her turn, or a George Sand holding out, even on the scaffold, the hand of sympathy and friendship to the young fanatic, Alibaud.3

The wives of the exiles were deprived of all civil rights; abandoning their wealth and position in society, they faced a whole lifetime of slavery in Eastern Siberia. where the terrible climate was less formidable than the Siberian police. Sisters, who were not permitted to accompany their condemned brothers, absented themselves from Court, and many of them left Russia ; almost all of them retained in their hearts a lively feeling of 2. The president had proposed to elect Arakcheyev, on the ground of his nearness to the Tsar. Labzin then proposed the election of Ilya Baykov, the Tsar's coachman. 'He is not only near the Tsar but sits in front of him,' he said.

3· Camille Desmoulins was guillotined, with Danton, 5 April 1794; his wife, Lucile, soon followed him. Alibaud was executed 1 1 July 1836, for an attempt on the life of Louis Philippe.

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affection for the sufferers. But this was not s o among the men : fear devoured this feeling in their hearts, and none of them dared to open their lips about 'the unfortunate'.

As I have touched on this subject, I cannot refrain from giving some account of one of these heroic women, whose history is known to very few.

2

In the ancient family of the Ivashevs a French girl was living as a governess. The only son of the house wished to marry her. All his relations were driven wild by the idea ; there was a great commotion, tears, and entreaties. They succeeded in inducing the girl to leave Petersburg and the young man to delay his intention for a season. Young Ivashev was one of the most active conspirators, and was condemned to penal servitude for life. For this was a form of mesalliance from which his relations did not protect him. As soon as the terrible news reached the young girl in Paris, she started for Petersburg, and asked permission to travel to the Government of Irkutsk, in order to join her future husband.

Benkendorf tried to deter her from this criminal purpose ; when he failed, he reported the case to Nicholas. The Tsar ordered that the position of women who had remained faithful to their exiled husbands should be explained to her. 'I don't keep her back,' he added ; 'but she ought to realise that if wives, who have accompanied their husbands out of loyalty, deserve some indulgence, she has no claim whatever to such treatment, when she intends to marry one whom she knows to be a criminaL'

In Siberia nothing was known of this permission. When she had found her way there, the poor girl was forced to wait while a correspondence went on with Petersburg. She lived in a miserable settlement .peopled with released criminals of an kinds, unable to get any news of her lover or to inform him of her whereabouts.

By degrees she made acquaintances among her strange companions. One of these was a highwayman who was now employed in the prison, and she told him all her story. Next day he brought her a note from Ivashev ; and soon he offered to carry messages between them. All day he worked in the prison ; at nightfall he got a scrap of writing from Ivashev and started off,

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undeterred by weariness or stormy weather, and returned to his daily work before dawn.

At last permission came for their marriage. A few years later, penal servitude was commuted to penal settlement, and their condition was improved to some extent. But their strength was exhausted, and the wife was the first to sink under the burden of all she had undergone. She faded away, as a flower from southern climes was bound to fade in the snows of Siberia.

Ivashev could not survive her long : just a year later he too died.

But he had ceased to live before his death : his letters (which impressed even the inquisitors who read them) were evidence not only of intense sorrow, but of a distracted brain ; they were full of gloomy poetry and a crazy piety ; after her death he never really lived, and the process of his death was slow and solemn.

This history does not end with their deaths. Ivashev's father, after his son's exile, transferred his property to an illegitimate son, begging him not to forget his unfortunate brother but to do what he could. The young pair were survived by two children, two nameless infants, with a future prospect of the roughest labour in Siberia - without friends, without rights, without parents. Ivashev's brother got permission to adopt the children.

A few years later he ventured on another request : he used influence, that their father's name might be restored to them, and this also was granted.

3

I was strongly impressed by stories of the rebels and their fate, and by the horror which reigned in Moscow. These events revealed to me a new world, which became more and more the centre of my whole inner life ; I don't know how it came to pass ; but, though I understood very dimly what it was all about, I felt that the side that possessed the cannons and held the upper hand was not my side. The execution of Pestel 4 and his companions finally awakened me from the dreams of childhood.

Though political ideas occupied my mind day and night, my notions on the subject were not very enlightened : indeed they were so wide of the mark that I believed one of the objects of 4· One of the Decembrists.

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the Petersburg insurrection t o consist i n placing Constantine on the throne as a constitutional monarch.

It will easily be understood that solitude was a greater burden to me than ever : I needed someone, in order to impart to him my thoughts and ideals, to verify them, and to hear them confirmed. Proud of my own 'disaffection,' I was unwilling either to conceal it or to speak of it to people in general.

My choice fell first on Ivan Protopopov, my Russian tutor.

This man was full of that respectable indefinite liberalism, which, though it often disappears with the first grey hair, marriage, and professional success, does nevertheless raise a man's character. He was touched by what I said, and embraced me on leaving the house. 'Heaven grant,' he said, 'that those feelings of your youth may ripen and grow strong ! ' His sympathy was a great comfort to me. After this time he began to bring me manuscript copies, in very small writing and very much frayed, of Pushkin's poems - Ode to Freedom, The Dagger, and of Ryleyev's Thoughts. These I used to copy out in secret ; and now I print them as openly as I please I

As a matter of course, my reading also changed. Politics for me in future, and, above all, the history of the French Revolution, which I knew only as described by Mme Proveau. Among the books in our cellar I unearthed a history of the period, written by a royalist ; it was so unfair that, even at fourteen, I could not believe it. I had chanced to hear old Bouchot say that he was in Paris during the Revolution ; and I was very anxious to question him. But Bouchot was a surly, taciturn man, with spectacles over a large nose; he never indulged in any needless conversation with me : he conjugated French verbs, dictated examples, scolded me, and then took his departure, leaning on his thick knotted stick.

The old man did not like me : he thought me a mere idler, because I prepared my lessons badly ; and he often said, 'You will come to no good.' But when he discovered my sympathy with his political views, he softened down entirely, pardoned my mistakes, and told me stories of the year '93, and of his departure from France when 'profligates and cheats' got the upper hand. He never smiled ; he ended our lesson with the same dignity as before, but now he said indulgently, 'I really thought you would come to no good, but your feelings do you credit, and they will save you.'

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4

To this encouragement and approval from my teachers there was soon added a still wam1er sympathy which had a profound influence upon me.

In a little town of the Government of Tver lived a granddaughter of my father's eldest brother. Her name was Tatyana Kuchin. I had known her from childhood, but we seldom met : once a year, at Christmas or Shrovetide, she came to pay a visit to her aunt at Moscow. But we had become close friends. Though five years my senior, she was short for her age and looked no older than myself; My chief reason for getting to like her was that she was the first person to talk to me in a reasonable way : I mean, she did not constantly express surprise at my growth ; she did not ask what lessons I did and whether I did them well ; whether I intended to enter the Army, and, if so, what regiment ; but she talked to me as most sensible people talk to one another, though she kept the little airs of superiority which all girls like to show to boys a little younger than themselves.

We corresponded, especially after the events of 1824 ; but letters mean paper and pen and recall the schoolroom table with its ink-stains and decorations carved with a penknife. I wanted to see her and to discuss our new ideas ; and it may be imagined with what delight I heard that my cousin was to come in February (of 1826) and to spend several months with us. I scratched a calendar on my desk and struck off the days as they passed, sometimes abstaining for a day or two, just to have the satisfaction of striking out more at one time. In spite of this, the time seemed very long ; and when it came to an end, her visit was postponed more than once ; such is the way of things.

One evening I was sitting in the school-room with Protopopov.

Over each item of instruction he took, as usual, a sip of sour broth ; he was explaining the hexameter metre, ruthlessly hashing, with voice and hand, each verse of Gnedich's translation of the lliad into its separate feet. Suddenly, a sound unlike that of town sledges came from the snow outside ; I heard the faint tinkle of harness-bells and the sound of voices out-of-doors. I flushed up, lost all interest in the hashing process and the wrath of Achilles, and rushed headlong to the front hall. There was my cousin from Tver, wrapped up iri furs, shawls, and comforters, and wearing a

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hood and white fur boots. Blushing red with frost and, perhaps, also with joy, she ran into my arms.

5

Most people speak of their early youth, its joys and sorrows, with a slightly condescending smile, as if they wished to say, like the affected lady in Griboyedov's play, 'How childish ! ' Children, when a few years are past, are ashamed of their toys, and this is right enough : they want to be men and women, they grow so fast and change so much, as they see by their jackets and the pages of their lesson-books. But adults might surely realise that childhood and the two or three years of youth are the fullest part of life, the fairest, and the most truly our own ; and indeed they are possibly the most important part, because they fix all that follows, though we are not aware of it.

So l01ig as a man moves modestly forwards, never stopping and never reflecting, and until he comes to the edge of a precipice or breaks his neck, he continues to believe that his life lies ahead of him ; and therefore he looks down upon his past and is unable to appreciate the present. But when experience has laid low the flowers of spring and chilled the glow of summer - when he discovers that life is practically over, and all that remains a mere continuance of the past, then he feels differently towards the brightness and warmth and beauty of early recollections.

Nature deceives us all with her endless tricks and devices : she makes us a gift of youth, and then, when we are grown up, asserts her mastery and snares us in a web of relations, domestic and public, most of which we are powerless to control; and, though we impart our personal character to our actions, we do not possess our souls in the same degree ; the lyric element of personality is weaker, and, with it, our feelings and capacity for enjoyment - all, indeed, is weaker, except intelligence and will.

6

My cousin's life was no bed of roses. She lost her mother in childhood ; her father was a passionate gambler, who, like all men who have gambling in their blood, was constantly rich and poor by turns and ended by ruining himself. What was left of his fortune he devoted to his stud, which now became the object of all his thoughts and desires. His only son, a good-natured cavalry

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officer, was taking the shortest road t o ruin : a t the age o f nineteen, he was a more desperate gambler than his father.

When the father was fifty, he married, for no obvious reason, an old maid who was a teacher in the Smolny Conven't. She was the most typical specimen of a Petersburg governess whom I had ever happened to meet : thin, blonde, and very shortsighted, she looked the teacher and the moralist all over. By no means stupid, she was full of an icy enthusiasm in her talk, she abounded in commonplaces about virtue and devotion, she knew history and geography by heart, spoke French with repulsive correctness, and concealed a high opinion of herself under an artificial and Jesuitical humility. These traits are common to all pedants in petticoats ; but she had others peculiar to the capital or the convent.

Thus she raised tearful eyes to heaven, when speaking of the visit of 'the mother of us all' (the Empress, Marya Fedorovna) ;5 she was in love with Tsar Alexander, and carried a locket or ring containing a fragment of a letter from the Empress Elizabeth 6 -

'il a repris son sourire de bienveillance ! '

It is easy to imagine the harmonious trio that made up this household : a card-playing father, passionately devoted to horses and racing and noisy carouses in disreputable company ; a daughter brought up in complete independence and accustomed to do as she pleased in the house ; and a middle-aged blue-stocking suddenly converted into a bride. As a matter of course, no love was lost between the stepmother and stepdaughter. In general, real friendship between a woman of thirty-five and a girl of seventeen is impossible, unless the former is sufficiently unselfish to renounce all claim to sex.

The common hostility between stepmothers and step-daughters does not surprise me in the least : it is natural and even moral. A new member of the household, who usurps their mother's place, provokes repulsion on the part of the children. To them the second marriage is a second funeral. The child's love is revealed in this feeling, and whispers to the orphan, 'Your father's wife is not your mother.' At one time the Church understood that a second marriage is inconsistent with the Christian conception of marriage and the Christian dogma of immortality ; but she made 5· The wife of Paul an d mother of Alexander I an d Nicholas.

6. Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, reigned from 1741 to 1762.

Probably 'il' refers to her father.