My Past and Thoughts

'Of course you can stay. Where the devil could you go?'

The precentor thanked the prince and went away. Golitsyn said to me by \vay of explanation:

'You see he is a very good fellow; it is that b-b-blackguard, that thief, that vile pettifogger has put him up to it.'

Let Savigny and Mittermeyer do their best to formulate and classify the juridical concepts developed in our Orthodox fatherland between the stables where the house-serfs vvere flogged and the master's study where the peasants were fleeced.

The second cause celebre, the one with the pettifogger aforesaid, was not successful. Golitsyn came in, and he suddenly shouted so loud, and the secretary shouted so loud, and after that there was nothing left but for them to go for each other, and then the prince, of course, \vould have smashed the stinking clerk. Since, however, everything in that household followed the laws of a peculiar logic, it was not the prince who fought with the secretary, but the secretary who fought with the door.

Brimming over \vith spite and refreshed by another noggin of gin, he aimed a blow with his fist as he \vent out a t the big glass

\vindow in the door, and broke it to bits. These windows are half an inch thick.

'Police! ' roared Golitsyn. 'Burglary! Police!' and going into the drmving-room he fell fainting on the sofa. When he had recover('d a littl(', he explained to me among other things what the ingratitude of the secretary consisted of. The man had been his brother's agent and had swindled him-1 do not remember how-and must without fail have been brought to trial. Golitsyn was sorry for him; he put himself, as i t were, so thoroughly in his place that he pawned his last watch to buy him off. And th('n, ha,·ing complete proof that he was a rogue, he took him on as his steward!

There can be no doubt whatever tha t he had cheated Golitsyn at every turn.

I went away. A man v..-!10 could smash a glass door with his fist could find justice and punishment for himself. Moreover, he told me afterwards himself, when he was asking me to get him a passport to return to Russia, that he had proudly offered Golitsyn a pistol and suggested casting lots which should fire.

If this was so, the pistol was certainly not loaded.

The princP spent his last penny in pacifying the Revolt of Spartacus, and none the less ended, as might have been expected, by bPing i mprisoned for debt. Anyone else would have been clapped in prison, and that vvould have been the end of it; but

The Free Russian P1 es!> and "The Bell"

549

even that could not hapFen to Golitsyn simply m the common way.

A policeman used to conduct him between seven and eight o'clock every evening to Cremorne Gardens; there he used to conduct a concert for the pleasure of the lorettes of all London, and with the last wave of his ivory sceptre a policeman, till then unobserved, would spring up out of the earth and escort the prince to the cab which took the captive in his black swallowtail and white gloves to prison. There were tears in his eyes as he said 'Good-bye' to me in the Gardens. Poor prince! Another man might have laughed at it, but he to0k his incarceration to heart. His relations eventually redeemed him ; then the government permitted him to return to Russia, and at first directed him to Yaroslavl to live, where he could conduct religious concerts, together with Felinski, the Bishop of Warsaw. The government was kinder to him than his father; as black a sheep as his son, he advised the latter to go into a monastery. The father knew the son well ; and yet he was himself so good a musician that Beethoven dedicated a symphony15 to him.

Next after the exuberant figure of the Assyrian god, of the fleshy ox-Apollo, a series of other Russian oddities must not be forgotten.

I am not speaking of flitting shades like the colonel rioos, but of those who, stranded by various vicissitudes of fate, have lingered for a long time in London ; such as the clerk in the War Office who, having got into a mess with his files and debts, threw himself into the Neva, was drowned . . . and popped up in London, an c.rile, in a fur cap and a fur-lined coat, which he never abandoned, regardless of the muggy warmth of a London winter.

Or such as my friend Ivan Ivanovich Savich, whom the English called Savage and who, with antecedents and future and all, with raw skin on his head where there should have been hair, clamours for a place in my gallery of Russian rarities.1 6 A retired officer of the Pavlovsky regiment of Life Guards, he lived 15 The three string quartets, in E flat major, A minor and B major, were commissioned by Nikolay Borisovich Golitsyn. and were written in 1 823.

(A .S. )

1 6 Savich, a retired officer, went abroad in 1 8+4 for treatment. He became a permanent emigrant for fear of the police aftpr the arrest of his brother, N. I. Savich, a member of the Cyril ;md Methodius secret society.

I. I. Savich took no part in politics either at home or abroad. (R.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

550

in comfort in foreign parts, and so continued up to the revolution of February. Then he took fright, and began to look on himself as a criminal. Not that his conscience troubled him ; what troubled him was the thought of the gendarmes who would meet him at the frontier, the thought of dungeons, of a troika, of the snow, and he resolved to postpone his return. Suddenly the news reached him that his brother had been arrested in connection with the Shevchenko case. There really was some risk for him, and he at once resolved to return. It wa� at that time that I made his a cquaintance at Nice. Savich set off, having bought a minute phial of poison for the journey, which he intended as he crossed the frontier to insert in a hollow tooth and to bite if he should be arrested.

As he neared his native land his fright grew greater and greater, and by the time he arrived at Berlin it had become a suffocating anguish. Hmvever, Savich mastered himself and took his seat in a carriage. He remained there for the first five stations; farther than that he could not bear it. The engine stopped to take in water; on an entirely different pretext he left his carriage. The engine whistled and the train moved off without Savich ; and that was just what he wanted. Leaving his trunk to the mercy of fate, he returned to Berlin by the first train going in the opposite direction. Thence he sent a telegram concerning his luggage, and went to get a visa for his passport to Hamburg.

'Yesterday you were going to Russia, and to-day you are going to Hamburg,· remarked the policeman, vd10 had no intention of refusing the visa. The frightened Savich said: 'Letters-! have received letters,' and probably his expression as he said it was such that it was only by the Prussian official's neglect of his duty tha t he was not arrested. Thereupon Savich, like Louis-Philippe, escaping though pursued by no one, arrived in London. In London a hard life began for him, as for thousands and thousands of others; for years he maintained an honest and resolute struggle with poverty. But for him, too, destiny provided a comic trimming to all tragic events. He made up his mind to give lessons in mathematics, drawing and even French ( for English people! ) .

After consulting this man and that, he saw that i t could not be clone without an advertisement or visiting cards.

'But the trouble was this: how would the Russian government look a t it? I thought and thought about it, and I had anonymous cards printed.'

It was a long time before I could get over my delight at this grand invention: it had never entered my head that it was possible to have a visiting-card without a name on it.

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

5 5 1

With the help of his anonymous cards, and with great perseverance and fearful self-denial (he used to live for days together on bread and potatoes) , he succeeded in getting afloat, was employed in selling things on commission, and his fortunes began to mend.

And this was just at the time when the fortunes of another officer of the Pavlovsky bodyguard took a thoroughly bad turn ; defeated, robbed, deceived, and made a fool of, the commanding officer of the Pavlovsky regiment17 departed into eternity. Dispensations followed and amnesties; Savich too wished to take advantage of the Imperial mercies, so off he writes to Brunnov18

and asks whether he comes under the amnesty. A month later Savich is invited to the Embassy. 'My case is not so simple,' he thought ; 'they have been thinking it over for a month.'

'We have received an answer,' the senior secretary says to him; 'you have inadvertently put the Ministry in a difficult position; they have nothing about you. They have applied to the Ministry of Home Affairs, and they can find no file relating to you either. Tell us plainly what it was; it cannot have been anything of consequence.'

'Why, in 1 849 my brother was arrested and afterwards exiled.'

'Well?'

'That was all.'

'No,' thought Nikolay, 'he is joking'; and he told Savich that if that was the case the Ministry would make further inquiries.

A couple of months went by. I can imagine what went on during these two months in Petersburg: references, reports, confidential inquiries, secret questions passed from the Ministry to the Third Division, from the Third Division to the Ministry, the reports of the Governor-General of Kharkov . . . reprimands, observations . . . but Savich's file could not be found.

The Ministry reported to London to that effect.

Brunnov himself sends for Savich.

'Here,' he says-'look at the answer: there is nothing anywhere concerning you. -Tell me, what business was it you were mixed up in?'

'My brother . . .'

17 It was of the lzmaylovsky regiment that Nicholas I was Colonel-in·

Chief. (A.S.)

l 8 The Russian representative in London 1856--8 was not Brunnov but M. I. Khrebtovich. F. I . Brunnov was Russian plenipotentiary in England.

1 840--54 and 1 858-74, with the rank of ambassador from 1 860. (A.S.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

552

'I have heard all that, but with what affair were you yourself connected?'

'There was nothing else.'

Brunnov, who had never been surprised at anything from his birth up, was surprised.

'Then what do you ask for a pardon for if you have done nothing?'

'I thought that it was better, anyway.'

'So quite simply you don't need to be amnestied: you need a passport,' and Brunnov ordered a passport to be given him.

In high delight Savich dashed off to us.

After describing in detail the whole story of how he had managed to be amnestied, he took Ogarev by the arm and led him away into the garden.

'For God's sake, give me some advice,' he said to him. 'Alexander lvanovich always laughs at me-that is his way; but you have a kind heart. Tell me candidly: do you think I can safely go through Vienna? '

Ogarev did not justify this good opinion; h e burst out laughing ; but not only Ogarev-I can imagine how the faces of Brwmov and Nikolay for two minutes lost the wrinkles traced by weighty affairs of State and smiled when Savich, amnestied, walked out of their office.

But with all his eccentricities Savich was an honest man. The other Russians who rose to the surface, God knows whence, strayed for a month or two about London, called on us with letters of introduction written by themselves and vanished God knows whither, were by no means so harmless.

The melancholy case which I am going to relate took place in the summer of 1 862. The reaction was at that time in its incubation stage, and from its internal, hidden rottenness nothing had yet emerged into the open. No one was afraid to come and see us; no one was afraid to take copies of The Bell and other publications of ours away with him; many people boasted of the expert way in which they conveyed them over the frontier.

When we advised them to be careful, they laughed at us. We hardly ever wrote letters to Russia: we had nothing to say to our old friends, for we were drifting ever farther and farther away from them; with our new, unknown friends we corresponded through The Bell.

In the spring Kelsiev rcturnPd from Moscow and Petersburg.

His journey is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable episodes of that period. The man who had slipped under the noses of the

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

553

police, scarcely concealing himself, who had been present at meetings of schismatics and drinking parties of comrades, with the stupidest Turkish passport in his pocket, and had returned safe and sound to London, had begun to champ the bit a good deal. He took it into his head to get up a subscription-dinner in our honour on the fifth anniversary of The Bell at Kuhn's restaurant. I asked him to put off the celebration to another, happier time. He would not. The supper was not a success: there was no entrain about it, and there could not be. Among the participants were people v.-hose interests were too extraneous to ours.

Talking of one thing and the other between toasts and anecdotes, it was mentioned as the simplest thing in the world that Kelsiev's friend, Vetoshnikov, was going to Petersburg and was ready to take something with him. The party broke up late.

Many people said that they would be \vith us on Sunday. In fact, a regular crowd assembled, among whom were people whom we knew very little, and unfortunately Vetoshnikov himself; he came up to me and said that he was going next morning, and asked me whether I had not any letters or commissions. Bakunin had already given him two or three letters. Ogarev went downstairs to his own room and wrote a few words of friendly greeting to Nikolay Serno-Solovyevich, to which I added a word of greeting and asked the latter to call the attention of Chernyshevsky (to whom I had never written) to our proposal in The Bell to print the Sovremennik (Contemporary) in London at our expense.

The guests began to leave about twelve o'clock. Two or three of them remained. Vetoshnikov came into my study and took the letter. It is very possible that even that might have remained unnoticed. But this is what happened. By way of thanking those who had taken part in the dinner, I asked them to choose any one of our publications or a big photograph of me by Levitsky as a souvenir. Vetoshnikov took the photograph ; I advised him to cut off the margin and roll it up into a tube; he would not, and said he should put it at the bottom of his trunk, and so wrapped it in a sheet of The Times and went off. That could not escape notice.

Saying good-bye to him, the last of the party, I went calmly off to bed-so great is one's blindness at times-and of course never dreamed how dearly that minute would cost me and what sleepless nights it would bring me.

All put together it was stupid and careless in the extreme. We might have delayed Vetoshnikov until Tuesday: we might have

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

554

sent him off on Saturday; why had he not come in the morning? . . . and, indeed, why had he come himself at all? .

and, indeed, why did we write the letters?

It is said that one of our guests19 telegraphed at once to Petersburg.

Vetoshnikov was arrested on the steamer; the rest is well known.20

The You1zger En1igra1zts :

Tlze Co1111110n Fund

KELSIEV1 HAD HARDLY passed out of our door when fresh people, driven out by the severe cold of 1 863, were knocking at it. These came not from the training-schools of the coming revolution but from the devastated stage on which they had already acted roles.

They were seeking shelter from the storm without and seeking nothing within ; what they needed was a temporary haven until the weather improved, until a chance presented itself to return to the fray. These men, while still very young, had fmished with ideas, with culture; theoretical questions did not interest them, partly because they had not yet arisen among them, partly because what they were concerned with was their application.

Though they had been defeated physically, they had given proofs of their courage. They had furled their flag, and their task I9 One of Herzcn's guests was G. G. Peretts, an agent of the Third Division, who gave information of the return of P. A. Vetoshnikov with

'dangerous documents.' (A.S. )

20 Mass arrests in Russia, the result of the seizure of the letters that Vetoshnikov was carrying, seriously weakened H.'s and Ogarev's ties with the revolutionary movement in Russia. (A.S.)

1 V. I. Kelsiev was temporarily a member of the circle of revolutionary emigrants and became one of the first renegades of the Russian liberation movement. ( A.S.) The preceding chapter is devoted to his tragi-comic story ; I regret space didn't permit including it, for it is a Chekhovian tale that displays both Herzen's novelistic talents and his humanity.

( D.M.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

555

was to preserve its honour. Hence their dry tone, cassant, raide, abrupt and rather elevated. Hence their martial, impatient aversion for prolonged deliberation, for criticism, their somewhat elaborate contempt for all intellectual luxuries, among which they put Art in the foreground. What need had they of music? \Vhat need of poetry? 'The fatherland is in danger, aux armes, citorens!' In certain cases they were theoretically right, but they did not take into account the complex, intricate process of balancing the ideal with the real, and, I need hardly say, they assumed that their views and theories were the views and theories of the whole of Russia. To blame for this our young pilots of the coming storm would be unjust. It is the common characteristic of youth ; a year ago a Frenchman,2 a follower of Comte, assured me that Catholicism did not exist in France, that it had completement perdu le terrain, and he pointed among others to the medical faculty, to the professors and students who were not merely not Catholics but not even Deists.

'\Vell, but the part of France,' I observed, 'which neither gives nor hears medical lectures?'

'It, of course, keeps to religion and its rites-but more from habit and ignorance.'

'I can very well believe it, but what will you do with it?'

'What did they do in 1 792?'

'Not much: at first the Revolution closed the churches, but aftenvards opened them again. Do you remember Augereau's answer to Napoleon when they were celebrating the Concordat?

"Do you like the ceremony?" the consul asked as they came out of Notre-Dame. The Jacobin general answered: "Very much. I am only sorry that the two hundred thousand men are not present who went to their graves to abolish such ceremonies! " '

'Ah bah! we have grown wiser, and we shall not open the church doors-or rather we shall not close them at all, but shall turn the temples of superstition into schools.'

'L'infame sera ecrasee,' I wound up, laughing.

'Yes, no doubt of it; that is certain ! '

'But that you and I will not see it-that is even more certain.'

It is to this looking at the surrounding world through a prism coloured by personal sympathies that half the revolutionary 2 G. N. Vyrubov, who had emigrated from Russia in 1 864. Herzen was critical of his views and acti,·ities, calling him 'Frenchman' and 'doctrinaire' and censuring him for his complete break with his native country. (A.S.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

556

failures arc due. The life of young people, spent in general in a noisy, closed seclusion of a sort, remote from the everyday, wholesale struggle for personal interests, though it clearly grasps general truths, nearly always comes to grief through a false understanding of their application to the needs of the day.

At first our new visitors cheered us with a ccounts of the movement in Petersburg, of the savage antics of the full-fledged reaction, of trials and persecutions, of university and literary parties. Then, when all this had been told with the rapidity with which in such cases men hasten to tell all they know, a pause, a hiatus would follow ; our conversations became dull and monotonous.

'Can this,' I thought, 'actually be old age divorcing two generations? Is it the chill induced by years, by weariness, by ordeals?'

\Vhatever it might be due to, I felt that with the arrival of these new men our horizon was not widened but narrowed. The scope of our conversations was more limited. Sometimes we had nothing to say to one another. They were occupied with the details of tht>ir coteries, beyond which nothing interested them.

Having once related everything of intPrest about them, there was nothing to do but to repeat it, and they did repeat it. They took little interest in learning or in public affairs; they even read little, and did not follow the newspapers regularly. Absorbed in mPmoriPs and expectations, they did not care to step forth into other fields; while we had not air to breathe in that stifling atmosphere. \Ve had been spoiled by different dimensions and were smothered.

Moreover, even if they did know a certain stratum in Petersburg, tlwy did not know Russia at all and, though sincerely desirous of corning into contact with the people, they only approached them bookishly and theoretically.

\Vhat \Ve had in common was too general. Advance together, serve, as the French say, take action together \Ye might, but it was hard to stand sti ll with a rms folded and live together. It was useless even to think of a serious influence on them. A morbid and very unc('remonious vanity had long ago taken the bit betwepn its tt>eth.3 Sometimes, it is true, they did ask for a

:I Tlwir ,·anity was not so m uch gn•at as it was touchy and irritable'. and abon• all. unn•strainPd in \vords. Tlwv could conc<'al nPithPr thPir Pnvv nor a spPciill kind of punctilious insi�tPnce on rPSJH'Clful rPcognition �f tlw position thPy ascrihPrl to th('lllSPi n•s. At thP samp tinw tiH'Y look('(!

down on PYPrything awl \\'!'rP pPrp<•tually jPPring at onl' anothPr. which

"·as why tlwi1· friPndships ll<'YPr lasted longpr than a month.

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

557

programme, for guidance, but for all their sincerity there was no reality about this. They expected us to formulate their own opinions, and only assented when what we said did not contradict them in the least. They looked upon us as respected veterans, as something past and over, and were naively surprised that we were not yet so very much behind themselves.

I have always and in everything feared 'above all sorrows,'

mesalliances; I have always tolerated them, partly through humanity, partly through carelessness, and have always suffered

-

from them.

It was not hard to foresee that our new ties would not last long, that sooner or later they would be broken and that, considering the churlish character of our new friends, this rupture would not come off without disagreeable consequences.

The question upon which our rickety relationship came to grief was just that old question through which acquaintances tacked together with rotten threads usually come apart. I mean money. Knowing absolutely nothing of my resources nor of my sacrifices, they made demands upon me which I did not think i t right to satisfy. I f I had been able, through all our reverses, without the slightest assistance, to conduct the Russian propaganda for fifteen years, it was only because I had put a careful limit to my other expenses. My new acquaintances considered that all I was doing was not enough, and looked with indignation at a man who gave himself out for a socialist and did not distribute his property in equal shares among people who wanted money without working. Obviously they had not advanced beyond the impractical point of view of Christian charity and voluntary poverty, and mistook that for practical socialism.

The attempts to collect a 'Common Fund' yielded no results of importance. Russians are not fond of giving money to any common cause, unless it includes the building of a church, a banquet, a drinking-party and the approval of the higher authorities.

When the impecuniosity of the exiles was at its height, a rumour circulated among them that I had a sum of money entrusted to me for the purposes of propaganda.

It seemed perfectly right to the young people to relieve me of it.

To make the position clear, I must relate a certain strange incident that occurred in the year 1 857. One morning I received a very brief note from an unknown Russian; hP wrote to me that he 'urgently needed to see me,' and asked me to fix a time.

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

558

I happened to be going to London at the time, and so instead of answering I went myself to the Sablonniere Hotel and inquired for him. He was at home. He was a young man who looked like a cadet, shy, very depressed, and with the peculiar rather rough-hewn appearance of the seventh or eighth son of a steppe landowner. Very uncommunicative, he was almost completely silent; it was evident that he had something on his mind, but he could not come to the point of putting it into words.

I \vent away, inviting him to dinner two or three days later.

Before that date I met him in the street.

'May I walk with you?' he asked.

'Of course ; there is no danger for me in being seen with you, though there is for you in being seen with me. But London is a big place.'

'I am not afraid'-and then all at once, taking the bit between his teeth, he hurriedly burst out: 'I shall never go back to Russia-no, no, I certainly shall not go back to Russia . . . .'

'Upon my word, and you so young?'

'I love Russia-! love it dearly; but there the people . . . I cannot live there. I want to found a colony on completely socialistic principles; I have thought it all over, and now I am going straight there.'

'Straight where?'

"To the Marquesas Islands.'

I looked at him in dumb amazement.

'Yes, yes; it is all settled. I am sailing by the next steamer, and so I am very glad that I have met you to-day-may I put an indiscreet question to you?'

'As many as you like.'

'Do you make any profit out of your publications? '

'Profit! I am glad to say that now the press pays its way.'

'\Veil, but what if it should not?'

' I shall make it up.'

'So that no sort of commercial aim enters into your propaganda? '

I laughed heartily.

'\Veil, but how a z·e you going to pay it off alone? And your propaganda is essential. Please forgive me ; I am not asking out of curiosity: \vhen I left Russia for ever, I had the thought in my mind of doing something useful for our country, and I de(ided

. . . well, I only wanted to know first from yourself about finances . . . yes, I decided to leave a small sum of money with you. Should your printing-press need it, or the Russian propagancla generally, then it would be at your disposal.'

Again I had to look at him in amazement.

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

559

'Neither the printing-press nor Russian propaganda nor I are in need of money; on the contrary, things are going swimmingly. Why should I take your money? But though I refuse to take it, allow me to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kind intention.'

'No, sir, it is all decided. I have 50,000 francs. I shall take 30,000 with me to the Islands, and I shall leave 20,000 with you for propaganda.'

'What am I to do with it?'

'Well, if you don't need the money you can give it back to me if I return; but if I don't return within ten years, or if I die--use it for your propaganda efforts. Only,' he added, after a moment's thought, 'do what you like, but . . . bu t don't give anything to my heirs. Are you free to-morrow morning?'

'Certainly, if you like.'

'Do me the favour of taking me to the bank and to see Rothschild ; I know nothing about these things, I can't speak English and I speak French very badly. I want to make haste to get rid of the 20,000 and be off.'

'Very well, I shall accept the money, but on these conditions: I shall give you a receipt.'

'I don't want any receipt.'

'No, but I must give you one, and I shan't take your money without it. Now listen. In the first place, it shall be stated in the receipt that your money is entrusted not to me alone, but to me and to Ogarev. In the second, since you may get sick of the Marquesas Islands and begin to pine for your native country . . .' (he shook his head) . 'How can one know what one does not know? . . . There is no need to specify the object with which you are giving us the capital: we will say that the money is put at the complete disposal of Ogarev and myself; should we make no other use of it, we shall invest the whole sum for you in securities at five per cent. or thereabouts, guaranteed by the English government. Then I give you my word that we shall not touch your money except in case of extreme necessity for propaganda purposes; you may count upon it in any circumstances, except that of bankruptcy in England.'4

'If you insist on taking so much trouble, do so. And to-morrow let us go for the money! '

4 Herzen's account corresponds exactly t o the contents o f a letter of 3 1 st August, 1 857, from P. A. Bakhmetev to H. After he left London B. was not seen in Europe arrd nothing is known of his further fortunes. I n July 1 869, a t Ogarev's request, H. gave him half the money i n the fund, which was passed on to S. G. Nechayev. After H.'s death the other

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

560

The following day was an unusually amusing and busy one. It began with the bank and with Rothschild. The money was paid in notes. Bakhmetev at first conceived the guileless intention of changing them into Spanish gold or silver. Rothschild's clerks looked at him in amazement, but when suddenly, as though half awake, he said in very broken Franco-Russian: 'Well, then, lcttre credit Ilc Marquise,' Kestner, the manager, turned on me an alarmed and anxious look, which said better than any words:

'He is not dangerous, is he?' Besides, never before in Rothschild's bank had anyone asked for a letter of credit to the Marquesas Islands.

We decided to take 30,000 francs in gold and go home; on the way we went into a cafe. I wrote the receipt; Bakhmetev for his part wrote for me that he put £800 at the complete disposal of myself and Ogarev; then he went home to get something and I went off to a bookshop to wait for him; a quarter of an hour later he came in, white as a sheet, and announced that of his 30,000 francs 250, that is £10, were missing. He was utterly overcome. How the loss of 250 francs could so upset a man who had just given away 20,000 without any secure guarantee is another psychological riddle of human nature.

'Haven't you a note too much?' he asked me.

'I haven't the money with me. I gave it to Rothschild, and here is the receipt, precisely 800.' Bakhmetev, who had changed his French notes into sovereigns with no need to do so, scattered 30,000 on Tchorszewski's counter; he counted them and counted them over again; £10 \Yere missing, and that was all about it.

Seeing his despair, I said to Tchorszewski:

'I'll take that damned £ 1 0 on myself somehow; here he has done a good deed, and he is punished for it.

'It is no use grie,·ing and discussing it,' I added to him, 'I propose going to Rothschild's at once.'

We drove there. By now it vvas after four and the bank was closed. I went in \vith the embarrassed Bakhmetev. Kestner half, too. was given hv Ogari;,. to �echaye,·. I I.'s apprehension was rpaliwd awl B.'s fund was squandered on adn•nturist PntPrpr·isPs of Ilakunin ami �Pdlil_n•v. ( A.S. ) ThP Sm·iet Academicians are. for once, pu tting it mild!,-. For thP facts on Kecha\e,·s can•Pr. h is sinister and mastprful persolli.Iit\. and his exploitation of the aging Ba kunin's idealism-and WPa l-.nPss-cf. Carr's The Romantic Eri/,·s, chapter H . .. The

'Affain• :'\Pchayev'; or· the First Tl'rTorist." For the fictional truth about him- as \'erho,·cnsky fils -and the pol itical murder that l anded him for tire rl'st of h is l ife in the Peter- Paul fort ress, cf. Dostoevsky's The Possrssrd. (D.M.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

561

looked at him and smiled, took a £10 note from the table and handed it to me.

'When your friend changed the money he gave me two £10

notes instead of two £5 ones, and at first I did not notice it.'

Bakhmetev looked and looked, and commented:

'How stupid that £10 notes and £5 notes are the same colour; who would notice the difference? You see what a good thing it was that I changed the money into gold.'

His mind was at rest and he came to dine with me; I promised to go and say good-bye to him next day. He was quite ready to start. A little shabby, battered trunk such as cadets or students have, a greatcoat tied up with a strap, and . . . and . . . 30,000

francs in gold wrapped up in a thick pocket-handkerchief, as people tie up a pound of gooseberries or nuts.

This was how the man was setting off for the Marquesas Islands.

'Upon my soul!' I said to him ; 'why, you will be robbed and murdered before your ship casts off; you had better put your money in your trunk.'

'It is full.'

'I'll get you a bag.'

'Not on any account.'

And so he went off. During the first days I feared that he would be made away with and that I should incur the suspicion of having sent someone to kill him.

From that day there has been no sight nor sound of him . . . .

I put his money in Consols with the firm intention of not touching it except in the case of the printing-press or propaganda being in the utmost straits.

For a long time no one in Russia knew of this; then there were vague rumours, for which we were indebted to two or three of our friends who had given their word to say nothing about it. At last it was learnt that the money really existed and was in my keeping.

This news fell like an apple of temptation, a chronic incitement and ferment. It turned out that everyone needed the money-and I did not give it to them. They could not forgive me for not having lost the whole of my own property, and here I had a deposit given me for the propaganda ; and who were 'the propaganda' if not they? The sum quickly grew from modest francs to silver roubles, and was still more tantalising for those who desired to waste it privately for the common cause. They were indignant with Bakhmetev for having entrusted the money to me and not to someone else; the boldest among them declared

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

562

that it was an error on his part; that he had really meant to give it not to me but to a certain political circle in Petersburg, and that, not knowing how to do this, he had given it to me in London. The audacity of these opinions was the more remarkable that Bakhmetev's surname was as unknown as was his very existence, and that he had not spoken to anyone else of his proposal before his departure, nor had anyone spoken to him since then.

Some needed the money in order to send emissaries; others for establishing centres on the Volga ; others still for the publication of a journal. They were dissatisfied with The Bell, and did not readily respond to our invitation to work on it.

I absolutely refused to give the money; and let those who demanded it tell me themselves what would have become of it if I had.

'Bakhmetev may return without a farthing,' I said ; 'it is not easy to make a fortune by founding a socialist colony in the Marquesas Islands.'

'He is dead for sure.'

'But what if he is alive to spite you?'

'Well, but he gave the money for the propaganda, you know.'

'So far I haven't needed it.'

'But we do.'

'What for precisely?'

'We must send someone to the Volga and someone to Odessa . . . .'

'I don't think that is very necessary.'

'So you don't believe in the indispensability of sending them?'

'I do not.'

'He is growing old and getting miserly,' the most resolute and ferocious said about me in different keys.

'But why mind him? Just take the money from him and have done with it,' the still more resolute and ferocious added, 'and if he resists, we will go for him in the papers and teach him to keep back other people's money.'

I did not give up the money.

They did not go for me in the papers. I was abused in the press much later, but that was over money too . . . .

These more ferocious ones of whom I have spoken were the clumsy and uncouth representatives of the 'New Generation,'

who may be called the Sobakeviches and Nozdrcvs5 of Nihilism.

However superfluous it may be to make a reservation, yet I

" Two characters in Gogol's Dead Souls. ( R. )

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

563

shall do so, knowing the logic and the manners of our opponents.

I have not the slightest desire in what I am saying to fling a stone at the younger generation or at Nihilism. Of the latter I have written many times. Our Sobakeviches of Nihilism do not constitute its most powerful expression, but only represent its exaggerated extremes.6

Who would judge of Christianity from the Flagellants of Origen or of the Revolution from the September butchers and the tricoteuses of Robespierre?

The arrogant lads of whom I am speaking are worth studying, because they are the expression of a temporary type, very definitely marked and very frequently repeated, a transitional form of the sickness of our development from our former stagnation.

For the most part they were lacking in the deportment which is given by breeding, and the staying power which is given by scientific studies. In the first fervour of emancipation they were in a hurry to cast off all the conventional forms and to push away all the rubber fenders which prevent rough collisions. This made difficult the simplest relations with them.

Removing everything to the last rag, our enfants terribles proudly appeared as their mothers bore them, and their mothers had not borne them well, not as simple, rather too plump lads but as inheritors of the evil, unhealthy life of our lower classes in Petersburg. Instead of athletic muscles and youthful nakedness, they displayed the melancholy traces of hereditary anaemia, the traces of old sores and of various fetters and collars. There were few among them who had come up from the people. The hall, the barrack-room, the seminary, the petty proprietor's farm survived in their blood and their brains, and lost none of their characteristic features though twisted in an opposite direction. So far as I know, this fact has attracted no serious attention.

On the one hand, the reaction against the old narrow, oppressive world was bound to throw the younger generation into antagonism and negation of their hostile surroundings; it was useless to expect moderation or justice in them. On the contrary, everything was done in defiance, everything was done in resentment. 'You are hypocrites, we shall be cynics; you have been moral in words, '"e will be wicked in words; you have been polite to your superiors and rude to your inferiors, we shall be G At that very time in Petersburg and l\1oscow. and even in Kazan and Kharkov, there were circles h<'ing formed among the university youth who devoted themseh·es in earnest to the study of science. especially among the medical students. They worked honestly and conscientiously but, cut off from acti,·e participa tion in the questions of the day, they were not forced to leave Russia and we scarcely knew anything of them.

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

564

ru.de to everyone; you bow down to those whom you do not respect, we will jostle people without apologising; your feeling of personal dignity consisted in nothing but decorum and external honour, we make it our point of honour to flout every decorum and to scorn every point d'honneur.'

But on the other hand, though disowning all the ordinary forms of social life, their character was full of its own hereditary ailments and deformities. Casting off, as we have said, all veils, the most desperate played the dandy in the costume of Gogol's Petukh7 and did not preserve the pose of the MediCi Venus.

Their nakedness did not conceal, but revealed, what they were.

It revealed that their systematic uncouthness, their rude and insolent talk, had nothing in common with the inoffensive and simple-hearted coarseness of the peasant, but a great deal in common with the manners of the low-class pettifogger, the shopboy and the flunkey. The people no more considered them as one of themselves than they did a Slavophil in a murmolka. To the people these men have remained alien, the lowest stratum of the enemies' camp, skinny young masters, scribblers out of a job, Russians turned Germans.

To be completely free, one must forget one's liberation and that from which one has been liberated, and cast off the habits of the environment out of which one has grown. Until this has been done we cannot help being conscious of the servants' hall, the barrack-room, the government office or the seminary in every gesture they make and every word they utter.

To hit a man in the phiz at the first objection he advances-if not with a fist then with a word of abuse-to call Stuart Mill a rascal,8 forgetting all the service he has done, is not that the same as the Russian master's way of 'punching old Gavrilo in the snout for a crumpled cravat'?9 In this and similar pranks do you not recognise the policeman, the district officer, the village constable dragging a bailiff by his grey beard? Do you not, in the insolent arrogance of their manners and answers, clearly recognise the insolence of the officers of the days of Nicholas?

Do you not see, in men who talk haughtily and disdainfully of 7 A character in Gog:ol"s Drad Souls, who was naked when he mel Chichikov, the hero of the story. ( Tr.)

s N. V. Sokolov, the Pronomist of 1/usskoyr Slo�·o, applied the word

'rascal" in English, to John Stuart Mill in an article in the issue of July 1 865. (A.S.)

!J From D. V. Davydov's poem, 'A Contemporary Song.' ( A .S.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

565

Shakespeare and Pushkin, the grandsons of Skalozub, reared in the house of their grandsire who wanted 'to make a Voltaire of his corporal'?10

The very leprosy of bribery has survived in high-handed importunity for money, by bias and threats under pretext of common causes, in the feeble impulse towards being fed at the expense of the service and towards avenging a refusal by slander and libel.

All this will be transformed and thrashed out with time. But there is no blinking the fact that a strange soil has been prepared by the Tsar's paternal government and imperial civilisation in our 'kingdom of darkness.' It is a soil on which seedlings of great promise have grown, on the one hand, into worshippers of the Muravevs and the Katkovs and, on the other, into the bullies of Nihilism and the impudent Bazarov free-lances.

Our black earth needs a good deal of drainage!

1Vl. Bakltllirt and

tile Cause of Pola11d

AT THE END of November we received the following letter from Bakunin:

San Francisco, October 1 6, 1861 .

Friends,-! have succeeded in escaping from Siberia, and after long wanderings on the Amur, on the shores of the Gulf of Tartary and across Japan, I arrived to-day in San Francisco.

Friends, I long to coml' to you with my whole being, and as soon as I arrive I shall set to work; I shall work with you on the Polish-Slavonic question, which has been my idee fixe since 1 846 and was in practice my speciality in 1 848

and 1 849.

The destruction, the complete destruction, of the Austrian empire will be my last word; I don't say deed: that IO A reference to A. S. Griboyedov: Woe from Wit, IV, 5. (A.S.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

566

would be too ambitious; to promote it I am ready to become a drummer-boy or even a scoundrel,1 and if I should succeed in advancing it by one hair's-breadth I shall be satisfied.

And beyond that there appears the glorious, free Slav Federation, the one way out for Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, and the Slavonic peoples generally . . . .

We had known of his intention to escape from Siberia some months before. By the New Year Bakunin in his own exuberant person was clasped in our arms.

Into our work, into our closed shop of two, a new element had entered, or rather an old element, perhaps a risen shade of the

'forties, and most of all of 1 848. Bakunin was just the same; he had grown older in body only, his spirit was as young and enthusiastic as in the days of the all-night arguments with Khomyakov in Moscow. He \vas just as devoted to one idea, just as capable of being carried away by it, and seeing in everything the fulfilment of his dPsires and idPals, and evPn more ready for every experience, every sacrifice, feeling that he had not so much life before him, and that consequently he must make haste and not let slip a single chance. He was fretted by prolonged study, by the weighing of pros and cons and, confident and theoretical as ever, he longed for any action if only it were in the midst of the storms of revolution, in the midst of destruction and danger.

Now, too, as in the articles signed 'Jules Elizard,'2 he repeated :

'Die Lust der Zerstorung ist eine schaffende Lust.' The fantasies and ideals \vith which he was imprisoned in Konigstem3 in 1 849

he had preserved, and had carried them complete across Japan and California in 1 86 1 . Even his language recalled the finer articles of La Reforme and La vraie Republique, the striking speeches in La Constituante and at Blanqui's Club. The spirit of the parties of that period, their exclusiveness, their personal sympathies and antipathies, above all their faith in the second coming of the revolution-it \'\·as all here.

Strong characters, if not destroyed at once by prison and exile, are preserved by them in an extraordinary way; they come out of them as though out of a faint and go on with what they were I The word used by Bakunin is 'prokhvost,' which is the German 'Profoss'

( Eng. 'provost' ) , a military policeman: sometimes an executioner. (R.)

� Under this pseudonym Bakunin published articles on the reaction i n Germany in the lahrbiichcr o f 1 842, which were brought o u t under the e

: 1 A fortress in Saxony where political offenders were imprisoned. ( A .S.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

567

about when they lost consciousness. The Decembrists came back from being buried in the snows of Siberia more youthful than the young people who met them, who had been trampled down before ripening. While two generations of Frenchmen changed several times, turned red and white by turns, advancing with the flood and borne back by the ebb, Barbes and Blanqui remained steady beacons, recalling from behind prison bars and distant foreign lands the old ideals in all their purity.

'The Polish-Slavonic question . . . the destruction of the A�strian empire . . . the glorious free Slav Federation . . .' and all this is to happen straight off, as soon as he arrives in London!

And it is written from San Francisco when he has one foot on the ship !

The European reaction did not exist for Bakunin, the bitter years from 1 848 to 1 858 did not exist for him either; of them he had but a brief, far-away, faint knowledge. He had read them in Siberia, just as he had read at Kaydanov about the Punic Wars and of the fall of the Roman Empire. Like a man who has returned after the plague, he heard 'vho had died, and sighed for them all; but he had not sat by the bedside of the dying, had not hoped that they would be saved, had not followed them to the grave. The events of 1 848, on the contrary, were all about him, near to his heart, vivid and in detail; the conversations with Caussidiere, the speeches of the Slavs at the Prague Conference,4

discussions with Arago or Ruge-to Bakunin all these were affairs of yesterday; they were all still ringing in his ears and flashing before his eyes.

There is nothing to wonder at in this, however, even over and above his imprisonment.

The first days after the February Revolution were the best days in Bakunin's life. Returning from Belgium, to which he had been driven by Guizot for his speech at the Polish anniversary of the 29th of November, 1 847, he cast prudence to the winds and plunged head over ears into the revolutionary sea. He never left the barracks of the Montagnards, he slept with them, ate with them and preached, preached continually, communism and l' egalite du salaire, levelling-down in the name of equality, the e'mancipation of all the Slavs, the destruction of all the Austrias, 4 30th May-1 2th J une, 1 848. B. adhered to the radical Left. The leading part in the conference was played by the Czech Liberal bourgeoisie who put forward an idea for the transformation of the Austrian empire into a federation of Slav states under the aegis of the Habsburg monarchy.

(A.S.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

568

the revolution en permanence, war to the death of the last foe.

Caussidiere, the Prefect from the barricades, who was making

'order out of disorder,' did not know how to get rid of the dear preacher, and planned with Flocon to send him off to the Slavs in earnest, with a brotherly accolade and a conviction that there he would break his neck and be no more trouble. 'Que! homme!

que! homme!' Caussidiere used to say of Bakunin: 'On the first day of the revolution he is simply a treasure, but on the day after he ought to be shot!'S

When I arrived in Paris from Rome at the beginning of May 1 848, Bakunin was already holding forth in Bohemia, surrounded by Old Believer monks, Czechs, Croats and democrats, and he continued haranguing them until Prince \Vindischgratz put an end to his eloquence with cannon (and used this excellent opportunity to shoot his own wife by mistake on purpose) .6

Disappearing from Prague, Bakunin appeared again as military commandant of Dresden ; the former artillery officer taught the art of war to the professors, musicians and chemists who had taken up arms, and advised them to hang Raphael's Madonna and Murillo's pictures on the city walls and with them protect themselves from the Prussians, who were ::.u klassisch gebildet to dare to fire on Raphael.i

Artillery, on the whole, was apt to excite him. On the way from Paris to Prague he knocked up against a revolt of peasants somewhere in Germany; they were shouting and making an uproar before a castle, unable to do anything. Bakunin got out of his ,·chicle and, not having time to find out what the matter was, formed the peasants up and instructed them so adroitly that by the time he went to get in again to continue his journey the castle was blazing on all four sides.

5 'Tell Caussidii>re.' I said in jest to his friends. 'that the difference between Bakunin and h i m is that Caussidii>re. too. is a splendid fellow. but it would be better to shoot him the day bP/orP the rf'volution.' Later on in London, in the year 1 8-5+. I remindeZ! him of this. The Prefect in exile only smote "·ith l;is hugf' fist upon his mighty clwst with the force with which piles are driven into the earth, and said: 'I carry Bakunin's image here. here.'

6 \Vhile Austrian troops undf'r \Y. were putting down the rising in Prague in June 1 8·�8. \Y.'s wife went to the windo"· of their house and was mortall v woundf'd. (A .S. )

7 A centun� later thf' T\'azis mountPcl the "Baf'dekl'r bombings'" against Co,·entry. Bath. central London (a special f'ffort was made to destroy St.

Pau l 's cathedral. "·h ich miraculous!\· survived. but manv \Vren churches didn't ) , and otllf'r historic English beauty spots. The ;\larch of Progress has been swift and consistent-to the rear. ( D.M.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

569

Some day Bakunin will conquer his sloth and keep his promise; some day he will tell the tale of the long martyrdom that began for him after the taking of Dresden. I recall here only the main points. Bakunin was sentenced to the scaffold. The Saxon king commuted the axe to imprisonment for life; and afterwards, with no ground for doing so, handed him over to Austria. The Austrian police thought to find out from him something about the intentions of the Slavs. They imprisoned Bakunin in the Hradcin, and getting nothing out of him they sent him . to Olmiitz. Bakunin was taken in fetters with a strong escort of dragoons; the officer who got into the conveyance with him loaded his pistol.

'What is that for?' Bakunin asked. 'Surely you don't think that I can escape under these conditions? '

'No, but your friends may try to rescue you ; the government has heard rumours to that effect, and in that case

'

'What then?'

'I have orders to put a bullet into your head

And the companions galloped off.

At Olmiitz Bakunin was chained to the wall, and in that situation he spent six months. At last Austria got tired of feeding a foreign criminal for nothing; she offered to give him up to Russia. N icholas did not need Bakunin at all, but he had not the strength to refuse. At the Russian frontier Bakunin's fetters were removed. Of that act of clemency I have heard many times ; the fetters were indeed taken off, but those who tell the tale have forgotten to add that others much heavier were put on instead.

The Austrian officer who handed over the prisoner demanded the return of the fetters as being Imperial and Royal government property.

Nicholas praised Bakunin's brave conduct at Dresden, and put him into the Alexeyevsky ravelin. There he sent Orlov to him with orders to tell him that he (Nicholas) desired from him an account of the German and Slav movement (the monarch was not aware that every detail of this had been published in the newspapers ) . This account he 'required not as his Tsar, but as his spiritual father.' Bakunin asked Orlov in what sense the Tsar understood the words 'spiritual father': did it imply that everything told in confession must be a holy secret? Orlov did not know what to say: in general, these people are more accustomed to ask questions than to answer them. Bakunin wrote8 a news-8 In the Peter-Paul Fortress, in the summPr of 1 85 1 , B. wrote for Nicholas I his 'Confession,' in which his Pan-Slav tendencies found full expression.

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

5 70

paper 'leading article.' Nicholas was satisfied with this, too. 'He is a good, intelligent young fellow, but a dangerous man; he must be kept shut up,' and for three whole years after this approval from His Majesty, Bakunin was interred in the Alexeyevsky ravelin. His confinement must have been thorough, too, if even that giant was brought so low that he wanted to take his own life. In 1 854 Bakunin was transferred to the Schliisselburg.

Nicholas was afraid that Charles Napier would liberate him; but Charles Napier and Co. did not liberate Bakunin from the ravelin but Russia from Nicholas. Alexander I I, in spite of his fit of mercy and magnanimity, left Bakunin in the fortress till 1 857, and then sent him to live in Eastern Siberia. In Irkutsk he found himself free after nine years of imprisonment. Fortunately for him the governor of the region was an original person-a democrat and a Tatar, a liberal and a despot, a relation of Mikhail Bakunin's and of Mikhail Muravev's and himself a Muravev, not yet called 'of the Amur.' He gave Bakunin a chance to breathe, an opportunity to live like a human being and to read the newspapers and magazines; he even shared his dreams of future revolutions and wars. In gratitude to Muravev, Bakunin in his mind appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the future citizen army with which he proposed in his turn to annihilate Austria and found the Slav League.

In 1 860 Bakunin's mother petitioned the Tsar for her son's return to Russia ; the Tsar said that 'Bakunin should never be brought back from Siberia during his lifetime' but, that she might not be left without comfort and the Imperial clemency, he permitted her son to enter the civil service as a copying clerk.

Then Bakunin, taking into consideration - the Tsar's ruddy cheeks and his mere forty years of age, made up his mind to escape; I completely approve of this decision. Recent years have shown, better than anything else could have, that he had nothing to expect in Siberia. Nine years in a fortress and several years of exile were more than enough. It was not, as was said, because of his escape that things became worse for the political exiles, but because the times had grown worse, men had grown worse. What influence had Bakunin's escape on the infamous

'I shall confess to You as to a spiritual father,' he wrote to the Tsar. In his 'Confession' B. admitted all his transgressions, and e<1lled his revolutionary activities mad and c riminal. proceeding from immaturity of mind (M. A. Bakunin: Sobr. soch. i pisem . . . . IV. 1 04-206 ) . He realised that his 'Confession' could only compromise him in the eyes of the revolu tionaries, and therefore tried to conceal its actual contents. ( A .S.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

5 7 1

persecution and death of Mikhaylov?9 And a s for the reprimand of a man like Korsakov10-that is not worth talking about. It is a pity it was not two.

Bakunin's escape is remarkable for the space it covered; it is the very longest escape in a geographical sense. After making his way to the Amur, on the pretext of commercial business, he succeeded in persuading an American skipper to take him to the shores of Japan. At Hakodate another American captain undertook to convey him to San Francisco. Bakunin went on board his ship and found the sea-captain busily fussing over a dinner; ·he was expecting an honoured guest, and invited Bakunin to join them. Bakunin accepted the invitation, and only when the visitor arrived found that it was the Russian Consul-General.

It was too late, too dangerous, too ridiculous to try to conceal himself: he entered at once into conversation with him and said that he had obtained leave to go on a pleasure-trip. A small Russian squadron under the command, if I remember right, of Admiral Popov was riding at anchor, about to sail for Nikolayev:

'You are not returning with our men? ' inquired the Consul.

'I have only just arrived,' said Bakunin, 'and I want to see a little more of the country.'

After dining together they parted en bans amis. Next day he passed the Russian squadron in the American steamer: there were no more dangers, apart from those of the ocean.

As soon as Bakunin had looked about him and settled down in London, that is, had made the acquaintance of all the Poles and Russians who were there, he set to work. To a passion for propaganda, for agitation, for demagogy, if you like, to incessant activity in founding and organising plots and conspiracies and establishing relations and in ascribing immense significance to them, Bakunin added a readiness to be the first to carry out his ideas, a readiness to risk his life, and recklessness in accepting all the consequences. His nature was a heroic one, left out of work by the course of history. He sometimes wasted his powers on rubbish, as a lion wastes the pacing he does in his cage, always thinking that he will walk out of it. But Bakunin was not 9 M. I. Mikhaylo\' was condemned at the end of 1 861 to six years' forced labour and permanent residence in Siberia. He was put in irons and sent to extremely harsh forced labour in the Kandin mines, where he perished in 1865. (A.S.)

10 M. S. Korsakov, Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, was severely reprimanded by Alexander II for allowing B. to escape. (A.S.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

5 72

a mere rhetorician, afraid to act upon his own words, or trying to evade carrying his theories into practice.

Bakunin had many defects. But his defects were slight, and his strong qualities were great . . . . Is it not in itself a sign of greatness that, wherever he was cast up by fate, as soon as he had grasped two or three features of his surroundings, he singled out the revolutionary current and at once set to work to carry it farther, to expand it, making of it the burning question of life?

It is said that Turgenev meant to draw Bakunin's portrait in Rudin ; but Rudin hardly recalls certain features of Bakunin.

Turgenev, carried away by the biblical custom of God, created Rudin in his own image and semblance. Turgenev's Rudin, saturated in the jargon of philosophy, is Bakunin as a young man.

In London he first of all set about revolutionising The Bell, and in 1 862 advanced against us almost all that in 1847 he had advanced against Belinsky. Propaganda was not enough; there ought to be immediate action ; centres and committees ought to be organised ; to have people closely and remotely associated with us was not enough, we ought to have 'dedicated and halfdedicated brethren,' organisations on the spot-a Slavonic organisation, a Polish organisation. Bakunin thought us too moderate, unable to take advantage of the situation of the moment, insufficiently fond of resolute measures. He did not lose heart, however, but was convinced that in a short time he would set us on the right path. ""hile awaiting our conversion Bakunin gathered about him a regular circle of Slavs. Among them there were Czechs, from the writer Fritsch to a musician who was called Naperstok ;11 Serbs who were simply called after their father's names loanovic, Danilovic, Petrovic ; there were vVallachians who did duty for Slavs, with the everlasting 'esco' at the end of their names; finally, there \vas a Bulgarian who had been a doctor in the Turkish army. And there were Poles of every diocese-the Bonapartist, the Mieroslawski, the Czartorysczki: democrats without socialist ideas but with a tinge of the officer ; socialists, Catholics, anarchists, aristocrats and men who were simply soldiers, ready to fight anywhere in North or South America . . . and by preference in Poland.

\Vith them Bakunin made up for his nine years' silence and solitude. He argued, lectured, made arrangements, shouted, decided. directed, organised and encouraged all day long, all night long, for days and nights together. In the brief minutes he had 11 The word means 'thimble" in Russian. (Tr.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

5 73

free he rushed to his writing-table, cleared a little space from cigarette-ash, and set to work to write five, ten, fifteen letters to Semipalatinsk and Arad, to Belgrade and Tsargrad, to Bessarabia, Moldavia and Belokrinitsa. In the middle of a letter he would fling aside the pen and bring up to date the views of some old-fashioned Dalmatian, then, without finishing his exhortation, snatch up the pen and go on writing. This, however, was made easier for him by the fact that he was writing and talking about one and the same thing. His activity, his laziness, his appetite, and everything else, like his gigantic stature and the everlasting sweat he was in, everything, in fact, was on a superhuman scale, as he was himself; and he was himself a giant with his leonine head and tousled mane.

At fifty he was exactly the same wandering student from the Maroseyka, the same homeless Bohemien from the Rue de Bourgogne, with no thought for the morrow, careless of money, throwing it away when he had it, borrowing it indiscriminately right and left when he had not, as simply as children take from their parents, careless of repayment; as simply as he himself would give his last money to anyone, only keeping what he needed for cigarettes and tea. This manner of life did not worry him; he was born to be a great vagrant, a great nomad. If anyone had asked him once and for all what he thought of the right of property, he might have answered as Lalande answered Napoleon about God: 'Sire, in my pursuits I have not come upon any necessity for this right!' There was something child-like, simple and free from malice about him, and this gave him an unusual charm and attracted to him both the weak and the strong, repelling none but the affected petit bourgeois.12 His striking personality, the eccentric and powerful appearance he made everywhere, in a coterie of young people in Moscow, in a lecture-room at Berlin University, among Weitling's Communists and Caussidiere's Montagnards, his speeches in Prague, his command at Dresden, his trial, imprisonment, sentence to death, torture in Austria and surrender to Russia-where he vanished behind the fearful walls of the Alexeyevsky ravelin-make of 12 \Vhen, carried away in arl\"ument, Bakunin poured on his opponent's head a noisy storm of abuse for which no one else would have been for·

given, Bakunin was forgiven, and I the first to do so. Martyanov would sometimes say: 'He is only a grown-up Liza,' Alexander lvanovich; how could one be angry with her-a child?'

• H.'s daughter by Natalya Tuchkov-Ogarev, born 1 858. ( Tr. )

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

574

him one of those individualists whom neither the contemporary world nor history can pass by.

That he ever came to marry, I can only put down to the boredom of Siberia. He had piously preserved all the habits and customs of his fatherland, that is of student-life in Moscow: heaps of tobacco lay on his table like stores of forage, cigar-ash covered his papers, together with half-finished glasses of tea ; from morning onwards clouds of smoke hung about the room from a regular suite of smokers, who smoked as though they were racing each other, hurriedly blov•;ing it out and dra\ving it in-as only Russians and Slavs do smoke, in fact. Many a time I enjoyed the amazement accompanied by a certain horror and perplexity, of the landlady's servant, Grace, when at dead of night she brought boiling water and a fifth basin of sugar into this hotbed of Slav emancipation.

Long after Bakunin left London, tales were told at No. 10

Paddington Green of the v1ray he went on, which upset all the consolidated notions and religiously observed forms and degrees of English middle-class life. Note at the same time that both the maid and the landlady were madly devoted to him.

'Yesterday," one of his friends told Bakunin, 'So-and-so arrived from Russia ; he is a very fine man, formerly an officer.'

'I have heard about him; he is very \veil spoken of.'

'May I bring him?'

'Certainly; but "vhy bring him, where is he? I'll go and see him. I'll go at once.'

'He seems to be rather a Constitutionalist.'

'Perhaps, but . . .'

'But I know he is a chivalrous, fearless and noble man.'

'And trustworthy?'

'He is much respected at Orsett House.'

'Let us go to him.'

'Why? He meant to come to you: that was what we agreed. I'll bring him.'

Bakunin rushes to his writing; he writes and scratches out something, writes it out again, and seals up a packet addressed to Jassy; in his restless expectation he begins walking about the room \Vith a tread which sets the whole house-No. 1 0 Paddington Green-shaking with his step.

The officer makes his appearance quietly and modestly. Bakunin lc met a l'aisc, talks like a comrade, like a young man, fascinates him, scolds him for his constitutionalism and suddenly asks:

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

575

'I am sure you won't refuse to do something for the common cause.'

'Of course not.'

'There is nothing that detains you here ?'

'Nothing; I have only just arrived, I. . . .'

'Can you go to-morrow or next day with this letter to Jassy?'

Such a thing had not happened to the officer either at the front in time of war or on the general staff in peace-time. However, accustomed to military obedience, he says, after a pause, in a voice that does not sound quite natural:

'Oh yes!'

'I knew you \vould. Here is the letter perfectly ready.'

'I am ready to set off at once . . . only . . .' (the officer i s embarrassed) . 'I had not at a l l reckoned o n such a journey.'

'What? No money? Then say so; that's of no consequence. I'll get it for you from Herzen: you shall pay it back later on. Why, what is it? Only some £20 or so. I'll write to him at once. You will find money at Jassy. From there you can make your way to the Caucasus. We particularly need a trust·.vorthy man there.'

The officer, amazed, dumbfounded, and his companion equally amazed and dumbfounded, take their leave. A little girl whom Bakunin employed on great diplomatic errands flies to me through the rain and sleet with a note. I used to keep chocolate en losanges expressly for her benefit, to comfort her for the climate of her native country, and so I give her a big handful and add:

'Tell the tall gentleman that I shall talk it over with him personally.'

The correspondence in fact turned out to be superfluous.

Bakunin appeared for dinner, that is an hour later.

'Why £20 for X?'

'Not for him, for the cause; and I say, brother, isn't X a splendid fellow?'

'I have known him for some years. He has stayed in London before.'

'It is such a chance, it would be a sin to let it slip. I am sending him to Jassy, and then he'll have a look round in the Caucasus.'

'To Jassy? And from there to the Caucasus?'

'I see you are going to be funny,' said Bakunin. 'You won't prove ·anything by jokes.'

'But you know you don't want anything in Jassy.'

'How do you know?'

'I know, in the first place, because nobody does want anything

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

576

in Jassy; and in the second place, if anything were wanted, you would have been telling me about it incessantly for the last week. You have simply come across a shy young man who wants to prove his devotion, and so you have taken it into your head to send him to Jassy. He wants to see the Exhibition and you will show him Moldo-Wallachia . Come, tell me what for?'

'What inquisitiveness! You never take part in these things with me: what right have you to ask?'

'That is true: in fact, I imagine that it i s a secret you will keep from everyone ; anyhow, I have not the slightest intention of giving money for couriers to Jassy and Bucharest.'

'But he will pay you back; he will have money.'

'Then let him make a wiser use of it. That's enough; you can send the letter by some Petresco-Manon-Lescaut; and now let's go and eat.'

And Bakunin, laughing himself, and shaking his head, which was always a little too heavy for him, set himself steadily and zealously to the work of eating his dinner, after which he would say each time: 'Now comes the happy moment,' and light a cigarette.

He used to receive everyone, at any time, everywhere. Often he would be still asleep like Onegin, or tossing on his bed, which creaked under him, and two or three Slavs would be in his bedroom smoking with desperate haste; he would get up heavily, souse himself with water, and at the same moment proceed to instruct them; he was never bored, never found them a burden ; he could talk without being tired, with the same freshness of mind, to the cleverest or the stupidest man. This lack of discrimination sometimes led to very funny incidents.

Bakunin used to get up late; he could hardly have done otherwise, since he spent the night talking and drinking tea.

One morning some time a fter ten o'clock he heard someone moving about in his room. His bed stood curtained off in a large alcove.

'Who's there?' shouted Bakunin, waking up.

'A Russian.'

'What is your name?'

'So-and-so.'

'Delighted to see you.'

'Why is it you get up so late and you a democrat?'

Silence: the sounds of splashing water, cascades.

'Mikhail Alexandrovich !'

'Well?'

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

5 7 7

'I wanted to ask you, were you married in church?'

'Yes.'

'You d i d wrong. What a n example o f inconsistency; and here is Turgenev too, having his daughter legally married. You old men ought to set us an example.'

'What nonsense you are talking.'

'But tell me, did you marry for love?'

'What has that to do \Vith you?'

'There was a rumour going about that you married because your bride \vas rich ! 'l3

'Have you come here to cross-examine me? Go to the devil ! '

'Well now, here you are angry, and I really meant no harm.

Good-bye. But I shall come and see you again all the same.'

'All right, all right. Only be more sensible next time.'

Meanwhile the Polish storm was drawing nearer and nearer. In the autumn of 1 862 Potebnya appeared in London for a few days.

Melancholy, pure-hearted, devoted heart and soul to the hurricane, he came to talk to us for himself and his comrades, meaning in any case to go his own way. Poles began to arrive from their country more and more frequently; their language was sharper and more definite. They were moving directly and consciously towards the explosion. I felt with horror that they were going to unavoidable ruin.

'I am mortally sorry for Potebnya and his comrades,' I said to Bakunin, 'and the more so that I doubt whether their aims are the same as those of the Poles.'

'Oh yes they are, yes they arc,' Bakunin retorted. '"'e can't sit for evPr "·ith our arms folded, reflecting; we must take history as it presents itself, or else one "·ill always be too far behind or too far in front.'

Bakunin grew younger; he \vas in his element: he loved not only the uproar of the rPvolt and the noise of the club, the market-place and the barricade ; he loved the preparatory agitation, the excited and at the same time restrained life, spent among conspiracies, consultations, sleepless nights, conferences, agreements, corrections of cyphers, invisible inks and secret signs. Anyone who has taken part in rehearsals for private theatricals or in preparing a Christmas tree knows that the preparation is one of the best, most exquisite parts of it. But though he \Vas carried away by the preparations of the Christmas tree I had a gnawing at my heart; I -.vas continually 13 Bakunin took no dowry with his wife.

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

578

arguing with him and reluctantly doing what I did not want to do.

Here I must stop to ask a sorrowful question. How, whence did I come by this readiness to give way, though with a murmur, this weak yielding, though after rebellion and a protest? I had, on the one hand, a conviction that I ought to act in one way, and, on the other, a readiness to act quite differently. This wavering, this dissonance, dieses Zogernde has done me infinite harm in my life, and has not even left me with the faint comfort of recognising that my mistake was involuntary, unconscious; I have made blunders a contre-coeur; I had all the arguments on the other side before my eyes. I have told in one of my earlier chapters of the part I took in the 1 3th of June, 1 849. That is typical of what I am saying. I did not for one instant believe in the success of the 1 3th of June; I saw the absurdity of the movement and its impotence, the indifference of the people, the ferocity of the reaction, and the pettiness of the revolutionaries.

(I had written about it already, and yet I went out into the square, laughing at the people who went with me.) How many misfortunes, how many blows I should have been spared in my life, if at all the crises in it I had had the strength to listPn to myself. I have been reproached for being easily carried away; I have been carried away, too, but that is not what matters most. Though I might be committed by my impressionable temper, I pulled myself up at once ; thought, reflection and observation almost always gained the day in theory, but not in practice. That is just what is hard to explain: why I let myself be led nolens volens. . . .

The reason for my quick compliance was false shame, though sometimes it was the better influences of love, friendship and indulgence; but did all this overcome my power of reasoning?

After the funeral of VVorcell on the 5th of February, 1 857, when all the mourners had dispersed to their homes and I, returning to my room, sat down sadly at my writing-table, a melancholy question came into my mind. Had we not lowered into the ground with that just man, and had we not buried with him all our relations with the Polish emigrants?

The gentle character of the old man, which was a conciliating element in the misunderstandings that were constantly arising, had gone for ever, but the misunderstandings remained. Privately, personally, we might love one or another among the Poles and be friendly with them, but there was little common undPrstanding between us in general, and that made our relations strained and conscientiously reserved ; we made concessions

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

5 79

to one another, that is, weakened ourselves and decreased in each other what was almost the best and strongest in us. It was impossible to come to a common understanding by open talk. We started from different points, and our paths only intersected in our common hatred for the autocracy of Petersburg. The ideal of the Poles was behind them: they strove towards their past, from which they had been cut off by violence and which was the only starting-point from which they could advance again. They had masses of holy relics, while we had empty cradles. In all their actions and in all their poetry there is as much of despair as there is of living faith.

They look for the resurrection of their dead, while we long to bury ours as soon as possible. Our lines of thought, our forms of inspiration are different; our whole genius, our whole constitution has nothing in common with theirs. Our association with them seemed to them alternately a mesalliance and a marriage of convenience. On our side there was more sincerity, but not more depth: we were conscious of our indirect guilt, we liked their daring and respected their indomitable protest. What could they like, what could they respect in us? They did violence to themselves in making friends with us; they made an honourable exception for a few Russians.

In that dark prison-house the reign of Nicholas locked us into as fellow-prisoners, we had more sympathy with than knowledge of each other. But as soon as the window was opened a little space, we divined that we had been brought by different paths and that we should disperse in different directions. After the Crimean War we heaved a sigh of relief, and our joy was an offence to them: the new atmosphere in Russia reminded them not of their hopes but of their losses. For us the new times began with presumptuous demands; we rushed forward ready to smash everything; with them it began with requiems and services for the dead. But for a second time the government welded us together. At the sound of firing at priests and children, at crucifixes and women, the sound of firing above the chanting of hymns and prayers, all questions were silenced, all differences were wiped out. With tears and lamentations, I wrote then a series of articles14 which deeply touched the Poles.

From his deathbed old Adam Czartorysczki sent me by his son a warm word of greeting; a deputation of Poles in Paris presented me with an address signed by four hundred exiles, to 14 'Vivat Polonia,' 'lOth April and the Murders in Warsaw,' 'Mater Dolorosa' and others published in The Bell. (A.S.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

580

which signatures were sent from all parts of the world, even from Polish refugees living in Algiers and in America. It seemed as though in so much we were united ; but one step farther in and the difference, the sharp difference, leaped to the eye.

One day Ksawery Branicki, Chojecki and one or two other Poles were sitting with me; they were all on a brief visit to London, and had come to shake hands with me for my articles.

The talk fell on the shot fired at ConstantineY'

'That shot,' I said, 'will do you terrible damage. The government might have made some concessions; now it will yield nothing, and will be twice as savage.'

'But that is just what we want ! ' Ch. £_16 observed with heat ;

'there could be n o worse misfortune for u s than concessions. We want a breach, an open conflict.'

'I hope most earnestly that you may not regret i t.'

Ch. E. smiled ironically, and no one added a word. That was in the summer of 186 1 . And a year and a half later Padlewski said the same thing when he was on his way to Poland through Petersburg.

The die was cast! .

Bakunin believed in the possibility of a nsmg of the peasants and the army in Russia, and to some extent we believed in it too ; and indeed the government itself believed in it, as was shown later on by a series of measures, of officially inspired articles, and of punishments by special decree. That men's minds were working and in a ferment vvas beyond dispute, and no one saw at the time that the popular excitement \vould be turned to ferocious patriotism.

Bakunin, not too much given to weighing every circumstance, looked only towards the ultimate goal, and took the second month of pregnancy for the ninth. He carried us away not by arguments but by his hopes. He longed to believe, and he believed, that Zhmud and the Volga, the Don and the Ukraine would rise as one man when they heard of VVarsaw; he believed that the Old Believers would take advantage of the Catholic movement to obtain a legal standing for the Schism.

That the league among the officers of the troops stati oned in Poland and Lithuania-the league to which Potebnya belonged 15 The Grand Duke Constantine Nikolavevich was made viceroy of Poland in 1 862. On the day of his arrival in \\'arsaw. in J une of th�t year. an a tt<'mpt was made on his life. (A.S. )

16 Charl es Edmond was the pseudonym of Chojecki. ( A .S.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

581

-was growing and gathering strength was beyond all doubt; but it was very far from possessing the strength which the Poles through design and Bakunin through simplicity ascribed to it.

One day towards the end of September Bakunin came to me looking particularly preoccupied and somewhat solemn.

'The Warsaw Central Committee,' he said, 'has sent two members to negotiate with us. One of them you know-Padlewski ; the other is Giller, a veteran warrior; he took a walk from Poland to the mines in fetters, and as soon as he was back he set to work again. This evening I will bring them to see you, and tomorrow we will meet in my room. We must define our relations once for all.'

My answer to the officers was being printed at that time.

'My programme is ready, I will read my letter aloud.'

'I agree with your letter, you know that; but I don't know whether they will altogether like it; in any case, I imagine that it won't be enough for them.'

In the evening Bakunin arrived with three visitors instead of two. I read them my letter. While we were talking and while I was reading, Bakunin sat looking alarmed, as relations arc at an examination, or as lawyers are when they tremble lest their client should let something slip out and spoil the whole game of the defence that has been so well arranged, if not strictly in accordance with the truth, anyway for a successful finish.

I saw from their faces that Bakunin had guessed right, and that they were not particularly pleased by what I read them.

'First of all,' observed Giller, 'we shall read the letter to you from the Central Committee.' Milovicz read it; the document, with which readers of The Bell are familiar, \"\·as written in Russian, not quite correctly, but clearly. It has been said that I translated it from the French and altered the sense. That is not true. All three spoke Russian well.

The sense of the document was to tell the Russians through us that the provisional Polish government agreed with us and adopted as its basis for action: 'The recognition of the right of the peasantry to the land tilled by them, and the complete selfdetermination of every people, the right to determine its own destiny.'

This manifesto, Milovicz said, bound me to soften the interrogative and hesitating form of my letter. I agreed to some changes, and suggested to them that they might accentuate and define more clearly the idea of the self-determination of provinces; they agreed. This dispute over words showed that our attitude towards the same questions was not identical.

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

582

Next day Bakunin was with me in the morning. He was dissatisfied with me, thought I had been too cold, as though I did not trust them.

'Whatever more do you want? The Poles have never made such concessions. They express themselves in other words which are accepted among them as an article of faith; they can't possibly at the first step, as they hoist the national flag, wound the sensitive popular feeling.'

'I fancy, all the same, that they really care very lit_tle about the land for the peasants and too much about the provinces.'

'My dear fellow, you will have a document in your hands corrected by you and signed in the presence of all of us; whatever more do you want?'

'I do want something else though! '

'How difficult every step i s t o you! You are not a practical man at all.'

'Sazonov usPd to say that before you did.'

Bakunin waved his hand in despair and \vent off to Ogarev's room. I looked mournfully after him. I saw that he was in the middle of his revolutionary debauch, and that there would be no bringing him to reason now. With his seven-league boots he was striding over seas and mountains, over years and generations.

Beyond the insurrection in Warsaw he was already seeing his

'Glorious and Slav Federation'17 of which the Poles spoke with something between horror and repulsion ; he already saw the red flag of 'Land and Freedom' waving on the Urals and the Volga, in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, possibly on the Winter Palace and the Peter-Paul fortress, and was in haste to smooth away all diffirultit>s somehow, to conceal contradictions, not to fill up the gullies but to fling a skeleton bridge across them.

'There is no liberation without land.'

'You are like a diplomat at the Congress of Vienna,' Bakunin repeated to me with vexation, when we were talking afterwards with the representatives of the provisional Polish government in his room. 'You keep picking holes in words and expressions. This is not an article for a newspaper, it is not literature.'

'For my part,' observed Giller, 'I am not going to quarrel about words; change them as you like, so long as the main drift remains the same.'

'Bravo, Giller,' criNI Bakunin gleefully.

'Well, that fellow,' I thought, 'has come with his horses shod 17 'Slavn' is the Hussian for 'glory.' (Tr.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

583

for any season ; he will not yield an inch in fact, and that is why he so readily yields in words.'

The manifesto was corrected, the members of the Zhond18

signed it. I sent it off to the printing-press.

Giller and his companions were fully persuaded that we represented the focus abroad of a whole organisation which depended upon us and would at our command join them or not join them.

For them what was essential lay not in words nor in theoretical agreements; they could always tone down their profession de foi by interpretations, so that its vivid colours would have altered, faded and vanished.

That the first nuclei of an organisation were being formed in Russia there was no doubt. The first fibrils, the first threads could be discerned with the naked eye; from these threads, these knots, a vast web might be woven, given time and tranquillity.

All that was true, but it was not there yet, and every violent shock threatened to ruin the work for a whole generation and to tear asunder the first lacework of the spider's web.

That is just what, after sending the Committee's letter to the press, I said to Giller and his companions, telling them of the prematureness of their rising. Padlewski knew Petersburg too well to be surprised by my words-though he did assure me that the vigour and ramification of the League of Land and Freedom went much farther than we imagin�d; but Giller grew thoughtful. 'You thought,' I said to him, smiling, 'that we were stronger? You were right. We have great power and influence, but that power rests entirely on public opinion, that is, it may evaporate all in a minute; we are strong through the sympathy with us, through our harmony with our people. There is no organisation to which we could say, "Turn to the right or turn to the left." '

'But, my dear fellow, all the same . . .' Bakunin was beginning, walking about the room in excitement.

'Why, is there?' I asked him, and stopped.

'Well, that is as you like to call it; of course, if you go by the external form, it is not at all in the Russian character, but you see . . . .'

'Let me finish ; I want to explain to Giller why I have been so insistent about words. If people in Russia do not see on your standard "Land for the Peasants" and "Freedom for the Provinces," then our sympathy will do you no good at all but will 18 The Polish provisional government. ( R.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

584

ruin us; because all our strength rests on their hearts beating in unison with ours. Our hearts may beat more strongly and so be one second ahead of our friends; but they are bound to us by sympathy and not by duty!'

'You will be satisfied with us,' said Giller and Padlewski.

Next day two of them went off to Warsaw, while the third went off to Paris.

The calm before the storm came on. It was a hard, dark time, in which it kept seeming as though the storm would pass over, but it drew nearer and nearer. Then came the ukaz 'juggling' with the levying of recruits;19 this was the last straw; men who were still hesitating to take the final and irrevocable step dashed into the fray. Now even the Whites began to go over to the side of the rebellion.

Padlewski came again; the decree was not withdrawn. Padlewski went off to Poland.

Bakunin was going to Stockholm quite independently of Lapinski's expedition, of which no one thought at the time. Potebnya turned up for a brief moment and vanished after Bakunin. A plenipotentiary from 'Land and Freedom' came from Petersburg via Warsaw at the same time as Potebnya ; he described with indignation how the Poles who had summoned him to Warsaw had done nothing. He was the first Russian who had seen the beginning of the rebellion; he told us about the murder of the soldiers, about the wounded officer who was a member of the Society. The soldiers thought that this was treachery and began exasperatedly to beat the Poles. Padlewski, who was the chief leader in Kovno, tore his hair, but was afraid to act openly in opposition to his followers.

The plenipotentiary was full of the importance of his mission and invited us to become the agents of the League of Land and Freedom. I declined this, to the extreme surprise not only of Bakunin but even of Ogarev. I said that I did not like this hackneyed French term. The plenipotentiary was treating us as the Commissaires of the Convention of 1 793 treated the generals in the distant armies. I did not like that either.

'And are there many of you? ' I asked him.

19 In the autumn of 1 862 the Tsarist authorities issued an uka::. on the levying of recruits in the Kingdom of Poland, which was put into effect according to lists made up beforehand. The authorities tried by this means to put an end to the revolutionary movement in Poland. The conduct of the levy in January 1 863, caused the start of the rising. (A.S.)

The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"

585

'That is hard to say: some hundreds in Petersburg and three thousand in the provinces.'

'Do you believe it?' I asked Ogarcv afterwards. He did not answer.

'Do you believe it?' I asked Bakunin.

'Of course ; but,' he added, 'well, if there arc not as many now there soon will be!' and he burst into a roar of laughter.

'That is another matter.'

'The essence of it all is the giving support to feeble beginnings; if they were strong they would not need us,' observed Ogarev, vo,·ho was always dissatisfied with my scepticism on these occasions.

'Then they ought to come to us frankly admitting their weakness and asking for friendly help instead of proposing the stupid job of being agents.'

'That is youth,' Bakunin commented, and he went off to Svo,·eden.

And after him Potebnya went off too. With heartfelt sorrow I said good-bye to him. I did not doubt for one second that he was going straight to dcstruction.2°

A few days before 13akunin's departure Martyanov came in, paler than usual, gloomier than usual ; he sat down in a corner and said nothing. He was pining for Russia and brooding over the thought of returning home. A discussion of the Polish rebellion sprang up. Martyanov listened in silence, then got up, preparing to go, and suddenly stopped in front of me, and said gloomily:

'You must not be angry with me, Alexander Ivanovich; that may be so or it may not, but, anyway, you have done for The Bell. What business had you to meddle in Polish affairs? The Poles may be in the right, but their cause is for their gentry, not for you. You have not spared us, God forgive you, Alexander lvanovich ; you will remember what I say. I shall not see it myself; I am going home. There is nothing for me to do here.'

'You arc not going to Russia, and The Bell is not ruined,' I answered him.

He \\·cnt out without another word, leaving me heavily weighed down by this second prediction and by a dim consciousness that a blunder had been made.

Martyanov did as he had said ; he returned home in the spring of 1 863 and went to die in penal servitude, exiled by his 'People's Tsar' for his love for Russia and his trust in him.

2o A. A. Potebnya commanded a detachment which participated m the Polish rising; he died in battle, March 1863. (A.S.)

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

586

Towards the end of 1863 the circulation of The Bell dropped from two thousand or two thousand five hundred to five hundred, and never again rose above one thousand copies. The Charlotte Corday from Orlov and the Daniel from the peasants had been right.21

21 The 'Charlotte Corday' was the young Russian woman who visited H. in London in 1 862 and prophesied, 'Your friends and supporters will abandon you.' Daniel was Martyanov, who had warned H. of the de·

crease of The Bell's influence in Russia because of his defence of the 1 863 Polish revolt. (A.S.)

T H E

L A T E R

Y E A R S

( 1 8 6 0 - 1 8 6 8 )

FrcLgn1ents

S 'V I S S V I E W S

I REACHED FREIBURG at ten o'clock in the evening and went straight to the Zahringhof. The same landlord in a black velvet skull-cap who had received me in 1 85 1 , with the same regular features and superciliously polite face of a Russian master of the ceremonies, or an English hall-porter, came up to the omnibus and congratulated us on our arrival.

And the dining-room is the same, the same little rectangular folding sofas upholstered in red velvet.

Fourteen years have passed over Freiburg like fourteen days!

There is the same pride in the cathedral organ, the same pride in their suspension bridge.

The breath of the new restless spirit, continually shifting and casting down barriers, that was raised by the equinoctial gales of 1 848, scarcely touched towns which morally and physically stand apart, such as Jesuitical Freiburg and pietistic Neuchatel.

These towns, too, have advanced, though at the pace of a tortoise; they have improved, though to us they seem backward in their unfashionable, stony garb . . . . And of course much in the life of former days was not bad; it was more comfortable, more stable; it was better calculated for the small number of the chosen, and just for that reason it does not suit the huge number of the newly called, who are far from being spoiled or difficult to please.

Of course, in the present state of technical development, with the discoveries that are being made every day, with the facilitation of resources, it has been possible to organise modern life on a free and ample scale. But the Western European, as soon as he has a place of his own, is satisfied with little. In general, he has been falsely charged, and chiefly he has charged himself, with the passion for comfort and that self-indulgence of which people talk. All that, like everything else in him, is rhetoric and flourish. He has had free institutions without freedom, why not have a brilliant setting for a narrow and clumsy life? There are 1 This is Herzen's title for the eighty-odd p11gl's of "miscellaneous pieces"

at the end of Volwne III. They were written between 1 865 and 1 868.

(D.M.)

591

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

592

exceptions. One may find all sorts of things among English aristocrats and French camelias and the Jewish princes of this world . . . . All that is personal and temporary; the lords and bankers have no future and the camelias have no heirs. We are talking about the whole world, about the golden mean, about the chorus and the corps de ballet, which now is on the stage and acting, leaving aside the father of Lord Stanley, who has 20,000

francs a day, and the father of that child of twelve who flung himself into the Thames the other day to ease for his parents the task of feeding him.

The old tradesman who has grown rich loves to talk of the conveniences of life. For him it is still a novelty that he is a gentleman, qu'il a ses aises, 'that he has the means to do this, and that doing that will not ruin him.' He marvels at money and knows its value and how quickly it flies, \vhile his predecessors in wealth believed neither in its worth nor in its exhaustibility, and so have been ruined. But they ruined themselves with taste.

The bourgeois has little notion of making ample use of his accumulated capital. The habit of the former narrow, hereditary, niggardly life remains. He may indeed spend a great deal of money, but he does not spend it on the right things.

A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not those of spaciousness, and cannot get a\vay from them. Enrything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show. The proprietaire instinctively diminishes the size of his rooms and increases their number, �ot knowing why he makes the windows small and the ceilings Ion·; he takes advantage of every corner to snatch it from his lodger or from his own family. That corner is of no use to him but, just in case, he will take it away from somebody. V\'ith peculiar satisfaction he builds two inconvenient kitchens instead of one decent one, and puts up a garret for his maid in which she can neither work nor turn round, but to make up for that it is damp. To compensate for this economy of light and space he paints the front of the house, packs the drawing-room with furniture, and lays out bt>fore the hous(• a flower-bed with a fountain in it, which is a source of tribulation to children, nurses, dogs and tenants.

\\"hat is not spoilt by misPrliness is finished off by sluggishness of intellect. Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of da ily lift• without mingling with it, casts its vvealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for

The Later Years

593

it. All the profit goes to the wholesale dealers and for the others it is reckoned in scanty drops ; the wholesale dealers are changing the face of the earth, while private life trails along beside their steam-engines in its old lumbC'ring waggon with its broken-down nags. . . .

A fireplace which does not smoke is a dream. A landlord in Geneva said to me soothingly: 'This fireplace only smokes in the bise': that is just when one most needs a firC' ; and he says this as though the bise \vere an accident or a new invention, as though it had not blown before the birth of Calvin and would not blow after the death of Fazy. In all Europe, not excepting Spain or Italy, one must make one's \vill at the approach of winter, as men used to do formerly when they set off from Paris to Marseilles, and must hold a service to the Iversky Madonna in mid

April.

If these people tell me that they arC' not occupied with the vanity of vanities, and that they have many other things to do, I will forgive them their smoky chimneys, and the locks that open the door and your veins at the same time, and the stench in the passage, and so on ; but I shall ask, what is their work, what are their higher interests? They have none . . . . They only make a display of them to cover the inconceivable emptiness and senselessness of their lives.

In the Middle Ages men lived in the very nastiest \vay and

\vasted their efforts on utterly unnecessary edifices \vhich did not contribute to their comfort. But the Middle Ages did not talk about their passion for comfort; on the contrary, the more comfortless their life, the more nearly it approached their ideal; their luxury was in the splC'ndour of the House of God and of their assembly hall, and there they \";ere not niggardly, they grudged nothing. The knight in those days built a fortress, not a palace, and did not select a site with the most convenient road to it, but an inaccessible cliff. Nowadays there is no one to defend oneself against, and nobody believes in saving his soul by adorning a church ; the peaceful and orderly citizen has dropped out of the forum and the Rathaus, out of the opposition and the club; passions and fanaticisms, religions and heroisms, have all given way to material prosperity: and this has not been achieved.

For me there is something melancholy, something tragic, in all this, as though this world were living somehow in expectation of the earth's giving way under its feet, and were seeking not orderliness but forgetfulness. I see this not only in the care\vorn, wrinkled faces but also in a fear of any serious think-

M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S

594

ing, in an aversion from any analysis of the situation, in a convulsive craving to be busy, and for external distractions. The old are ready to play with toys, 'if only to keep from thinking.'

The fashionable mustard-plaster is an International Exhibition. The remedy and the illness together form an intermittent fever centred first in one part and then in another. All are rushing about sailing, walking, flying, spending money, striving, staring and growing weary, living even more uncomfortably in order to run after success-what? vVell, just that: successes. As though in three or four years there can be so much progress in everything; as though, when we have railways to travel by, there were such an extreme necessity to carry from place to place things like houses, machines, stables, cannon, even perhaps parks and kitchen gardens.

And when they are sick of exhibitions they will take to war and begin to be diverted by heaps of corpses-anything to avoid seeing certain black spots on the sky.

B E Y O :\ D T H E A L P S

THE ARCHITECTURAL, monumental character of Italian towns, together with their neglected condition, eventually palls on one.

A modern man is not at home in them., but in an uncomfortable box at a theatre on whose stage thP scenery is magnificent.

Life in them has not become balanced, is not simple, and is not convenient. The tone is elevated, and in everything there is declamation-and Italian declamation too (anyone who has heard Dante read aloud knows what that is like). In everything there is the strained intensity which used to be the fashion among Moscow philosophers and German learned artists ; everything is looked at from the highest point, vom hohern Standpunk!. This state of being constantly screwed up rejects all abandon, and is for ever prepared to give a rebuff and to deliver a homily in set phrases. Chronic enthusiasm is exhausting and irritating.

Man does not ahvays want to be marvelling, to be spiritually exalted, to feel virtuous, to be moved and to be floating about mentally far back in the past; but Italy will never let him drop below a certain pitch and incessantly reminds him that her street is not simply a street but a monument, that he should not only walk through her squares but ought to study them.

The Later Years

595

At the same time everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand (possibly it is the same everywhere) borders upon insanity and absurdity-or at least is reminiscent of childhood . . . . The Piazza Signoria is the nursery of the Florentine people; grandfather Buonarroti and Uncle Cellini presented it with marble and bronze playthings, and it has planted them at random in the square where so often blood has been shed and its fate has been decided-without the slightest consideration for David or Perseus . . . . There is a town in the water so that pike and perch can stroll about the streets . . : .

There is a town of stony chinks so that one must be a wood-louse or a lizard to creep and run along a narrow passage on the sea bottom left between the cliffs which are composed of palaces

. . . and then there is a Belovezh Forest of marble. What brain dared create the draft of that stone forest called Milan Cathedral, that mountain of stalactites? What brain had the audacity to carry out that mad architect's dream? . . . And who gave the money for it, the huge, incredible sum of money?

People only make sacrifices for what is unnecessary. Their fantastic aims are always the dearest to them; dearer than daily bread, dearer than self-interest. In selfishness a man must be trained, just as he must in humaneness. But imagination carries him away without any training, enthrals him without argument. The ages of faith were the ages of miracles.