Childhood, Youth and Exile - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Alexander Herzen (ч. 3)

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constant concessions t o the world, and went too far, till she came up against the logic of facts - the simple heart of the child who revolts against the absurdity and refuses the name of mother to his father's second choice.

The woman too is in an awkward situation when she comes away from the altar to find a family of children ready-made : she has nothing to do with them, and has to force feelings which she cannot possess ; she is bound to convince herself and the world, tHat other people's children are just as attractive to her as her own.

Consequently, I don't blame either the convent-lady or my cousin for their mutual dislike ; but I understand how a young girl unaccustomed to control was eager to go wherever she could be free. Her father was now getting old and more submissive to his learned wife ; her brother, the officer, was behaving worse and worse ; in fact, the atmosphere at home was oppressive, and she finally induced her stepmother to let her go on a visit to us, for some months or possibly for a year.

The day after her arrival, my cousin turned my usual routine, with the exception of my lessons, upside down. With a high hand she fixed hours for us to read together, advised me to stop reading novels, and recommended Segur's General History and The Travels of Anacharsis.1 From the ascetic point of view she opposed my strong inclination to smoke on the sly - cigarettes were then unknown, and I rolled the tobacco in paper myself : in general, she liked to preach to me, and I listened meekly to her sermons, if I did not profit by them. Fortunately, she was not consistent : quite forgetting her own arrangements, she read with me for amusement rather than instructfon, and often sent out a secret messenger in the shape of a pantry-boy to buy buckwheat cakes in winter or gooseberries in summer.

I believe that her influence on me was very good. She brought into my monastic life an element of warmth, and this may have served to keep alive the enthusiasms that were beginning to stir in my mind, when they might easily have been smothered by my father's ironical tone. I learned to be attentive, to be nettled by a 7· Voyage du jeune Anacharsis, by the Abbe Barthelemy, published in 1 779. Segur was a French historian (1753-I83o).

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single word, to care for a friend, and to feel affection ; I learned also to talk about feelings. In her I found support for my political ideas ; she prophesied a remarkable future and reputation for me, and I, with a child's vanity, believed her when she said I would one day be a Brutus or Fabricius.

To me alone she confided the secret of her love for a cavalry officer in a black jacket and dolman. It was really a secret ; for the officer, as he rode at the head of his squadron, never suspected the pure little flame that burnt for him in the breast of this young lady of eighteen. Whether I envied him, I can't say ; probably I did, a little ; but I was proud of being chosen as her confidant, and I imagined (under the influence of Werther) that this was a tragic passion, fated to end in some great catastrophe involving suicide by poison or the dagger. I even thought at times of calling on the officer and telling him the whole story.

My cousin brought shuttlecocks with her from horne. One of them had a pin stuck into it, and she always used it in playing ; if anyone else happened to get hold of it, she took it away and said that no other suited her as well. But the demon of mischief, which was always whispering its temptations in my ear, tempted me to take out this pin and stick it into another shuttlecock. The trick was entirely successful : my cousin always chose the shuttlecock with the pin in it. After a fortnight I told her what I had done : she changed colour, burst out crying, and ran to her own room. I was frightened and distressed ; after waiting half an hour I went to find her. Her door was locked, and I asked her to open it. She refused, saying that she was not well, and that I was an unkind, heartless boy. Then I wrote a note in which I begged her to forgive me, and after tea we made it up : I kissed her hand, and she embraced me and explained the full importance of the incident. A year before, the officer had dined at their house and played battledore with her afterwards ; and the marked shuttlecock had been used by him. I felt very remorseful, as if I had committed a real act of sacrilege.

My cousin stayed with us till October, when her father summoned her horne, promising to let her spend the next summer with us in the country. We looked forward with horror to the separation ; and soon there carne an autumn day when a carriage arrived to fetch her, and her maid carried down baskets and band-boxes, while our servants put in provisions of all kinds, to

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last a week, and crowded t o the steps t o say their good byes. We exchanged a close embrace, and both shed tears ; the carriage drove out into the street, turned into a side-street close to the very shop where we used to buy the buckwheat cakes, and disappeared. I took a turn in the courtyard, but it seemed cold and unfriendly ; my own room, where I went next, seemed empty and cold too. I began to prepare a lesson for Protopopov, and all the time I ,was thinking, 'Where is the carriage now ? has it passed the gates or not ?'

I had one comfort : we should spend next June together in the country.

I had a passionate love for the country, and our visits there gave me new life. Forests, fields, and perfect freedom - all this was a complete change to me, who had grown up wrapped in cottonwool, behind stone walls, never daring to leave the house on any pretext without asking leave, or without the escort of a footman.

From spring onwards, I was always much exercised by one question - shall we go to the country this year or not ? Every year my father said that he wished to see the leaves open and would make an early start; but he was never ready before July.

One year he put off so long that we never went at all. He sent orders every winter that the country house was to be prepared and heated, but this was merely a deep device, that the head man and ground-officer, fearing our speedy arrival, might pay more attention to their duties.

It seemed that we were to go. My father said to my uncle, that he should enjoy a rest in the country and must see what was doing on the land ; but still weeks went by.

The prospect became brighter by degrees. Food supplies were sent off - tea and sugar, grain of different kinds and wine ; then came another delay ; but at last the head man was ordered to send a certain number of peasants' horses on a fixed day. Joy I Joy I we are to go I

At that time I never thought of the trouble caused to the peasants by the loss of four or five days at the busiest time of the year. I was completely happy and made haste to pack up my books and notebooks. The horses came, and I listened with inward satisfaction to the sound of their munching and snorting in

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the court. I took a lively interest in the bustle of the drivers and the wrangles of the servants, as they disputed where each should sit and accommodate his belongings. Lights burnt all night in the servants' quarters : all were busy packing, or dragging about boxes and bags, or putting on special clothes for the journey, though it was not more than eighty versts. My father's valet was the most excited of the party : he realised all the importance of packing, pulled out in fury all that others had put in, tore his hair with vexation, and was quite impossible to approach.

On the day itself my father got up no earlier than usual -

indeed, it seemed later - and took just as long over his coffee ; it was eleven o'clock before he gave the order to put to the horses.

First came a coach to hold four, drawn by six or our own horses ; this was followed by three or sometimes four equipages - an open carriage, a brichka, and either a large waggon or two carts ; all these were filled by the servants and their baggage, in addition to the carts which had preceded us ; and yet there was such a squeeze that no one could sit in comfort.

We stopped half-way, to dine and feed the horses, at a large village, whose name of Perkhushkovo may be found in Napoleon's bulletins. It belonged to a son of the uncle of whom I spoke in describing the division of the property. The neglected manorhouse stood near the high road, which had dull flat fields on each side of it ; but to me even this dusty landscape was delightful after the confinement of a town. The floors of the house were uneven, and the steps of the staircase shook; our tread sounded loud, and the walls echoed the noise, as if surprised by visitors. The old furniture, prized as a rarity by its former owner, was now spending its last days in banishment here. I wandered, with eager curiosity, from room to room, upstairs and downstairs, and finally into the kitchen. Our cook was preparing a hasty meal for us, and looked discontented and scornful ; the bailiff was generally sitting in the kitchen, a grey-haired man with a lump on his head. When the cook turned to him and complained of the kitchen-range, the bailiff listened and said from time to time, 'Well, perhaps you're right' ; he looked uneasily at all the stir in the house and clearly hoped we should soon go away.

Dinner was served on special plates, made of tin or Britannia

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metal, and bought for the purpose. Meanwhile the horses were put to ; and the hall was filled with those who wished to pay their respects - former footmen, spending their last days in pure air but on short commons, and old women who had been pretty house-maids thirty years ago, all the creeping and hopping population of great houses, who, like the real locusts, devour the peasants' toil by no fault of their own. They brought with them flaxen-haired children with bare feet and soiled clothes ; the children kept pushing forward, and the old women kept pulling them back, and both made plenty of noise. The women caught hold of me when they could and expressed surprise at my growth in the same terms every year. My father spoke a few words to them ; some tried to kiss his hand, but he never permitted it ; others made their bow; and then we went away.

By the edge of a wood our bailiff was waiting for us, and he rode in front of us the last part of the way. A long lime avenue led up to our house from the vicarage ; at the house we were met by the priest and his wife, the sexton, the servants, and some peasants. An idiot, called Pronka, was there too, the only selfrespecting person ; for he kept on his dirty old hat, stood a little apart and grinned, and started away whenever any of the newcomers tried to approach him.

I have seen few more charming spots than this estate of V asilevskoye. On one side, where the ground slopes, there is a large village with a church and an old manor-house ; on the other side, where there is a hill and a smaller village, was a new house built by my father. From our windows there was a view for many miles : the endless corn-fields spread like lakes, ruffled by the breeze ; manor-houses and villages with white churches were visible here and there; forests of varying hues made a semicircular frame for the picture ; and the ribbon of the Moscow River shone blue outside it. In the early morning I used to push up my window as high as it would go, and look, and listen, and drink in the air.

Yet I had a tenderness for the old manor-house too, perhaps because it gave me my first taste of the country ; I had a passion for the long shady avenue which led up to it, and the neglected garden. The house was falling down, and a slender shapely birch-

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tree was growing out of a crack in the hall floor. A willow avenue went to the left, followed by reed-beds and white sand, all the way to the river ; about my twelfth year, I used to play the whole morning on this sand and among the reeds. An old gardener, bent and decrepit, was generally sitting in front of the house, boiling fruit or straining mint-wine; and he used to give me peas and beans to eat on the sly. There were a number of rooks in the garden ; they nested in the tree-tops and flew round and round, cawing ; sometimes, especially towards evening, they rose up in hundreds at a time, rousing others by their noise; sometimes a single bird would fly quickly from tree to tree, amid general silence. When night came on, some distant owl would cry like· a child or burst out laughing ; and, though I feared those wild plaintive noises, yet I went and listened.

The years when we did not stay at Vasilevskoye were few and far between. On leaving, I always marked my height on the wall near the balcony, and my first business on arriving was to find out how much I had grown. But I could measure more than mere bodily growth by this place : the regular recurrence to the same surroundings enabled me to detect the development of my mind.

Different books and different objects engaged my attention. In 1823 I was still quite a child and took childish books with me; and even these I left unread, taking more interest in a hare and a squirrel that lived in a 8arret near my room. My father allowed me, once every evening, to fire off a small cannon, and this was one of my chief delights. Of course, all the servants bore a hand in this occupation, and grey-haired men of fifty were no less excited than I was. In 1827 my books were Plutarch and Schiller; early in the morning I sought the remotest part of the wood, lay down under a tree, and read aloud, fancying myself in the forests of Bohemia. Yet, all the same, I paid much attention to a dyke which I and another boy were making across a small stream, and I ran there ten times a day to look at it and repair it. In 1829

and the next year, I was writing a 'philosophical' review of Schiller's Wallenstein, and the cannon was the only one of my old amusements that still maintained its attraction.

But I had another pleasure as well as firing off the cannon -

the evenings in the country haunted me like a passion, and I feel them still to be times of piety and peace and poetry One of

•

the last bright hours of my life also recalls to me an evening in

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the country. I was in Italy, and she was with me. The sun was setting, solemn and bright, in an ocean of fire, and melting into it. Suddenly the rich crimson gave place to a sombre blue, and smoke-coloured vapour covered all the sky ; for in Italy darkness comes on fast. We mounted our mules ; riding from Frascati to Rome, we had to pass through a small village; lights were twinkling already here and there, all was peace, the hoofs of the mules rang out on the stone, a fresh dampish wind blew from the Apennines. At the end of the village there was a small Madonna in a niche, with a lamp burning before her ; the village girls, coming home from work with white kerchiefs over their heads, knelt down and sang a hymn, and some begging pitferari who were passing by added their voices. I was profoundly impressed and much moved by the scene. We looked at each other, and rode slowly on to the inn where our carriage was waiting. When we got home, I described the evenings I had spent at Vasilevskoye.

What was it I described ?

The shepherd cracks his long whip and plays on his birch-bark pipe. I hear the lowing and bleating of the returning animals, and the stamping of their feet on the bridge. A barking dog scurries after a straggling sheep, and the sheep breaks into a kind of wooden-legged gallop. Then the voices of the girls, singing on their way from the fields, come nearer and nearer ; but the path takes a tum to the right, and the sound dies away again. Housedoors open with creaking of the hinges, and the children come out to meet their cows and sheep. Work is over. Children play in the street or by the river, and their voices come penetrating and clear over the water through the evening glow. The smell of burning passes from the corn-kilns through the air; the soaking dew begins to spread like smoke over the earth, the wind seems to walk audibly over the trees, the sunset glow sends a last faint light over the world - and Vera Artamonovna finds me under a lime-tree, and scolds me, though she is not seriously angry.

'What's the meaning of this ? Tea has long been served, and everyone is there. I have looked and looked for you everywhere till I'm tired out. I'm too old for all this running. And what do you mean by lying on the wet grass ? You'll have a cold tomorrow, I feel sure.'

'Never mind, never mind,' I would answer laughing ; 'I shan't

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have a cold, and I want no tea ; but you must steal me some cream, and mind you skim off the top of the jug ! '

'Really, I can't find it in my heart to be angry with you ! But how dainty you are ! I've got cream ready for you, without your asking. Look how red the sky is ! That's a sign of a good harvest.'

And then I made off home, jumping and whistling as I went.

1 1

We never went back to Vasilevskoye after 183 1 , and my father sold it during my banishment. In 1843 we were staying in the country within twenty ve:rsts of the old home and I could not resist paying it a visit. We drove along the familiar road, past the pine-wood and the hill covered with nut bushes, till we came to the ford which had given me such delight twenty years ago - I remembered the splashing water, the crunching sound of the pebbles, the coachman shouting at the jibbing horses. At last we reached the village and the priest's house ; there was the bench where the priest used to sit, wearing his brown cassock - a simple kindly man who was always chewing something and always in a perspiration ; and then the estate-office where Vasily Yepifanov made out his accounts ; never quite sober, he sat crouching over the paper, holding his pen very low down and tucking his third finger away behind it The priest was dead, and Vasily Yepifanov, not sober yet, was making out accounts somewhere else. The village head man was in the fields, but we found his wife at their cottage.

Changes had taken place in the interval. A new manor-house had been built on the hill, and a new garden laid out round it.

Returning past the church and churchyard, we met a poor deformed object, creeping, as it seemed, on all-fours. It signed to me, and I went close to it. It was an old woman, bent, paralysed, and half-crazy ; she used to live on charity and work in the old priest's garden ; she was now about seventy, and her, of all people, death had spared ! She knew me and shed tears, shaking her head and saying : 'How old you have grown ! I only knew you by your walk. And me - but there's no use talking about me.'

As we drove home, I saw the head man, the same as in our time, standing in a field some way off. He did not recognise me at first ; but when we were past, he made out who I was, took off his C.Y.E.-5

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hat, and bowed low. A little further on, I turned round, and Grigory Gorsky - that was the head man's name - was standing on the same spot and watching our carriage. That tall bearded figure, bowing in the harvest field, was a link with the past ; but V asilevskoye had ceased to be ours.

CHAPTER IV

My Friend Nick and the Sparrow Hills

S O M E time in the year 1824 I was walking one day with my father along the Moscow River, on the far side of the Sparrow Hills ; and there we met a French tutor whom we knew. He had nothing on but his shirt, was obviously in great alarm, and was calling out, 'Help ! Help ! • Before our friend had time to pull off his shirt or pull on his trousers, a Cossack ran down from the Sparrow Hills, hurled himself into the water, and disappeared. In another moment he reappeared, grasping a miserable little object, whose head and hands shook like clothes hung out to dry ; he placed this burden on the bank and said, 'A shaking will soon bring him round.'

The bystanders collected fifty roubles for the rescuer. The Cossack made no pretences but said very honestly, 'It's a sin to take money for a thing like that; for he gave me no trouble, no more than a cat, to pull h� out. But,' he added, 'though I don't ask for money, if I'm offered it, l may as well take it. I'm a poor man. So thank you kindly.' Then he tied up the money in his hanakerchief and went back to his horses grazing on the hill.

My father asked the man's name and wrote next day to tell his commanding officer of his gallantry; and the Cossack was promoted to be a corporal. A few months later the Cossack appeared at our house and brought a companion, a German with a · fair curling wig, pockmarked, and scented. This was the drowning man, who had come to return thanks on behalf of the Cossack; and he visited us afterwards from time to time.

Karl Sonnenberg had taught boys German in several families, and was now employed by a distant relation of my father's, who

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had confided to him the bodily health and German pronunciation of his son. This boy, Nikolay Ogarev, whom Sonnenberg always called Nick, attracted me. There was something kind, gentle, and thoughtful about him ; he was quite unlike the other boys whom I was in the way of seeing. Yet our intimacy ripened slowly : he was silent and thoughtful, I was lively and feared to trouble him by my liveliness.

Nick had lost his mother in infancy, and his grandmother died about the time when my cousin Tatyana left us and went home.

Their household was in confusion, and Sonnenberg, who had really nothing to do, made out that he was terribly busy ; so he brought the boy to our house in the morning and asked if we would keep him for the whole day. Nick was frightened and sad; I suppose he loved his grandmother.

After sitting together for some time, I proposed that we should read Schiller. I was soon astonished by the similarity of our tastes : he knew by heart much more than I did, and my favourite passages were those he knew best; we soon shut the book, and each began to explore the other's mind for common interests.

He too was familiar with the unprinted poems of Pushkin and Ryleyev;1 the difference from the empty-headed boys whom I sometimes met was surprising. His heart beat to the same tune as mine; he too had cut the painter that bound him to the sullen old shore of conservatism ; our business was to push off with a will ; and we decided, perhaps on that very first day, to act in support of the Crown Prince Constantine I

This was our first long conversation. Sonnenberg was always in our way, persistent as a fly in autumn and spoiling all our talk by his presence. He was constantly interfering, criticising without understanding, putting the collar of Nick's shirt to rights, or in a hurry to go home; in short, he was thoroughly objectionable.

But, before a month was over, it was impossible for my friend and me to pass two days without meeting or writing ; I who was naturally impulsive, became more and more attached to Nick, and he had a less demonstrative but deep love for me.

From the very first, our friendship was bound to take a serious tum. I cannot remember that we thought much of amusement, 1. One of the five Decembrists who were hanged when the revolt was suppressed. See also p. 48.

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especially when w e were alone. I don't mean that w e sat still always ; after all, we were boys, and we laughed and played the fool and teased Sonnenberg and shot with a bow in our courtyard. But our friendship was not founded on mere idle companionship : we were united, not only by equality of age and

'chemical' affinity, but by a common religion. Nothing in the world has more power to purify and elevate that time of life, nothing preserves it better, than a strong interest in humanity at large. We respected, in ourselves, our own future; we regarded one another as chosen vessels, with a fixed task before us.

We often took walks into the country ; our favourite haunts were the Sparrow Hills, and the fields outside the Dragomilovsky Gate. Accompanied by Sonnenberg, he used to come for me at six or seven in the morning ; and if I was still asleep, he used to throw sand or pebbles at my window. I woke up joyfully and hastened to join him.

These morning walks had been started by the activity of Sonnenberg. My friend had been brought up under a dyadka,2 in the manner traditional in noble Russian families, till Sonnenberg came. The influence of the dyadka waned at once, and the oligarchy of the servants' hall had to grin and bear it : they realised that they were no match for the 'accursed German' who was permitted to dine with the family. Sonnenberg's reforms were radical : the dyadka even wept when the German took his young master in person to a shop to buy ready-made boots. Just like the reforms of Peter the Great, Sonnenberg's reforms bore a military character even in matters of the least warlike nature. It does not follow from this that Sonnenberg's narrow shoulders were ever covered by epaulettes, plain or laced - nature has constructed the German on such a plan, that, unless he is a philosopher or theologian and therefore utterly indifferent to personal neatness, he is invariably military, whatever civilian sphere he may adorn.

Hence Sonnenberg liked tight clothes, closely buttoned and belted in at the waist ; and hence he was a strict observer of rules approved by himself. He had made it a rule to get up at six in the morning ; therefore he made his pupil get up one minute before six or, at latest, one minute after it, and took him out into the fresh air every morning.

2. See note to p. 39·

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The Sparrow Hills, at the foot of which Sonnenberg had been so nearly drowned, soon became to us a Holy Place.

One day after dinner, my father proposed to take a drive into the country, and, as Nick was in the house, invited him and Sonnenberg to join us. These drives were no joke. Though the carriage was made by Joachim, most famous of coachmakers, it had been used, if not severely, for fifteen years till it had become old and ugly, and it weighed more than a siege mortar, so that we took an hour or more to get outside the city-gates. Our four horses, ill-matched both in size and colour, underworked and overfed, were covered with sweat and lather in a quarter of an hour ; and the coachman, knowing that this was forbidden, had to keep them at a walk. However hot it was, the windows were generally kept shut. To all this you must add the steady pressure of my father's eye and Sonnenberg's perpetual fussy interference ; and yet we boys were glad to endure it all, in order that we might be together.

We crossed the Moscow River by a ferry at the very place where the Cossack pulled Sonnenberg out of the water. My father walked along with gloomy aspect and stooping figure, as always, while Sonnenberg trotted at his side and tried to amuse him with scandal and gossip. We two walked on in front till we had got a good lead ; then we ran off to the site of Vitberg's cathedral 3 on the Sparrow Hills.

Panting and flushed, we stood there and wiped our brows. The sun was setting, the cupolas of Moscow glittered in his rays, the city at the foot of the hill spread beyond our vision, a fresh breeze fanned our cheeks. We stood there leaning against each other ; then suddenly we embraced and, as we looked down upon the great city, swore to devote our lives to the struggle we had undertaken.

Such an action may seem very affected and theatrical on our part ; but when I recall it, twenty-six years after, it affects me to tears. That it was absolutely sincere has been proved by the whole course of our lives. But all vows taken on that spot are evidently doomed to the same fate : the Emperor Alexander also acted 3· See part II, chapter IX.

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sincerely when h e laid the first stone o f the cathedral there, but the first stone was also the last.

We did not know the full power of our adversary, but still we threw down the glove. Power dealt us many a shrewd blow, but we never surrendered to it, and it was not power that crushed us. The scars inflicted by power are honourable; the strained thigh of Jacob was a sign that he had wrestled with God in the night.

From that day the Sparrow Hills became a place of pilgrimage for us : once or twice a year we walked there, and always by ourselves. There, five years later, Ogarev asked me with a modest diffidence whether I believed in his poetic gift. And in 1833 he wrote to me from the country :

'Since I left Moscow, I have felt sad, sadder than I ever was in my life. I am always thinking of the Sparrow Hills. I long kept my transports hidden in my heart ; shyness or some other feeling prevented me from speaking of them. But on the Sparrow Hills these transports were not lessened by solitude; you shared them with me, and these moments are unforgettable; like recollections of bygone happiness, they pursued me on my journey, though I passed no hills but only forests.'

'Tell the world', he ended, 'how our lives (yours and mine) took shape on the Sparrow Hills.'

Five more years passed, and I was far from those Hills, but their Prometheus, Alexander Vitberg, was near me, a sorrowful and gloomy figure. After my return to Moscow, I visited the place again in 1842 ; again I stood by the foundation-stone and surveyed the same scene; and a companion was with me - but it was not my friend.

After 1827 we two were inseparable. In every recollection of that time, whether detailed or general, he is always prominent, with the face of opening manhood, with his love for me. He was early marked with that sign of consecration which is given to few, and which, for weal or for woe, separates a man from the crowd. A large oil-painting of Ogarev was made about that time and long remained in his father's house. I often stopped in front of it and looked long at it. He was painted with a loose open collar : the artist had caught successfully the luxuriant chestnut

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hair, the fleeting beauty of youth on the irregular features, and the somewhat swarthy complexion. The canvas preserves the serious aspect which precedes hard intellectual work. The vague sorrow and extreme gentleness which shine from the large grey eyes, give promise of great power of sympathy ; and that promise was fulfilled. The portrait was given to me. A lady, not related to Ogarev, afterwards got hold of it; perhaps she will see these lines and restore it to me.

I do not know why people dwell exclusively on recollections of first love and say nothing about memories of youthful friendship. First love is so fragrant, just because it forgets difference of sex, because it is passionate friendship. Friendship between young men has all the fervour of love and all its characteristics - the same shy reluctance to profane its feeling by speech, the same diffidence and absolute devotion, the same pangs at parting, and the same exclusive desire to stand alone without a rival.

I had loved Nick long and passionately before I dared to call him 'friend' ; and, when we were apart in summer, I wrote in a postscript, 'whether I am your friend or not, I don't know yet'.

He was the first to use 'thou' in writing to me ; and he called me Damon before I called him Pythias.

Smile, if you please, but let it be a kindly smile, such as men smile when recalling their own fifteenth year. Perhaps it would be better to ask, 'Was I like that in my prime ? ' and to thank your stars, if you ever had a prime, and to thank them doubly, if you had a friend to share it.

The language of that time seems to us affected and bookish.

We have travelled far from its passing enthusiasms and onesided partisanships, which suddenly give place to feeble sentimentality or childish laughter. In a man of thirty it would be absurd, like the famous Bettina will schlafen ;4 but, in its own season, this language of adolescence, this jargon de Ia puberte, this breaking of the soul's voice - all this is quite sincere, and even its bookish flavour is natural to the age which knows theory and is ignorant of practice.

Schiller remained our favourite; the characters in his plays 4· This must refer to Bettina von Arnim's first interview with Goethe at Weimar in April 1807. She writes that she sprang into Goethe's arms and slept there. The poet was then fifty-eight, and Bettina had ceased to be a child.

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were real for us ; we discussed them and loved or hated them as living beings and not as people in a book. And more than that we identified ourselves with them. I was rather distressed that Nick was too fond of Fiesco, and wrote to say that behind every Fiesco stands a Verrina. My own ideal was Karl Moor, but I soon deserted him and adopted the Marquis Posa instead.

Thus it was that Ogarev and I entered upon life hand in hand.

We walked in confidence and pride ; without counting the cost, we answered every summons and surrendered ourselves sincerely to each generous impulse. The path we chose was not easy ; but we never once left it; wounded and broken, we still went on, and no one outstripped us on the way. I have reached, not our goal but the place where the road turns downhill, and I seek instinctively for your arm, my friend, that I may press it and say with a sad smile as we go down together, 'So this is all ! '

Meanwhile, in the wearisome leisure to which I a m condemned by circumstances, as I find in myself neither strength nor vigour for fresh toil, I am recording our recollections.5 Much of what bound us so closely has found a place in these pages, and I give them to you. For you they have a double meaning, the meaning of epitaphs, on which we meet with familiar names.

But it is surely an odd reflection, that, if Sonnenberg had learned to swim or been drowned when he fell into the river, or if he had been pulled out by some ordinary private and not by that Cossack, we should never have met; or, if we had, it would have been at a later time and in a different way - not in the little room of our old house where we smoked our first cigars, and where we drew strength from one another for our first long step on the path of life.

CHAPTER V

Details of Home Life - Men of the Eighteenth Century in Russia -

A Day at Home - Guests and Visitors - Sonnenberg - Servants 1

The dullness and monotony of our house became more intolerable with every year. But for the prospect of University life, my new 5. This was written in 1853·

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friendship, my interest in politics, and my lively turn of character, I must either have run away or died of the life.

My father was seldom cheerful; as a rule he was dissatisfied with everyone and everything. He was a man of unusual intelligence and powers of observation, who had seen and heard a great deal and remembered it ; he was a finished man of the world and could be exceedingly pleasant and interesting ; but he did not choose to be so, and sank deeper and deeper into a state of morbid solitude.

What precisely it was that infused so much bile and bitterness into his blood, it is hard to say. No period of passion, of great misfortunes, mistakes, and losses, had ever taken place in his life. I could never fully understand the source of that bitter scorn and irritation which filled his heart, of his distrust and avoidance of mankind, and of the disgust that preyed upon him.

Perhaps he took with him to the grave some recollection which he never confided to any ear ; perhaps it was merely due to the combination of two things so incongruous as the eighteenth century and Russian life ; and there was a third factor, the traditional idleness of his class, which had a terrible power of producing unreasonable tempers.

In Europe, especially in France, the eighteenth century produced an extraordinary type of man, which combined all the weaknesses of the Regency with all the strength of Spartans or Romans. Half like Faublas and half like Regulus, these men opened wide the doors of revolution and were the first to rush into it, jostling one another in their haste to pass out by the 'window' of the guillotine. Our age has ceased to produce those strong, complete natures; but last century evoked them everywhere, even in countries where they were not needed and where their development was bound to be distorted. In Russia, men who were exposed to the influence of this powerful European current, did not make history, but they became unlike other men. Foreigners at home and foreigners abroad, spoilt for Russia by European prejudices and for Europe by Russian habits, they were a living contradiction in terms and sank into an artificial life of sensual enjoyment and monstrous egoism.

Such was the most conspicuous figure at Moscow in those

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days, Prince Yusupov, a Tartar prince, a grand seigneur of European reputation, and a Russian grandee of brilliant intellect and great fortune. He was surrounded by a whole pleiad of greyhaired Don Juans and free-thinkers - such men as Masalsky, Santi, and the rest. They were all men of considerable mental development and culture; but they had nothing to do, and they rushed after pleasure, loved and petted their precious selves, genially gave themselves absolution for all transgressions, exalted the love of eating to the height of a Platonic passion, and lowered love for women into a kind of gluttonous epicureanism.

Old Yusupov was a sceptic and a bon-vivant ; he had been the friend of Voltaire and Beaumarchais, of Diderot and Casti ; and his artistic taste was beyond question. You may convince yourself of this by a single visit to his palace outside Moscow and a glance at his pictures, if his heir has not sold them yet by auction. At eighty, this luminary was setting in splendour, surrounded by beauty in marble and colour, and also in flesh and blood. Pushkin, who dedicated a noble Epistle to him,1 used to converse with Yusupov in his country-house ; and Gonzaga, to whom Yusupov dedicated his theatre, used to paint there.

By his education and service in the Guards, by his birth and connections, my father belonged to the same circle ; but neither temperament nor health allowed him to lead a life of dissipation to the age of seventy, and he went to the opposite extreme. He determined to secure a life of solitude, and found it intensely tedious - all the more tedious because he had sought it merely for his own sake. A strong will was degraded into stubborn wilfulness, and unused powers spoilt his temper and made it difficult.

At the time of his education European civilisation was so new in Russia that a man of culture necessarily became less of a Russian. To the end of his life he wrote French with more ease and correctness than Russian, and he literally never read a Russian book, not even the Bible. The Bible, indeed, he did not read even in other languages ; he knew, by hearsay and from extracts, the matter of Holy Scripture in general, and felt no curiosity to examine further. He did not respect Derzhavin and Krylov, the first because he had written an ode on the death of his uncle, 1. To a Great Man (1830).

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Prince Meshchersky, and the latter, because they had acted together as seconds in a duel. When my father heard that the Emperor Alexander was reading Karamzin's History of the Russian Empire, he tried it himself but soon laid it aside :

'Nothing but old Slavonic names ! Who can take an interest in all that ? ' - such was hJs disparaging criticism.

His contempt for mankind was unconcealed and without exceptions. Never, under any circumstances, did he rely on anyone, and I don't remember that he ever preferred a considerable request in any quarter ; and he never did anything to oblige other people. All he asked of others was · to maintain appearances : les appearances, les convenances - his moral code consisted of these alone. He excused much, or rather shut his eyes to much : but any breach of decent forms enraged him to such a degree that he became incapable of the least indulgence or sympathy. I puzzled so long over this unfairness that I ended by understanding it : he was convinced beforehand that any man is capable of any bad action, and refrains from it only because it does not pay, or for want of opportunity ; but in any breach of politeness he found personal offence, and disrespect to himself, or 'middle-class breeding', which, in his opinion, excluded a man from all decent society.

'The heart of man,' he used to say, 'is hidden, and nobody knows what another man feels. I have too much business of my own to attend to other people, let alone judging their motives.

But I cannot live in the same room with an ill-bred man : he offends me, il me froisse. Otherwise he may be the best man in the world ; if so, he will go to Heaven ; but I have no use for him.

The most important thing in life, more important than soaring intellect or erudition, is savoir vivre, to do the right thing always, never to thrust yourself forward, to be perfectly polite to everyone and familiar with nobody.'

All impulsiveness and frankness my father disliked and calleo familiarity ; and all display of feeling passed with him for sentimentality. He regularly represented himself as superior to all such trivialities ; but what that higher object was, for the sake of which he sacrificed his feelings, I have no idea. And when this proud old man, with his clear understanding and sincere contempt of mankind, played this part of a passionless judge, whom did he mean to impress by the performance ? A woman whose

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will h e had broken, though she never tried t o oppose him ; a boy whom his own treatment drove from mere naughtiness to positive disobedience ; and a score of footmen whom he did not reckon as human beings !

And how much strength and endurance was spent for this object, how much persistence ! How surprising the consistency with which the part was played to the very end, in spite of old age and disease ! The heart of man is indeed hidden.

At the time of my arrest, and later when I was going into exile, I saw that the old man's heart was much more open than I supposed to love and even to tenderness. But I never thanked him for this ; for I did not know how he would have taken my thanks.

As a matter of course, he was not happy. Always on his guard, discontented with everyone, he suffered when he saw the feelings he inspired in every member of the household. Smiles died away and talk stopped whenever he came into the room. He spoke of this with mockery and resented it ; but he made no concession whatever and went his own way with steady perseverance. Stinging mockery and cool contemptuous irony were the weapons which he could wield with the skill of an artist, and he used them equally against us and against the servants. There are few things that a growing boy resents more ; and, in fact, up to the time of my imprisonment I was on bad terms with my father and carried on a petty warfare against him, with the men and maids for my allies.

For the rest, he had convinced himself that he was dangerously ill, and was constantly under treatment. He had a doctor resident in the house and was visited by two or three other physicians ; and at least three consultations took place each year. His sour looks and constant complaints of his health (which was not really so bad) soon reduced the number of our visitors. He resented this ; yet he never remonstrated or invited any friend to the house. An air of terrible boredom reigned in our hous�, especially in the endless winter evenings. The whole suite of drawingrooms was lit up by a single pair of lamps ; and there the old man walked up and down, a stooping figure with his hands behind his back; he wore cloth boots, a velvet skull-cap, and a warm jacket

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of white lamb-skin : he never spoke a word, and three or four brown dogs walked up and down with him.

As melancholy grew on him, so did his wish to save, but it was entirely misapplied. His management of his land was not beneficial either to himself or to his serfs. The head man and his underlings robbed both their master and the peasants. In certain matters there was strict economy ; candle-ends were saved and light French wine was replaced by sour wine from the Crimea; on the other hand, a whole forest was felled without his knowledge on one estate, and he paid the market price for his own oats on another. There were men whom he permitted to steal; thus a peasant, whom he made collector of the obrok at Moscow, and who was sent every summer to the country, to report on the head man and the farm-work, the garden and the timber, grew rich enough to buy a house in Moscow after ten years' service. From childhood I hated this factotum : I was present once when he thrashe d an old peasant in our courtyard ; in my fury I caught him by the beard and nearly fainted myself. From that time I could never bear the sight of him. He died in 1845. Several times I asked my father where this man got the money to buy a house.

'The result of sober habits,' he said; 'that man never took a drop m his life.'

Every year about Shrovetide our peasants from the Government of Penza brought their payments in kind to Moscow. It was a fortnight's journey for the carts, laden with carcasses of pork, sucking-pigs, geese, chickens, rye, eggs, butter, and even linen.

The arrival of the peasants was a regular field-day for all our servants, who robbed and cheated the visitors right and left, without any right to do so. The coachman charged for the water their horses drank, and the women charged for a warm place by the fire, while the aristocrats of the servants' hall expected each to get a sucking-pig and a piece of cloth, or a goose and some pounds of butter. While the peasants remained in the courtyard, the servants feasted continuously : soup was always boiling and sucking-pigs roasting, and the servants' hall reeked perpetually of onions, burning fat, and bad whisky. During the last two days Bakay never came into the hall, but sat in the kitchen-passage, dressed in an old livery overcoat, without jacket or waistcoat

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underneath it ; and other servants grew older visibly and darker in complexion. All this my father endured calmly enough, knowing that it must be so and that reform was impossible.

These provisions always arrived in a frozen condition, and thereupon my father summoned his cook Spiridon and sent him to the markets to enquire about prices. The cook reported astonishingly low figures, lower by half than was actually offered.

My father called him a fool and sent for his factotum and a dealer in fruit named Slepushkin. Both expressed horror at the cook's figures, made enquiries, and quoted prices a little higher.

Finally Slepushkin offered to take the whole in a lump - eggs, sucking-pigs, butter, rye, and all - 'to save you, batyushka, from further worry'. The price he offered was of course a trifle higher than the cook had mentioned. My father consented : to celebrate the occasion, Slepushkin presented him with some oranges and gingerbread, and the cook with a note for 200 roubles And the most extraordinary part of this transaction was that it was repeated exactly every year.

Slepushkin enjoyed my father's favour and often borrowed money of him; and the strange way in which he did it showed his profound knowledge of my father's character.

He would borrow 500 roubles for two months, and two days before payment was due, he would present himself at our house, carrying a currant-loaf on a dish and 500 roubles on the top of the loaf. My father took the money, and the borrower bowed low and begged, though unsuccessfully, to kiss his benefactor's hand.

But Slepushkin would turn up again a week later and ask for a loan of 1 ,500 roubles. He got it and again paid his debt on the nail ; and my father considered him a pattern of honesty. A week later, Slepushkin would borrow a still larger sum. Thus in the course of a year he secured 5,000 roubles in ready money to use in his business ; and for this he paid, by way of interest, a couple of currant-loaves, a few pounds of figs and walnuts, and perhaps a hundred oranges and Crimean apples.

I shall end this subject by relating how my father lost nearly a thousand acres of valuable timber on one of the estates which had come to him from his brother, the Senator.

In the forties Count Orlov, wishing to buy land for his sons,

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offered a price for this estate, which was in the Government of Tver. The parties came to terms, and it seemed that the transaction was complete. But when the Count went to examine his purchase, he wrote to my father that the forest marked upon the plan of the estate had simply disappeared.

'There I' said my father, 'Orlov is a clever man of course ; he was involved in the conspiracy too.2 He has written a book on finance ; but when it comes to business, he is clearly no good.

Necker 3 over again ! I shall send a friend of iny own to look at the place, not a conspirator but an honest man who understands business.'

But alas ! the honest man came back and reported that the forest had disappeared ; all that remained was a fringe of trees, which made it impossible to detect the truth from the high-road or from the manor-house. After the division between the brothers, my uncle had paid five visits to the place, but had seen nothing I 7

That our way of life may be thoroughly understood, I shall describe a whole day from the beginning. They were all alike, and this very monotony was the most killing part of it all. Our life went on like an English clock with the regulator put back - with a slow and steady movement and a loud tick for each second.

At ten in the morning, the valet who sat in the room next the bedroom, informed Vera Artamonovna, formerly my nurse, that the master was getting up ; and she went off to prepare coffee, which my father drank alone in his study. The house now assumed a different aspect : the servants began to clean the rooms or at least to make a pretence of doing something. The servants'

hall, empty till then, began to fill up ; and even Macbeth, the big Newfoundland dog, sat down before the stove and stared unwinkingly at the fire.

Over his coffee my father read the Moscow Gazette and the Journal de St Petersbourg. It may be worth mentioning that the newspapers were wanned to save his hands from contact with the damp sheets, and that he read the political news in the French z. See p. 147.

3· facques Necker (1732.-1804), Minister of Finance under Louis XVI ; the husband of Gibbon's first love, and the father of Mme de Stael.

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version, finding i t clearer than the Russian. For some time h e took in the Hamburg Gazette, but could not pardon the Germans for using German print; he often pointed out to me the difference between French and German type, and said that the curly tails of the Gothic letters tried his eyes. Then he ordered the Journal de Francfort for a time, but finally contented himself with the native product.

When he had read the newspaper, he noticed for the first time the presence of Sonnenberg in the room. When Nick reached the age of fifteen, Sonnenberg professed to start a shop ; but having nothing to sell and no customers, he gave it up, when he had spent such savings as he had in this useful form of commerce ; yet he still called himself 'a commercial agent'. He was then much over forty, and at that pleasant age he lived like the fowls of the air or a boy of fourteen ; he never knew today where he would sleep or, how he would secure a dinner tomorrow. He enjoyed my father's favour to a certain extent : what that amounted to, we shall see presently.

In 1 840 my father bought the house next to ours, a larger and better house, with a garden, which had belonged to Countess Rostopchin, wife of the famous governor of Moscow. We moved into it. Then he bought a third house, for no reason except that it was adjacent. Two of these houses stood empty ; they were never let because tenants would give trouble and might cause fires - both houses were insured, by the way - and they were never repaired, so that both were in a fair way to fall down.

Sonnenberg was permitted to lodge in one of these houses, but on conditions : (1) he must never open the yard-gates after 10

p.m. (as the gates were never shut, this was an easy condition) ; (2) he was to provide firewood at his own expense (he did in fact buy it of our coachman) ; and (3) he was to serve my father as a kind of private secretary, corning in the morning to ask for orders, dining with us, and returning in the evening, when there was no company, to entertain his employer with conversation and the news.

The duties of his place may seem simple enough ; but my father contrived to make it so bitter that even Sonnenberg could not stand it continuously, though he was familiar with all the

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privitations that can befall a man with no money and no sense, with a feeble body, a pock-marked face, and German nationality.

Every two years or so, the secretary declared that his patience was at an end. He packed up his traps, got together by purchase or barter some odds and ends of disputable value and doubtful quality, and started off for the Caucasus. Misfortune dogged him relentlessly. Either his horse - he drove his own horse as far as Tiflis and Redut-Kale - came down with him in dangerous places inhabited by Don Cossacks ; or half his wares were stolen ; or his two-wheeled cart broke down and his French scent-bottles wasted their sweetness on the broken wheel at the foot of Mount Elbrus ; he was always losing something, and when he had nothing else to lose, he lost his passport. Nearly a year would pass, and then Sonnenberg, older, more unkempt, and poorer than before, with fewer teeth and less hair than ever, would tum up humbly at our house, with a stock of Persian powder against fleas and bugs, faded silk for dressing-gowns, and rusty Circassian daggers ; and down he settled once more in the empty house, to buy his own firewood and run errands by way of rent.

As soon as he noticed Sonnenberg, my father began a little campaign at once. He acknowledged by a bow enquiries as to his health ; then he thought a little, and asked (this just as an example of his methods), 'Where do you buy your hair-oil ? '

I should say that Sonnenberg, though the plainest of men, thought himself a regular Don Juan : he was careful about his clothes and wore a curling wig of a golden-yellow colour.

'I buy it of Bouis, on the Kuznetsky Bridge,' he answered abruptly, rather nettled ; and then he placed one foot on the other, like a man prepared to defend himself.

'What do you call that scent ? '

'Night-violet,' was the answer.

'The man is cheating you. Violet is a delicate scent, but this stuff is strong and unpleasant, the sort of thing embalmers use for dead bodies. In the weak condition of my nerves, it makes me feel ill. Please tell them to bring me some eau-de-cologne.'

Sonnenberg made off himself to fetch the bottle.

'Oh, no ! you'd better call someone. If you come nearer me

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yourself, I shall faint.' Sonnenberg, who counted o n his hair-oil to captivate the maids, was deeply injured.

When he had sprinkled the room with eau-de-cologne, my father set about inventing errands : there was French snuff and English magnesia to be ordered, and a carriage advertised for sale to be looked at - not that my father ever bought anything. Then Sonnenberg bowed and disappeared till dinner-time, heartily glad to get away.

The next to appear on the scene was the cook. Whatever he had bought or put on the slate, my father always objected to the price.

'Dear, dear ! how high prices are ! Is nothing coming in from the country ? '

'No, indeed, Sir,' answered the cook; 'the roads are very bad just now.'

'Well, you and I must buy less, until they're mended.'

Next he sat down at his writing table, where he wrote orders for his bailiff or examined his accounts, and scolded me in the intervals of business. He consulted his doctor also ; but his chief occupation was to quarrel with his valet, Nikita. Nikita was a perfect martyr. He was a short, red-faced man with a hot temper, and might have been created on purpose to annoy my father and draw down reproofs upon himself. The scenes that took place between the two every day might have furnished material for a comedy, but it was all serious to them. Knowing that the man was indispensable to him, my father often put up with his rudeness ; yet, in spite of thirty years of complete failure, he still persisted in lecturing him for his faults. The valet would have found the life unendurable, if he had not possessed one means of relief : he was generally tipsy by dinner-time. My father, though this did not escape him, did not go beyond indirect allusions to the subject : for instance, he would say that a piece of brown bread and salt prevented a man from smelling of spirits. When Nikita had taken too much, he shuffled his feet in a peculiar way while handing the dishes ; and my father, on noticing this, used to invent a message for him at once; for instance, he would send him to the barber's to ask if he had changed his address. Then he would say to me in French : 'I know he won't go ; but he's not

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sober ; he might drop a soup plate and stain the cloth and give me a start. Let him take a tum ; the fresh air will do him good.'

On these occasions, the valet generally made some reply, or, if not, muttered to himself as he left the room. Then the master called him back with unruffled composure, and asked him, 'What did you say to me ? '

' I said nothing at all t o you.'

'Then who are you talking to ? Except you and me, there is nobody in this room or the next.'

'I was talking to myself.'

'A very dangerous thing : madness often begins in that way.'

The valet went off in a fury to his room, which was next to his master's bedroom. There he read the Moscow Gazette and made wigs for sale. Probably to relieve his feelings, he took snuff furiously, and the snuff was so strong or the membrane of his nose so weak, that he always sneezed six or seven times after a pinch.

The master's bell rang and the valet threw down the hair in his hands and answered the bell.

'Is that you sneezing ?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Then, bless you I ' - and a motion of the hand dismissed the valet.

1 1

On the eve of each Ash Wednesday all the servants came, according to the old custom, to ask pardon of their master for offences ; and on these solemn occasions my father came into the drawing-room accompanied by his valet. He always pretended he could not recognise some of the people.

'Who is that decent old man, standing in that comer ? ' he would ask the valet.

'Danilo, the coachman,' was the impatient answer ; for Nikita knew all this was play-acting.

'Dear, dear I how changed he is ! I really believe it is drinking too much that ages them so fast. What does he do now ?'

'He drives fire-wood.'

My father made a face as if he were suffering severe pain.

'Drives wood ? What do you mean ? Wood is not driven, it is conveyed in a cart. Thirty years might have taught you to speak better • . • Well, Danilo, God in His mercy has permitted me to

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meet you yet another year. I pardon you all your offences throughout the year, your waste of my oats and your neglect of my horses ; and you must pardon me. Go on with your work while strength lasts ; and now that Lent is beginning, I advise you to take rather less spirits : at our years it is bad for the health, and the Church forbids it.' This was the kind of way in which he spoke to them all on this occasion.

We dined at four : the dinner lasted a long time and was very tiresome. Spiridon was an excellent cook; but his parsimony as well as my father's made the meal rather unsatisfying, though there were a number of courses. My father used to put bits for the dogs in a red j ar that stood beside his place ; he also fed them off his fork, a proceeding which was deeply resented by the servants and therefore by myself also ; but I do not know why.

Visitors, rare in general, were especially rare at dinner. I only remember one, whose appearance at the table had power at times to smooth the frown from my father's face, General Nikolay Bakhmetev. He had given up active service long ago ; but he and my father had been gay young subalterns together in the Guards, in the time of Catherine; and, while her son was on the throne, both had been court-martialled, Bakhmetev for fighting a duel, and my father for acting as a second. Later, the one had gone off to foreign parts as a tourist, the other to Ufa as Governor. Bakhmetev was a big man, healthy and handsome even in old age ; he enjoyed his dinner and his glass of wine, he enjoyed cheerful conversation, and other things as well. He boasted that in his day he had eaten a hundred meat patties at a sitting ; and, at sixty, he could eat a dozen buckwheat cakes swimming in a pool of butter, with no fear of consequences. I witnessed his feats of this kind more than once.

He had some faint influence over my father and could control him to some extent. When he saw that his friend was in too bad a temper, he would put on his hat and march away. 'I'm off for the present,' he would say ; 'you're not well, and dull tonight. I meant to dine with you but I can't stand sour faces at my dinner. Gehorsamer Diener ! ' Then my father would say to me, by way of explanation : 'What life there is in that old man yet I He may thank God for his good health ; he can't feel for poor

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sufferers like me ; in this awful frost he rushes about in his sledge and thinks nothing of it, at this season ; but I thank my Creator every morning for waking up with the breath still in my body.

There is truth in the proverb - it's ill talking between a full man and a fasting.' More indulgence than this it was impossible to expect from my father.

Family dinners were given occasionally to near relations, but these entertainments proceeded rather from deep design than from mere warmth of heart. Thus my uncle, the Senator, was always invited to a party at our house for his birthday, 20 February, and we were invited by him for St John's Day, 24 June, which was my father's birthday ; this arrangement not only set an edifying example of brotherly love, but also saved each of them from giving much larger entertainment at his own house.

There were some regular guests as well. Sonnenberg appeared at dinner ex officio ; he had prepared himself by a bumper of brandy and a sardine eaten beforehand, and declined the tiny glass of stale brandy offered him. My last French tutor was an occasional guest - an old miser and scandal-monger, with an impudent face. M. Thirie constantly made the mistake of filling his glass with wine instead of beer. My father would say to him, 'If you remember that the wine is on your right, you will not make the mistake in future' : and Thirie crammed a great pinch . of snuff into his large and crooked nose, and spilt the snuff over his plate.

One of these visitors was an exceedingly comic figure, a short, bald old man, who always wore a short, tight tailcoat, and a waistcoat which ended where a modern waistcoat begins. His name was Dmitri Pimenov, and he always looked twenty years out of date, reminding you of 1810 in 1830, and of 1820 in 1840.

He was interested in literature, but his natural capacity was small, and he had been brought up on the sentimental phrases of Karamzin, or Marmon tel and Marivaux. Dmitriyev was his master in poetry ; and he had been tempted to make some experiments of his own on that slippery track which is trod by Russian authors

- his first publication was a translation of La Rochefoucauld's Pensees, and his second a treatise on Female Beauty and Charm.

But his chief distinction was, not that he had once published C.Y.E.-6

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books which nobody ever read, but that, i f h e once began to laugh, he could not stop, but went on till he crowed convillsi,vely like a child with whooping-cough. He was aware of this, and therefore took his precautions when he felt it coming on : he pulled out his handbrchief, looked at his watch, buttoned up his coat, and covered his face with both hands ; then, when the paroxysm was imminent, he got up, turned his face to the wall, and stood in that position suffering torments, for half an hour or longer ; at last, red in the face and worn out by his exertions, he sat down again and mopped his bald head ; and for a long time an occasional sob heaved his body.

He was a kindly man, but awkward and poor and a man of letters. Consequently my father attached no importance to him and considered him as 'below the salt' in all respects ; but he was well aware of this tendency to convulsive laughter, and used to make his guests laugh to such an extent that other people could not help laughing too in an uncomfortable fashion. Then the author of all this merriment, with a slight smile on his own lips, used to look at us as a man looks at puppies when they are rioting.

My father sometimes played dreadful tricks on this unlucky admirer of Female Beauty and Charm.

A Colonel of Engineers was announced by the servant one day.

'Bring him in,' said my father, and then he turned to Pimenov and said, 'Please be careful before him : he is unfortunate enough to have a very peculiar stammer' - here he gave a very successful imitation of the Colonel - 'I know you are easily amused, but please restrain yourself.'

That was quite enough : before the officer had spoken three words, Pimenov pulled out his handkerchief, made an umbrella out of his hand, and finally sprang to his feet.

The officer looked on in surprise, while my father said to me with perfect composure : 'What can be the matter with our friend ? He is suffering from spasms of some kind : order a glass of cold water for him at once, and bring eau-de-cologne.'

But in these cases Pimenov clutched his hat and vanished.

Home he went, shouting with laughter for a mile or so, stopping at the crossings, and leaning against the lamp-posts.

For several years he dined at our house every second Sunday, with few exceptions ; and my father was equally vexed, whether

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he carne or failed to come. He was not kind to Pirnenov, but the worthy man took the long walk, in spite of that, until he died.

There was nothing laughable about his death : he was a solitary old bachelor, and, when his long illness was nearing the end, he looked on while his housekeeper robbed him of the very sheets upon his bed and then left him without attendance.

But the real martyrs of our dinner-table were certain old and feeble ladies, who held a humble and uncertain position in the household of Princess Khovansky, my father's sister. For the sake of change, or to get information about our domestic affairs -

whether the heads of the family had quarrelled, whether the cook had beaten his wife and been detected by his master, whether a·

maid had slipped from the path of virtue - these old people sometimes carne on a saint's day to spend the day. I ought to mention that these old widows had known my father forty or fifty years earlier in the house of the Princess Meshchersky, where they were brought up for charity. During this interval between their precarious youth and unsettled old age, they had quarrelled for twenty years with husbands, tried to keep them sober, nursed them when paralysed, and buried them. One had fought the battle of life in Bessarabia with a husband on half-pay and a swarm of children ; another, together with her husband, had been a defendant for years in the criniinal courts ; and all these experiences had left on them the traces of life in provincial towns - a dread of those who have power in this world, a spirit of humility and also of blind fanaticism.

Their presence often gave rise to astonishing scenes.

'Are you not well, that you are eating nothing, Anna Yakiniovna ? ' my father would ask.

Then Anna Yakiniovna, the widow of some obscure official, an old woman with a worn faded face and a perpetual smell of camphor, apologised with eyes and fingers as she answered : 'Excuse me, batyushka - I am really quite ashamed ; but, you know, by old custom to-day is a Fast-day.'

'What a nuisance ! You are too scrupulous, matyushka : "not that which entereth into a man defileth a man but that which cometh out" : . whatever you eat, the end is the same. But we ought to watch "what cometh out of the mouth", and that means

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scandal against our neighbours. I think you should dine a t home on such days. Suppose a Turk were to tum up, he might want pilaus ; but my house is not a hotel where each can order what he wants.' This terrified the old woman who had intended to ask for some milk pudding ; but she now attacked the kvass and the salad, and made a pretence of eating enormously.

But if she, or any of them, began to eat meat on a Fast-day, then my father (who never fasted himself) would shake his head sorrowfully and say : 'Do you really think it worth while, Anna Yakimovna, to give up the ancient custom, when you have so few years still to live ? I, poor sinner, don't fast myself, because I have many diseases ; but you may thank God for your health, considering your age, and you have kept the fasts all your life ; and now all of a sudden - think what an example to them -' pointing to the servants. And the poor old woman once more fell upon the kvass and the salad.

These scenes filled me with disgust, and I sometimes ventured to defend the victim by pointing out the desire of conformity which he expressed at other times. Then it was my father's custom to get up and take off his velvet skull-cap by the tassel : holding it over his head, he would thank me for my lecture and beg me to excuse his forgetfulness. Then he would say to the old lady : 'These are terrible times 1 Little wonder that you neglect the Fast, when children teach their parents ! What are we coming to ? It is an awful prospect; but fortunately you and I will not live to see it.'

1 )

After dinner m y father generally lay down for a n hour and a half, and the servants at once made off to the taverns and teashops. Tea was served at seven, and we sometimes had a visitor at that hour, especially my uncle, the Senator. This was a respite for us ; for he generally brought a budget of news with him and produced it with much vivacity. Meanwhile my father put on an air of absolute indifference, keeping perfectly grave over the most comic stories, and questioning the narrator, as if he could not see the point, when he was told of any striking fact.

The Senator came off much worse, when he occasionally contradicted or disagreed with his younger brother, and sometimes even without contradicting him, if my father happened to be

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specially out of humour. In the serio-comic scenes, the most comic feature was the contrast between my uncle's natural vehemence and my father's artificial composure. 'Oh, you're not well today,' my uncle would say at last, and then snatch his hat and go off in a hurry. One day he was unable in his anger to open the door. 'Damn that door ! ' he said, and kicked it with all his might.

My father walked slowly up to the door, opened it, and said with perfect calmness, 'The door works perfectly : but it opens outwards, and you try to open it inwards and get angry with it.' I may mention that the Senator, being two years older than my father, always addressed him as 'thou,' while my father said

'you' as a mark of respect for seniority.

When my uncle had gone, my father went to his bedroom ; but first he always enquired whether the gates of the court were shut, and expressed some doubt when he was told they were, though he never took any steps to ascertain the facts. And now began the long business of undressing : face and hands were washed, fomentations applied and medicines swallowed ; the valet placed on the table near the bed a whole arsenal of phials, nightlights, and pill-boxes. For about an hour the old man read memoirs of some kind, very often Bourrienne's Memorial de Ste Helene. And so the day ended.

Such was the life I left in 1834. and such I found it in 1 840, and such it remained down to my father's death in 1846. When I returned from exile at the age of thirty, I realised that my father was right in many respects, and that he, to his misfortune, knew the world only too well. But did I deserve that he should preach even the truth in a manner so repulsive to the heart of youth ?

His intelligence, chilled by a long life spent in a corrupt society, made him suspicious of all the world ; his feelings were not warm and did not crave for reconciliation ; and therefore he remained at enniity with all his fellow-creatures.

In 1839, and still more in 1842, I found him feeble and suffering from symptoms which were not imaginary. My uncle's death had left him more solitary than ever ; even his old valet had gone, but he was just the same ; his bodily strength had failed him, but his cruel wit and his memory were unaffected ; he still carried on the same petty tyranny, and the same old Sonnenberg still

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pitched his camp i n our old house and ran errands as before.

For the first time, I realised the sadness of that life and watched with an aching heart that solitary deserted existence, fading away in the parched and stony desert which he created around him by his own actions, but was powerless to change. He knew his powerlessness, and he saw death approaching, and held out jealously and stubbornly. I felt intense pity for the old man, but I could do nothing - he was inaccessible.

I sometimes walked past his study and saw him sitting in his deep armchair, a hard, uncomfortable seat ; he had his dogs round hir.l and was playing with my three-year-old son, just the two together. It seemed to me that the sight of this child relaxed the clutching fingers and stiffening nerves of old age, and that, when his dying hand touched the cradle of infancy, he could rest from the anxiety and irritable strife in which his whole life had been spent.

C H A P T E R VI

The Kremlin Offices - Moscow University - The Chemist - The Cholera - Filaret - Passek

In spite of the ominous prognostications of the one-legged general, my father entered my name for service at the Government offices in the Kremlin, under Prince Yusupov. I signed some document, and there the matter ended. I never heard anything more about my office, except once, three years later, when a man was sent to our house by Yusupov, to inform me that I had gained the first step of official promotion ; this messenger was the court architect, and he always shouted as if he were standing on the roof of a five-storeyed house and giving orders from there to workmen in the cellar. I may remark in passing, that all this hocus-pocus was useless : when I passed my final examination at the University, this gave me at once the promotion earned by service ; and the loss of a year or two of seniority was not serious.

On the other hand, this pretence of office-work nearly prevented me from matriculating ; for, when the University authorities found that I was reckoned as a Government clerk, they refused me permission to take the examination.

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For the clerks in public offices there were special afternoon lectures, of an elementary kind, which gave the right of admission to a special examination. Rich idlers, young gentlemen whose education had been neglected, men who wished to avoid military service and to get the rank of assessor as soon as possible - such were the candidates for this examination ; and it served as a kind of gold-mine to the senior professors, who gave private instruction at twenty roubles a lesson.

To pass through these Caudine Forks to knowledge was entirely inconsistent with my views, and I told my father decidedly that unless he found some other method I �hould retire from the Civil Service.

He was angry : he said that my wilfulness pr�vented him from settling my future, and blamed my teachers for filling my head with this nonsense ; but when he saw that all this had little effect upon me, he determined to wait on Prince Yusupov.

The Prince settled the matter in no time ; there was no shillyshallying about his methods. He sent for his secretary and told him to make out leave of absence for me - for three years. The secretary hummed and hawed and respectfully submitted to his chief that four months was the longest period for which leave could be granted without the imperial sanction.

'Rubbish, my friend ! ' said the Prince ; 'the thing is perfectly simple : if he can't have leave of absence, then say that I order him to go through the University course and complete his studies.'

The secretary obeyed orders, and next day found me sitting in the lecture-theatre of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics.

The University of Moscow and the High School of Tsarskoye Selo 1 play an important part in this history of Russian education and in the life of the last two generations.

After the year 1812, Moscow University and Moscow itself rose in importance. Degraded from her position as an imperial capital by Peter the Great, the city was promoted by Napoleon, partly by his wish but mainly against it, to be the capital of the Russian nation. The people discovered the ties of blood that bound them 1. Tsarskoye Selo, i.e., The Tsar's Village, was near Petersburg.

Pushkin was at this school.

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to Moscow b y the pain they felt o n hearing o f her capture b y the enemy. For her it was the beginning of a new epoch ; and her University became more and more the centre of Russian education, uniting as it did everything to favour its development -

historical importance and geographical position.

There was a vigorous outburst of intellectual activity in Petersburg after the death of the Emperor Paul ; but this died away in the darkness that followed the fourteenth of December, 1825.

All was reversed, the blood flowed back to the heart, and all activity was forced to ferment and burrow underground. But Moscow University stood firm and was the first visible object to emerge from the universal fog.

The University soon grew in influence. All the youth and strength of Russia came together there in one common meetingplace, from all parts of the country and all sections of society ; there they cast off the prejudices they had acquired at home, reached a common level, formed ties of brotherhood with one another, and then went back to every part of Russia and penetrated every class.

Down to 1848 the constitution of our universities was purely democratic. Their doors were open to everyone who could pass the examination, provided he was not a serf, or a peasant detained by the village community. The Emperor Nicholas limited the number of freshmen and increased the charges to pensioners, permitting poor nobles only to escape from this burden. But all this belongs to the class of measures that will disappear together with the passport system, religious intolerance, and so on.

A motley assemblage of young men, from high to low, from North and South, soon blended into a compact body united by ties of friendship. Among us social distinctions had none of that offensive influence which ones sees in English schools and regiments -

to say nothing of English universities which exist solely for the rich and well-hom. If any student among us had begun to boast of his family or his money, he would have been tormented and sent to Coventry by the rest.

The external distinctions among us were not deep and proceeded from other sources. For instance, the Medical School was across the park and somewhat removed from the other faculties ; besides, most of the medical students were Germans or came from

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theological seminaries. The Germans kept somewhat apart, and the bourgeois spirit of Western Europe was strong in them. The whole education of the divinity students and all their ideas were different from ours ; we spoke different languages ; they had grown up under the yoke of monastic control and been crammed with rhetoric and theology ; they envied our freedom, and we resented their Christian humility.

Though I joined the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, I never had any great turn or much liking for mathematics. Nick and I were taught the subject by the same teacher, whom we liked because he told us stories ; he was very entertaining, but I doubt if he could have developed a special passion in any pupil for his branch of science. He knew as far as Conic Sections, i.e., just what was required from schoolboys entering the University ; a true philosopher, he had never had the curiosity to glance at the 'University branches' of mathematics. It was specially remarkable that he taught for ten years continuously out of a single book - Francoeur's treatise - and always stopped at the same page, having no ambition to go beyond the required minimum.

I chose that Faculty, because it included the subject of natural science, in which I then took a specially strong interest; and this interest was due to a rather odd meeting.

I have described already the remarkable division of the family property in 1822. When it was over, my oldest uncle went to live in Petersburg, and nothing was heard of him for a long time. At last a report got abroad that he intended to marry. He was then over sixty, and it was well known that he had other children as well as a grown-up son. He did, in fact, marry the mother of his eldest son and so made the son legitimate. He might as well have legitimised the other children; but the chief object of these proceedings was well known - he wished to disinherit his brothers ; and he fully attained that object by the acknowledgement of his son. In the famous inundation of 1824, the water flooded the carriage in which he was driving. The old man caught cold, took to his bed, and died in the beginning of 1825.

About the son there were strange reports : it was said that he was unsociable and had no friends ; he was interested in chemistry

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and spent his life over the microscope ; he read even at meals and disliked women's society.

His uncles transferred to him the grievance they had felt against his father. They always called him 'The Chemist', using this as a term of contempt, and giving it to be understood that chemistry was a quite impossible occupation for a gentleman.

He had suffered horrible treatment from his father, who kept a harem in the house and not only insulted him by the spectacle of shameless senile profligacy but was actually jealous of his son's rivalry. From this dishonourable existence The Chemist tried to escape by means of laudanum ; but a friend who worked at chemistry with him saved his life by a mere chance. This frightened the father, and he treated his son better afterwards.

When his father died, The Chemist set free the fair captives of the harem, reduced by half the heavy dues levied by his father on the peasants, forgave all arrears, and gave away for nothing the exemptions which his father used to sell, excusing household servants from service in the Army.

When he came to Moscow eighteen months later, I was anxious to see him ; for I was inclined to like him for his treatment of his peasants, and also for the dislike which his uncles unjustly felt for him.

He called on my father one morning - a shortish man, with a large nose and half his hair gone ; he wore gold spectacles, and his fingers were stained with chemicals. My father's reception was cold and cutting, but the nephew gave just as good as he got ; when they had taken each other's measure, they talked on casual topics with a show of indifference and parted politely, but a strong feeling of dislike was concealed on both sides. My father saw that his antagonist would never give way.

They never came closer afterwards. The Chemist very rarely visited his uncles ; the last time he and my father met was after the Senator's death - he carne to ask a loan of JO,ooo roubles, in order to buy land. My father refused to lend it ; The Chemist was angry, but he rubbed his nose and said with a smile : 'What possible risk is there ? My estate is entailed, and I want the money for improvements. I have no children, so that you are the heir to my land as I am to yours.' 2 My father, who was then seventyfive, never forgave his nephew this sally.

2. Herzen himself was excluded from succession by his birth

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I began to visit him from time to time. His was a singular existence. He had a large house on the Tver Boulevard, where he lived in one very small room and used another as a laboratory. His old mother occupied another small room at the end of the passage ; and the rest of the house was unused, and left exactly as it was when his father migrated to Petersburg. Tarnished chandeliers, valuable furniture, rarities of all kinds, grandfather clocks supposed to have been bought by Peter the Great in Amsterdam, armchairs supposed to have belonged to Stanislas Leszczynski,3 empty frames, and pictures turned to the wall - all these, in complete disorder, filled three large drawing-rooms which were neither heated nor lighted. In the outer hall the servants were generally playing the banjo and smoking - in the very room where formerly they hardly dared to breathe or say their prayers. One of them lit a candle and escorted me through the long museum ; and he never failed to advise me to keep on my overcoat, because it was very cold in the drawing-rooms. Thick layers of dust covered all the projections of the furniture, and the contents of the rooms were reflected in the carved mirrors and seemed to move with the candle; straw, left over from packing, lay comfortably here and there, together with scraps of paper and bits of string.

After passing through these rooms, you came at last to a curtained door which led into the study. The heat in this room was terriffic ; and here The Chemist was always to be found, wearing a stained dressing-gown trimmed with squirrel-fur, sitting behind a rampart of books, and surrounded by bottles, retorts, crucibles, and other apparatus. A few years earlier, this room had been the scene of shocking vice and cruelty ; now it smelt of chlorine and was ruled by the microscope; and in this very room I was born !

When my father returned from foreign parts, he had not yet quarrelled with his brother, and spent some months under his roof. Here too my wife was born in the year 1817. After two years The Chemist sold the house, and I spent many evenings there, arguing about Pan-Slavism and losing my temper with Khomyakov,4 though nothing could make him lose his. The chief 3· King of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV.

4· Alexey Khomyakov (1804--60), poet, theologian, and a leader of the Slavophil party.

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rooms were altered then, but the outside steps, front hall, and staircase were unchanged ; and the little study was left as before.

The Chemist's household arrangements, simple at all times, were even simpler when his mother went to the country in summer and took the cook with her. At four in the afternoon, his valet brought a coff�·pot, made some strong broth in it, and placed it by the fire of the chemical furnace, where all sorts of poisons were brewing ; then he fetched half a chicken and a loaf from an eating-house ; and that was his master's dinner. When it was eaten, the valet washed the coffee-pot and restored it to its proper functions. The man came again in the evening : he removed from the sofa a heap of books and a tiger-skin which The Chemist had inherited from his father ; and when he had spread out a sheet and fetched pillows and a coverlet, the study, which had served as kitchen and drawing-room, was converted just as easily into a bedroom.

At the very beginning of cur acquaintance, The Chemist perceived that I was no mere idler ; and he urged me to give up literature and politics - the former was mere trifling and the latter not only fruitless but dangerous - and take to natural science. He gave me Cuvier's Essay on Geological Changes and Candolle's Botanical Geography, and, seeing that I profited by the reading, he placed at my disposal his own excellent collections and preparations, and even offered to direct my studies himself. On his own ground he was very interesting - exceedingly learned, acute, and even amiable, within certain limits. As far as the monkeys, he was at your service : from the inorganic kingdom up to the orang-outan, nothing came amiss to him ; but he did not willingly venture farther, and philosophy, in particular, he avoided as mere moonshine. He was no enemy to reform, nor Rip van Winkle : he simply disbelieved in human nature - he believed that selfishness is the one and only motive of our actions, and is limited . only by stupidity in some cases and by ignorance in others.

His materialism shocked me. It was quite unlike the superficial and half-hearted scepticism of a previous generation. His views were deliberate, consistent, and definite - one thought of

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Lalande's famous answer to Napoleon. 'Kant accepts the hypothesis of a deity.' said Napoleon. 'Sir,' answered the astronomer,

'in the course of my studies I have never found it necessary to make use of that hypothesis.'

The Chemist's scepticism did not refer merely to theology.

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire he called a mystic, and Oken a mere lunatic. He felt for the works of natural philosophers the contempt my father had expressed for Karamzin - 'They first invent spiritual forces and First Causes, and then they are surprised that they cannot prove them or understand them.' In fact, it was my father over again, but differently educated and belonging to a different generation.

His views on social questions were even more disquieting. He believed that men are no more responsible for their actions, good or bad, than beasts : it was all a matter of constitution and circumstances and depended mainly on the state of the nervous system, from which, as he said, people expect more than it is able to give. He disliked family life, spoke with horror of marriage, and confessed frankly that, at thirty years of age, he had never once been in love. This hard temperament had, however, one tender side which showed itself in his conduct towards his mother. Both had suffered much from his father, and common suffering had united them closely. It was touching to see how he did what he could to surround her solitary and sickly old age with security and attention.

He never tried to make converts to his views, except on chemistry : they came out casually or were elicited by my questions.

He was even unwilling to answer the objections I urged from an idealistic point of view ; his answers were brief, and he smiled as he spoke, showing the kind of considerateness that an old mastiff will show to a lapdog whom he allows to snap at him and only pushes gently from him with his paw. But I resented this more than anything else and returned unwearied to the attack, though I never gained a single inch of ground. In later years I often called to mind what The Chemist had said, just as I recalled my father's utterances ; and, of course, he was right in three-quarters of the points in dispute. But, all the same, I was right too. There are truths which, like political rights, cannot be conveyed from one man to another before a certain age.

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It was The Chemist's influence that made me choose the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Perhaps I should have done better to take up medicine ; but it did me no great harm to acquire a partial knowledge of differential and integral equations, and then to lose it absolutely.

Without a knowledge of natural science, there is no salvation for the modem man. This wholesome food, this strict training of the mind by facts, this proximity to the life that surrounds ours, and this acknowledgement of its independence - without these there lurks somewhere in the soul a monastic cell, and this contains a germ of mysticism which may cover like a dark cloud the whole intellect.

Before I had gone through College, The Chemist had moved to Petersburg, and I did not meet him again till my return from exile. A few months after my marriage I paid a half-secret visit of a few days to my father, who was L.ving near Moscow. He was still displeased at my marriage, and the purpose of my journey was to make peace between us once for all. I broke my journey at the village of Perkhushkovo, the place where we had so often stayed in my youth. The Chemist was expecting me there; he even had dinner ready for me, and two bottles of champagne.

Four or five years had made no change in him, except that he looked a little older. Before dinner he said to me quite seriously :

'Please tell me frankly. how marriage and domestic life strike you. Do you find it to your taste, or only passable ?' I laughed, and he went on : 'I am astonished at your boldness ; no man in a normal condition could ever decide on so awful a step. More than one good match has been suggested to me ; but when I think that a woman would do as she liked in my room, arranging everything in what she thinks order, forbidding me to smoke possibly, making a noise and talking nonsense, I feel such terror of the prospect that I prefer to die in solitude.'

'Shall I stop the night here or go on to my father's ? ' I asked him after dinner.

'There is room enough in the house,' he answered, 'but for your own sake I advise you to go on ; you will get there by ten o'clock. Of course you know he's still angry with you. Well, old people's nerves are generally less active at night, before they get

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to sleep, and you will probably get a much better reception tonight than tomorrow morning ; by then his spurs will be sharp for the fray.'

'Ha ! ha l ha ! ' I laughed, 'there is my old instructor in physiology and materialism ! You remind me of those blissful days, when I used to come to you, like Wagner in Faust, to bore you with my idealism and to suf.Ier, with some impatience, the cold water you threw on it.'

He laughed too and replied, 'You have lived long enough, since then, to find out that all human actions depend merely on the nerves and chemical combination.'

Later, we somehow drifted apart; probably we were both to blame. Nevertheless, he wrote me a letter in 1846. I had published the first part of Who Is At Fault? � and was beginning to be the fashion. He wrote that he was sorry to see me wasting my powers on trivial objects. 'I made it. up with you because of your letters on the study of Nature, in which you made me understand (as far as it is intelligible to the mind of man) the German philosophy. But why, instead of going on with serious work, do you write fairy tales ? ' I sent him a few friendly words in reply, and there our relations ended.

If these lines happen to fall under The Chemist's eyes, I beg that he will read them before going to bed, when the nerves are less active ; and I am convinced that he will be able then to pardon this friendly gossip, and all the more because I cherish a real regard for him.

And so, at last, the doors of my prison were opened, and I was free. The solitude of my smallish room and the quiet half-secret interviews with my one friend, Ogarev, were now exchanged for a noisy family of six hundred members. In a fortnight, I was more at home there than I had ever been, from the day I was born, in my father's house.

But even here my father's house pursued me, in the shape of a footman whom my father sent with me to the University, especially when I walked there. I spent a whole term in trying to dodge this escort, and was formally excused from it at last. I say 'formally', because my valet Peter, who was entrusted with this duty, s. A noveL

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very soon realised, first, that I disliked being escorted, and secondly, that he himself would be much better off in various places of amusement than in the entrance-hall of my lectureroom, where he had no occupation except to exchange gossip and pinches of snuff with the two porters. What was the motive of this precaution ? Was it possible that Peter, who had been liable all his life to drinking-bouts that lasted for days, could keep me straight ? I don't suppose my father believed that; but, for his own peace of mind, he took measures - ineffective, indeed, but still measures - much in the way that freethinkers keep Lent This is a characteristic feature of the old system of education in Russia. Till I was seven, I was not allowed to come downstairs alone - the flight was rather steep ; and Vera Artamonovna went on bathing me till I was eleven. It was of a piece with this system that I should have a servant walking behind me to College, and should not be allowed, before I was twenty-one, to be out later than half-past ten. I was never really free and independent till I was banished ; but for that incident, the system would probably have gone on till I was twenty-five or thirty-five.

Like most energetic boys who had been brought up alone, I rushed into the arms of my companions with such frank eagerness, made proselytes with such sublime confidence, and was myself so fond of everyone, that I could not but kindle a corresponding warmth in my hearers, who were mostly of the same age as myself. I was then seventeen.

The process of making friends was hastened partly by the advice which worldly wisdom gave me - to be polite to all and intimate with none, to confide in nobody ; and there was also the belief which we all took with us to College, the belief that here our dreams would be realised, that here we should sow the seed of a future harvest and lay the foundations of a permanent alliance.

The young men of my time were admirable. It was just the time when ideals were stirring more and more in Russia. The formalism of theological training and Polish indolence had alike disappeared, and had not yet given place to German utilitarian·

ism, which applies culture to the mind, like manure to a field, in the hope of a heavier crop. The best students had ceased to con·

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sider learning as a tiresome but indispensable byway to official promotion ; and the questions which we discussed had nothing to do with advancement in the Civil Service.

On the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge had not yet become divorced from realities, and did not distract our attention from the suffering humanity around us ; and this sympathy heightened the social morality of the students. My friends and I said openly in the lecture-room whatever came into our heads ; copies of forbidden poems were freely circulated, and forbidden books were read aloud and commented on ; and yet I cannot recall a single instance of information given by a traitor to the authorities. There were timid spirits who held aloof and shut their eyes ; but even they held their tongues.

One foolish boy made some disclosures to his mother, when she questioned him, under threat of the rod, about the Malov affair.

The fond mother - she was a Princess and a leader in society -

rushed to the Rector and communicated her son's disclosures, in order to prove his repentance. We found this out, and tormented him so, that he left before his time was up.

But this episode, which led to my confinement within the walls of the University prison, is worth telling.

Malov, though a professor in the University, was a stupid, rude, ill-educated man, an object of contempt and derision to the students. One of them, when asked by a Visitor, how many professors there were in their department, replied that there were nine, not counting Malov.6 And this man, who could be spoken of in this way, began to treat his class with more and more rudeness, till they determined to turn him out of the lecture-room.

When their plan was made, they sent two spokesmen to our department, and invited me to bring reinforcements. I raised the fiery cross against the foe at once, and was joined by some adherents. When we entered Malov's lecture-room, he was there and saw us.

One fear only was depicted on the faces of all the audience -

that he might refrain for once from rude remarks. But that fear soon passed off. The tightly packed lecture-room was in a fever and gave vent to a low suppressed noise. Malov made some ob-6. There is here an untranslatable play on words.

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jection, and a scraping of feet began. 'You are like horses, expressing your thoughts with your feet,' said the professor, imagin·

ing, I suppose, that horses think by gallop and trot. Then the stonn broke, with hisses and yells. 'Tum him out ! tum him out !

Pereat!' Malov turned white as a sheet and made a desperate effort to control the noise, but failed ; the students jumped up on the benches. Malov slowly left his chair, hunched himself up, and made his way to the door. The students followed him through the court to the street outside, and threw his goloshes out after him.

The last detail was important : if once it reached the street, the proceedings became much more serious ; but what lads of seventeen or eighteen would ever take that into account ?

The University Council took fright and induced the Visitor to represent the affair as settled, and, with that object, to consign the guilty persons or someone, at least, to the University prison.

That was rather ingenious on their part. Otherwise, it was likely enough that the Emperor would send an aide-de-camp, and that the aide-de-camp, in order to earn a cross, would have magnified the affair into conspiracy and rebellion ; then he would have advised penal servitude for all the offenders, and the Emperor, in his mercy, would have sent them to the colours instead. But seeing vice punished and virtue triumphant, the Emperor merely confirmed the action of the students by dismissing the professor.

Though we drove Malov as far as the University gates, it was Nicholas who drove him out of them.

So the fat was in the fire. On the following afternoon, one of the porters hobbled up to me, a white-haired old man who was normally in a state more drunk than sober, and produced from the lining of his overcoat a note from the Rector for me : I was ordered to call on him at seven in the evening. The porter was soon followed by a student, a baron from the Baltic Provinces, who was one of the unfortunate victims enticed by me, and had received an invitation similar to mine. He looked pale and frightened and began by heaping reproaches on me; then he asked me what I advised him to say.

'Lie desperately,' I answered ; 'deny everything, except that there was a row and you were present.'

'But if the Rector asks why I was in the wrong lecture-room ? '

'That's easy. Say o f course that o ur lecturer di d not tum up,

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and that you, not wishing to waste your time, went to hear someone else.'

'He won't believe me.'

'That's his affair.'

When we entered the University yard, I looked at my baron : his plump cheeks were very pale, and he was obviously feeling uncomfortable. 'Listen to me,' I said ; 'you may be sure that the Rector will deal with me first. Say what I say, with variations ; you really took no special part in the affair. But remember one thing : for making a row and for telling lies about it, they will, at most, put you in the prison, but, if you are not careful and involve any other student, I shall tell the rest and we shall poison your existence.' The baron promised, and kept his word like a gentleman.

The Rector at that time was Dvigubsky, a survival and a typical specimen of the antediluvian professor - but, for flood I should substitute fire, the Great Fire of 1812.

They are extinct now : the patriarchal epoch of Moscow University ends with the appointment of Prince Obolensky as Visitor.

In those days the Government left the University alone : the professors lectured or not, the students attended or not, just as they pleased, and the latter, instead of the kind of cavalry uniform tbey have now, wore mufti of varying degrees of eccentricity, and very small caps which would hardly stick on over their virgin locks.

Of professors there were two classes or camps, which carried on a bloodless warfare against each other - one composed exclusively of Germans, the other of non-Germans. The Germans included some worthy and learned men, such as Loder, Fischer, Hildebrandt, and Heym ; but they were distinguished as a rule for their ignorance and dislike of the Russian language, their want of sympathy with the students, their unlimited consumption of tobacco, and the large number of stars and orders which they always wore. The non-Germans, on their side, knew no modern language but Russian ; they had the ill-breeding of the theological school and the servile temper of their nation ; they were mostly overworked, and they made up for abstention from tobacco by an excessive indulgence in strong drinks. Most of the Germans came

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from GOttingen, and most o f the non-Germans were sons of priests.

Dvigubsky belonged to the latter class. He looked so much the ecclesiastic that one of the students - he had been brought up at a priests' school - asked for his blessing and regularly addressed him as 'Your Reverence' in the course of an examination. But he was also startingly like an owl wearing the Order of St Anne ; and as such he was caricatured by another student who had come less under church influences. He came occasionally to our lectureroom, and brought with him the dean, Chumakov, or Kotelnitsky, who had charge of a cupboard labelled Materia Medica, and kept, for some unknown reason, in the mathematical class-room ; or Reiss, who had been imported from Germany because his uncle knew chemistry, and lectured in French with such a pronunciation that poisson took the place of poison in his mouth, and some quite innocent words sounded unprintable. When these old gentlemen appeared, we stared at them : to us they were a party of 'dug-outs', the Last of the Mohicans, representatives of a different age, quite remote from ours - of the time when Knyazhnin and Kheraskov were read, the time of good-natured Professor Diltey, who had two dogs which he named Babil and Bijou, because one never stopped barking and the other was always silent.

1 1

But Dvigubsky was by no means a good-natured professor : his reception of us was exceedingly abrupt and discourteous ; I talked terrible nonsense and was rude, and the baron played second fiddle to me. Dvigubsky was provoked and ordered us to appear before the Council next morning. The Council settled our business in half an hour : they questioned, condemned, and sentenced us, and referred the sentence, for confirmation, to Prince Golitsyn.

I had hardly had time to give half a dozen performances in the lecture-room, representing the proceedings of the University Court, when the beginning of the lecture was interrupted by the appearance of a party, consisting of our inspector, an army major, a French dancing-master, and a corporal, who carried an order for my arrest and incarceration. Some students escorted me, and there were many more in the courtyard, who waved their hands

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or caps. Clearly I was not the first victim. The University police tried in vain to push them back.

I found two captives already immured in the dirty cellar which served as a prison, and there were two more in another room ; six was the total number of those who suffered from this affair. We were sentenced to a diet of bread and water, and, though we declined some soup which the Rector sent us, we did not suffer ; for when the College emptied at nightfall, our friends brought us cheese, game, cigars, wine, and liqueurs. The sentry grumbled and scolded, but he took a small bribe, and introduced the supplies.

After midnight, he moved to some distance and allowed several of our friends to join us. And so we spent our time, feasting by night and sleeping by day.

A certain Panin, a brother of the Minister of Justice and employed under our Visitor, mindful of Army traditions, took it into his head one night to go the rounds and inspect our cellar-prison.

We had just lit a candle, keeping it under a chair to betray no light, and were attacking our midnight meal, when a knocking was heard at the outer door, not the meek sound that begs for admittance- and fears to be heard more than not to be heard, but a knock of power and authority. The sentry turned rigid, we hid the bottles and our guests in a cupboard, blew out the light, and dropped on our pallet-beds. Panin came in. 'You appear to be smoking.' he said - the smoke was so thick that Panin and the inspector who were carrying a lantern were hardly visible.

'Where do they get a light from ? From you ? ' he asked the sentry.

The man swore he was innocent, and we said that we had got tinder of our own. The inspector promised to take it and our cigars away ; and Panin went off, without ever noticing that there were twice as many caps in the room as heads.

On Saturday evening the inspector appeared and announced that I and one other might go home ; the rest were to stay till Monday. I resented this proposal and asked him whether I might stay. He fell back a step, looked at me with that expression of dignified wrath which is worn by ballet-dancers when representing angry kings or heroes, and said, 'By all means, if you want to ! ' Then he left us ; and this sally on my part brought down more paternal wrath on me than any other part of the affair.

Thus the first nights which I spent away from home were spent in prison. I was soon to experience a prison of another kind, and C.Y.E.-7

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there I spent, not eight days, but nine months ; and when these had passed, instead of going home, I went into exile. But much happened before that .

. From this time I was a popular hero in the lecture-room. Till then I was considered 'all right' by the rest ; but, after the Malov affair, I became, like the lady in Gogol, all right in the fullest sense of that term.

But did we learn anything, meanwhile, and was study possible under such circumstances ? I think we did. The instruction was more limited in quantity and scope than in the 40s. But a university is not bound to complete scientific education : its business is rather to put a man in a position to walk by himself; it should raise problems and teach a man to ask questions. And this is exactly what was done by such professors as Pavlov and Kachenovsky, each in his own way. But the collision of young minds, the exchange of ideas, and the discussion of books - all this did more than professors or lectures to develop and ripen the student.

Moscow University was a successful institution ; and the professors who contributed by their lectures to the development of lermontov, Belinsky, Turgenev, Kaveli]1, and Pirogov, may play cards with an easy conscience, or, with a still easier conscience, rest in their graves.

And what astonishing people some of them were I There was Chumakov, who treated the formulae of Poinsot's Algebra like so many serfs - adding letters and subtracting them, mixing up square numbers and their roots, and treating x as the known quantity. There was Myagkov, who, in spite of his name,7 lectured on the harshest of sciences, the science of tactics. The constant study of this noble subject had actually given a martial air to the professor ; and as he stood there buttoned up to the throat and erect behind his stock, his lectures sounded more like words of command than mere conversation. 'Gentlemen, artillery ! ' he would cry out. It sounded like the field of battle, but it only meant that this was the heading of his next discourse. And there was Reiss, who lectured on chemistry but never ventured further than hydrogen - Reiss, who was elected to the Chair for no knowledge of his own but because his uncle had once studied the 7· Myagky is the Russian for 'mild'.

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science. The latter was invited to come to Russia towards the end of Catherine's reign ; but the old man did not want to move, and sent his nephew instead.

My University course lasted four years, the additional year being due to the fact that a whole session was lost owing to cholera. The most remarkable events of that time were the cholera itself, and the visits of Humboldt and Uvarov.

1 3

When Humboldt 8 was on his way back from the Ural Mountains, he was welcomed to Moscow at a formal meeting of the Society for the Pursuit of Natural Science, most of whose members were state functionaries of some kind, not at all interested in science, either natural or unnatural. But the glory of Humboldt -

a Privy Councillor of the Prussian King, a man on whom the Tsar had graciously conferred the Order of St Anne, with instructions that the recipient was to be put to no expense in the matter - was a fact of which even they were not ignorant ; and they were determined to show themselves to advantage before a man who had climbed Chimborazo and who lived at Sans-Souci.9

Our attitude towards Europe and Europeans is still that of provincials towards the dwellers in a capital : we are servile and apologetic, take every difference for a defect, blush for our peculiarities and try to hide them, and confess our inferiority by imitation. The fact is that we are intimidated : we have never got over the sneers of Peter the Great and his coadjutors, or the superior airs of French tutors and Germans in our Civil Service.

Western nations talk of our duplicity and cunning ; they believe we want to deceive them, when we are only trying to make a creditable appearance and pass muster. A Russian will express quite different political views in talking to different persons, without any ulterior object, and merely from a wish to please : the bump of complaisance is highly developed in our skulls.

'Prince Dmitry Golitsyn', said Lord Durham on one occasion,

'is a true Whig, a Whig at heart.' Prince Golitsyn was a worthy 8. Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859), born at Berlin, a famous writer on natural science.

9· The Prussian palace, near Potsdam.

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Russian gentleman, but I d o not understand in what sense he was a Whig. It is clear enough that the Prince in his old age wished to be polite to Lord Durham and put on the Whig for that purpose.

1 )

Humboldt's reception in Moscow and at the University was a tremendous affair. Everyone carne to meet him - the Governor of the city, functionaries military and civil, and the judges of the Supreme Court ; and the professors were there wearing full uniform and their Orders, looking most martial with swords and three-cornered hats tucked under their arms. Unaware of all this, Humboldt arrived in a blue coat with gilt buttons and was naturally taken aback. His way was barricaded at every point between the entrance and the great hall : first the Rector stopped him, then the Dean, now a budding professor, and now a veteran who was just ending his career and therefore spoke very slowlv ; each of them delivered a speech of welcome in Latin or German or French, and all this went on in those terrible stone funnels miscalled passages, where you stopped for a minute at the risk of catching cold for a month. Humboldt listened bare-headed to them all and replied to them all. I feel convinced that none of the savages, either red-skinned or copper-coloured, whom he had met in his travels, made him so uncomfortable as his reception at Moscow.

When he reached the hall at last and could sit down, he had to get up again. Our Visitor, Pisarev, thought it necessary to set forth in a few powerful Russian sentences the merits of His Excellency, the famous traveller ; and then a poet, Glinka, in a deep hoarse voice recited a poem of his own which began : Humboldt, Prometheus of our time I

What Humboldt wanted was to discuss his observations on the magnetic pole, and to compare the meteorological records he had taken in the Ural Mountains with those at Moscow ; but the Rector preferred to show him some relic plaited out of the hair of Peter the Great. It was with difficulty that Ehrenberg and Rose found an opportunity to tell him something of their discoveries.10

Even in unofficial circles, we don't do things much better in 10. Odd views were taken in Russia of Humboldt's travels. There was a Cossack at Perm who liked describing how he escorted 'a mad

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Russia. Liszt was received in just the same way by Moscow society ten years ago. There was folly enough over him in Germany; but that was quite a different thing - old-maidish gush and sentimentality and strewing of roses, whereas in Russia there was servile acknowledgement of power and prim formality of a strictly official type. And Liszt's reputation as a Don Juan was mixed up in an unpleasant way with it all : the ladies swarmed around him, just as boys in out-of-the-way places swarm round a traveller when he is changing horses and stare at him or his carriage or his hat. Every ear was turned to Liszt, every word and every reply was addressed to him alone. I remember one evening when Khomyakov, in his disgust with the company, appealed to me to start a dispute with him on any subject, that Liszt might discover there were some people in the room who were not exclusively taken up with him. I can only say one thing to console our ladies - that Englishwomen treated other celebrities, Kossuth, Garibaldi, and others, in just the same way, crowding and jostling round the object of worship ; but woe to him who seeks to learn good manners from Englishwomen, or their husbands I 16

Our other distinguished visitor was also 'a Prometheus of our time' in a certain sense ; only, instead of stealing fire from Zeus, he stole it from mankind. This Prometheus, whose fame was sung, not by Glinka but by Pushkin himself in his Epistle to Lucullus, was Uvarov, the Minister of Education.U He astonished us by the Prussian prince called 'Gumplot'. When asked what Gumplot did, he said : 'He was quite childish, picking grasses and gazing at sand. At one place he told me through the interpreter to wade into a pool and fish out what was at the bottom - there was nothing but what there is at the bottom of every pool. Then he asked if the water at the bottom was very cold. You won't catch me th:tt way, thought I ; so I saluted and said, "The rules of the service require it, Your Excel·

Ieney." ' (Author's Note.)

1 1 . Sergey Uvarov (1 786-1855) was both Minister of Education and President of the Academy of Sciences. He used his power to tighten the censorship and suppressed The Moscow Telegraph, edited by Polevoy, which was the most independent of Russian journals ; in this way he 'stole fire from mankind'. The reference to Pushkin is malicious : what Pushkin wrote about Uvarov in that poem was the reverse of complimentary. 'Lucullus' was Count Sheremetev and Uvarov was his heir.

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number of languages h e spoke and b y the amount of h is miscellaneous knowledge ; he was a real shopman behind the counter of learning and kept samples of all the sciences, the elements chiefly, in his head. In Alexander's reign, he wrote reform pamphlets in French ; then he had a German correspondence with Goethe on Greek matters. After becoming minister, he discoursed on Slavonic poetry of the fourth century, which made Kachenovsky remark to him that our ancestors were much busier in fighting bears than in hymning their gods a·nd kings. As a kind of patent of nobility, he carried about in his pocket a letter from Goethe, in which Goethe paid him a very odd compliment : 'You have no reason to apologise for your style : you have succeeded in doing what I could never do - forgetting German grammar.'

This highly placed Admirable Crichton invented a new kind of torture for our benefit. He gave directions that the best students should be selected, and that each of them should deliver a lecture in his own department of study, in place of the professor. The Deans of course chose the readiest of the students to perform.

These lectures went on for a whole week. The students had to get up all the branches of their subject, and the Dean drew a lot to determine the theme and the speaker. Uvarov invited all the rank and fashion of Moscow. Ecclesiastics and judges, the Governor of the city, and the old poet, Dmitriyev - everyone was there.

It fell to me to lecture on a mineralogical subject. Our professor, Lovetsky - he is now dead - was a tall man with a clumsy figure and awkward gait, a large mouth and a large and entirely expressionless face. He wore a pea-green overcoat, adorned in the fashion of the First Consulate with a variety of capes; and while taking off this garment in the passage outside the lecture-room, he always began in an even and wooden voice which seemed to suit his subject. 'In our last lecture we dealt fully with silicon dioxide' - then he took his seat and went on, 'We proceed to aluminium . . . '. In the definition of each metal, he followed an absolutely identical formula, so that some of them had to be defined by negatives, in this way : 'Crystallisation : this metal does not crystallise' ; 'Use : this metal is never nsed' ; 'Service to man :

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this substance does nothing but hann to the human organism.'

Still he did not avoid poetical illustration or edifying comment : whenever he showed us counterfeit gems and explained how they were made, he never failed to add, 'Gentlemen, this is dishonest.'

When alluding to fanning, he found moral worth in a cock that was fond of crowing and courting his hens, and blue blood in a ram if he had 'bald knees'. He had also a touching story about some flies which ran over the bark of a tree on a fine summer day till they were caught in the resin which had turned to amber ; and this always ended with the words, 'Gentlemen, these things are an allegory.'

When I was summoned forth by the Dean, the audience was somewhat weary : two lectures on mathematics had had a depressing effect upon hearers who did not understand a word of the subject. Uvarov called for something more lively and a speaker with a ready tongue ; and I was chosen to meet the situation.

While I was mounting to the desk, Lovetsky sat there motionless, with his hands on his knees, looking· like Memnon or Osiris.

I whispered to him, 'Never fear I I shan't give you away I ' - and the worthy professor, without looking at me and hardly moving his lips. formed the words, 'Boast not, when girding on thine annour ! ' I nearly laughed aloud, but when I looked in front of me, the whole room swam before my eyes, I felt that I was losing colour, and my mouth grew strangely dry. It was my first speech in public; the lecture-room v·as full of students, who relied upon me; at a table just below me sat the dignitaries and all the professors of our faculty. I took the paper and read out in a voice that sounded strange to myself, 'Crystallisation : its conditions, laws, and forms.'

While I was considering how I should begin, a consoling thought came into my head - that, if I did make mistakes, the professors might perhaps detect them but would certainly not speak of them, while the rest of the audience would be quite in the dark, and the students would be quite satisfied if I managed not to break down ; for I was a favourite with them. So I delivered my lecture and ended up with some speculative observations, addressing myself throughout to my companions and not to the minister. Students and professors shook me by the hand and expressed their thanks. Uvarov presented me to Prince Golitsyn, who said something, but I could not understand it, as the Prince

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used vowels only and n o consonants. Uvarov promised m e a book as a souvenir of the occasion ; but I never got it.

My second and third appearances on a public stage were very different. In 1836 I took a chief part in amateur theatricals before the Governor and beau monde of Vyatka. Though we had been rehearsing for a month, my heart beat furiously and my hands trembled ; when the overture came to an end, dead silence followed, and the curtain slowly rose with an awful twitching. The leading lady and I were in the green-room ; and she was so sorry for me, or so afraid that I would break down and spoil the piece, that she administered a full bumper of champagne; but even this was hardly able to restore me to my senses.

This preliminary experience saved me from all nervous symptoms and self-consciousness when I made my third public appearance, which was at a Polish meeting held in London and presided over by the ex-Minister Ledru-Rollin.

But perhaps I have dwelt long enough on College memories. I fear it may be a sign of senility to linger so long over them ; and I shall only add a few details on the cholera of 1 8 3 1 .

The word 'cholera', so familiar now i n Europe and especially in Russia, was heard in the North for the first time in 183 1 . The dread contagion caused general terror, as it spread up the course of the Volga towards Moscow. Exaggerated rumours filled men's minds with horror. The epidemic took a capricious course, sometimes pausing, and sometimes passing over a district : it was believed that it had gone round Moscow, when suddenly the terrible tidings spread 'like wildfire. 'The cholera is in the city.'

A student who was taken ill one morning died in the University hospital on the evening of the next day. We went to look at the body. It was emaciated as if by long illness, the eyes were sunk in their sockets, and the features were distorted. Near him lay his attendant who had caught the infection during the night.

We were told that the University was to be closed. The notice was read in our faculty by Denisov, the professor of technology; he was depressed and perhaps frightened ; before the end of the next day he too was dead.

All the students collected in the great court of the University.

There was something touching in that crowd of young men forced

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asunder by the fear of infection. All were excited, and there were many pale faces ; many were thinking of relations and friends ; we said goodbye to the scholars who were to remain behind in quarantine, and dispersed in small groups to our homes. There we were greeted by the stench of chloride of lime and vinegar, and submitted to a diet which, of itself and without chloride or cholera, was quite enough to cause an illness.

It is a strange fact, but this sad time is more solemn than sad in my recollection of it.

The aspect of Moscow was entirely changed. The city was animated beyond its wont by the feeling of a common life. There were fewer carriages in the streets ; crowds stood at the crossings and spoke darkly of poisoners ; ambulances, conveying the sick, moved along at a footpace, escorted by police ; and people turned aside as the hearses went by. Bulletins were published twice a day. The city was surrounded by troops, and an unfortunate beadle was shot while trying to cross the river. These measures caused much excitement, and fear of disease conquered the fear of authority ; the inhabitants protested ; and meanwhile tidings followed tidings - that so-and-so had sickened and so-and-so was dead.

The Archbishop, Filaret, ordained a Day of Humiliation. At the same hour on the same day all the priests went in procession with banners round their parishes, while the terrified inhabitants came out of their houses and fell on their knees, weeping and praying that their sins might be forgiven ; even the priests were moved by the solemnity of the occasion. Some of them marched to the Kremlin, where the Archbishop, surrounded by clerical dignitaries, knelt in the open air and prayed, 'May this cup pass from us I'

Filaret carried on a kind of opposition to Government, but why he did so I never could understand, unless it was to assert his own personality. He was an able and learned man, and a perfect master of the Russian language, which he spoke with a happy flavouring of Church-Slavonic ; but all this gave him no right to be in opposition. The people disliked him and called him a freemason, because he was intimate with Prince A. N. Golitsyn and preached in Petersburg just when the Bible Society was in vogue there. The Synod forbade the use of his Catechism in the schools. But the

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clergy who were under his rule trembled before him.

Filaret knew how to put down the secular powers with great ingenuity and dexterity ; his sermons breathed that vague Christian socialism to which Lacordaire and other far-sighted Roman Catholics owed their reputation. From the height of his episcopal pulpit, Filaret used to say that no man could be legally the mere instrument of another, and that an exchange of services was the only proper relation between human beings ; and this he said in a country where half the population were slaves.

Speaking to a body of convicts who were leaving Moscow on their way to Siberia, he said, 'Human law has condemned you and driven you forth ; but the Church will not let you go ; she wishes to address you once more, to pray for you once again, and to bless you before your journey.' Then, to comfort them, he added, 'You, by your punishment, have got rid of your past, and a new life awaits you ; but, among others' (and there were probably no others present except officials) 'there are even greater sinners than you' ; and he spoke of the penitent thief at the Crucifixion as an example for them.

But Filaret's sermon on the Day of Humiliation left all his previous utterances in the shade. He took as his text the passage where the angel suffered David to choose between war, famine, and pestilence as the punishment for his sin, and David chose the pestilence. The Tsar came to Moscow in a furious rage, and sent a high Court official to reprove the Archbishop ; he even threatened to send him to Georgia to exercise his functions there. Filaret submitted meekly to the reproof; and then he sent round a new rescript to all the churches, explaining that it was a mistake to suppose that he had meant David to represent the Tsar : we ourselves were David, sunk like him in the mire of sin. In this way, the meaning of the original sermon was explained even to those who had failed to grasp its meaning at first.

Such was the way in which the Archbishop of Moscow played at opposition.

The Day of Humiliation was as ineffectual as the chloride of lime; and the plague grew worse and worse.

I witnessed the whole course of the frightful epidemic of cholera at Paris in 1849. The violence of the disease was increased by the

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hot June weather ; the poor died like flies ; of the middle classes some fled the country, and the rest locked themselves up in their houses. The Government, exclusively occupied by the struggle against the revolutionaries, never thought of taking any active steps. Large private subscriptions failed to meet the requirements of the situation. The working class were left to take their chance ; the hospitals could not supply all the beds, nor the police all the coffins, that were required ; the corpses remained for forty-eight hours in living-rooms crowded with a number of different families.

In Moscow things were different.

Prince Dmitry Golitsyn was Governor of the city, not a strong man, but honourable, cultured, and highly respected. He gave the line to Moscow society, and everything was arranged by the citizens themselves without much interference on the part of Government. A committee was formed of the chief residents -

rich landowners and merchants. Each member of the committee undertook one of the districts of Moscow. In a few days twenty hospitals were opened, all supported by voluntary contributions and not costing one penny to the State. The merchants supplied all that was required in the hospitals - bedding, linen, and warm clothing, and this last might be kept by convalescents. Young people acted gratuitously as inspectors in the hospitals, to see that tbe freewill offerings of the merchants were not stolen by the orderlies and nurses.

The University too played its part. The whole medical school, both teachers and students, put themselves at the disposal of the committee. They were distributed among the hospitals and worked there incessantly until the infection was over. For three or four months these young men did fine work in the hospitals, as assistant physicians, dressers, nurses, or clerks, and all this for no pecuniary reward and at a time when the fear of infection was intense. I remember one Little Russian student who was trying to get an exeat on urgent private affairs when the cholera began. It was difficult to get an exeat in term-time, but he got it at last and was just preparing to start when the other students were entering the hospitals. He put his exeat in his pocket and joined them.

When he left the hospital, his leave of absence had long expired, and he was the first to laugh heartily at the form his trip had taken.

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Moscow had the appearance o f being sleepy and slack, of caring for nothing but gossip and piety and fashionable intelligence ; but she invariably wakes up and rises to the occasion when the hour strikes and when the thunder-storm breaks over Russia.

She was wedded to Russia in blood in 1612, and she was welded to Russia in the fire of 1 8 1 2.

She bent her head before Peter, because he was the wild beast whose paw contained the whole future of Russia.

Frowning and pouting out his lips, Napoleon sat outside the gates, waiting for the keys of Moscow ; impatiently he pulled at his bridle and twitched his glove. He was not accustomed to be alone when he entered foreign capitals.

'But other thoughts had Moscow mine,' as Pushkin wrote, and she set fire to herself.

The cholera appeared, and once again the people's capital showed itself full of feeling and power I ·

In August of 1830 we went to stay at Vasilevskoye, and broke our journey as usual at Perkhushkovo, where our house looked like a castle in a novel of Mrs Radcliffe's. After taking a meal and feeding the horses, we were preparing to resume our journey, and Bakay, with a towel round his waist, was just calling out to the coachman, 'All right ! ' when a mounted messenger signed to us to stop. This was a groom belonging to my uncle, the Senator.

Covered with dust and sweat, he jumped off his horse and delivered a packet to my father. The packet contained the Revolution of July ! Two pages of the Journal de:s Debats, which he brought with him as well as a letter, I read over a hundred times till I knew them by heart ; and for the first time I found the country tiresome.

It was a glorious time and events moved quickly. The spare figure of Charles X had hardly disappeared into the fogs of Holyrood, when Belgium burst into flame and the throne of the citizen-king began to totter. The revolutionary spirit began to work in men's mouths and in literature : novels, plays, and poetry entered the arena and preached the good cause.

We knew nothing then of the theatrical element which is part of all revolutionary movements in France, and we believed sincerely in all we heard.

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If anyone wishes to know how powerfully the news of the July revolution worked on the rising generation, let him read what Heine wrote, when he heard in Heligoland that 'the great Pan, the pagan god, was dead'. There is no sham enthusiasm there : Heine at thirty was just as much carried away, just as childishly excited, as we were at eighteen.

We followed every word and every incident with close attention - bold questions and sharp replies, General Lafayette and General Lamarque. Not only did we know all about the chief actors - on the radical side, of course - but we were warmly attached to them, and cherished their portraits, from Manuel and Benjamin Constant to Dupont de l'Eure and Armand Carrel.

Our special group consisted of five to begin with, and then we fell in with a sixth, Vadim Passek.

There was much that was new to us in Vadim. We five had all been brought up in very much the same way : we knew no places but Moscow and the surrounding country ; we had read the same books and taken lessons from the same teachers ; we had been educated either at home or in the boarding-school connected with the University. But Vadim was born in Siberia, during his father's exile, and had suffered poverty and privation. His father was his teacher, and he was one of a large family, who grew up familiar with want but free from all other restraints. Siberia has a stamp of its own, quite unlike the stamp of provincial Russia ; those who bear i t have more health and more elasticity. Compared to Vadim we were tame. His courage was of a different kind, heroic and at times overbearing ; the high distinction of suffering had developed in him a special kind of pride, but he had also a generous warmth of heart. He was bold, and even imprudent to excess ; but a man born in Siberia and belonging to a family of exiles has this advantage over others, that Siberia has for him no terrors.

As soon as we met, Vadim rushed into our arms. Very soon we became intimate. It should be said that there was nothing of the nature of ceremony or prudent precaution in our little coterie of those days.

'Would you like to know Ketscher, of whom you have heard so much ? ' V adim once asked me.

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'Of course I should.'

'Well, come at seven tomorrow evening, and don't be late ; he will be at our house.'

When I arrived, Vadim was out. A tall man with an expressive face was waiting for him and shot a glance, half good-natured and half formidable, at me from under his spectacles. I took up a book, and he followed my example.

'I say,' he began, as he opened the book, 'are you Herzen ?'

And so conversation began and soon grew fast and furious.

Ketscher soon interrupted me with no ceremony : 'Excuse me I I should be obliged if you would address me as "thou".'

'By all means ! ' said I. And from that minute - perhaps it was the beginning of 183 1 - we were inseparable friends ; and from that minute Ketscher's friendly laugh or fierce shout became a part of my life at all its stages.

The acquaintance with Vadim brought a new and gentler element into our camp.

As before, our chief meeting-place was Ogarev's house. His invalid father had gone to live in the country, and he lived alone on the ground-floor of their Moscow house, which was near the University and had a great attraction for us all. Ogarev had that magnetic power which forms the first point of crystallisation in any medley of disordered atoms, provided the necessary affinity exists. Though scattered in all directions, they become imperceptibly the heart of an organism. In his bright cheerful room with its red and gold wall-paper, amid the perpetual smell of tobacco and punch and other - I was going to say, eatables and drinkables, but now I remember that there was seldom anything to eat but cheese - we often spent the time from dark till dawn in heated argument and sometimes in noisy merriment. But, side by side with that hospitable students' room, there grew more and more dear to us another house, in which we learned - I might say, for the first time - respect for family life.

Vadim often deserted our discussions and went off home : when

· he had not seen his mother and sisters for some time, he became restless. To us our little club was the centre of the world, and we thought it strange that he should prefer the society of his family; were not we a family too ?

Then he introduced us to his family. They had lately returned from Siberia; they were ruined, yet they bore that stamp of

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dignity which calamity engraves, not on every sufferer, but on those who have borne misfortune with courage.

Their father was arrested in Paul's reign, having been informed against for revolutionary designs. He was thrown into prison at Schliisselburg and then banished to Siberia. When Alexander restored thousands of his father's exiles, Passek was forgotten.

He was a nephew of the Passek who became Governor of Poland, and might have claimed a share of the fortune which had now passed into other hands.

While detained at Schliisselburg, Passek had married the daughter of an officer of the garrison. The young girl knew that exile would be his fate, but she was not deterred by that prospec-t. In Siberia they made a shift at first to get on, by selling their last belongings, but the pressure of poverty grew steadily worse and worse, and the process was hastened by their increasing family.

Yet neither destitution nor manual toil, nor the absence of warm clothing and sometimes of daily food - nothing prevented them from rearing a whole family of lion-cubs, who inherited from their father his dauntless pride and self-confidence. He educated them by his example, and they were taught by their mother's self-sacrifice and bitter tears. The girls were not inferior to the boys in heroic constancy. Why shrink from using the right word ? - they were a family of heroes. No one would believe what they endured and did for one another ; and they held their heads high through it all.

When they were in Siberia, the three sisters had at once time a single pair of shoes between them ; and they kept it to walk out in, in order to hide their need from the public eye.

At the beginning of the year 1826 Passek was permitted to return to Russia. It was winter weather, and it was a terrible business for so large a family to travel from Tobolsk without furs and without money ; but exile becomes most unbearable when it is over, and they were longing to be gone. They contrived it somehow. The foster-mother of one of the children, a peasant woman, brought them her poor savings as a contribution, and only asked that they would take her too ; the post-boys brought them as far as the Russian frontier for little payment or none at all ; the

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children took turns i n driving o r walking ; and s o they completed the long winter journey from the Ural ridge to Moscow. Moscow was their dream and their hope; and at Moscow they found starvation waiting for them.

When the authorities pardoned Passek, they never thought of restoring to him any part of his property. On his arrival, worn out by exertions and privations, he fell ill ; and the family did not know where they were to get tomorrow's dinner.

The father could bear no more ; he died. The widow and children got on as best they could from day to day. The greater the need, the harder the sons worked ; three of them took their degree at the University with brilliant success. The two eldest, both excellent mathematicians, went to Petersburg ; one served in the N avy and the other in the Engineers ; and both contrived to give lessons in mathematics as well. They practised strict self-denial and sent home all the money they earned.

I have a vivid recollection of their old mother in her dark jacket and white cap. Her thin pale face was covered with wrinkles, and she looked much older than she was ; the eyes alone still lived and revealed such a fund of gentleness and love, and such a past of anxiety and tears. She was in love with her children ; they were wealth and distinction and youth to her ; she used to read us their letters, and spoke of them with a sacred depth of feeling, while her feeble voice sometimes broke and trembled with unshed tears.

Sometimes there was a family gathering of them all at Moscow, and then the mother's joy was beyond description. When they sat down to their modest meal, she would move round the table and arrange things, looking with such joy and pride at her young ones, and sometimes mutely appealing to me for sympathy and admiration. They were really, in point of good looks also, an exceptional family. At such times I longed to kiss her hand and fall upon her neck.

She was happy then ; it wduld have been well if sh� had died at one of those meetings.

In the space of two years she lost her three eldest sons.

Diomid died gloriously, honoured by the foe, in the arms of victory, though he laid down his life in a quarrel that was not his. As a young general, he was killed in action against Cir-

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cassians. But laurels cannot mend a mother's broken heart. The other two were less fortunate : the weight of Russian life lay heavy upon them and crushed them at last.

Alas ! poor mother I

Vadim died in February of 1843. I was present at his death ; it was the first time I had witnessed the death of one dear to me, and I realised the unrelieved horror, the senseless irrationality, and the stupid injustice of the tragedy.

Ten years earlier Vadim had married my cousin Tatyana, and I was best man at the wedding. Family life and change of conditions parted us to some extent. He was happy in his quiet life, but outward circumstances were unfavourable and his enterprises were unsuccessful. Shortly before I and my friends were arrested, he went to Kharkov, where he had been promised a professor's chair in the University. This trip saved him from prison ; but his name had come to the ears of the police, and the University refused to appoint him. An official admitted to him that a document had been received forbidding his appointment because the Government knew that he was connected with disaffected persons.

So Vadim remained without employment, i.e. without bread to eat. That was his form of punishment.

We were banished. Relations with us were dangerous. Black years of want began for him ; for seven years he struggled to earn a bare living, suffering from contact with rough manners and hard hearts, and unable to exchange messages with his friends in their distant place of exile ; and the struggle proved too hard even for his powerful frame.

'One day we had spent all our money to the last penny' - his wife told me this story later - 'I had tried to borrow ten roubles the day before, but I failed, because I had borrowed already in every possible quarter. The shops refused to give us any further credit, and our one thought was - what will the children get to eat tomorrow ? Vadim sat in sorrow near the window ; then he got up, took his hat, and said he meant to take a walk. I saw that he was very low, and I felt frightened ; and yet I was glad that he should have something to divert his thoughts. When he went out, I threw myself upon the bed and wept bitter tears, and then I

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began t o think what was to b e done. Everything o f any value, rings and spoons, had been pawned long ago. I could see no resource but one - to go to our relations and beg their cold charity, their bitter alms. Meanwhile Vadim was walking aimlessly about the streets till he came to the Petrovsky Boulevard. As he passed a bookseller's shop there, it occurred to him to ask whether a single copy of his book had been sold. Five days earlier he had enquired, with no result ; and he was full of apprehension when he entered the shop. ''Very glad to see you," said the man ; "I have heard from my Petersburg agent that he has sold 300

roubles' worth of your books. Would you like payment now ?"

And the man there and then counted out fifteen gold pieces.

Vadim's joy was so great that he was bewildered. He hurried to the nearest eating-house, bought food, fruit, and a bottle of wine, hired a cab, and drove home in triumph. I was adding water to some remnants of soup, to feed the children, and I meant to give him a little, pretending that I had eaten something already ; and then suddenly he came in, carrying his parcel and the bottle of wine, and looking as happy and cheerful as in times past.'

Then she burst out sobbing and could not utter another word.

After my return from banishment I saw him occasionally in Petersburg and found him much changed. He kept his old convictions, but he kept them as a warrior, feeling that he is mortally wounded, still grasps his sword. He was exhausted and depressed, and looked forward without hope. And such I found him in Moscow in 1842 ; his circumstances were improved to some extent, and his works were appreciated, but all this came too late.

Then consumption - that terrible disease which I was fated to watch once again 12 - declared itself in the autumn of 1842, and Vadim wasted away.

A month before he died, I noticed with horror that his powers of mind were failing and growing dim like a flickering candle ; the atmosphere of the sick-room grew darker steadily. Soon it cost him a laborious effort to find words for incoherent speech, and he confused words of similar sound ; at last, he hardly spoke except to express anxiety about his medicines and the hours for taking them.

At three o'clock one February morning, his wife sent for me.

11. Herzen's wife died of consumption at Nice in

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The sick man was i n distress and asking for me. I went u p t o his bed and touched his hand ; his wife named me, and he looked long and wearily at me but failed to recognise me and shut his eyes again. Then the children were brou!Jht, and he looked at them, but I do not think he recognised them either. His breathing became more difficult; there were intervals of quiet followed by long gasps. Just then the bells of a neighbouring church rang out ; Vadim listened and then said, 'That's for early Mass,' and those were his last words. His wife sobbed on her knees beside the body ; a young college friend, who had shown them much kindness during the last illness, moved about the room, pushing away the table with the medicine-bottles and drawing up the blinds. I left the house ; it was frosty and bright out of doors, and the rising sun glittered on the snow, just as if all was right with the world. My errand was to order a coffin.

When I returned, the silence of death reigned in the little house. In accordance with Russian custom, the dead man was lying on the table in the drawing-room, and an artist-friend, seated at a little distance, was drawing, through his tears, a portrait of the lifeless features. Near the body stood a tall female figure, with folded arms and an expression of infinite sorrow ; she stood silent, and no sculptor could have carved a nobler or more impressive embodiment of grief. She was not young, but still retained the traces of a severe and stately beauty ; wrapped up in a long mantle of black velvet trimm.ed with ermine, she stood there like a statue.

I remained standing at the door.

The silence went on for several :ninutes ; but suddenly she bent forward, pressed a kiss on the cold forehead, and said, 'Goodbye, goodbye, dear Vadim' ; then she walked with a steady step into an inner room. The painter went on with his work; he nodded to me, and I sat down by the window in silence; we felt no wish to talk.

The lady was Mme Chertkov, the sister of Count Zakhar Chernyshev, one of the exiled Decembrists.

Melkhisedek, the Abbot of St Peter's Monastery, himself offered that Vadim should be buried within the convent walls. He knew Vadim and respected him for his researches into the history of Moscpw. He had once been a simple carpenter and a furious dissenter; but he was converted to Orthodoxy, became a monk,

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and rose to b e Prior and finally Abbot. Yet h e always kept the broad shoulders, fine ruddy face, and simple heart of the car·

penter.

When the body appeared before the monastery gates, Melkhisedek and all his monks came out to meet the martyr's poor coffin, and escorted it to the grave, singing the funeral music.

Not far from his grave rests the dust of another who was dear to us, Venevitinov, and his epitaph runs : He knew life well but left it soon

and V a dim knew it as well.

But Fortune was not content even with his death. Why indeed did his mother live to be so old ? When the period of exile carne to an end, and when she had seen her children in their youth and beauty and fine promise for the future, life had nothing more to give her. Any man who values happiness should seek to die young. Permanent happiness is no more possible than ice that will not melt.

Vadirn's eldest brother died a few months after Diornid, the soldier, fell in Circassia : a neglected cold proved fatal to his en·

feebled constitution. He was the oldest of the family, and he was hardly forty.

Long and black are the shadows thrown back by these three coffins of three dear friends ; the last months of my youth are veiled from me by funeral crape and the incense of thuribles.

After dragging on for · a year, the affair of Sungurov and our other friends who had been arrested came to an end. The charge, as in our case and in that of Petrashev's group, was that they intended to form a secret society and had held treasonable con·

versations. Their punishment was to be sent to Orenburg, to join the colours.

And now our tum carne. Our names were already entered on the black list of the secret police. The cat dealt her :first playful blow at the mouse in the following way.

When our friends, after their sentence, were starting on their long march to Orenburg without warm enough clothing, Ogarev

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and Kireyevsky each started a subscription for them, as none of them had money. Kireyevsky took the proceeds to Staal, the commandant, a very kind-hearted old soldier, of whom more will be said hereafter. Staal promised to transmit the money, and then said :

'What papers are those you have ?'

'The subscribers' names,' said Kireyevsky, 'and a list of subscriptions.'

'Do you trust me to pay over the money ?' the old man asked.

'Of course I do.'

'And I fancy the subscribers will trust you. Well, then, what's the use of our keeping these names ?' and Staal threw the list into the fire; and I need hardly say that was a very kind action.

Ogarev took the money he had collected to the prison himself, and no difficulty was raised. But the prisoners took it into their heads to send a message of thanks from Orenburg, and asked some functionary who was travelling to Moscow to take a letter which they dared not trust to the post The functionary did not fail to profit by such an excellent opportunity of proving his loyalty to his country : he laid the letter before the head of the police at Moscow.

Volkov, who had held this office, had gone mad, his delusion being that the Poles wished to elect him as their king and Lesovsky had succeeded to the position. Lesovsky was a Pole himself; he was not a cruel man or a bad man ; but he had spent his fortune, thanks to gambling and a French actress, and, like a true philosopher, he preferred the situation of chief of the police at Moscow to a situation in the slums ofthat city.

He summoned Ogarev, Ketscher, Satin, Vadim. Obolensky and others, and charged them with having relations with political prisoners. Ogarev replied that he had written to none of them and had received no letter; if one of them had written to him, he could not be responsible for that. Lesovsky then said :

'You raised a subscription for them, which is even worse. The Tsar is merciful enough to pardon you for once ; but I warn you, gentlemen, that you will be strictly watched, and you had better be careful.'

He looked meaningly at all the party and his eye fell on Ketscher, who was older and taller than the rest, and was lifting C.Y.E.-8

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his eyebrows and looking rather :fierce. He added, 'I wonder that you, Sir, considering your position in society, are not ashamed to behave so.' Ketscher was only a country doctor ; but, from Lesovsky's words, he might have been Chancellor of the Imperial Orders of Knighthood;

I was not summoned; it is probable that the letter did not contain my name.

This threat we regarded as a promotion, a consecration, a powerful incentive. Lesovsky's warning was oil on the flames; and, as if to make things easier for the police, we all took to velvet caps of the Karl Sand 13 fashion and tri-coloured neckties.

Colonel Shubinsky now climbed up with the velvet tread of a cat into Lesovsky's place, and soon marked his predecessor's weakness in dealing with us : our business was to serve as one of the steps in his official career, and we did what was wanted.

But :first I shall add a few words about the fate of Sungurov and his companions.

Kohlrei£ returned to Moscow, where he died in the arms of his grief-stricken father.

Kostenetsky and Antonovich both distinguished themselves as private soldiers in the Caucasus and received commissions.

The fate of the unhappy Sungurov was far more tragic. On reaching the :first stage of their journey from Moscow, he asked permission of the officer, a young man of twenty, to leave the stifling cottage crammed with convicts for the fresh air. The officer walked out with him. Sungurov watched for an opportunity, sprang off the road, and disappeared. He must have known the district well, for he eluded the officer ; but the police got upon his tracks next day. When he saw that escape was impossible, he cut his throat. He was carried back to Moscow, unconscious and bleeding profusely. The unlucky officer was deprived of his commission.

Sungurov did not die. He was tried again, not for a political offience but for trying to escape. Half his head was shaved ; and to this outward ignominy the court added a single stroke of the 13. The German student who shot Kotzebue.

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whip to be inflicted inside the prison. Whether this was actually carried out, I do not know. He was then sent off to work in the mines at Nerchinsk.

His name came to my ears just once again and then vanished for ever.

When I was at Vyatka, I happened to meet in the street a young doctor, a college friend ; and we spoke about old times and common acquaintances.

'Good God I ' said the doctor, 'do you know whom I saw on my way here ? I was waiting at a post-house for fresh horses. The weather was abominable. An officer in command of a party of convicts came in to warm himself. We began to talk ; and hearing that I was a doctor, he asked me to take a look at one of the prisoners on march; I could tell him whether the man was shamming or really very bad. I consented : of course, I intended in any case to back up the convict. There were eighteen convicts, as well as women and children, in one smallish barrack-room; some of the men had their heads shaved, and some had not; but they were all fettered. They opened out to let the officer pass ; and we saw a figure wrapped in a convict's overcoat and lying on some straw in a comer of the dirty room.

' "There's your patient," said the officer. No fibs on my part were necessary : the man was in a high fever. He was a horrible sight : he was thin and worn out by prison and marching ; half his head was shaved, and his beard was growing ; he was rolling his eyes in delirium and constantly calling for water.

' "Are you feeling bad, my man ? " I said to the patient, and then I told the officer that he was quite unable to march.

'The man fixed his eyes on me and then muttered, "Is that you ?" He addressed me by name and added, in a voice that went through me like a knife. "You won't know me again."

' "Excuse me," I said ; "I have forgotten your name," and I took his hot dry hand in my own.

' "I am Sungurov," he answered. Poor fellow I ' repeated the doctor, shaking his head.

'Well, did they leave him there ?' I asked.

'No : a cart was got for him.'

After writing the preceding narrative, I learned that Sungurov died at Nerchinsk.

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CHAPTER V I I

End of College Life - The 'Schiller' Stage - Youth - The Artistic Life

Saint-Simonianism and N. Polevoy - Polezhayev 1

THE storm had not yet burst over our heads when my college course came to an end. My experience of the final stage of education was exactly like that of everyone else - constant worry and sleepless nights for the sake of a painful and useless test of the memory, superficial cramming, and all real interest in learning crowded out by the nightmare of examination. I wrote an astronomical dissertation for the gold medal, and the silver medal was awarded me. I am sure that I should not be able now to understand what I wrote then, and that it was worth its weight in

silver.

I have sometimes dreamt since that I was a student preparing for examination ; I thought in horror how much I had forgotten and how certain I was to fail, and then I woke up, to rejoice with all my heart that the sea and much else lay between me and my University, and that no one would ever examine me again or venture to place me at the bottom of the list. My professors would really be astonished, if they could discover how much I have gone backward in the interval.

When the examinations were over, the professors shut themselves up to count the marks, and we walked up and down the passage and the vestibule, the prey of hopes and fears. Whenever anyone left the meeting, we rushed to him, eager to learn our fate ; but the decision took a long time. At last Heyman came out and said to me, 'I congratulate you ; you have passed.' 'Who else ?

who else ?' I asked ; and some names were mentioned. I felt both sad and pleased. As I walked out of the college gates, I felt that I was leaving the place otherwise than yesterday or ever before, and becoming a stranger to that great family party in which I had spent four years of youth and happiness. On the other hand, I was pleased by the feeling that I was now admittedly grown up, and also - I may as well confess it - by the fact that I had got my degree at the first time of asking.

I owe so much to my Alma Mater and I continued so long after

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my degree to live her life and near her, that I cannot recall the place without love and reverence. She will not accuse me of ingratitude. In this case at least it is easy to be grateful; for gratitude is inseparable from love and bright memories of youthful development. Writing in a distant foreign land, I send her my blessing I

The year which we spent after leaving College formed a triumphant conclusion to the first period of our youth. It was one long festival of friendship, of high spirits, of inspiration and exchange of ideas.

We were a small group of college friends who kept together after our course was over, and continued to share the same views and the same ideals. Not one of us thought of his future career or financial position. I should not praise this attitude in grown-up people, but I value it highly in a young man. Except where it is dried up by the corrupting influence of vulgar respectability, youth is everywhere unpractical, and is especially bound to be so in a young country which has many ideals and has realised few of them. Besides, the unpractical sphere is not always a fool's paradise : every aspiration for the future involves some degree of imagination ; and, but for unpractical people, practical life would never get beyond a tiresome repetition of the old routine.

Enthusiasm of some kind is a better safeguard against real degradation than any sermon. I can remember youthful follies, when high spirits carried us sometimes into excesses ; but I do not remember a single disgraceful incident among our set, nothing that a man need be really ashamed of or seek to forget and cover up. Bad things are done in secret ; and there was nothing secret in our way of life. Half our thoughts - more than half - were not directed towards that region where idle sensuality and morbid selfishness are concentrated on impure designs and make vice thrice as vicious.

I have a sincere pity for any nation where old heads grow on young shoulders ; youth is a matter, not only of years, but of temperament. The German student, in the height of his eccen-

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tricity, is a hundred times better than the young Frenchman or Englishman with his dull grown-up airs; as to American boys who are men at fifteen - I find them simply repulsive.

In old France the young nobles were really young and fine; and later, such men as Saint-Just and Hoche, Marceau and Desmoulins, heroic children reared on Rousseau's dark gospel, were young too, in the true sense of the word. The Revolution was the work of young men : neither Danton nor Robespierre, nor Louis XVI himself survived his thirty-fifth year. Under Napoleon, the young men all became subalterns ; the Restoration, the 'resurrection of old age', had no use for young men; and everybody became grown-up, business-like, and dull.

The last really young Frenchmen were the followers of Saint

Simon.1 A few exceptions only prove the fact that their young men have no liveliness or poetry in their disposition. Escousse and Lebras blew their brains out, just because they were young men in a society where all were old. Others struggled like fish jerked out of the water upon a muddy bank, till some of them got caught on the barricades and others on the Jesuits' hook.

Still youth must assert itself somehow, and therefore most young Frenchmen go through an 'artistic' period : that is, those who have no money spend their time in humble cafes of the Latin quarter with humble grisettes, and those who have money resort to large cafes and more expensive ladies. They have no

'Schiller' stage ; but they have what may be called a 'Paul de Kock'

stage, which soon consumes in poor enough fashion all the strength and vigour of youth, and turns out a man quite fit to be a commercial traveller. The 'artistic' stage leaves at the bottom of the soul one passion only - the thirst for money, which excludes all other interests and determines all the rest of life; these practical men laugh at abstract questions and despise women - this is the result of repeated conquests over those whose profession it is to be defeated. Most young men, when going through this stage, find a guide and philosopher in some hoary sinner, an extinct celebrity who lives by sponging on his young friends - an actor who has lost his voice, or an artist whose hand has begun to 1 . Claude Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1 76o-I825), founded at Paris a society which was called by his name. His views were socialistic.

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shake. Telemachus imitates his · Mentor's pronunciation and his drinks, and especially his contempt for social problems and profound knowledge of gastronomy.

In England this stage takes a different form. There young men go through a stormy period of amiable eccentricity, which consists in silly practical jokes, absurd extravagance, heavy pleasantries, systematic but carefully concealed profligacy, and useless expeditions to the ends of the earth. Then there are horses, dogs, races, dull dinners ; next comes the wife with an incredible number of fat, red-cheeked babies, business in the City, The Times, parliament, and old port which finally clips the Englishman's wings.