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student of human nature and a s a physician, h e had placed these officials under his microscope; he knew all their petty hidden vices ; and, encouraged by their dullness and cowardice, he observed no limits in his way of addressing them.

He constantly repeated the same phrase - 'It does not matter twopence' or 'It won't cost you twopence.' I once laughed at him for this, and he said : 'What are you surprised at ? The object of all speech is to persuade, and I only add to my statements the strongest proof that exists in the world. Once convince a man that it won't cost him twopence to kill his own father and he'll kill him sure enough.'

He was always willing to lend moderate sums, as much as a hundred or two hundred roubles. Whenever he was appealed to for a loan, he pulled out his pocket-book and asked for a date by which the money would be repaid.

'Now,' he said, 'I will bet a rouble that you will not pay the money on that day.'

'My dear Sir, who do you take me for ? ' the borrower would say.

'My opinion of you does not matter twopence,' was the reply;

'but the fact is that I have kept an account for six years, and not a single debtor has ever paid me on the day, and very few after it.'

When the time had expired, the doctor asked with a grave face for the payment of his bet.

A rich merchant at Perm had a travelling carriage for sale. The doctor called on them and delivered the following speech all in a breath. 'You are selling a carriage, I need one. Because you are rich and a millionaire, everyone respects you, and I have come to testify my respect for the same reason. Owing to your wealth, it does not matter twopence to you whether you sell the carriage or not ; but I need it, and I am poor. You will want to squeeze me and take advantage of my necessity ; therefore you will ask 1 ,500

roubles for it. I shall offer 700 roubles; I shall come every day to haggle over the price, and after a week you will let me have it for 750 or 8oo. Might we not as well begin at once at that point ?

I am prepared to pay that sum.' The merchant was so astonished that he let the doctor have the carriage at his own figure.

But there was no end to the stories of Chebotarev's eccentricity. I shall add two more.

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4

I was present once when a lady, a rather clever and cultivated woman, asked him if he believed in mesmerism. 'What do you mean by mesmerism ?' he asked. The lady talked the usual nonsense in reply. 'It does not matter twopence to you,' he said, 'to know whether I believe in mesmerism or not ; but if you like, I will tell you what I have seen in that way.' 'Please do.' 'Yes ; but you must listen attentively,' and then he began to describe some experiments made by a friend of his, a doctor at Kharkov ; his description was very lively, clever, and interesting.

While he was talking, a servant brought in some refreshments on a tray, and was leaving the room when the lady said, 'You have forgotten the mustard.' Chebotarev stopped dead. 'Go on, go on,' said the lady, a little frightened already. 'I'm listening to you.' 'Pray, Madam, has he remembered the salt ? ' 'I see you are angry with me,' said the lady, blushing. 'Not in the least, I assure you. I know that you were listening attentively ; but I also know that no woman, however intelligent she may be and whatever may be the subject under discussion, can ever soar higher than the kitchen. How then could I venture to be angry with you in particular ? '

Another story about him. Being employed a s a doctor at the factories of a Countess Polier, he took a fancy to a boy he saw there, and wished to have him for a servant. The boy was willing, but the steward said that the consent of the Countess must first be obtained. The doctor wrote to .her, and she replied that he might have the boy, on condition of paying down a sum equal to the payments due to her from the boy during the next five years. The doctor wrote at once to express his willingness, but he asked her to answer this question : 'As Encke's comet may be expected to pass through the orbit of the earth in three years and a half from now, who will be responsible for repaying the money I have advanced, in case the comet drives the earth out of its orbit ?'

5

On the day I left for Vyatka, the doctor turned up at my house early in the morning. He began with this witticism. 'You are like Horace : he sang once and people have been translating him

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ever since, and s o you are translated 4 from place to place for that song you sang.' Then he pulled out his purse and asked if I needed money for the journey. I thanked him and declined his offer. 'Why don't you take it ? It won't cost you twopence.' 'I have money. 'A bad sign,' he said ; 'the end of the world is coming.'

Then he opened his notebook and made this entry. 'For the first time in fifteen years' practice I have met a man who refused money, and that man was on the eve of departure.'

Having had his jest, he sat down on my bed and said seriously :

'That's a terrible man you are going to. Keep out of his way as much as ever you can. If he takes a fancy to you, that says little in your favour; but if he dislikes you, he will certainly ruin you ; what weapon he will use, false accusation or not, I don't know, but ruin you he will ; he won't care twopence.'

Thereupon he told me a strange story, which I as able to verify at a later date by means of papers preserved in the Home Office at Petersburg.

6

Tyufyayev had a mistress at Perm, the sister of a humble official named Petrovsky. The fact was notorious, and the brother was laughed at. Wishing therefore to break off this connection, he threatened to write to Petersburg and lay information, and, in short, made such a noise and commotion that the police arrested him one day as insane and brought him up to be examined before the administration of the province. The judges and the inspector of public health - he was an old German, much beloved by the poor, and I knew him personally - all agreed that Petrovsky was insane.

But Chebotarev knew Petrovsky and had been his doctor. He told the inspector that Petrovsky was not mad at all, and urged a fresh examination; otherwise, he would feel bound to carry the matter further. The administration raised no difficulties; but· unfortunately Petrovsky died in the mad-house before the day fixed for the second examination, though he was a young man and enjoyed good health.

News of the affair now reached Petersburg. The sister was arrested (Tyufyayev ought to have been) and a secret enquiry began. Tyufyayev dictated the replies of the witnesses. He surpassed 4· The same Russian verb means 'to translate' and 'to transfer'.

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himself in this business. He devised a means to stifle it for ever and to save himself from a second involuntary journey to Siberia.

He actually induced the sister to say that her youth and inexperience had been taken advantage of by the late Tsar Alexander when he passed through Perm, and that the quarrel with her brother dated from that event.

Was her story true ? Well, la regina ne aveva mol to, 5 says the story-teller in Pushkin's Egyptian Nights.

7

Such was the man who now undertook to teach me the business of administration, a worthy pupil of Arakcheyev, acrobat, tramp, clerk, secretary, Governor, a tender-hearted, unselfish being, who shut up sane men in mad-houses and made away with them there.

I was entirely at his mercy. He had only to write some nonsense to the Minister at Petersburg, and I should be packed off to Irkutsk. Indeed, writing was unnecessary ; he had the right to transfer me to some savage place like Kay or Tsarevo-Sanchursk, where there were no resources and no means of communication.

He sent one young Pole to Glazov, because the ladies had the bad taste to prefer him as a partner in the mazurka to His Excellency.

In this way Prince Dolgoruky was transferred from Perm to Verkhoturye, a place in the Government of Perm, buried in mountains and snow-drifts, with as bad a climate as Berezov and even less society.

8

Prince Dolgoruky belonged to a type which is becoming rarer with us; he was a sprig of nobility, of the wrong sort, whose escapades were notorious at Petersburg, Moscow, and Paris. His whole life was spent in folly ; he was a spoilt, insolent, offensive practical joker, a mixture of buffoon and fine gentleman. When his pranks exceeded all bounds, he was banished to Perm.

He arrived there with two carriages ; the first was occupied by himself and his dog, a Great Dane, the second by his French cook and his parrots. The arrival of this wealthy visitor gave much pleasure, and before long all the town was rubbing shoulders in his dining-room. He soon took up with a young lady of Perm; 5· The reference in Pushk.in is to Cleopatra's lovers.

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and this young lady, suspecting that h e was unfaithful, turned up unexpectedly at his house one morning, and found him with a maid-servant. A scene followed, and at last the faithless lover took his riding-whip down from its peg ; when the lady perceived his intention, she made off ; simply attired in a dressing-gown and nothing else, he made after her, and caught her up on the small parade-ground where the troops were exercised. When he had given the jealous lady a few blows with his whip, he strolled home, quite content with his perfomance.

But these pleasant little ways brought upon him the persecution of his former friends, and the authorities decided to send this madcap of forty on to Verkhoturye. The day before he left, he gave a grand dinner, and all the local officials, in spite of the strained relations, came to the feast ; for Dolgoruky had promised them a new and remarkable pie. The pie was in fact excellent and vanished with extraordinary rapidity. When nothing but the crust was left, Dolgoruky said to his guests with an air of emotion : 'It never can be said that I spared anything to make our last meeting a success. I had my dog killed yesterday, to make this pie.'

The officials looked first with horror at one another and then round the room for the Great Dane whom they all knew perfectly ; but he was not there. The Prince ordered a servant to bring in the mortal remains of his favourite ; the skin was all there was to show ; the rest was in the stomachs of the people of Perm.

Half the town took to their bed.s in consequence.

Dolgoruky meanwhile, pleased by the success of the practical joke he had played on his friends, was travelling in triumph to Verkhoturye. To his train he had now added a third vehicle containing a hen-house and its inhabitants. At several of the posthouses on his way he carried off the official registers, mixed them up, and altered the figures ; the posting-department, who, even with the registers, found it difficult enough to get the returns right, almost went mad in consequence.

9

The oppressive emptiness and dumbness of Russian life, when misallied to a strong and even violent temperament, are apt to produce monstrosities of all kinds.

Not only in Dolgoruky's pie, but in Suvorov's crowing like a

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cock, in the strange outbursts of Izmaylov, in the semi-voluntary insanity of Mamonov,6 and in the wild extravagances of Tolstoy, nicknamed 'The American', everywhere I catch a national note which is familiar to us all, though in most of us it is weakened by education or turned in some different direction.

Tolstoy I knew personally, just at the time when he lost his daughter, Sara, a remarkable girl with a high poetic gift. He was old then ; but one look at his athletic figure, his flashing eyes, and the grey curls that clustered on his forehead, was enough to show how great was his natural strength and activity. But he had developed only stormy passions and vicious propensities. And this is not surprising : in Russia all that is vicious is allowed to grow for long unchecked, while men are sent to a fortress or to Siberia at the first sign of a humane passion. For twenty years Tolstoy rioted and gambled, used his fists to mutilate his enemies, and reduced whole families to beggary, till at last he was banished to Siberia.

He made his way through Kamchatka to America and, while there, obtained permission to return to Russia. The Tsar pardoned him, and he resumed his old life the very day after his return. He married a gipsy woman, a famous singer who belonged to a gipsy tribe at Moscow, and turned his house into a gambling-hell. His nights were spent at the card-table, and all his time in excesses ; wild scenes of cupidity and intoxication went on round the cradle of his daughter. It is said that he once ordered his wife to stand on the table, and sent a bullet through the heel of her shoe, in order to prove the accuracy of his aim.

His last exploit very nearly sent him back to Siberia. He contrived to entrap in his house at Moscow a tradesman against whom he had an old grudge, bound him hand and foot, and pulled out one of his teeth. It is hardly credible that this should have happened only ten or twelve years ago. The man lodged a complaint. But Tolstoy bribed the police and the judges, and the victim was lodged in prison for false witness. It happened that a well-known man of letters was then serving on the prison committee and took up the affair, on learning the facts from the tradesman. Tolstoy was seriously alarmed ; it was clear that he was likely 6. Suvorov, the famous general (1 729-1800), was eccentric in his

personal habits. Izmaylov, a rich landowner at the of the

nineteenth century, was infamous for his cruelties. Mamonov (1758-1803) was one of Catherine's favourites.

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to b e condemned. But anything i s possible in Russia. Count Orlov sent secret instructions that the affair must be hushed up, to deprive the lower classes of a direct triumph over the aristocracy, and he also advised that the man of letters should be removed from the committee. This is almost more incredible than the incident of the tooth. But I was in Moscow then myself and well acquainted with the imprudent man of letters. But I must go back to Vyatka.

10

The office there was incomparably worse than my prison. The actual work was not hard ; but the mephitic atmosphere - the place was like a second Grotto del Cane 7 - and the monstrous and absurd waste of time made the life unbearable. Alenitsyn did not treat me badly. He was even more polite than I expected ; having been educated at the grammar school of Kazan, he had some respect for a graduate of Moscow University.

Twenty clerks were employed in the office. The majority of them were entirely destitute of either intellectual culture or moral sense, sons of clerks, who had learned from their cradles to look upon the public service as a means of livelihood and the cultivators of the land as the source of their income. They sold official papers, pocketed small sums whenever they could get them, broke their word for a glass of spirits, and stuck at nothing, however base and ignominious. My own valet stopped playing billiards at the public rooms, because, as he said, the officials cheated shamefully and he could not give them a lesson because of their rank in society.

With these men, whose position alone made them safe from my servant's fists, I had to sit every day from nine till two and again from five till eight.

Alenitsyn was head of the whole office, and the desk at which I sat had a chief also, not a bad-hearted man, but drunken and illiterate. There were four other clerks at my desk ; and I had to be on speaking terms with them, and with all the rest as well.

Apart from the fact that these people would sooner or later have paid me out for any airs of exclusiveness, it is simply impossible not to get to know people in whose company you spend several hours every day. It must also be remembered how people in the 7· The

near Naples where dogs were held over the sulphurous vapour

they became insensible.

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country hang o n to a stranger, especially i f h e comes from the capital, and still more if he has been mixed up in some exciting scandal.

When I had tugged at the oar all day in this galley, I used sometimes to go home quite stupefied and fall on my sofa, worn out and humiliated, and incapable of any work or occupation. I heartily regretted my prison cell with its foul air and black beetles, its locked door and turn-key behind the lock. There I was free and did what I liked without interference ; there I enjoyed dead silence and unbroken leisure; I had exchanged these for trivial talk, dirty companions, low ideas, and coarse feelings.

When I remembered that I must go back there in the afternoon, and back again tomorrow, I sometimes fell into such :fits of rage and despair that I drank wine and spirits for consolation.

Nor was that all. One of my desk-fellows would perhaps look in, for want of something to do ; and there he would sit and chatter till the appointed hour recalled us to the office.

1 1

After a few months, however, the office life became somewhat less oppressive.

It is not in the Russian character to keep up a steady system of persecution, unless where personal or avaricious motives are involved ; and this fact is due to our Russian carelessness and indifference. Those in authority in Russia are generally unlicked and insolent, and it is very easy, when dealing with them, to come in for the rough side of their tongue; but a war of pinpricks is not in their way - they have not the patience for it, perhaps because it brings in no profit.

In the heat of the moment, in order to display their power or prove their zeal, they are capable of anything, however absurd and unnecessary ; but then by degrees they cease to trouble you.

I found this to be the case in my office. It so happened that the Ministry of the Interior had just been seized with a :fit of statistics. Orders were issued that committees should be appointed all over the country, and information was required from these committees which could hardly have been supplied in such countries as Belgium and Switzerland. There were also ingenious tables of all kinds for :figures, to show a maximum and minimum as well as averages, and conclusions based on a comparison of ten years

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(for nine o f which, if you please, n o statistics a t all had been recorded) ; the morality of the inhibitants and even the weather were to be included in the report. For the committee and for the collection of facts not a penny was allotted ; the work had to be done from pure love of statistics ; the rural police were to collect the facts and the Governor's office to put them in order. The office was overburdened with work already, and the rural police preferred to use their fists rather than their brains ; both looked on the statistics committee as a mere superfluity, an official joke ; nevertheless, a report had to be presented, including tables of figures and conclusions based thereon.

To all our office the job seemed excessively difficult. It was, indeed, simply impossible ; but to that nobody paid any attention ; their sole object was to escape a reprimand. I promised Alenitsyn that I would write the introduction and first part of the report, with specimen tables, introducing plenty of eloquent phrases, foreign words, apt quotations, and impressive conclusions, if he would allow me to perform this difficult task at my house instead of at the office. He talked it over with the Governor and gave permission.

The beginning of the report dealt with the committee's activity ; and here, as there was nothing to show at present, I dwelt upon hopes and intentions for the future. This composition moved Alenitsyn to the depth of his heart and was considered a masterpiece even by the Governor. That was the end of my labours in the department of statistics, but I was made chairman of the committee. Thus I was delivered from the slavery of copying office papers, and my drunken chief became something like my subordinate. Alenitsyn only asked, from some idea of keeping up appearances, that I should just look in every day at the office.

To show how utterly impossible it was to draw up serious tables, I shall quote some information received from the town of Kay. There were many absurdities, and this was one.

Persons drowned

2

Causes of drowning unknown

2

Total

4

Under the heading 'Extraordinary Events' the following tragedy was chronicled : 'So-and-so, having injured his brain with spiritu-

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ous liquors, hanged himself.' Under the heading 'Morality of the Inhabitants' this was entered : 'No Jews were found in the town of Kay.' There was a question whether any funds had been allotted to the building of a church, or exchange, or hospital. The answer was : 'Money allotted to the building of an exchange was not allotted.'

1 2

Statistics saved me from office work, but they had one bad result

- they brought me into personal relations with the Governor.

There was a time when I hated this man, but that time has long passed away, and the man has passed away himself - he died about 1845 near Kazan, where he had an estate. I think of him now without anger ; I regard him as a strange beast encountered in some primeval forest, which deserves study, but, j ust because it is a beast, cannot excite anger. But then it was impossible not to fight him ; any decent man must have done so. He might have damaged me seriously, but accident preserved me ; and to resent the harm which he failed to do me would be absurd and pitiable.

The Governor was separated from his wife, and the wife of his cook occupied her place. The cook was banished from the town, his only guilt being his marriage ; and the cook's wife, by an arrangement whose awkwardness seemed intentional, was concealed in the back part of the Governor's residence. Though she was not formally recognised, yet the cook's wife had a little court, formed out of those officials who were especially devoted to the Governor - in other words, those whose conduct could least stand investigation ; and their wives and daughters, though rather bashful about it, paid her stolen visits after dark This lady possessed the tact which distinguished one of her most famous male predecessors - Catherine's favourite, Potemkin. Knowing her consort's way and anxious not to lose her place, she herself procured for him rivals from whom she had nothing to fear. Grateful for this indulgence, he repaid her with his affection, and the pair lived together in harmony.

The Governor spent the whole morning working in his office.

The poetry of his life began at three o'clock. He loved his dinner, and he liked to have company while eating. Twelve covers were laid every day ; if the party was less than six, he was annoyed ; if it fell to two, he was distressed ; and if he had no guest, he was

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almo�t desperate and went off t o the apartments of his Dulcinea, to dine there. It is not a difficult business to get people together, in order to feed them to excess ; but his official position, and the fear his subordinates felt for him, prevented them from availing themselves freely of his hospitality, and him from turning his house into an inn. He had therefore to content himself with heads of departments - though with half of them he was on bad terms -

occasional strangers, rich merchants, spirit-distillers, and 'curiosities'. These last may be compared with the capacites, who were to be introduced into the Chamber of Deputies, under Louis

Philippe. I netd hardly say that I was a 'curiosity' of the first water at Vyatka.

1 3

People banished for their opinions t o remote parts of Russia are a little feared but by no means confounded with ordinary mortals.

For the provincial mind 'dangerous people' have that kind of attraction which notorious Don Juans have for women, and notorious courtesans for men. The officials of Petersburg and grandees of Moscow are much more shy of 'dangerous' people than the dwellers in the provinces and especially in Siberia.

The exiled Decembrists were immensely respected. Yushnevsky's widow was treated as a lady of the first consequence in Siberia ; the official figures of the Siberian census were corrected by means of statistics supplied by the exiles ; and Miinnich, in his prison, managed the affairs of the province of Tobolsk, the Governers themselves resorting to him for advice in matters of importance.

The common people are even more friendly to the exiles ; they always take the side of men who have been punished. Near the Siberian frontier, the word 'exile' disappears, and the word 'unfortunate' is used instead. In the eyes of the Russian people, the sentence of a court leaves no stain. In the Government of Perm, the peasants along the road to Tobolsk often put out kvass or milk and bread on the window-sill, for the t�se of some 'unfortunate'

who may be trying to escape from Siberia.

14

In this place I may say something about the Polish exiles. There are some as far west as Nizhny, and after Kazan the number

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rapidly increases ; there were forty of them at Perm and at least as many at Vyatka ; and each of the smaller towns contained a few.

They kept entirely apart and avoided all communication with the Russian inhabitants ; among themselves they lived like brothers, and the rich shared their wealth with the poor.

I never noticed any special hatred or any liking for them on the part of the Russians. They were simply considered as outsiders ; and hardly any of the Poles knew Russian.

I remembered one of the exiles who got permission in 1837 to return to his estates in Lithuania. He was a tough old cavalry officer who had served under Poniatowski in several of Napoleon's campaigns. The

But, since Konarski's 8 time, Poles have begun to think quite differently of Russians.

In general, the exiled Poles are not badly treated ; but those of them who have no means of their own are shockingly ill off.

Such men receive from Government fifteen roubles a month, to pay for lodgings, clothing, food, and fuel. In the larger towns, such as Kazan or Tobolsk, they can eke out a living by giving lessons or concerts, by playing at balls or painting portraits or teaching children to dance ; but at Perm and Vyatka even these resources did not exist. In spite of that, they never asked Russians for assistance in any form.

1 5

The Governoz's invitations to dine on the luxuries of Siberia were a real infliction to me. His dining-room was merely the office over again, in a different shape, cleaner indeed, but more objectionable, because there was not the same appearance of compuJsion about it.

He knew his guests thoroughly and despised them. Sometimes he showed his claws, but he generally treated them as a man 8. A Polish revolutionary ; born in t8o8, he was shot in February 1839·

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treats his dogs, either with excessive familiarity or with a roughness beyond all bounds. But all the same he continued to invite them, and they came in a flutter of joy, prostrating themselves before him, currying favour by tales against others, all smiles and bows and complaisance.

I blushed for them and felt ashamed.

Our intimacy did not last long : the Governor soon perceived that I was unfit to move in the highest circles of Vyatka.

After three months he was dissatisfied with me, and after six months he hated me. I ceased to attend his dinners, and never even called at his house. As we shall see later, it was a visit to Vyatka from the Crown Prince 9 that saved me from his persecution.

In this connection it is necessary to add that I did nothing whatever to deserve either his attentions and invitations at first, or his anger and ill-usage afterwards. He could not endure in me an attitude which, though not at all rude, was independent; my behaviour was perfectly correct, but he demanded servility.

He was greedily jealous of the power which he had worked hard to gain, and he sought not merely obedience but the appearance of unquestioning subordination. Unfortunately, in this respect he was a true Russian.

The gentleman says to his servant : 'Hold your tongue ! I will not allow you to answer me back.'

The head of an office says to any subordinate who ventures on a protest : 'You forget yourself. Do you know to whom you are speaking ?'

Tyufyayev cherished a secret but intense hatred for everything aristocratic, and it was the result of bitter experience. For him the penal servitude of Arakcheyev's office was a harbour of refuge and freedom, such as he had never enjoyed before. In earlier days his employers, when they gave him small jobs to do, never offered him a chair ; when he served in the Controller's office, he was treated with military roughness by the soldiers and once horsewhipped by a colonel in the streets of Vilna. The clerk stored all this up in his heart and brooded over it ; and now he was Governor, and it was his turn to play the tyrant, to keep a man standing, to address people familiarly, to speak unnecessarily loudly, and at times to commit long-descended nobles for trial.

9· Afterwards Alexander II.

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From Perm h e was promoted to Tver. But the nobles, however deferential and subservient, could not stand Tyufyayev. They petitioned for his removal, and he was sent to Vyatka.

There he was in his element once more. Officials and distillers, factory-owners and officials, - what more could the heart of man desire ? Everyone trem!Jled before him and got up when he approached ; everyone gave him dinners, offered him wine, and sought to anticipate his wishes ; at every wedding or birthday party the :first toast proposed was 'His Excellency the Governor I '

C H A P T E R V I I I

Officials - Siberian Governors - A Bird o f Prey - A Gentle Judge - An Inspector Roasted - The Tatar - A Boy of the Female Sex - The Potato Revolt - Russian Justice

1

ONE of the saddest consequences of the revolution effected by Peter the Great is the development of the official class in Russia.

These chinovniks are an artificial, ill-educated, and hungry class, incapable of anything except office-work, and ignorant of every·

thing except official papers. They form a kind of lay clergy, officiating in the law-courts and police-offices, and sucking the blood of the nation with thousands of dirty, greedy mouths.

Gogo! raised one side of the curtain and showed us the Russian chinovnik in his true colours ;1 but Gogo!, without meaning to, makes us resigned by making us laugh, and his immense comic power tends to suppress resentment. Besides, fettered as he was by the censorship, he could barely touch on the sorrowful side of that unclean subterranean region in which the destinies of the ill-starred Russian people are hammered and shaped.

There, in those grimy offices which we walk through as fast as we can, men in shabby coats sit and write ; first they write a rough draft and then copy it out on stamped paper - and individuals, families, whole villages are injured, terrified, and ruined.

The father is banished to a distance, the mother is sent to prison, 1. Gogol's play, The Revizor, is a satire on the Russian bureaucracy.

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the son t o the Army ; i t all comes upon them a s suddenly a s a clap of thunder, and in most cases it is undeserved. The object of it all is money. Pay up ! If you don't, an inquest will be held on the body of some drunkard who has been frozen in the snow. A collection is made for the village authorities ; the peasants contrib·

ute their last penny. Then there are the police and law-officers -

they must live somehow, and one has a wife to maintain and another a family to educate, and they are all model husbands and fathers.

This official class is sovereign in the north-eastern Governments of Russia and in Siberia. It has spread and flourished there without hindrance and without pause; in that remote region where all share in the profits, theft is the order of the day. The Tsar himself is powerless against these entrenchments, buried under snow and constructed out of sticky mud. All measures of the central Government are emasculated before they get there, and all its purposes are distorted : it is deceived and cheated, betrayed and sold, and all the time an appearance of servile fidelity is kept up, and official procedure is punctually observed.

Speransky 2 tried to lighten the burdens of the people by introducing into all the offices in Siberia the principle of divided control. But it makes little difference whether the stealing is done by individuals or gangs of robbers. He discharged hundreds of old thieves, and took on hundreds of new ones. The rural police were so terrified at first that they actually paid blackmail to the peasants. But a few years passed, and the officials were making as much money as ever, in spite of the new conditions.

A second eccentric Governor, General Velyaminov, tried again.

For two years he struggled hard at Tobolsk to root out the malpractices ; and then, conscious of failure, he gave it all up and ceased to attend to business at all.

Others, more prudent than he, never tried the experiment ; they made money themselves and let others do the same.

'I shall root out bribery.' said Senyavin, the Governor of Moscow, to a grey-bearded old peasant who had entered a complaint against some crying act of injustice. The old man smiled.

'What are you laughing at ? ' asked the Governor.

'Well, I was laughing, batyushka ; you must forgive me. I was 2. Mikhail

(1772-1839), minister under Alexander I, was Governor of

in 1819.

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thinking of one of our people, a great strong fellow, who boasted that he would lift the Great Cannon at Moscow ; and he did try, but the cannon would not budge.'

Senyavin used to tell this story hilllSelf. He was one of those unpractical bureaucrats who believe that well-turned periods in praise of honesty, and rigorous prosecution of the few thieves who get caught, have power to cure the widespread plague of Russian corruption, that noxious weed that spreads at ease under the protecting boughs of the censorship.

Two things are needed to cope with it - publicity, and an entirely different organisation of the whole machine. The old national system of justice must be re-introduced, with oral procedure and sworn witnesses and all that the central Government detests so heartily.

2

Pes tel, one of the Governors of Western Siberia, was like a Roman proconsul, and was outdone by none of them. He carried on a system of open and systematic robbery throughout the country, which he had entirely detached from Russia by means of his spies.

Not a letter crossed the frontier unopened, and woe to the writer who dared to say a word about his rule. He kept the merchants of the First Guild in prison for a whole year, where they were chained and tortured. Officials he punished by sending them to the frontier of Eastern Siberia and keeping them there for two or three years.

The people endured him for long ; but at last a tradesman of Tobolsk determined to bring the state of things to the Tsar's knowledge. Avoiding the usual route, he went first to Kyakhta and crossed the Siberian frontier from there with a caravan of tea.

At Tsarskoye Selo 3 he found an opportunity to hand his petition to Alexander, and begged him to read it. Alexander was astonished and impressed by the strange matter he read there. He sent for the petitioner, and they had a long conversation which convinced him of the truth of the terrible story. Horrified and somewhat confused, the Tsar said :

'You can go back to Siberia now, my friend ; the rna tter shall be looked into.'

'No, Your Majesty,' said the man ; 'I cannot go home now ; I 3· See note to p. 85.

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would rather g o to prison. My interview with Your Majesty cannot be kept secret, and I shall be murdered.'

Alexander started. He turned to Miloradovich, who was then Governor of Petersburg, and said :

'I hold you answerable for this man's life.'

'In that case,' said Miloradovich, 'Your Majesty must allow me to lodge him in my own house.' And there the man actually stayed until the affair was settled.

Peste! resided almost continuously at Petersburg. You will remember that the Roman proconsuls also generally lived in the capital.4 By his presence and his connections and, above all, by sharing his booty, he stopped in advance all unpleasant rumours and gossip. He and Rostopchin were dining one day at the Tsar's table. They were standing by the window, and the Tsar asked,

'What is that on the church cross over there - something black ? '

'I cannot make i t out,' said Rostopchin; 'we must appeal to Peste!; he has wonderful sight and can see from here what is going on in Siberia.'

The Imperial Council, taking advantage of the absence of Alexander - he was at Verona or Aix - wisely and justly decided that, as the complaint referred to Siberia, Peste!, who was fortunately on the spot, should conduct the investigation. But Miloradovich, Mordvinov, and two others protested against this decision, and the matter was referred to the Supreme Court.

That body gave an unjust decision, as it always does when trying high officials. Peste! was reprimanded, and Treskin, the Civil Governor of Tobolsk, was deprived of his official rank and title of nobility and banished. Peste! was merely dismissed from the service.

Peste! was succeeded at Tobolsk by Kaptsevich, a pupil of Arakcheyev. Thin and bilious, a tyrant by nature and a restless martinet, he introduced military discipline everywhere; but, though he fixed maximum prices, he left all ordinary business in the hands of the robbers. In 1824 the Tsar intended to visit Tobolsk. Throughout the Government of Perm there is an excellent high road, well worn by traffic; it is probable that the soil was favourable for its construction. Kaptsevich made a similar road all the way to Tobolsk in a few months. In spring, when the snow was melting and the cold bitter, thousands of men were driven in 4· Herzen is mistaken here.

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relays to work at the road. Sickness broke out and half the workmen died ; but 'zeal overcomes all difficulties', and the road was made.

Eastern Siberia is governed in a still more casual fashion. The distance is so great that all rumours die away before they reach Petersburg. One Governor of Irkutsk used to fire cannon at the town when he was cheerful after dinner ; another, in the same state, used to put on priest's robes and celebrate the Mass in his own house, in the presence of the Bishop ; but, at least, neither the noise of the former nor the piety of the latter did as much harm as the state of siege kept up by Pestel and the restless activity of Kaptsevich.

3

It is a pity that Siberia is so badly governed. The choice of Governors has been peculiarly unfortunate. I do not know how Muravev acquits himself there - his intelligence and capacity are well known ; but all the rest have been failures. Siberia has a great future before it. It is generally regarded as a kind of cellar, full of gold and furs and other natural wealth, but cold, buried in snow, and ill provided with comforts and roads and population. But this is a false view.

The Russian Government is unable to impart that life-giving impulse which would drive Siberia ahead with American speed.

We shall see what will happen when the mouths of the Amur are opened to navigation, and when America meets Siberia on the borders of China.

I said, long ago, that the Pacific Ocean is the Mediterranean of the future; and I have been pleased to see the remark repeated more than once in the New York newspapers. In that future the part of Siberia, lying as it does between the ocean, South Asia, and Russia, is exceedingly important. Siberia must certainly extend to the Chinese frontier : why should we shiver and freeze at Berezov and Yakutsk, when there are such places as Krasnoyarsk and Minusinsk ?

The Russian settlers in Siberia have traits of character which suggest development and progress. The population in general are healthy and well grown, intelligent and exceedingly practical.

The children of the emigrants have never felt the pressure of landlordism. There are no great nobles in Siberia, and there is no

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aristocracy in the towns ; authority i s represented b y the civil officials and military officers ; but they are less like an aristocracy than a hostile garrison established by a conqueror. The cultivators are saved from frequent contact with them by the immense distances, and the merchants are saved by their wealth. This latter class, in Siberia, despise the officials : while professing to give place to them, they take them for what they really are - inferiors who are useful in matters of law.

Arms are indispensable to the settler, and everyone knows how to use them. Familiarity with danger and the habit of prompt action have made the Siberian peasant more soldierly, more resourceful. and more ready to resist, than his Great Russian brother. The distance of the churches has left him more independence of mind : he is lukewarm about religion and very often a dissenter. There are distant villages which the pJ:iest visits only thrice a year, when he christens the children in batches, reads the service for the dead, marries all the couples, and hears confession of accumulated sins.

4

On this side of the Ural ridge, the ways of governors are less eccentric. But yet I could fill whole volumes with stories which I heard either in the office or at the Governor's dinner-table -

stories which throw light on the malpractices and dishonesty of the officials.

5

'Yes, Sir, he was indeed a marvel, my predecessor was' - thus the inspector of police at Vyatka used to address me in his confidential moments. 'Well, of course, we get along fairly, but men like him are born, not made. He was, in his way, I might say, a Caesar, a Napoleon' - and the eyes of my lame friend, the Major, who had got his place as recompense for a wound, shone as he recalled his glorious predecessor.

'There was a gang of robbers, not far from the town. Complaints came again and again to the authorities ; now it was a party of merchants relieved of their goods, now the manager of a distillery was robbed of his money. The Governor was in a fuss and drew up edict after edict. Well, as you know, the country police are not brave : they can deal well enough with a petty

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thief, if there's only one ; but here there was a whole gang, and, likely enough, in possession of firearms. As the country police did nothing, the Governor summoned the town inspector and said :

' "I know that this is not your business at all, but your well·

known activity forces me to appeal to you."

'The inspector kn.ew all about the scandal already.

' "General," said he, "I shall start in an hour. I know where the robbers are sure to be; I shall take a detachment with me; I shall come upon the scoundrels, bring them back in chains, and lodge then in the town prison, before they are three days older." Just like Suvorov to the Austrian Emperor I And he did what he said he would do : he surprised them with his detachment; the robbers had no time to hide their money ; the inspector took it all and marched them off to the town.

'When the trial began, the inspector asked where the money was.

' "Why, batyushka, we put it into your own hands," said two of the men.

' "Mine I " cried the inspector, with an air of astonishment.

' "Yes, yours," shouted the thieves.

' ''There's insolence for you ! " said the inspector to the magistrate, turning pale with rage. "Do you expect to make people believe that I was in league with you ? I shall show you what it is to insult my uniform ; I was a cavalry officer once, and my honour shall not be insulted with impunity ! "

'So the thieves were flogged, that they might confess where they had stowed away the money. At first they were obstinate, but when they heard the order that they were to be flogged "for two pipes", then the leader of the gang called out - "We plead guilty I We spent the money ourselves."

' "You might have said so sooner," remarked the inspector,

"instead of talking such nonsense. You won't get round me in a hurry, my friend." "No, indeed ! " muttered the robber, looking in astonishment at the inspector; "we could teach nothing to Your Honour, but we might learn from you."

'Well, over that affair the inspector got the Vladimir Order.'

'Excuse me,' I said, interrupting his enthusiasm for the great man, 'but what is the meaning of that phrase "for two pipes" ?'

'Oh, we often use that in the police. One gets bored, you know, while a flogging is going on; so one lights a pipe; and, as a rule,

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when the pipe i s done, the flogging i s over too. But in special cases we order that the flogging shall go on till two pipes are smoked out. The men who flog are accustomed to it and know exactly how many strokes that means.'

6

Ever so many stories about this hero were in circulation at Vyatka. His exploits were miraculous. For some reason or another

- perhaps a Staff-general or Minister was expected - he wished to show that he had not worn cavalry uniform for nothing, but could put spurs to a charger in fine style. With this object in view, he requisitioned a horse from a rich merchant of the district ; it was a grey stallion, and a very valuable animal. The merchant refused it.

'All right,' said the inspector; 'if you don't choose to do me such a trifling service voluntarily, then I shall take the horse without your leave.'

'We shall see about that,' said Gold.

'Yes, you shall,' said Steel.

The merchant locked up his stable and set two men to guard it.

'Foiled for once, my friend ! ' he thought.

But that night, by a strange accident, a fire broke out in some empty sheds close to the merchant's house. The inspector and his men worked manfully. In order to save the house, they even pulled down the wall of the stable and let out the object of dispute, with not a hair of his mane or tail singed. Two hours later, the inspector was caracoling on a grey charger, on his way to receive the thanks of the distinguished visitor for his courage and skill in dealing with the fire. This incident proved to everyone that he bore a charmed life.

7

The Governor was once leaving a party ; and, just as his carriage started, a careless driver, in charge of a small sledge, drove into him, striking the traces between the wheelers and leaders. There was a block for a moment, but the Governor was not prevented from driving home in perfect comfort. Next day he said to the inspector : 'Do you know whose coachman ran into me last night ?

He must be taught better.'

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'That coachman will not d o i t again, Your Excellenq,,' answered the inspector with a smile; 'I have made him smart properly for it.'

'Whose coachman was it ?'

'Councillor Kulakciv's, Your Excellency.'

At that moment the old Councillor, whom I found at Vyatka and left there still holding the same office, came into the room.

'You must excuse us,' said the Governor, 'for giving a lesson to your coachman yesterday.'

The Councillor, quite in the dark, looked puzzled.

'He drove into my carriage yesterday. Well, you understand, if he did it to me, then • . .'

'But, Your Excellency, my wife and I spent the evening at home, and the coachman was not out at all.'

'What's the meaning of this ? ' asked the Governor.

But the inspector was not taken aback.

'The fact is, Your Excellency, I had such a press of business yesterday that I quite forgot about the coachman. But I confess I did not venture to mention to Your Excellency that I had forgotten. I meant to attend to his business at once.'

'Well, there's no denying that you are the right man in the right place ! ' said the Governor.

8

Side by side with this bird of prey I shall place the portrait of a very different kind of official - a mild and sympathetic creature, a real sucking dove.

Among my acquaintance at Vyatka was an old gentleman who had been dismissed from the service as inspector of rural police.

He now drew up petitions and managed lawsuits for other people

- a profession which he had been expressly forbidden to adopt.

He had entered the service in the year one, had robbed and squeezed and blackmailed in three provinces, and had twice figured in the dock. This veteran liked to tell surprising stories of what he and his contemporaries had done ; and he did not conceal his contempt for the degenerate successors who now filled their places.

'Oh, they're mere bunglers,' he used to say. 'Of course they take bribes, or they couldn't live; but as for dexterity or know-

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ledge o f the law, you needn't expect anything o f the kind from them. Just to give you an idea, let me tell you of a friend of mine who was a judge for twenty years and died twelve months ago.

He was a genius ! The peasants revere his memory, and he left a trifle to his family too. His method was all his own. If a peasant came with a petition, the Judge would admit him at once and be very friendly and cheerful.

' "Well, my friend, tell me your name and your father's name, too."

'The peasant bows - "Yermolay is my name, batyushka, and my father's name was Grigory."

' "Well, how are you, Y ermolay Grigoryevich, and where do you come from ? "

' " I live a t Dubilovo."

' "I know, I know - those mills on the right hand of the high road are yours, I suppose ? "

' "Just so, batyushka, the mills belong to our village."

' "A prosperous village, too - good land - black soil."

' "We have no reason to murmur against Heaven, Your Worship."

' "Well, that's right. I dare say you have a good large family, Yermolay Grigoryevich ?"

' "Three sons and two daughters, Your Worship, and my eldest daughter's husband has lived in our house these five years."

' "And I dare say there are some grandchildren by this time ? "

' "Indeed there are, Your Worship - a few of them too."

' "And thank God for it ! He told us to increase and multiply.

Well, you've come a long way, Yermolay Grigoryevich ; will you drink a glass of brandy with me ? "

'The visitor seems doubtful. The Judge fills the glass, saying :

' "Come, come, friend - the holy fathers have not forbidden us the use of wine and oil on this day."

' "It is true that we are allowed it, but strong drink brings a man to all bad fortune." Thereupon he crosses himself, bows to his host, and drinks the dram.

' "Now, with a family like that, Grigoryevich, you must find it hard to feed and clothe them all. One horse and one cow would never do for you - you would run short of milk for such a number."

' "One horse, batyushka I That wouldn't do at all. I've three,

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and I had a fourth, a roan, but it died in St Peter's Fast ; it was bewitched ; our carpenter Dorofey hates to see others prosper, and he has the evil eye."

' "Well, that does happen sometimes. But you have good pasture there, and I dare say you keep sheep.'

' "Yes, we have some sheep."

' "Dear me, we have had quite a long chat, Yermolay Grigoryevich. I must be off to Court now - the Tsar's service, as you know. Have you any little business to ask me about, I wonder ? "

' "Indeed I have, Your Worship."

' "Well, what is it ? Have you been doing something foolish ?

Be quick and tell me, because I must be starting."

' "This is it, Your Honour. Misfortune has come upon me in my old age, and I trust to you. It was Assumption Day ; we were in the public-house, and I had words with a man from another village - a nasty fellow he is, who steals our wood. Well, we had some words, and then he raised his fist and struck me on the breast. 'Don't you use your fists off your own dunghill,' said I ; and I wanted to teach him a lesson, s o I gave him a tap. Now, whether it was the drink or the work of the Evil One, my fist went straight into his eye, and the eye was damaged. He went at once to the police - 'I'll have the law on him,' says he."

'During this narrative the Judge - a fig for your Petersburg actors ! - becomes more and more solemn ; the expression of his eyes becomes alarming ; he says not a word.

'The peasant sees this and changes colour ; he puts his hat down on the ground and takes out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his brow. The Judge turns over the leaves of a book and still keeps silence.

' "That is why I have come to see you, batyushka," the peasant says in a strained voice.

' "What can I do in such a case ? It's a bad business I What made you hit him in the eye ? "

' "What indeed, batyushka ! I t was the enemy led m e astray."

' "Sad, very sad ! Such a thing to ruin a whole family ! How can they get on without you - all young, and the grandchildren mere infants ! A sad thing for your wife, too, in her old age ! "

'The man's legs begin to tremble. "Does Your Honour think it's as bad as all that ? "

' "Take the book and read the act yourself. But perhaps you C.Y.E.-I3

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can't read ? Here is the article dealing with injuries t o the person

- 'shall first be flogged and then banished to Siberia'."

' "Oh, save a man from ruin, save a fellow-Christian from destruction ! Is it impossible . . . "

' "But, my good man, we can't go against the law. So far as it's in our hands, we might perhaps lower the thirty strokes to five or so."

' "But about Siberia ?"

' "Oh, there we're powerless, my friend."

'The peasant at this point produces a purse, takes a paper out of the purse and two or three gold pieces out of the paper; with a low bow he places them on the table.

' "What's all that, Yermolay Grigoryevich ? "

' "Save me, batyushka ! "

' "No more of that 1 I have my weak side and I take a present at times ; my salary is small and I have to do it. But if I do, I like to give something in return ; and what can I do for you ? If only it had been a rib or a tooth ! But the eye 1 Take your money back."

'The peasant is dumbfounded.

' "There is just one possibility : I might speak to the other judges and write a line to the county town. The matter will probably go to the court there, and I have friends there who will do all they can. But they're men of a different kidney, and three yellowboys will not go far in that quarter."

'The peasant recovers a little.

' "I don't want anything - I'm sorry for your family ; but it's no use offering them less than 400 roubles."

' "Four hundred roubles ! How on earth can I get such a mint of money as that, in these times ? It's quite beyond me, I swear."

' "It's not easy, I agree. We can lessen the flogging ; the man's sorry, we shall say, and he was not sober at the time. People do live in Siberia, after all ; and it's not so very far from here. Of course, you might manage it by selling a pair of horses and one of the cows and the sheep. But you would have to work many years to replace all that stock ; and if you don't pay up, your horses will be left all right but you'll be off on the long tramp yourself. Think it over, Grigoryevich ; no hurry ; we'll do nothing till tomorrow; but I must be going now.'' And the Judge pockets

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the coins he had refused, saying, "It's quite unnecessary - I only take it to spare your feelings ! "

'Next day, an old Jew turns up at the Judge's house, lugging a bag that contains 3 50 roubles in coinage of all dates.

'The Judge promises his assistance. The peasant is tried, and tried over again, and well frightened ; then he gets off with a light sentence, or a caution to be more prudent in future, or a note against his name as a suspicious character. And the peasant for the rest of his life prays that God will reward the Judge for his kindness.

'Well, that's a specimen of the neat way they used to do it' so the retired inspector used to wind up his story.

9

In Vyatka the Russian tillers of the soil are fairly independent, and get a bad name in consequence from the officials, as unruly and discontented. But the Finnish natives, poor, timid, stupid people, are a regular gold mine to the rural police. The inspectors pay the governors twice the usual sum when they are appointed to districts where the Finns live.

The tricks which the authorities play on these poor wretches are beyond belief.

If the land-surveyor is travelling on business and passes a native village, he never fails to stop there. He takes the theodolite off his cart, drives in a post and pulls out his chain. In an hour the whole village is in a ferment. 'The land-measurer ! the landmeasurer ! ' they cry, just as they used to cry, 'The French ! the French ! ' in the year 1812. The elders come to pay their respects : the surveyor goes on measuring and making notes. They ask him not to cheat them out of their land, and he demands twenty or thirty roubles. They are glad to give it and collect the money : and he drives on to the next village of natives.

Again, if the police find a dead body, they drag it about for a fortnight - the frost makes this possible - through the Finnish villages. In each village they declare that they have just found the corpse and mean to start an inquest ; and the people pay blackmail.

Some years before I went to Vyatka, a rural inspector, a famous blackmailer, brought a dead body in a cart into a large

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village o f Russian settlers, and demanded, I think, 200 roubles.

The village elder consulted the community ; but they would not go beyond one hundred. The inspector would not lower his price.

The peasants got angry : they shut him up with his two clerks in the police-office and threatened, in their turn, to bum them alive. The inspector did not take them seriously. The peasants piled straw around the house ; then, by way of ultimatum, they held up a hundred-rouble note on a pole in front of the window.

The hero inside asked for a hundred more. Thereupon the peasants fired the straw at all four comers, and all the three Mucius Scaevolas of the rural police were burnt to death. At a later time this matter came before the Supreme Court.

These native settlements are in general much less thriving than the Russian villages.

'You don't seem well off, friend,' I said to the native owner of a hut where I was waiting for fresh horses ; it was a wretched, smoky, lop-sided cabin, with windows looking over the yard at the back.

'What can we do, batyushka ? We are poor, and keep our money for a rainy day.'

'A rainy day ? It looks to me as if you'd got it already. But drink that for comfort' - and I filled a glass with rum.

'We don't drink,' said the Finn, with a greedy look at the glass and a suspicious look at me.

'Come, come, you'd better take it.'

'Well, drink first yourself.'

I drank, and then he followed my example. 'What are you doing ? ' he asked. 'Have you come on business from Vyatka ? '

'No,' I answered ; 'I'm a traveller o n m y way there.' He was considerably relieved to hear this ; he looked all round, and added by way of explanation, 'The rainy day is when the inspector or the priest comes here.'

I should like to say something here about the latter of these personages.

10

Of the Finnish population some accepted Christianity before Peter's reign, others were baptised in the time of Elizabeth,5 and others have remained heathen. Most of those who changed their 5· Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, reigned from 1741 to 1762.

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religion under Elizabeth are still secretly attached to their own dismal and savage faith.

Every two or three years the police-inspector and the priest make a tour of the villages, to find out which of the natives have not fasted in Lent, and to enquire the reasons. The recusants are harried and imprisoned, flogged and fined. But the visitors search especially for some proof that the old heathen rites are still kept up. In that case, there is a real 'rainy day' - the detective and the missionary raise a storm and exact heavy blackmail ; then they go away, leaving all as it was before, to repeat their visit in a year or two.

In the year 183 5 the Holy Synod thought it necessary to convert the heathen Cheremises to Orthodoxy. Archbishop Filaret nominated an active priest named Kurbanovsky as missionary.

Kurbanovsky, a man eaten up by the Russian disease of ambition, set to work with fiery zeal. He tried preaching at first, but soon grew tired of it ; and, in point of fact, not much is to be done by that ancient method.

The Cheremises, when they heard of this, sent their own priests to meet the missionary. These fanatics were ingenious savages : after long discussions, they said to him : 'The forest contains not only silver birches and tall pines but also the little juniper. God permits them all to grow and does not bid the juniper be a pine tree. We men are like the trees of the forest.

Be you the silver birches, and let us remain the juniper. We don't interfere with you, we pray for the Tsar, pay our dues, and provide recruits for the Army ; but we are not willing to be false to our religion.'

· Kurbanovsky saw that they could not agree, and th at he was not fated to play the part of Cyril and Methodius.6 He had recourse to the secular arm ; and the local police-inspector was delighted - he had long wished to show his zeal for the church ; he was himself an unbaptised Tatar, a true believer in the Koran, and his name was Devlet Kildeyev.

He took a detachment of his men and proceeded to besiege the Cheremises. Several villages were baptised. Kurbanovsky sang the Te Deum in church and went back to Moscow, to receive with 6. In the ninth century Cyril and his brother Method ius, two Greek monks of Salonika, introduced Christianity among the Slavs. They invented the Russian alphabet.

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humility the velvet cap for good service ; and the Government sent the Vladimir Cross to the Tatar.

But there was an unfortunate misunderstanding between the Tatar missionary and the local mullah. The mullah was greatly displeased with this believer in the Koran took to preachng the Gospel and succeeded so well. During Ramadan, the inspector boldly put on his cross and appeared in the mosque wearing it; he took a front place, as a matter of course. The mullah had just begun to chant the Koran through his nose, when he suddenly stopped and said that he dared not go on, in the presence of a true believer who had come to the mosque wearing a Christian emblem.

The congregation protested ; and the discomfited inspector was forced to put his cross in his pocket.

I read afterwards in the archives of the Home Office an account of this brilliant conversion of the Cheremises. The writer mentioned the zealous cooperation of Devlet Kildeyev, but unfortunately forgot to add that his zeal for the Church was the more disinterested because of his firm belief in the truth of Islam.

1 1

Before I left Vyatka, the Department of Imperial Domains was committing such impudent thefts that a commission of enquiry was appointed ; and this commission sent out inspectors into all the provinces. A new system of control over the Crown tenants was introduced after that time.

Our Governor at that time was Kornilov ; he had to nominate two subordinates to assist the inspectors, and I was one of the two. I had to read a multitude of documents, sometimes with pain, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with disgust. The very headings of the subjects for investigation struck me with astonishment : (1) The loss and total disappearance of a police-station, and the destruction of the plan by the gnawing of mice.

(2) The loss of twelve miles of arable land.

(3) The transference of the peasant's son Vasily to the female sex.

The last item was so remarkable that I read the details at once from beginning to end.

There was a petition to the Governor from the father of the

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child. The petitioner stated that fifteen years ago a daughter had been born to him, whom he wished to call Vasilisa ; but the priest, not being sober, christened the girl Vasily, and entered the name thus on the register. This fact apparently caused little disturbance to the father ; but when he found he would soon be required to provide a recruit for the Army and pay the poll-tax for the child, he informed the police. The police were much puzzled.

They began by refusing to act, on the ground that he ought to have applied earlier. The father then went to the Governor, and the Governor ordered that this boy of the female sex should be formally examined by a doctor and a midwife. But at this point, matters were complicated by a correspondence with the ecclesiastical authorities ; and the parish priest, whose predecessor, under the influence of drink, had been too prudish to recognise differences of sex, now appeared on the scene ; the matter went on for years, and I rather think the girl was never cleared of the suspicion of being a boy.

The reader is not to suppose that this absurd story is a mere humorous invention of mine.

During the Emperor Paul's reign a colonel of the Guards, making his monthly report, returned as dead an officer who had gone to the hospital ; and the Tsar struck his name off the lists.

But unfortunately the officer did not die ; he recovered instead.

The colonel induced him to return to his estates for a year or two, hoping to find an opportunity of putting matters straight ; and the officer agreed. But his heirs, having read of his death in the Gazette, positively refused to recognise him as still alive ; though inconsolable for their loss, they insisted upon their right of succession. The living corpse, whom the Gazette had killed once, found that he was likely to die over again, by starvation this time.

So he travelled to Petersburg and handed in a petition to the Tsar.

This beats even my story of the girl who was also a boy.

12

It is a miry slough, this account of our provincial administration ; yet I shall add a few words more. This publicity is the last paltry compensation to those who suffered unheard and unpitied.

Government is very ready to reward high officials with grants of unoccupied land. There is no great harm in that, though it

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might b e wiser t o keep i t for the needs of a n increasing population. The rules governing such allotments of land are rather detailed ; it is illegal to grant the banks of a navigable river, or wood fit for building purposes, or both sides of a river ; and finally, land reclaimed by peasants may in no case be taken from them, even though the peasants have no title to the land except prescription.

All this is very well, on paper ; but in fact this allotment of land to individuals is a terrible instrument by which the Crown is robbed and the peasants oppressed.

Most of the magnates to whom the leases are granted either sell their rights to merchants, or try, by means of the provincial authorities, to secure some privileges contrary to the rules. Thus it happened, by mere chance, of course, that Count Orlov himself got possession of the road and pastures used by droves of cattle in the Government of Saratov.

No wonder, then, that the peasants of a certain district in Vyatka were deprived one fine morning of all their land, right up to their houses and farmyards, the soil having passed into the possession of some merchants who had bought the lease from a relation of Count Kankrin.7 The merchants next put a rent on the land. The law was appealed to. The Crown Court, being bribed by the merchants and fearing a great man's cousin, put a spoke in the wheel ; but the peasants, determined to go on to the bitter end, chose two shrewd men from among the�nselves and sent them off to Petersburg. The matter now came before the Supreme Court. The judges suspected that the peasants were in the right ; but they were puzzled how to act, and consulted Kankrin. That nobleman admitted frankly that the land had been taken away unjustly ; but he thought there would be difficulty in restoring it, because it might have been re-sold since, and because the new owners might have made some improvements. He therefore suggested that advantage should be taken of the vast extent of the Crown lands, and that the same quantity of land should be granted to the peasants, but in another district. This solution pleased everyone except the peasants : in the first place, it was no trifle to reclaim fresh land ; and, in the second place, the land 7· Count Kankrin (1774-1845) was Minister of Finance from 1823

till his death. He carried through some important reforms in the currency.

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offered them turned out to be a bog. As the peasants were more interested in growing corn than in shooting snipe, they sent in a fresh petition.

The Crown Court and the Treasury then treated this as a fresh case. They discovered a law which provided that, in cases where unsuitable land had been allotted, the grant should not be cancelled but an addition of 50 per cent should be made ; they therefore directed that the peasants should get half a bog in addition to the bog they had been given already.

The peasants sent in a third petition to the Supreme Court.

But, before this was discussed, the Board of Agriculture sent them plans of their new land, duly bound and coloured ; with a neat diagram of the points of the compass 'arranged in a star, and suitable explanations of the rhombus R R Z and the rhombus Z Z R, and, above all, with a demand for a fixed payment per acre. When the peasants saw that, far from getting back their good land, they were to be charged money for their bog, they flatly refused to pay.

The rural inspector informed the Governor of this ; and the Governor sent troops under the command of the town inspector of Vyatka. The latter went to the spot, arrested several men and beat them, restored order in the district, took money, handed over the 'guilty' to the Criminal Court, and was hoarse for a week after, owing to the strain on his voice. Several of the offenders were sentenced to flogging and banishment.

Two years afterwards, when the Crown Prince was passing through the district, these peasants presented a petition, and he ordered the matter to be examined. It was at this point that I had to draw up a report of all the proceedings. Whether anything sensible was done in consequence of this fresh investigation, I do not know. I have heard that the exiles were restored, but I never heard that the land had been given back.

1 3

In the next place I shall refer to the famous episode of the 'potatorebellion'.

In Russia, as formerly throughout Europe, the peasants were unwilling to grow potatoes, from an instinctive feeling that

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potatoes are poor food and not productive o f health and strength.

Model landlords, however, and many Crown settlements used to grow these tubers long before the 'potato-revolt'.

In the Government of Kazan and part of Vyatka, the people had grown a crop of potatoes. When the tubers were taken up, it occurred to the Board of Agriculture to start communal pits for storing them. The pits were authorised, ordered, and constructed ; and in the beginning of winter the peasants, with many misgivings, carted their potatoes to the communal pits. But they positively refused, when they were required in the spring to plant these same potatoes in a frozen condition. What, indeed, can be more insulting to labouring men than to bid them do what is obviously absurd ? But their protest was represented as a rebellion. The minister despatched an official from Petersburg ; and this intelligent and practical man excused the farmers of the first district he visited from planting the frozen potatoes, and charged for this dispensation one rouble per head. He repeated this operation in two other districts ; but the men of the fourth district flatly refused either to plant the potatoes or to pay the money.

'You have excused the others,' they said ; 'you are clearly bound to let us off too.' The official then tried to end the business by threats and corporal punishment ; but the peasants armed themselves with poles and routed the police. The Governor sent a force of Cossacks to the spot ; and the neighbouring districts backed up the rebels.

It is enough to say that cannon roared and rifles cracked J>efore the affair was over. The peasants took to the woods and were routed out of their covert like wild animals by the Cossacks. They were caught, chained, and sent to Kosmodemyansk to be tried by court-martial.

By a strange chance there was a simple, honest man, an old major of militia, serving on the court-martial ; and he ventured to say that the official from Petersburg was to blame for all that had happened. But everyone promptly fell on the top of him and squashed him and suppressed him ; they tried to frighten him and said he ought to be ashamed of his attempt 'to ruin an innocent man'.

The enquiry went on just as enquiries do in Russia : the peasants were flogged on examination, flogged as a punishment,

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flogged as an example, and flogged to get money out of them ; and then a number of them were exiled to Siberia.

It is worthy of remark that the Minister passed through Kosmodemyansk during the trial. One thinks he might have looked in at the court-martial himself or summoned the dangerous major to an interview. He did nothing of the kind.

The famous Turgot,8 knowing how unpopular the potato was in France, distributed seed-potatoes to a number of dealers and persons in Government employ, with strict orders that the peasants were to have none. But at the same time he let them know privately that the peasants were not to be prevented from helping themselves. The result was that in a few years potatoes were grown all over the country.

All things considered, this seems to me a better method than the cannon-ball plan.

14

In the year 1836 a strolling tribe of gipsies came to Vyatka and encamped there. These people wandered at times as far as Tobolsk and lrbit, carrying on from time immemorial their roving life of freedom, accompanied of course by a bear that had been taught to dance and children that had been taught nothing ; they lived by doctoring horses, telling fortunes, and petty theft. At Vyatka they went on singing their songs and stealing chickens, till the Governor suddenly received instructions, that, if the gipsies turned out to have no passports - no gipsy was ever known to possess one - a certain interval should be allowed them, within which they must register themselves as members of the village communities where they happened to be at the time.

If they failed to do so by the date mentioned, then all who were fit for military service were to be sent to the colours, the rest to be banished from the country, and all their male children to be taken from them.

Tyufyayev himself was taken aback by this decree. He gave notice of it to the gipsies, but he reported to Petersburg that it could not be complied with. The registration would cost money ; the consent of the communities must be obtained ; and they would 8. Turgot (172.7-1781) was one of the Ministers of Finance under Louis XVI.

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want money for admitting the gipsies. After taking everything into consideration, Tyufyayev proposed to the Minister - and he must get due credit for the proposal - that the gipsies should be treated leniently and given an extension of time.

In reply the Minister ordered him to carry out the original instructions when the time had expired. The Governor hardened his heart and sent a detachment to surround the gipsy encampment ; when that was done, the police brought up a militia battalion, and scenes that beggar description are said to have followed -

women, with their hair flying loose, ran frantically to and fro, shrieking and sobbing, while white-haired old women clutched hold of their sons. But order triumphed, and the police-inspector secured all the boys and the recruits, and the rest were marched off by stages to their place of exile.

But a question now arose : where were the kidnapped children to be put, and at whose cost were they to be maintained ?

In former days there had been schools for foundlings which cost the Crown nothing ; but these had been abolished, as productive of immorality. The Governor advanced the money from his own pocket and consulted the Minister. The Minister replied that, until further orders, the children were to be looked after by the old people in the alms-house.

To make little children live with dying old men and women, and to force them to breath the atmosphere of death ; and on the other hand, to force the aged and worn-out to look after the' children for nothing - that was a real inspiration I 1 5

While I a m o n this subject, I shall tell here the story o f what happened eighteen months later to a bailiff of my father's.

Though a peasant, he was a man of intelligence and experience; he had several teams of his own which he hired out, and he served for twenty years as bailiff of a small detached village.

In the year which I spent at Vladimir, he was asked by the people of a neighbouring village to supply a substitute as a recruit for the Army; and he turned up in the town with the future defender of his country at the end of a rope. He seemed perfectly self-confident and sure of success.

'Yes, batyushka,' he said to me, combing with this fingers his thick brown beard with some grey in it, 'it all depends on how

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you manage these things. We put forward a lad two years ago, but he was a very poor miserable specimen, and the men were very much afraid that he would not do. "Well," said I, "you must begin by collecting some money - the wheel won't go round unless you grease it ! " So we had a talk together, and the village produced twenty-five gold pieces. I drove into the town, had a talk with the people in the Crown Court, and then went straight to the President's house - a clever man, batyushka, and an old acquaintance of mine. He had me taken into his study, where he was lying on the sofa with a bad leg. I put the facts before him.

He laughed and said, "All right, all right ! But you tell me how many of them you have brought with you ; for I know what an old skinflint you are." I put ten gold pieces on the table with a low bow. He took them up and played with them. ''Well," says he, "I'm not the only person who expects payment ; have you brought any more ? " ''Well," said I, "we can go as far as ten more." "You can count for yourself," says he, "where they are to go to : the doctor will want a couple, and the inspector of recruits another couple, and the clerk - I don't think more than three will be needed in that quarter; but you had better give me the lot, and I'll try to arrange it for you." '

'Well, did you give it ? ' I asked.

'Certainly I did ; and the man was passed for the Army all right.'

Enlightened by this method of rounding off accounts, and attracted probably by the five gold pieces to whose ultimate destination he had made no allusion, the bailiff was sure of success this time also. But there is many a slip between the bribe and the palm that closes on it. Count Essen, an imperial aide-de-<:amp, was sent to Vladimir to inspect the recruits. The bailiff, with his golden arguments in his pocket, found his way into the presence of the Count. But unfortunately the Count was no true Russian, but a son of the Baltic provinces which teach German devotion towards the Russian Tsar. He got angry, raised his voice, and, worse than all, rang his bell ; in ran a secretary, and police-officers on the top of him. The bailiff, who had never dreamed of the existence of a man in uniform who would refuse a bribe, lost his head altogether ; instead of holding his tongue, he swore by all his gods that he had never offered money, and wished that his eyes might fall out and he might die of thirst, if he had ever

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thought o f such a thing. Helpless as a sheep, h e was taken o ff to the police-station, where he probably repented of his folly in insulting a high officer by offering him so little.

Essen was not content with his own clear conscience nor with having given the man a fright. He probably wished to lay the axe to the tree of Russian corruption, to punish vice, and to make a salutary example. He therefore reported the bailiff's nefarious attempt to the police, the Governor, and the Recruiting Officer.

The offender was put in prison and ordered to be tried. Thanks to the absurd law, which is equally severe on the honest man who gives a bribe and the official who pockets it, the affair looked bad, and I resolved at all costs to save the bailiff.

I went at once to the Governor, but he refused to interfere.

The President and Councillors of the Criminal Court shook their heads : the aide-de-camp was interested in the case, and that frightened them. I went to Count Essen himself, and he was very gracious - he had no wish that the bailiff should suffer, but thought he needed a lesson : 'Let him be tried and acquitted,' he said. When I repeated this to the inspector of police, he remarked : 'The fact is, these gentlemen don't understand business.

If the Count had simply sent him to me, I should have warmed the fool's back for walking into a river without asking if there was a ford ; then I should have sent him about his business, and all parties would have been satisfied. But the court complicates matters.'

I have never forgotten what the Count said and what the inspector said : they expressed so neatly and clearly the view of justice entertained in the Russian Empire.

Between these Pillars of Hercules of our national jurisprudence, the bailiff had fallen into the deep water, in other words, into the Criminal Court. A few months later the court came to a decision : the criminal was to be flogged and then banished to Siberia. His son and all his relations came to me, begging me to save the father and head of the family. I felt intense pity myself for the sufferer, who was perfectly innocent. I called again on the President and Councillors ; again I tried to prove that they were injuring themselves by punishing this man so severely. 'You know very well yourselves,' I said, 'that no lawsuit is never settled without bribes ; and you will starve yourselves, unless you take the truly

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Christian view that every gift i s good and perfect.' 9 B y begging and bowing and sending the bailiff's son to bow still lower, I attained half of my object. The man was condemned to suffer a certain number of lashes within the prison walls, but he was not exiled ; and he was forbidden to undertake any business of the kind in future for other peasants.

When I found that the Governor and state-attorney had confirmed this remission, I went off to beg the police that the flogging might be lightened ; and they, partly flattered by this personal appeal, and partly pitying a martyr in a cause so near to their own hearts, and also because they knew the man was well-to-do, promised me that the punishment should be merely nominal.

A few days later the bailiff came to my house one morning ; he looked thin, and there was more grey in his beard. For all his j oy, I soon perceived that he had something on his mind.

'What's troubling you ? ' I asked.

'Well, I wish I could get it all over at once.'

'I don't understand you.'

'What I mean is - when will the flogging be ? '

'But haven't you been flogged ?'

'No.'

'But they've let you out, and I suppose you're going home.'

'Home ? Yes, I'm going home, but I keep thinking about the flogging ; the secretary spoke of it, I am sure I heard him.'

I was really quite puzzled. At last I asked him if he had a written discharge of any kind. He handed it to me. I read there the original sentence at full length, and then a postscript, that he was to be flogged within the prison walls by sentence of the court and then to be discharged, in possession of this certificate.

I burst out laughing. 'You see, you've been flogged already.'

'No, batyushka, I've not.'

'Well, if you're not content, go back and ask them to flog you ; perhaps the police will take pity upon you.'

Seeing me laugh, he too smiled, but he shook his head doubt·

fully and said, 'It's a very queer business.'

A very irregular business, many will say ; but let them reflect that it is this kind of irregularity alone which makes life possible in Russia.

g. There is a reference to the Epistle of James, i. 17.

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C H A P T E R IX

Alexander Vitberg

1

I N the midst of all this ugliness and squalor, these petty and repulsive persons and scenes, in this world of chicanery and red tape, I recall the sad and noble figure of a great artist.

I lived at his side for two years and a half and saw this strong man breaking up under the pressure of persecution and misfortune.

Nor can it be said that he succumbed without a protest ; for ten long years he struggled desperately. When he went into exile, he still hoped to conquer his enemies and right himself; in fact, he was still eager for the conflict, still full of projects and expedients.

But at Vyatka he saw that all was over.

He might have accepted this discovery but for the wife and children at his side, and the prospect of long years of exile, poverty, and privation ; he grew greyer and older, not day by day, but hour by hour. I was two years at Vyatka, and when I left, he was ten years older than when I carne.

Let me tell you the story of this long martyrdom.

2

The Emperor Alexander could not believe in his victory over Napoleon. Glory was a burden to him, and he quite sincerely gave it to God's name instead. Always inclined to mysticism and despondency, he was more than ever haunted by these feelings after his repeated victories over Napoleon.

When the last soldier of the French army had retreated over the frontier, Alexander published a manifesto, in which he took a vow to erect a great cathedral at Moscow, dedicated to the Saviour.

Plans for this church were invited from all quarters, and there was a great cornpeti tion of artists.

Alexander Vitberg was then a young man ; he had been trained in the art schools at Petersburg and had gained the gold medal for

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painting. Of Swedish descent, he was born in Russia and received his early education in the School of Mines. He was a passionate lover of art, with a tendency to eccentricity and mysticism. He read the Emperor's manifesto and the invitation for designs, and at once gave up all his former occupations. Day and night he wandered about the streets of Petersburg, tormented by a fixed idea which he was powerless to banish. He shut himself up in his room, took his pencil, and began to work.

The artist took no one into his confidence. After working for several months, he travelled to Moscow, where he studied the city and its surroundings. Then he set to work again, hiding himself from all eyes for months at a time, and hiding his drawings also.

The time came for the competition. Many plans were sent in, plans from Italy and from Germany, and our own academicians sent in theirs. The design of this unknown youth took its place among the rest. Some weeks passed before the Emperor examined the plans, and these weeks were the Forty Days in the Wilderness, days of temptation and doubt and painful anxiety.

The Emperor was struck by Vitberg's design, which was on a colossal scale and remarkable for religious and artistic feeling.

He stopped first in front of it and asked who had sent it in. The envelope was opened ; the name inside was that of an unknown student of the Academy.

Alexander sent for Vitberg and had a long conversation with him. He was impressed by the artist's confident and animated speech, the real inspiration which filled him, and the mystical turn of his convictions. 'You speak in stone,' the Emperor said, as he looked through the plans again.

The plans were approved that very day ; Vitberg was appointed architect of the cathedral and president of the building committee. Alexander was not aware that there were thorns beneath the crown of laurels which he placed on the artist's head.

3

There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture. Abstract, geometrical, musical and yet dumb, passionless, it depends entirely upon symbolism, form, suggestion. Simple lines, and the harmonious combination and numerical relations between these, present something mysterious and at the same time incomplete.

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A building, a temple, does not comprise its object within itself; i t differs i n this respect from a statue or a picture, a poem o r a symphony. The building needs an inhabitant ; in itself it is a prepared space, a setting, like the shell of a tortoise or marine creature ; and the essential thing is just this, that the outer case should fit the spirit and the inhabitant, as closely as the shell fits the tortoise. The walls of the temple, its vaults and pillars, its main entrance, its foundations and cupola, should all reflect the deity that dwells within, just as the bones of the skull correspond exactly to the convolutions of the brain.

To the Egyptians their temples were sacred books, their obelisks were sermons by the high road.

Solomon's temple is the Bible in stone ; and so St Peter's at Rome is the transition, in stone, from Catholicism to a kingdom of this world, the first stage of our liberation from monastic fetters.

The mere construction of temples was at all times accompanied Jy so many mystical rites, allegoric ceremonies, and solemn con

"ecrations, that the medieval builders ranked themselves as a kind of religious order, as successors to the builders of Solomon's Temple ; and they formed themselves into secret companies, of 1hich freemasonry was a later development.

The Renaissance robbed architecture of this essentially mystical note. The Christian faith began to contend with scepticism, the Gothic spire with the Greek fa�ade, religious sanctity with worldly beauty. This is why St Peter's at Rome is so insignificant ; in that colossal erection Christianity is struggling to come alive ; the Church turns pagan, and Michelangelo uses the walls of the Sistine Chapel to depict Jesus Christ as a brawny athlete, a Hercules in the flower of youth and strength.

After this date church architecture fell into utter decadence, till it became a mere reproduction, in varying proportions, either of St Peter's or of ancient Greek temples. There is one Parthenon at Paris which is called the Church of the Madeleine, and another at New York, which is used as the Exchange.

Without faith and without special circumstances, it was hard to build anything with life about it. All modern churches are misfits and pretentious anachronisms, like those angular Gothic churches with which the English ornament their towns and offend every artistic eye.

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4

But the circumstances in which Vitberg drew his plans, his own personality, and the Emperor's temperament, all these were quite exceptional.

The war of 1812 had a profound effect upon men's minds in Russia, and it was long after the liberation of Moscow before the general emotion and excitement subsided. Then foreign events, the taking of Paris, the history of the Hundred Days, expectations and rumours, Waterloo, Napoleon on board the Bel!erophon, mourning for the dead and anxiety for the living, the returning armies, the warriors restored to their homes - all this had a strong effect upon the least susceptible natures. Now imagine a young man, an artist and a mystic, endowed with creative power, and also an enthusiast spurred on by current events, by the Tsar's challenge, and by his own genius.

Near Moscow, between the Mozhaysk and Kaluga roads, a modest eminence dominates the whole city. Those are the Sparrow Hill� of which I spoke in my early recollections. They command one of the finest views of all Moscow. Here it was that Ivan the Terrible, still young and unhardened, shed tears at the sight of his capital on fire ; and here that the priest Sylvester met him and by his stern rebuke changed for twenty years to come the nature of that monster and man of genius.

Napoleon and his army marched round these hills. There his strength was broken, and there his retreat began. What better site for a temple in memory of 1812 than the farthest point reached by the enemy ?

But this was not enough. It was Vitberg's intention to convert the hill itself into the lowest part of the cathedral, to build a colonnade to the river, and then, on a foundation laid on three sides by nature herself, to erect a second and a third church. But all the three churches made one ; for Vitberg's cathedral, like the chief dogma of Christianity, was both triple and indivisible.

The lowest of the three churches, hewn in the rock, was a parallelogram in the shape of a coffin or dead body. All that was visible was a massive entrance supported on columns of almost Egyptian size ; the church itself was hidden in the primitive unworked rock. It was lighted by lamps in high Etruscan candelabra ; a feeble ray of daylight from the second church passed into it

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through a transparent picture of the Nativity. All the heroes who fell in 1 8 1 2 were to rest in this crypt ; a perpetual mass was to be said there for those who had fallen on the field of battle ; and the names of them all, from the chief commanders to the private soldiers, were to be engraved on the walls.

On top of this coffin or cemetery rose the second church, in the form of a Greek cross with limbs of equal length spreading to the four quarters, a temple of life, of suffering, of labour. The colonnade which led up to it was adorned with statues of the Patriarchs and Judges. At the entrance were the Prophets ; they stood outside the church, pointing out the way which they could not tread themselves. Inside this temple the Gospel story and the Acts of the Apostles were represented on the walls.

Above this building, crowning it, completing it, and including it, the third church was to be built in the shape of the Pantheon.

It was brightly lighted, as the horne of the Spirit, of unbroken peace, of eternity ; and eternity was represented by its shape.

Here there were no pictures or sculpture ; but there was an exterior frieze representing the archangels, and the whole was surmounted by a colossal dome.

Sad is my present recollection of Vitberg's main idea ; he had worked it out in every detail, in complete accordance at every point with Christian theology and architectural beauty.

This astonishing man spent a whole lifetime over his conception. It was his sole occupation during the ten years that his trial lasted ; in poverty and exile, he devoted several hours of each day to his cathedral. He lived in it ; he could not believe that it would never be built; his whole life - his memories, his consolations, his fame - was wrapped up in that portfolio.

It may be that in the future, when the martyr is dead, some later artist may shake the dust from those leaves and piously give to the world that record of suffering, those plans over which the strong man, after his brief hour of glory had gone out, spent a life of darkness and pain.

His plan was full of genius, and startling in its extravagance; for this reason Alexander chose it, and for this reason it should have been carried out. It is said that the hill could never have supported such a building ; but I do not believe it, especially in view of all the modern triumphs of engineering in America and

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England, those suspension-bridges and tunnels which a train takes eight minutes to pass through.

Miloradovich advised Vitberg to have granite monoliths for the great pillars of the lowest church. Someone pointed out that the process of bringing these from Finland would be very costly.

'That is the very reason why we should get them,' answered Miloradovich ; 'if there were granite quarries on the Moscow River, where would be the wonder in erecting the pillars ? '

Miloradovich was a soldier, but h e understood the element of romance in war and in other things. Magnificent ends are gained by magnificent means. Nature alone attains to greatness without effort.

The chief accusation brought against Vitberg, even by those who never doubted his honesty, was this, that he had accepted the post of director of the works. As an artist without experience, and a young man ignorant of finance, he should have been content with his position as architect. This is true.

It is easy to sit in one's chair and condemn Vitberg for this.

But he accepted the post just because he was young and inexperienced, because nothing seemed hard when once his plans had been accepted, because the Tsar himself offered him the post, encouraged him, and supported him. Whose head would not have been turned ? Where are these sober, sensible, self-controlled people ? H they exist, they are not capable of constructing colossal plans, they cannot makes stones speak.

)

As a matter of course, Vitberg was soon surrounded by a swarm of rascals, men who look on state employment merely as a lucky chance to line their own pockets. It is easy to understand that such men would undermine Vitberg and set traps for him ; yet he might have climbed out of these but for something else - had not envy in some quarters, and injured dignity in others, been added to general dishonesty.

There were three other members of the commission as well as Vitberg - the Archbishop Filaret, the Governor of Moscow, and Kushnikov, a Judge of the Supreme Court ; and all three resented from the first the presence of this 'whipper-snapper', who

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actually ventured to state his objections and insist o n his own opinions.

They helped others to entangle and defame him, and then they destroyed him without a qualm.

Two events contributed to this catastrophe, the fall of the Minister, Prince A. N. Golitsyn, and then the death of Alexander.

The Minister's fall dragged Vitberg down with it. He felt the full weight of that disaster : the Commission complained, the Archbishop was offended, the Governor was dissasitfied. His replies were called insolent - insolence was one of the main charges brought against him on his trial - and it was said that his subordinates stole - as if there was a single person in the public service in Russia who refrains from stealing ! It is possible, indeed, that his agents stole more than usual ; for he was quite inexperienced in the management of reformatories or the detection of highly placed thieves.

Alexander ordered Arakcheyev to investigate the affair. He himself was sorry for Vitberg and sent a message to say that he was convinced of the architect's honesty.

But Alexander died and Arakcheyev fell. Under Nicholas, Vitberg's affair at once assumed a more threatening aspect. It dragged on for ten years, and the absurdity of the proceedings is incredible. The Supreme Court dismissed charges taken as proved by the Criminal Court, and charged him with guilt of which he had been acquitted ; the committee of ministers found him guilty on all the charges ; and the Emperor Nicholas added to the original sentence banishment to Vyatka.

So Vitberg was banished, having been discharged from the public service 'for abusing the confidence of the Emperor Alexander and for squandering the revenues of the Crown'. A claim was brought against him for a million roubles - I think that was the sum ; all his property was seized and sold by auction, and a report was spread that he had transferred an immense sum of money to America.

I lived for two years in the same house with Vitberg and kept up constant relations with him till I left Vyatka. He had not saved even enough for his daily bread, and his family lived in the direst poverty.

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6

In order to throw light on this trial and all similar trials in Russia, I shall add two trifling details.

Vitberg bought a forest for building material from a merchant named Lobanov, but, before the trees were felled, offered to take another forest instead which was nearer the river and belonged to the same owner. Lobanov agreed ; the trees were felled and the timber floated down the river. More timber was needed at a later date, and Vitberg bought the first forest over again. Hence arose the famous charge that he had paid twice over for the same timber. The unfortunate Lobanov was put in prison on this charge and died there.

7

Of the second affair I was myself an eye-witness.

Vitberg bought up land with a view to his cathedral. His idea was that the serfs, when transferred with the land he had bought, should bind themselves to supply a fixed number of workmen to be employed on the cathedral ; in this way they acquired complete freedom from all other burdens for themselves and their community. It is amusing to note that our judges, being also landowners, objected to this measure as a form of slavery !

One estate which Vitberg wished to buy belonged to my father.

It lay on the bank of the Moscow River ; stone had been found there, and Vitberg got leave from my father to make a geological inspection, in order to determine how much stone there was.

After obtaining leave, Vitberg had to go off to Petersburg.

Three months later my father learned that the quarrying operations were being carried out on a great scale, and that the peasants' cornfields were buried under blocks of stone. His protests were not listened to, and he went to law. There was a stubborn contest. The defendants tried at first to throw all the blame on Vitberg, but, unfortunately for them, it turned out that he had given no orders whatever, and that the Commission had done the whole thing during his absence.

The case was referred to the Supreine Court, which surprised everyone by coming to a fairly reasonable decision. The stone which had been quarried was to belong to the landowner, as

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compensation for the injury t o his fields ; the Crown funds spent on the work were to be repaid, to the amount of 1oo,ooo roubles, by those who had signed the contract for the work. The signatories were Prince Golitsyn, the Archbishop, and Kushnikov. Of course there was a great outcry, and the matter was referred to the Tsar.

The Tsar ordered that the payment should not be exacted, because - as he wrote with his own hand - 'the members of the Commission did not know what they were signing' I This is actually printed in the journals of the Supreme Court. Even if the Archbishop was bound by his cloth to display humility, what are we to think of the other two magnates who accepted the Tsar's generosity under such conditions ?

But where was the money to be found ? Crown property, we are told, can neither be burnt by fire nor drowned in water - it can only be stolen, we might add. Without hesitation a general of the Staff was sent in haste to Moscow to clear matters up.

He did so, restored order, and settled everything in the course of a few days. The stone was to be taken from the landowner, to defray the expenses of the quarry, though, if the landowner wished to keep the stone, he might do so on payment of 10o,ooo roubles. The landowner was not to receive special compensation,

· because the value of his property had been increased by the discovery of a new source of wealth (that is really a noble touch ! )

. but a certain law of Peter the Great's sanctioned the payment of so many kopecks an acre for the damage done to the peasants'

fields.

The real sufferer was my father. It is hardly necessary to add that this business of the stone quarry figured after all among the charges brought against Vitberg at his triaL

8

Vitberg had been living in exile at Vyatka for two years when the merchants of the town determined to build a new church.

Their plans surprised the Tsar Nicholas when they were submitted to him. He confirmed them and gave orders to the local authorities that the builders were not to mar the architect's design.

'Who made these plans ? ' he asked of the minister.

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'Vitberg, Your Majesty.'

'Do you mean the same Vitberg ?'

'The same man, Your Majesty.'

And so it happened that Vitberg, most unexpectedly, got permission to return to Moscow or Petersburg. When he asked leave to clear his character, it was refused ; but when he made skilful plans for a church, the Tsar ordered his restoration - as if there had ever been a doubt of his artistic capacity !

In Petersburg, where he was starving for bread, he made a last attempt to defend his honour. It was a complete failure. He applied to Prince A. N. Golitsyn ; but the Prince thought it impossible to open the question again, and advised Vitberg to address a humble petition for pecuniary assistance to the Crown Prince. He said that Zhukovsky and himself would interest themselves in the matter, and held out hopes of a gift of 1 ,ooo roubles.

Vitberg refused.

I visited Petersburg for the last time at the beginning of winter in 1846, and there I saw Vitberg. He was quite a wreck ; even his wrath against his enemies, which I had admired so much in former days, had begun to cool down ; he had ceased to hope and was making no endeavour to escape from his position ; a calm despair was making an end of him ; he was breaking up altogether and only waiting for death.

Whether the sufferer is still living, I do not know, but I doubt it.

'But for my children,' he said to me at parting, 'I would tear myself away from Russia and beg my bread over the world ; wearing my Cross of Vladimir, I would hold out calmly to the passer-by that hand which the Tsar Alexander grasped, and tell him of my great design and the fate of an artist in Russia.'

'Poor martyr,' thought I, 'Europe shall learn your fate - I promise you that.'

9

My intimacy with Vitberg was a great relief to me at Vyatka.

His serious simplicity and a certain solemnity of manner suggested the churchman to some extent. Strict in his principles, he tended in general to austerity rather than enjoyment ; but this strictness took nothing from the luxuriance and richness of his artistic fancy. He could invest his mystical views with such lively C.Y.E,-I4

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forms and such beautiful colouring that objections died o n your lips, and you felt reluctant to examine and pull to pieces the glimmering forms and shadowy pictures of his imagination.

His mysticism was partly due to his Scandinavian blood. It was the same play of fancy combined with cool reflection which we see in Swedenborg ;1 and that in its tum resembles the fiery reflection of the sun's rays when they fall on tlte ice-covered mountains and snows of Norway.

Though I was shaken for a time by Vitberg's influence, my positive tum of mind held its own nevertheless. It was not my destiny to be carried up to the third heaven ; I was born to inhabit earth alone. Tables never tum at my touch, rings never quiver when I look at them. The daylight of thought is my element, not the moonlight of imagination.

But I was more inclined to the mystical standpoint when I lived with Vitberg than at any other period of my life.

There was much to support Vitberg's influence - the loneliness of exile, the strained and pietistic tone of the letters I received from home, the love which was mastering my whole being with ever increasing power, and an oppressive feeling of remorse for my own misconduct.2

•

Two years later I was again influenced by ideas partly religious and partly socialistic, which I took from the Gospel and from Rousseau ; my position was tltat of some French tltinkers, such as Pierre Leroux.3

My friend Ogarev plunged even before I did into the waves of mysticism. In 183 3 he began to write a libretto for Gebel's oratorio of Paradise Lost ; and he wrote to me that the whole history of humanity was included in that poem ! It appears therefore that he then considered the paradise of his aspirations to have existed already and disappeared from view.

In 1838 I wrote from this point of view some historical scenes which I supposed at the time to be dramatic. They were in verse.

In one I represented the strife between Christianity and the ancient world, and told how St Paul, when entering Rome, raised a young man from the dead to enter on a new life. Another de-l. Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-I772}, a Swedish mystic and founder of a sect.

2. He refers to an intrigue he was carrying on at Vyatka.

3· A French publicist and disciple of Saint-Simon, 1797-1871.

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scribed the contest of the Quakers against the Church of England, and the departure of William Penn for America.

The mysticism of the Gospel soon gave way in my mind to the mysticism of science ; but I was fortunate enough to escape from the latter as well in course of time.

10

But now I must go back to the modest little town whi�h was called Khlynov until Catherine II changed its name to Vyatka ; what her motive was, I do not know, unless it was her Finnish patriotism.

In that dreary distant backwater of exile, separated from all I loved, surrounded by the unclean horde of officials, and exposed without defence to the tyranny of the Governor, I met nevertheless with many warm hearts and friendly hands, and there I spent many happy hours which are sacred in recollection.

Where are you now, and how are you, my snowbound friends ?

It is twenty years since we met. I suppose you have grown old, as I have ; you are thinking about marrying your daughters, and have given up drinking champagne by the bottle and tossing off bumpers of vodka. Which of you has made a fortune, and which has lost it ? Which has risen high in the official world, and which is laid low by the palsy ? Above all, do you still keep alive the memory of our free discussions ? Do those chords still resound that were struck so vigorously by our common friendship and our common resentment ?

I am unchanged, as you know, for I suspect that rumour flies from the banks of the Thames as far as you. I think of you sometimes, and always with affection. I have kept some letters of those former days, and some of them I regard as treasures and love to read over again.

'I am not ashamed to confess to you,' writes one young friend on 26 January 1838, 'that my heart is full of bitterness. Help me for the sake of that life to which you summoned me ; help me with your advice. I want to learn ; make me a list of books, lay down any programme you like ; I will work my hardest, if you will point the way. It would be sinful of you to discourage me.'

'I bless you,' another wrote to me just after I had left Vyatka,

'as the husbandman blesses the rain which gives life to his unfertilised field.'

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I copy out these lines, not from vanity, but because they are very precious to me. This appeal to young hearts and their generous reply, and the unrest I was able to awaken in them -

this is my compensation for nine months spent in prison and three years at Vyatka.

1 1

There is one thing more. Twice a week the post from Moscow came to Vyatka. With what excitement I waited near the postoffice while the letters were sorted ! How my heart beat as I broke the seal of my letter from horne and searched inside for a little enclosure, written on thin paper in a wonderfully small and beautiful hand I I did not read that in the post-office. I walked slowly horne, putting off the happy moment and feasting on the thought that the letter was there.

These letters have all been preserved. I left them at Moscow when I quitted Russia. Though I longed to read them over, I was afraid to touch them.

Letters are more than recollections, the very life blood of the past is stored up in them ; they are the past, exactly as it was, preserved from destruction and decay.

Is it really necessary once again to know, to see, to touch with hands which age has covered with wrinkles, what once you wore on your wedding-day ? 4

CHAPTER X

The Crown Prince at Vyatka - The Fall of Tyufyayev - Transferxed to Vladimir - The Inspector's Enquiry

1

TH E Crown Prince 1 is corning to Vyatka ! The Crown Prince is travelling through Russia, to see the country and to be seen himself ! This news was of interest to everyone and of special interest, of course, to the Governor. In his haste and confusion, he issued 4· These letters were from Herzen's cousin, Natalya Zakharin, who became his wife in 1838.

1 . Mterwards Alexander II.

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a number of ridiculous and absurd orders - for instance, that the peasants along the road should wear their holiday caftans, and that all hoardings in the towns should be repainted and all sidewalks mended. A poor widow who owned a smallish house in Orlov informed the mayor that she had no money to repair her sidewalk; the mayor reported this to the Governor, and the Governor ordered the floors of her house to be pulled up - the sidewalks there were made of wood - and, if that was insufficient, repairs were to be done at the public cost and the money to be refunded by the widow, even if she had to sell her house by auction for the purpose. Things did not go to the length of an auction, but the widow's floors were tom up.

2

Fifty versts from Vyatka is the spot where the wonder-working icon of St Nicholas was revealed to the people of Novgorod.

When they moved to Vyatka, they took the icon with them : but it disappeared and turned up again by the Big River, fifty versts away. The people removed it again i but they took a vow that, if the icon would stay with them, they would carry it in solemn procession once a year - on the twenty-third of May, I think - to the Big River. This is the chief summer holiday in the Government of Vyatka. The icon is despatched along the river on a richly decorated barge the day before, accompanied by the Bishop and all the clergy in their full robes. Hundreds of boats of every description, filled with peasants and their wives, native tribesmen and shopkeepers, make up a lively scene, as they sail in the wake of the Saint. In front of all sails the Governor's barge, decorated with scarlet cloth. It is a remarkable sight. The people gather from far and near in tens of thousands, wait on the bank for the arrival of the Saint, and move about in noisy crowds round the little village by the river. It is remarkable that the native Votyaks and Cheremises and even Tatars, though they are not Christians, come in crowds to pray to the icon. The festival, indeed, wears a purely pagan aspect. Natives and Russians alike bring calves and sheep as offerings up to the wall of the monastery ; they slaughter them on the spot, and the Abbot repeats prayers and blesses and consecrates the meat, which is offered at a special window on the inner side of the monastery enclosure. The meat is then distributed to the people. In old times

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it was given away, but nowadays the monks receive a few pence for each piece. Thus the peasant who has presented an entire calf has to spend a trifle in order to get a bit of veal for his own eating. The court of the monastery is filled with beggars, cripples, blind men, and sufferers from all sorts of deformity ; they sit on the ground and sing out in chorus for alms. The gravestones round the church are used as seats by boys, the sons of priests and shopmen ; armed with an ink-bottle, each offers to write out names of the dead, that their souls may be prayed for. 'Who wants names written ? ' they call out, and the women crowd round them and repeat the names. The boys scratch away with their pens with a professional air and repeat the names after them - 'Marya, Marya, Akulina, Stepanida, Father Joann, Matrena - no, no I auntie, half a kopeck is all you gave me; but I can't take less than five kopecks for such a lot - Joann, V asilisa, Iona, Marya, Yevpraxia, and the baby Katerina.'

The church is tightly packed, and the female worshippers differ oddly in their preferences : one hands a candle to · her neighbour with precise directions that it is to be offered to 'the guest', i.e. the Saint who is there on a visit, while another woman prefers 'the host', i.e. the local Saint. During the ceremonies the monks and attendant acolytes from Vyatka are never sober ; they stop at all the large villages along the way, and the peasants stand treat.

This ancient and popular festival was celebrated on the twentythird of May. But the Prince was to arrive on 19 May, and the Governor, wishing to please his august visitor, changed the date of the festival ; what harm could it do, if St Nicholas paid his visit three days too soon ? The Abbot's consent was necessary: but he was fortunately a man of the world and raised no difficulty when the Governor proposed to keep the twenty-third of May on the nineteenth.

3

Instructions of various kinds came from Petersburg ; for instance, it was ordered that each provincial capital should organise an exhibition of the local products and manufactures ; and the animal, vegetable, and mineral products were to be kept separate.

This division into kingdmns perplexed our office not a little, and puzzled even the Governor himself. Wishing not to make mis-

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takes, he decided, in spite of the bad relations between us, to seek my advice. 'Now, honey, for example,' he said, 'where would you put honey ? And that gilt frame - how can we settle where that belongs ? ' My replies showed that I had surprisingly exact information concerning the three natural kingdoms, and he proposed that I should undertake the arrangement of the exhibition.

4

I was still putting in order wooden spoons and native costumes, honey and iron trellis-work, when an awful rumour spread though the town that the Mayor of Orlov had been arrested. The Governor's face turned yellow, and he even seemed unsteady in his gait.

A week before the Prince arrived, the Mayor of Orlov wrote to the Governor that the widow whose floors had been tom up was making a disturbance, and that a rich and well-known merchant of the town declared his intention of telling the whole story to the Prince on his arrival. The Governor dealt very ingeniously with this firebrand ; he recalled with satisfaction the precedent of Petrovsky, and ordered that the merchant, being suspected of insanity, should be sent to Vyatka for examination.

Thus the matter would drag on till the Prince left the province; and that would be the end of it. The mayor did what he was told, and the merchant was placed in the hospital at Vyatka.

At last the Prince arrived. He greeted the Governor coldly and took no further notice of him, and he sent his own physician at once to examine the merchant. He knew all about it by this time.

For the widow had presented her petition at Orlov, and then the merchants and shop people had told the whole story. The Governor grew more and more crest-fallen. The affair looked bad. The mayor had said plainly that he acted throughout on the written orders of the Governor.

When the physician came back, he reported that the merchant was perfectly sane. That was a finishing stroke for the Governor.

At eight in the evening the Prince visited the exhibition with his suite. The Governor conducted him ; but he made a terrible hash of his explanations, till two of the suite, Zhukovsky 2 and z. The famous man of letters (1783-18 )2) who acted as tutor to Alexander. Arsenev undertook the scientific side of the Prince's education.

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Arsenev, seeing that things were not going well, invited m e to do the honours ; and I took the party round.

The young Prince had not the stern expression of his father; his features suggested rather good nature and indolence. Though he was only about twenty, he was beginning to grow stout. The few words he addressed to me were friendly, and he had not the hoarse abrupt utterance of his uncle Constantine.

When the Prince left the exhibition, Zhukovsky asked me what had brought me to Vyatka ; he was surprised to :find in such a place an official who could speak like a gentleman. He offered at once to speak to the Prince about me ; and he actually did all that he could. The Prince suggested to his father that I should be allowed to return to Petersburg ; the Emperor said that this would be unfair to the other exiles, but, owing to the Prince's intercession, he ordered that I should be transferred to Vladimir. This was an improvement in point of position, as Vladimir is 700

versts nearer Moscow. But of this I shall speak later.

5

In the evening there was a ball at the assembly-rooms. The musicians, who had been summoned for the occasion from one of the factories of the province, arrived in the town helplessly drunk.

The Governor rose to the emergency : the performers were all shut up in prison twenty-four hours before the ball, marched straight from prison to the orchestra, and kept there till the ball was over.

The ball was a dull, ill-arranged affair, both mean and motley, as balls always are in small towns on great occasions. The policeofficers bustled up and down; the officials, in full uniform, squeezed up against the walls ; the ladies crowded round the Prince, just as savages mob a traveller from Europe.

Apropos of the ladies, I may tell a · story. One of the towns offered a 'collation' after their exhibition. The Prince partook of nothing but a single peach ; when he had eaten it, he threw the stone out of the window. Suddenly a tall :figure emerged from the crowd of officials standing outside the building ; it was a certain rural judge, well known for his irregular habits ; he walked deliberately up to the window, picked up the stone, and put it in his pocket. When the collation was over, he went up to one of the important ladies and offered her the stone; she was

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charmed to get such a treasure. Then he went to several other ladies and made them happy in the same way. He had bought five peaches and cut out the stones. Not one of the six ladies could ever be sure of the authenticity of her prize.

6

When the Prince had gone, the Governor prepared with a heavy heart to exchange his satrapy for a place on the bench of the Supreme Court at home ; but he was not so fortunate as that.

Three weeks later the post brought documents from Petersburg addressed to 'The Acting Governor of the Province'. Our office was a scene of confusion ; officials came and went; we heard that an edict had been received, but the Governor pretended illness and kept his house.

An hour later we heard that Tyufyayev had been dismissed from his office ; and that was all that the edict said about him.

The whole town rejoiced over his fall. While he ruled, the atmosphere was impure, stale, and stifling ; now one could breathe more freely. And yet it was hateful to see the triumph of his subordinates. Asses in plenty raised their heels against this stricken wild boar. To compare small things with great, the meanness of mankind was shown as clearly then as when Napoleon fell. Between Tyufyayev and me there had been an open breach for a long time; and if he had not been turned out himself, he would certainly have sent me to some frontier town like Kay. I had therefore no reason to change my behaviour towards him ; but others, who only the day before had pulled off their hats at the sight of his carriage and run at his nod, who had smiled at his spaniel and offered their snuffboxes to his valet - these same men now would hardly salute him and made the whole town ring with their protests against the irregularities which he had committed and they had shared in. All this is an old story and repeats itself so regularly from age to age, in all places, that we must accept this form of baseness as a universal trait of human nature, and, at all events, not be surprised by it.

7

His successor, Kornilov, soon made his appearance. He was a very different sort of person - a man of about fifty, tall and stout, rather flabby in appearance, but with an agreeable smile and

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gentlemanly manners. H e formed all h is sentences with strict grammatical accuracy and used a great number of words ; in fact, he spoke with a clearness which was capable, by its copiousness, of obscuring the simplest topic. He had been at school with Pushkin and had served in the Guards; he bought all the new French books, liked to talk on serious topics, and gave me a copy of Tocqueville's 3 Democracy in America the day after he arrived at Vyatka.

It was a startling change. The same rooms, the same furniture, but, instead of the Tatar tax-collector with the face of an Eskimo and the habits of a Siberian, a theorist with a tincture of pedantry but a gentleman none the less. Our new Governor had intelligence, but his intellect seemed to give light only and no warmth, like a bright day in winter which ripens no fruit though it is pleasant enough. He was a terrible formalist too, though not of the red-tape variety ; it is not easy to describe the type, but it was just as tiresome as all varieties of formalism are.

As the new Governor had a real wife, the offictal residence lost its ultra-bachelor characteristics ; it became monogamous. As a consequence of this, the members of the Council became quite domestic characters : these bald old gentlemen, instead of boasting over their conquests, now spoke with tender affection of their lawful wives, although these ladies were past their prime and either angular and bony, or so fat that it was impossible for a surgeon to draw blood from them.

8

Some years before he came to us, Kornilov, being then a colonel in the Guards, was appointed Civil Governor of a provindal town, and entered at once upon business of which he knew nothing.

Like all new brooms, he began by reading every official paper that was submitted to him. He came across a certain document from another Government which he could not understand, though he read it through several times.

He rang for his secretary and gave it to him to read. But the secretary also was unable to explain the matter clearly.

'What will you do with this document,' asked Kornilov, 'if I pass it on to the office ? '

3· Alexis d e Tocqueville, a French statesman and publicist (1805-59).

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'I shall hand it t o Desk Til - i t is i n their department.'

'So the chief of Desk Til will know what to do ? '

'Certainly, Your Excellency ; h e has been in charge of that desk for six years.'

'Please summon him to me.'

The chief came, and Kornilov handed him the paper and asked what should be done. The clerk ran through it hastily, and then said a question must be asked of the Crown Court and instructions given to the inspector of rural police.

'What instructions ? '

The clerk seemed puzzled ; a t last h e said that, though it was difficult to state them on the spot, it was easy to write them down.

'There is a chair; will you be good enough to write now ?'

The clerk took a pen, wrote rapidly and confidently, and soon produced the two documents.

The Governor took them and read them through ; he read them through again ; he could make nothing of them. 'Well,' he used to say afterwards, 'I saw that it really was in the form of an answer to the original document ; so I plucked up courage and signed it.

The answer gave entire satisfaction; I never heard another word about it.'

9

The announcement of my transference to Vladimir arrived before Christmas. My preparations were quickly made, and I started off.

I said a cordial good-bye to society at Vyatka ; in that distant town I had made two or three real friends among the young merchants. They vied with one another in showing sympathy and friendship for the outcast. Several sledges accompanied me to the first stopping-place, and, in spite of my protests, a whole cargo of eatables and drinkables was placed on my conveyance. Next day I reached Y aransk.

After Y aransk the road passes through endless pine-forests.

There was moonlight and hard frost as my small sledge slid along the narrow track. I have never since seen such continuous forests.

They stretch all the way to Archangel, and reindeer occasionally find their way through them to the Government of Vyatka.

Most of the wood is suitable for building purposes. The fir-trees

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seemed to file past my sledge like soldiers; they were remarkably straight and high, and covered with snow, under which their black needles stuck out like bristles. I fell asleep and woke again

- and there were the armies of the pines still marching past at a great rate, and sometimes shaking off the snow. There are small clearings where the horses are changed ; you see a small house half-hidden in the trees and the horses tethered to a tree-trunk, and hear their bells jingling ; a couple of native boys in embroidered shirts run out, still rubbing their eyes ; the driver has a dispute with the other driver in a hoarse alto voice; then he calls out 'All right ! ' and strikes up a monotonous song - and the endless procession of pine-trees and snow-drifts begins again.

10

Just as I got out of the Government of Vyatka, I came in contact for the last time with the officials, and this final appearance was quite in their best manner.

We stopped at a post-house, and the driver began to unharness the horses. A tall peasant appeared at the door and asked who I was.

'What business is that of yours ?'

'I am the inspector's messenger, and he told me to ask.'

'Very well; go to the office and you will find my passport there.'

The peasant disappeared but returned in a moment and told the driver that he could not have fresh horses.

This was too much. I jumped out of the sledge and entered the house. The inspector was sitting on a bench and dictating to a clerk ; both were half-seas over. On another bench in a comer a man was sitting, or rather lying, with fetters on his feet and hands. There were several bottles in the room, glasses, and a litter of papers and tobacco ash on the table.

'Where is the inspector ?' I called out loudly, as I went in.

'I am the inspector,' was the reply. I had seen the man before in Vyatka ; his name was Lazarev. While speaking he stared very rudely at me - and then rushed towards me with open arms.

It must be remembered that, after Tyufyayev's fall, the officials, seeing that his successor and I were on fairly good terms, were a little afraid of me.

I kept him off with my hand, and asked in a very serious voice :

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'How could you order that I was to have no horses ? What an absurdity to detain travellers on the high road I '

'It was only a joke; I hope you won't be angry about it.' Then he shouted at his messenger : 'Horses I horses at once I What are you standing there for, you idiot ?'

'I hope you will have a cup of tea with some rum in it,' he said to me.

'No, thank you.'

'Perhaps we have some champagne' ; he rushed to the bottles, but they were all empty.

'What are you doing here ?' I asked.

'Holding an enquiry; this fine fellow took an axe and killed his father and sister. There was a quarrel and he was jealous.'

'And so you celebrate the occasion with champagne ?' I said.

The man looked confused. I glanced at the murderer. He was a Cherernis of about twenty ; there was nothing savage about his face ; it was of purely Oriental type with narrow flashing eyes and black hair.

I was so disgusted by the whole scene that I went out again into the yard. The inspector ran out after me, with a bottle of rum in one hand and a glass in the other, and pressed me to have a drink.

In order to get rid of him, I accepted. He caught me by the arm and said : 'I am to blame, I admit; but I hope you will not mention the facts to His Excellency and so ruin an honest man.'

As he spoke, he caught hold of my hand and actually kissed it, repeating a dozen times over, 'In God's name, don't ruin an honest man I ' I pulled away my hand in disgust and said :

'You needn't be afraid ; what need have I to tell tales ?'

'But can't I do you some service ?'

'Yes ; you can make them harness the horses quicker.'

'Look alive there I ' he shouted out, and soon began tugging at the straps himself.

1 1

I never forgot this incident. Nine years later I was in Petersburg for the last time ; I had to visit the Horne Office to arrange about a passport. While I was talking to the secretary in charge, a gentleman walked through the room, distributing friendly handshakes to the magnates of the office and condescending bows to

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the lesser lights. 'Hang i t I i t can't surely b e him I ' I thought.

'Who is that ? ' I asked.

'His name is Lazarev ; he is specially employed by the Minister and is a great man here.'

'Did he serve once as inspector in the Government of Vyatka ?'

'He did.'

'I congratulate you, gentlemen I Nine years ago that man kissed my hand I '

I t must be allowed that the Minister knew how to choose his subordinates.

CHAPTER XI

The Beginning of my Life at Vladimir

1

W H E N we had reached Kosmodemyansk and I came out to take my seat in the sledge, I saw that the horses were harnessed three abreast in Russian fashion ; and the bells jingled cheerfully on the yoke worn by the wheeler.

In Perm and Vyatka they harness the horses differently - either in single file, or one leader with two wheelers.

My heart beat fast with joy, to see the Russian fashion again.

'Now let us see how fast you can go I ' I said to the lad sitting with a professional air on the box of the sledge. He wore a sheepskin coat with the wool inside, and such stiff gloves that he could hardly bring two fingers together to clutch the coin I offered him.

'Very good, Sir. Gee up, my beauties I ' said the lad. Then he turned to me and said, 'Now, Sir, just you hold on ; there's a hill coming where I shall let the horses go.' The hill was a steep descent to the Volga, along which the track passed in winter.

He did indeed let the horses go. As they galloped down the hill, the sledge, instead of moving decently forwards, banged like a cracker from side to side of the road. The driver was intensely pleased ; and I confess that I, being a Russian, enjoyed it no less.

In this fashion I drove into the year 1838 - the best and brightest year of my life. Let me tell you how I saw the New Year in.

PR I S O N AND E X I L E

2

About eighty versts from Nizhny, my servant Matthew and I went into a post-house to warm ourselves. The frost was keen, and it was windy as well. The post-master, a thin and sickly creature who aroused my compassion, was writing out a way-bill, repeating each letter as he wrote it, and making mistakes all the same. I took off my fur coat and walked about the room in my long fur boots. Matthew warmed himself at the red-hot stove, the postmaster muttered to himself, and the wooden clock on the wall ticked with a feeble, jerky sound.

'Look at the clock, Sir,' Matthew said to me; 'it will strike twelve immediately, and the New Year will begin.' He glanced half-enquiringly at me and then added, 'I shall bring in some of the things they put on the sledge at Vyatka.' Without waiting for an answer, he hurried off in search of the bottles and a parcel.

Matthew, of whom I shall say more in future, was more than a servant - he was my friend, my younger brother. A native of Moscow, he had been handed over to our old friend Sonnenberg, to learn the art of bookbinding, about which Sonnenberg himself knew little enough ; later, he was transferred to my service.

I knew that I should have hurt Matthew by refusing, and I had really no objection myself to making merry in the posthouse. The New Year is itself a stage in life's journey.

He brought in a ham and champagne.

The wine was frozen hard, and the ham was frosted over with ice; we had to chop it with an axe, but a la guerre comme a la guerre.

'A Happy New Year,' we all cried. And I had cause for happiness. I was travelling back in the right direction, and every hour brought me nearer to Moscow - my heart was full of hope.

As our frozen champagne was not much to the taste of the post-master, I poured an equal quantity of rum into his glass ; and this new form of 'half and half' was a great success.

The driver, whom I invited to drink with us, was even more thoroughgoing in his methods : he poured pepper into the foaming wine, stirred it up with a spoon, and drank the glass at one gulp ; then he sighed and added with a sort of groan, 'That was fine and hot.'

The post-master himself helped me into the sledge, and was so

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zealous i n his attentions that h e dropped a lighted candle into the hay and failed to find it afterwards. He was in great spirits and kept repeating, 'A Happy New Year for me too, thanks to you.'

The 'heated' driver touched up the horses, and we started.

3

At eight on the following evening I arrived at Vladimir and stopped at an inn which is described with perfect accuracy in The Tarantas,1 with its queer menu in Russian-French and its vinegar for claret.

'Som�ne was asking for you this morning,' said the waiter, after reading the name on my passport ; 'perhaps he's waiting in the bar now.' The waiter's head displayed that dashing parting and noble curl over the ear which used to be the distinguishing marks of Russian waiters and are now peculiar to them and Prince Louis Napoleon.

I could not guess who this could be.

'But there he is,' added the waiter, standing aside. What I first saw was not a man at all but an immense tray piled high with all sorts of provisions - cake and biscuits, apples and oranges, eggs, almonds and raisins ; then behind the tray came into view the white beard and blue eyes belonging to the bailiff on my father's estate near Vladimir.

'Gavrilo Semenych I ' I cried out, and rushed into his arms. His was the first familiar face, the first link with the past, that I had met since the period of prison and exile began. I could not look long enough at the old man's intelligent face, I could not say enough to him. To me he represented nearness to Moscow, to my home and my friends : he had seen them all three days before and brought me greetings from them all. How could I feel that I was really far from them ?

4

The Governor of Vladimir was a man of the world who had lived long enough to attain a temper of cool indifference. He was a Greek and his name was Kuruta. He took my measure at once and abstained from the least attempt at severity. Office work was never even hinted at - the only duty he asked me to undertake 1. i.e., The Travelling Carriage, a novel by Count Sollogub.

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was that I should edit the Provincial Gazette in collaboration with the local schoolmaster.

I was familiar with this business, as I had started the unofficial part of the Gazette at Vyatka. By the way, one article which I published there nearly landed my successor in a scrape. In describing the festival on the Big River, I said that the mutton offered to St Nicholas used to be given away to the poor but was now sold. This enraged the Abbot, and the Governor had some difficulty in pacifying him.

s

Provincial Gazettes were first introduced in the year 1 837· It was Bludov, the Minister of the Interior, who conceived the idea of training in publicity the land of silence and dumbness. Bludov, known as the continuator of Karamzin's History - though he never added a line to it - and as the author of the Report on the Decembrist Revolution - which had better never have been written - was one of those doctrinaire statesmen who came to the front in the last years of Alexander's reign. They were able, educated, honest men ; they had belonged in their youth to the Literary Club of Arzamas ;2 they wrote Russian well, had patriotic feelings, and were so much interested in the history of their country that they had no leisure to bestow on contemporary events. They all worshipped the immortal memory of Karamzin, loved Zhukovsky, knew Krylov 3 by heart, and used to travel to Moscow on purpose to talk to Dmitriyev 4 in his house there. I too used to visit there in my student days ; but I was armed against the old poet by prejudices in favour of romanticism, by my acquaintance with N. Polevoy, and by a secret feeling of dissatisfaction that Dmitriyev, being a poet, should also be Minister of Justice. Though much was expected of them, they did nothing ; but that is the fate of doctrinaires in all countries. Perhaps they would have left more lasting traces behind them if Alexander had lived ; but Alexander died, and they never got beyond the mere wish to do the state some service.

2. Zhukovsky and Pushkin both belonged to this dub. It carried on a campaign against Shishkov and other opponents of the new developments in Russian style.

3· Krylov (1768-1844), the famous writer of fables.

4· Dmitriyev, a poet once famous, who lived long enough to welcome Pushkin.

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At Monaco there is a monument to one of their Princes with this inscription. 'Here rests Prince Florestan' - I forget his number

- 'who wished to make his subjects happy.' Our doctrinaires also wished to make Russia happy, but they reckoned without their host. I don't know who prevented Florestan ; but it was our Florestan 5 who prevented them. They were forced to take a part in the steady deterioration of Russia, and all the reforms they could introduce were useless, mere alterations of forms and names.

Every Russian in authority considers it his highest duty to rack his brains for some novelty of this kind ; the change is generally for the worse and sometimes leaves things exactly as they were.

Thus the name of 'secretary' has given place to a Russian equivalent in the public offices of the provinces, but the duties are not changed. I remember how the Minister of Justice put forward a proposal for necessary changes in the uniform of civilian officials.

It began with great pomp and circumstance - 'Having taken special notice of the lack of uniformity in the cut and fashion of certain uniforms worn by the civilian department, and having adopted as a principle . . . ', etc.

Beset by this itch for novelty the Minister of the Interior made changes with regard to the officers who administer justice in the rural districts. The old judges lived in the towns and paid occasional visits to the country ; their successors have their regular residence in the country and pay occasional visits to the towns. By this reform all the peasants came under the immediate scrutiny of the police. The police penetrated into the secrets of the peasant's commerce and wealth, his family life, and all the business of his community ; and the village community had been hitherto the last refuge of the people's life. The only redeeming feature is this - there are many villages and only two judges to a district.

6

About the same time the same Minister excogitated the Provincial Gazettes. Our Government, while utterly contemptuous of education, makes pretensions to be literary; and whereas, in England, for example, there are no Government newspapers at all, every public department in Russia publishes its own organ, and so does the Academy, and so do the Universities. We have papers to rep-5· i.e., the Emperor Nicholas.

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z6g

resent the mining interest and the pickled-herring interest, the interests of Frenchmen and Germans, the marine interest and the land-carriage interest, all published at the expense of Government.

The different departments contract for articles, just as they contract for fire-wood and candles, the only difference being that in the former case there is no competition ; there is no lack of general surveys, invented statistics, and fanciful conclusions based on the statistics. Together with a monopoly in everything else, the Government has assumed a monopoly of nonsense ; ordering everyone to be silent, it chatters itself without ceasing. In continuation of this system, Bludov ordered that each provincial Government should publish its own Gazette, and that each Gazette should include, as well as the official news, a department for history, literature and the like.

No sooner said than done. In fifty provincial Governments they were soon tearing their hair over this unofficial part. Priests from the theological seminaries, doctors of medicine, schoolmasters, anyone who was suspected of being able to spell correctly - all these were pressed into the service. These recruits reflected, read up the leading newspapers and magazines, felt nervous, took the plunge, and finally produced their little articles.

To see oneself in print is one of the strongest artificial passions of an age corrupted by books. But it requires courage, nevertheless, except in special circumsances, to venture on a public exhibition of one's productions. People who would not have dreamed of publishing their articles in the Moscow Gazette or the Petersburg newspapers, now began to print their writings in the privacy of their own houses. Thus the dangerous habit of possessing an organ of one's own took root, and men became accustomed to publicity. And indeed it is not a bad thing to have a weapon which is always ready for use. A printing press, like the human tongue, has no bones.

7

My colleague in the editorship had taken his degree at Moscow University and in the same faculty as myself. The end of his life was too tragical for me to speak of him with a smile ; but, down to the day of his death, he was an exceedingly absurd figure. By no means stupid, he was excessively clumsy and awkward. His exceptional ugliness had no redeeming feature, and there was an

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abnormal amount o f it. His face was nearly twice as large a s most people's and marked by small-pox ; he had the mouth of a codfish which spread from ear to ear ; his light-grey eyes were lightened rather than shaded by colourless eye-lashes ; his scalp had a meagre covering of bristly hair ; he was moreover taller by a head than mysel£,6 with a slouching figure and very slovenly habits.

His very name was such that it once caused him to be arrested.

Late one evening, wrapped up in his overcoat, he was walking past the Governor's residence, with a field-glass in his hand. He stopped and aimed the glass at the heavens. This astonished the sentry, who probably reckoned the stars as Government property : he challenged the rapt star-gazer - 'Who goes there ?'

'Nebaba,' 7 answered my colleague in a deep bass voice, and gazed as before.

'Don't play the fool with me - I'm on duty,' said the sentry.

'I tell you that I am Nebaba ! '

The soldier's patience was exhausted : he rang the bell, a sergeant appeared, the sentry handed the astronomer over to him, to be taken to the guard-room. 'They'll find out there,' as he said,

'whether you're a woman or not.' And there he would certainly have stayed till the morning, had not the officer of the day recognised him.

8

One morning Nebaba came to my room to tell me that he was going to Moscow for a few days, and he smiled with an air that was half shy and half sentimental. Then he added, with some confusion, 'I shall not return alone.' 'Do you mean that . . . ? '

'Yes, I am going to be married,' he answered bashfully. I was astonished at the heroic courage of the woman who was willing to marry this good-hearted but monstrously ugly suitor. But a fortnight later I saw the bride at his house; she was eighteen and, if no beauty, pretty enough, with lively eyes ; and then I thought him the hero.

Six weeks had not passed before I saw that things were going badly with my poor Orson. He was terribly depressed, corrected his proofs carelessly, never finished his article on 'The Migrati�n 6. Herzen himself was a very tall, large man.

7· The word means in Russian 'not a woman'.

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271

of Birds', and could not fix his attention on anything ; at times it seemed to me that his eyes were red and swollen. This state of things did not last long. One day as I was going home, I noticed a crowd of boys and shopkeepers running towards the churchyard. I walked after them.

Nebaba's body was lying near the church wall, and a rifle lay beside him. He had shot himself opposite the windows of his own bouse ; the string with which he had pulled the trigger was still attached to his foot. The police-surgeon blandly assured the crowd that the deceased had suffered no pain ; and the police prepared to carry his body to the station.

Nature is cruel to the individual. What dark foreboding filled the breast of this poor sufferer, before be made up his mind to use his piece of string and stop the pendulum which measured out nothing to him but insult and suffering ? And why was it so ? Because his father was consumptive or his mother dropsical ? Likely enough. But what right have we to ask for reasons or for justice ?

What is it that we seek to call to account ? Will the whirling hurricane of life answer our questions ?

9

At the same time there began for me a new epoch in my life pure and bright, youthful but earnest ; it was the life of a hermit, but a hermit thoroughly in love.

But this belongs to another part of my narrative.

AL S O IN PAPERB A C K FR O M O X F O R D

ALEXANDER HERZEN

From the Other Shore and

The Russian People and Socialism

with an Introduction by Isaiah Berlin

Herzen wrote From the Other Shore as a memorial to his disenchantment with the European revolutions of 1 848 and 1 849. It is a great polemical masterpiece, constituting his profession of faith and his political testament. In The Russian People and Socialism he expressed his Utopian hopes for the communal organisation of the uncorrupted Russian peasants.

'From the Other Shore is a magnificent prose poem of disillusionment, and Miss Moura Budberg's brilliant translation retains its passion and poetry . . . There is hardly a page in this extraordinary book which does not stimulate and excite. There is the additional pleasure of an introduction by Sir Isaiah Berlin, whose essays on 19th-century Russia are the fmest critical writing of this century . . . Now that the Oxford University Press is producing these reasonably priced publications, our leading critics should escape for once from their deep, worn ruts and encourage the public to enjoy a writer, baffling, delightful, contradictory whoM: brilliance will shine as long as books are read.' Lord Lambton, Spectator

Oxford Paperbacks