My Past and Thoughts - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Alexander Herzen (ч. 2)

Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the battle of Borodino, of the Berezina, of the taking of Paris were my cradle-songs, my nursery stories, my Iliad and my Odyssey. My mother and our servants, my father and Vera Artamonovna were continually going back to the terrible time which had impressed them so recently, so intimately, and so acutely. Then the returning generals and officers began crowding into Moscow. My father's old comrades of the Izmaylovsky regiment, now the heroes of a bloody war scarcely ended, were often at our house. They found relief from their fatigues and battles in describing them. This was in reality the most brilliant moment of the Petersburg period; the consciousness of strength gave new life, and all practical affairs and troubles seemed to be put off till the morrow when work would begin again: now all that was wanted was to revel in the joys of victory.

From these gentlemen my eager ears heard even more about the \var than from Vera Artamonovna. I was particularly fond of the stories told by Count Miloradovich;10 he spoke with the D Yakovlev. Lev Alexeyevich ( 1 764-1 839), 'the Senator.' (A.S.) 10 One of the genera"ts of the campaign of 1 8 1 2. Military Governor

General of Petersburg at the accession of Nicholas in 1 825, and killed in the rising of December 1 4th. ( Tr.)

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greatest vivacity, with lively mimicry, with roars of laughter, and more than once I fell asleep, on the sofa behind him, to the sound of them.

Of course, in such surroundings I was a desperate patriot and intended to go into the army; but an exclusive sentiment of nationality never leads to any good ; it led me to the following incident. Among others who used to visit us was the Comte de Quinsonaas, a French emigre and a lieutenant-general in the Russian service. A desperate royalist, he took part in the· celebrated fete of Versailles, at which the King's life-guards trampled underfoot the popular cockade and at which Marie Antoinette drank to the destruction of the revolution. This French count, a tall, thin, graceful old man with grey hair, was the very model of politeness and elegant manners. There was a peerage awaiting him in Paris, where he had already been to congratulate Louis XVIII on getting his situation. He had returned to Russia to dispose of his estate. Unluckily for me this most courteous of the generals of all the Russian armies had to begin speaking of the war in my presence.

'But surely you must have been fighting against us?' I remarked with extreme nai:vete.

'Non, man petit, non; j'etais dans l'armee russe.'

'What?' said I, 'you, a Frenchman, and fighting in our army?

That's impossible! '

M y father glanced sternly a t m e and changed the subject. The Count heroically set things right by saying to my father that 'he liked such patriotic sentiments.' My father had not liked them, and whPn the Count had gone away he gave me a terrible scolding. 'This is what comes of rushing headlong into conversation about all sorts of things you don't untlerstand and can't understand; it was out of fidelity to his king that the Count served under our emperor.'

I certainly did not understand that.

My father had spent twelve years abroad and his brother still longer; they tried to arrange their life in the foreign style while avoiding great expense and retaining all Russian comforts. Their life never was so arranged, either because they did not know how to manage or because the nature of a Russian landowner was stronger in them than their foreign habits. The management of their land and house was in common, the estate was undivided, an immense crowd of house-serfs peopled the ground floor, and consequently all conditions for disorder were present.

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Two nurses looked after me, one Russian and one German.

Vera Artamonovna and Madame Proveau were very kind women, but it bored me to watch them all day long knitting stockings and bickering together, and so at every favourable opportunity I ran away to the half of the house occupied by my uncle, the Senator (the one who had been an ambassador) , to see my one friend, his valet Calot.

I have rarely met a kinder, gentler, milder man ; utterly alone in Russia, parted from all his own people, with difficulty speaking broken Russian, his devotion to me was like a ,.,·oman's. I spent whole hours in his room, worried him, got in his way, played pranks-he bore it all with a good-natured smile; cut all sorts of marvels out of cardboard for me and carved various trifles out of wood (and how I loved him for it! ) . In the evenings he used to bring me up picture-books from the library-the Travels of Gmelin11 and of Pallas,12 and a fat book of The World in Picturcs,13 which I liked so much that I looked at it until the binding, although of leather, gave way; for a couple of hours at a timC' Calot would show mf' the same pictures, repeating the same explanation for the thousandth time.

Before my birthday and my name-day Calot \vould lock himself up in his room, from which came the sounds of a hammer and other tools; of�en he would pass along the corridor \vith rapid steps, locking his door after him every time, sometimes carrying a little sauce-pan of glue, sometimes a parcel with things wrapped up. It may well be imagined how much I longed to know what he \vas making; I used to send the house-serf boys to try and find out, but Calot kept a sharp look-out. \Ve somehow discovered, on the staircase, a little crack which looked straight into his room, but it was of no help to us; all we could see was the uppC'r part of the window and the portra it of Frederick II with a huge nose and huge star and the expression of an emaciated hawk. Two days before the event the noise would cease and the room would be opened-everything in it was as usual, except for scraps of coloured and gold paper here and there; I \vould 11 Gmelin. Johann Gear�?; ( 1 709-55 ) , a l ea rned German who travelled in the Enst. ( Tr.)

1 2 Pa llas. Peter Simon ( 1 741-1 8 1 1 ) , German traveller and naturalist who explored the Urals, Kirghiz Steppes, Altai Mountains, and parts of Siberia. ( Tr.)

1 :! Orbis semualium pictus by Yan Amos Komensky ( 1 592- 1 670) , a Czech pedagogue and humanist. (R.)

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flush crimson, devoured with curiosity, but Calot, with a n air of strained gravity, refused to approach the delicate subject.

I lived in agonies until the momentous day. At five o'clock in the morning I was awake and thinking of Calot's preparations; at eight o'clock he would himself appear in a white cravat, a white waistcoat and a dark-blue tail-coat-with empty hands.

When would it end? Had he spoiled it? And time passed and the ordinary presents came, and Yelizaveta Alexeyevna Golokhavastov's footman had already appeared with a costly toy, wrapped up in a napkin, and the Senator had already brought me some marvel, but the uneasy expectation of the surprise troubled my joy.

All at once, as it were casually, after dinner or after tea, Nurse would say to me:

'Go downstairs just a minute; there is somebody asking for you.'

At last, I thought, and went down, sliding on my arms down the banisters of the staircase. The doors into the ball-room were thrown open noisily, music was playing. A transparency with my monogram was lit up, serf-boys dressed up as Turks offered me sweetmeats, then follo\ved a puppet show or indoor fireworks.

Calot, perspiring with his efforts, was with his own hands setting everything in motion, and was no less enraptured than I was.

What presents could be compared with such an entertainment! I have never been fond of things, the bump of ownership and acquisitiveness has never been developed in me at any age, and now, after the prolonged suspense, the numbers of candles, the tinsel and the smell of gunpowder! Only one thing was lacking-a comrade of my own age, but I spent all my childhood in solitude,14 and certainly was not over-indulged in that respect.

14 My father had, besides me, another son ten years older. • I was always fond of him, but he could not be a companion to me. From his twelfth to his thirtieth year he was always in the hands of the surgeons. After a series of tortures, endured with extreme fortitude and rendering his whole existence one intermittent operation, the doctors declared his disease incurable. His health was shattered; circumstances and character contributed to the complete ruin of his life. The pages in which I speak of his lonely and melancholy existence have been omitted. I do not wish to print them without his consent.

• Yegor Ivanovich Herzen ( 1 803--82) . (A.S. )

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M y father and the Senator had an elder brother,15 between whom and the two younger brothers there was an open feud, in spite of which they managed their estate in common or rather ruined it in common. The triple control and the quarrel together led to glaring disorganisation. My father and the Senator did everything to thwart the elder brother, who did the same by them. The village elders and peasants lost their heads: one brother was demanding wagons; another, hay; a third, firewood ; each gave orders, each sent his authorised agents. The elder brother would appoint a village elder, the younger ones would remove him in a month, upon some nonsensical pretext, and appoint another whom their senior would not recognise. With all this, of course, backbiting, slander, spies and favourites were naturally plentiful, and under it all the poor peasants, who found neither justice nor defence, were harassed on all sides and oppressed with the double burden of work and the disorganisation caused by the capricious demands of their owners.

The first consequence of the feud between the brothers that made some impression upon them, was the loss of their great la·wsuit with the Counts Devier, though justice was on their side.

Though their interests were the same, they could never agree on a course of action; their opponents naturally profited by this. In addition to the loss of a large and fine estate, the Senate sentenced each of the brothers to pay costs and damages to the amount of thirty thousand paper roubles. This lesson opened their eyes and they made up their minds to divide their property. The preliminary negotiations lasted for about a year, the estate was carved into three fairly equal parts and they were to decide by casting lots which was to come to which. The Senator and my father visited their elder brother, whom they had not seen for several years, to negotiate and be reconciled ; then there was a rumour that he would visit us to complete the arrangements. The rumour of the visit of this elder brother16 excited horror and anxiety in our household.

15 There were originally four brothers: Petr. the grandfather of 'the cousin from Korrheva' mentioned in Chapter 3; Alexander, the elder brother here described. who is belie,·ed to haYe been the model from whom Dostoenky drew the chilracter of fedor PaYlovich in The Brothers Karama::ou: LeY, always referred to as 'the Seuator,' a ud lYall, Herzen's father. Of the sisters one was Y elizaveta Alexeyevna Golokh\"astov and oue was l\Iarya Alexeyevua KhO\· ansky. ThP family of the Yakovlevs was onp of thP oldPst aud most aristocratic in R ussia. ( Tr.) u ; Th is brother. Alexander. had an il legitimate daughter, Natalya, who became the wife of her first cousin, the author of this book. (R.)

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H e was one of those grotesquely odd creatures who are only possible in Russia, where life is so odd as to be grotesque. He was a man gifted by nature, yet he spent his whole life in absurd actions, often almost crimes. He had received a sound education in the French style, was very \Veil read-and spent his time in debauchery and empty idleness up to the day of his death. He, too, had served at first in the Izmaylovsky regiment, had been something like an aide-de-camp in attendance on Potemkin, then served in some mission, and returning to Petersburg was made Procurator of the Synod. Neither diplomatic nor monastic surroundings could restain his unbridled character. For his quarrels with the heads of the Church he was removed from his post; for a slap in the face, which he either tried to give, or gave, to a gentleman at an official dinner at the Governor-General's, he was banished from Petersburg. He went to his Tambov estate; there the peasants nearly murdered him for his brutality and amorous propensities; he was indebted to his coachman and his horses for his life.

After that he settled in Moscow. Deserted by all his relations and also by his acquaintances, he lived in solitude in his big house in the Tverskoy Boulevard, oppressing his house-serfs and ruining his peasants. He amassed a great library of books and collected a regular harem of serf-girls, both of which he kept under lock and key. Deprived of every occupation and concealing a passionate vanity, often extremely naive, he amused himself by buying unnecessary things, and bringing unnecessary lawsuits, which he pursued with great bitterness. His lawsuit concerning an Amati violin lasted tlzirtr years, and ended in his winning it.

After another lawsuit he succeeded by extraordinary efforts in winning a wall ,vhich was common to two houses, the possession of which was of no use to him whatever. Being himself on the retired list, he used, on reading in the newspapers of the promotions of his fellow-soldiers, to buy such orders as had been given to them, and lay them on his table as a mournful reminder of the decorations he might have received !

His brothers and sisters were afraid of him and had nothing to do wi{h him; our servants would go a long v,-ay round to avoid his house for fear of meeting him, and would turn pale at the sight of him ; women went in terror of his impudent persecution; the house-serfs paid for special Sf'rvices of prayer that they might not come into his possession.

So this was the terrible man who was to visit us. Extraordinary excitement prevailed throughout the house from early morning; I had never seen this legendary 'enemy-brother,'

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though I was born i n his house, where my father stayed when h e came back from foreign parts; I longed t o see him and at the same time I was frightened-! do not know why, but I was terribly frightened.

Two hours before his arrival, my father's eldest nephew, two intimate acquaintances and a good-natured stout and flabby official who was in charge of the legal business arrived, They were all sitting in silent expectation, when suddenly the butler came in, and, in a voice unlike his own, announced that the brother 'had graciously pleased to arrive.'

'Show him up,' said the Senator, with perceptible agitation,

\vhile my father began taking snuff, the nephe\'\' straightened his cravat, and the official hawked and coughed. I had been ordered to go upstairs but, trembling all over, I stayed in the next room.

Slowly and majestically the 'brother' advanced, and the Senator and my father went to meet him. He was holding an ikon with both hands before his chest, as people do at weddings and funerals, and in a drawling voice, a little through his nose, he addressed his brothers in the following words:

'vVith this ikon our father blessed me before his end, charging me and our late brother Petr to watch over you and to be a father to you in his place . . . if our father knew of your conduct to your elder brother! . . .'

'Come, man chcr frerc,' observed my father in his studiously indifferent voice, 'you have carried out our father's last wish well indeed. It would be better to forget these memories, painful to vou as well as to us.'

'How? vVhat?' shouted the devout brother. 'Is this what you have summoned me for? . . .' and he. flung down the ikon, so that the silv!'r setting gave a metallic clink. At this point the Senator shouted in a voice still more terrifying. I rushed headlong upstairs and only had time to see the official and the nephew, no less scared, retreating to the balcony.

V\'bat was done and how it was done, I cannot say; the frightened servants huddled into corners out of sight, no one knew anything of what happened, and neither the Senator nor my father ever spoke of this scene before me. Little by little the noise subsic!Nl and the partition of the estate was carried out, whether then or on another day I do not remember.

My father received Vasilevskoye, a big estate in the Ruzsky district, near Moscow. \Ve spent the whole summer there the following year; meanwhile the Senator bought himself a house on the Arhat, and we went to live alone in our great house,

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deserted and deathlike. Soon afterwards my father too bought a house in Old Konyushennaya Street.

With the Senator there departed first Calot, and secondly the source of all animation in our house. The Senator alone had prevented the hypochondriacal disposition of my father from prevailing; now it had full sway. The new house was gloomy; it suggested a prison or a hospital; the ground floor was vaulted and the thick walls made the windows look like the embrasures of a fortress. The house was surrounded on all sides by a courtyard unnecessarily large.

To tell the truth, it is more of a wonder that the Senator managed to live so long under the same roof as my father than that they parted. I have rarely sPen two men so complete a contrast as they were.

The Senator was of a kindly disposition, and fond of amusements; he had spent his whole life in the world of artificial light and of official diplomacy, the world that surrounded the court, without a notion that there was another more serious world, although he had been not merely in contact with but intimately connected with all the great events from 1 789 to 1815. Count Vorontsov had sent him to Lord Grenville17 to find out what General Bonaparte was going to undertake after abandoning the Egyptian army. He had been in Paris at the coronation of Napoleon. In 1 8 1 1 Napoleon had ordered him to be detained in Cassel, where he was ambassador 'at the court of King Jerome,'18

as my father used to say in moments of vexation. In fact, he took part in all the great events of his time, but in a queer way, irregularly.

When a captain in the Life Guards of the Izmaylovsky regiment, he was sent on a mission to London; Paul, seeing this in the muster-roll, ordered him to return at once to Petersburg. The soldier-diplomat set off by the first ship and appeared on parade.

'Do you want to remain in London?' Paul asked in his hoarse voice.

'If it should please your Majesty to permit me,' answered the captain-diplomat.

'Go back and lose no time,' said Paul in his hoarse voice, and he did go back, without even seeing his relations, who lived in Moscow.

17 British Foreign Secretary in 1 791, and Prime Minister, 1806 and 1 807, when the Act for the abolition of the slave trad!' was passed. ( Tr.) I B f.e., of Jerome Bonaparte, King of VVestphalia from 1 807 to 1 8 1 3.

( Tr.)

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While diplomatic questions were being settled by bayonets and grape-shot, he was an ambassador and concluded his diplomatic career at the time of the Congress of Vienna, that bright festival of all the diplomats. Returning to Russia he was appointed court chamberlain in Moscow, where there is no court.

Though he knew nothing of Russian law and legal procedure, he got into the Senate, became a member of the Council of Guardians, a director of the Mariinsky Hospital, and of the Alexandriinsky Institute, and he performed all his duties with a zeal that was hardly necessary, with a censoriousness that only did harm and with an honesty that no one noticed.

He was never at home, he tired out two teams of four strong horses in the course of the day, one set in the morning, the other after dinner. Besides the Senate, the sittings of which he never neglected, and the Council of Guardians, which he attended twice a week, besides the Hospital and the Institute, he hardly missed a single French play, and visited the English Club three times a week. He had no time to be bored: he was always busy and i nterested. He was always going somewhere, and his life rolled lightly on good springs through a world of official papers and red tape.

Moreover, up to the age of seventy-five he was as strong as a young man, was present at all the great balls and dinners, took part in every ceremonial assembly and annual function, whether it was of an agricultural or medical or fire insurance society or of the Society of Natural Philosophy . . . and, on the top of it all, perhaps because of it, preserved to old age some degree of human feeling and a certain warmth of heart.

No greater contrast to the sanguine Senator, who was always in motion and only occasionally visited his home, can possibly be imagined than my father, who hardly ever went out of his courtyard, hated the whole official world and was everlastingly freakish and discontented. We also had eight horses ( very poor ones) , but our stable was something like an almshouse for broken-down nags; my father kept them partly for the sake of appearances and partly so that the two coachmen and the two postillions should have something to do, besides fetching the Moscow News and getting up cock-fights, which they did very successfully between the coachhouse and the neighbour's yard.

My father had scarcely been in the service at all; educated by a French tutor, in the house of a devoutly religious aunt, he entered the lzmaylovsky regiment as a sergeant at sixteen, served until the accession of Paul, and retired with the rank of

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captain i n the Guards. I n 180 1 he went abroad and remained until the end of 181 1 , wandering from one country to another.

He returned with my mother three months before my birth, and after the fire of Moscow he spent a year on his estate in the province of Tver, and then returned to live in Moscow, trying to order his life so as to be as solitary and dreary as possible. His brother's liveliness hindered him in this.

After the Senator left us, everything in the house began to assume a more and more gloomy aspect. The walls, the furniture, the servants, everything bore a look of discontent and suspicion, and I need hardly say that my father himself was of all the most discontented. The unnatural stillness, the whispers and cautious footsteps of the servants, did not suggest attentive solicitude, but oppression and terror. In the rooms everything was stationary; for five or six years the same books would lie in the very same places with the same markers in them. In my father's bedroom and study the furniture was not moved nor the windows opened for years together. When he went away into the country he took the key of his room in his pocket, that they might not venture to scrub the floor or wash the walls in his absence.

UNTIL I WAS ten years old I noticed nothing strange or special in my position; it seemed to me simple and natural that I should be living in my father's house; that in his part of it I should be on my best behaviour, while my mother lived in another part of the house, in which I could be as noisy and mischievous as I liked.

The Senator spoiled me and gave me presents, Calot carried me about in his arms, Vera Artamonovna dressed me, put me to bed, and gave me my bath, Madame Proveau took me out for walks and talked to me in German; everything went on in its regular way, yet I began pondering on things.

Stray remarks, carelessly uttered words, began to attract my attention. Old Madame Proveau and all the servants were devoted to my mother, while they feared and disliked my father.

The scenes which sometimes took place between them were often

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the subject of conversation bet,..,·een Madame Proveau and Verd Artamonovna, both of whom always took my mother's side.

My mother certainly had a good deal to put up with. Being an extremely kind-hParted woman, with no strength of will, she was completely crushed by my father, and, as always happens with \veak characters, put up a desperate opposition in trifling matters and things of no consequence. Unhappily, in these trifling matters my father was nearly always in the right, and the dispute always ended for him in triumph.

'If I were in the mistress's place,' Madame Proveau would say, for instance, 'I would simply go straight back to Stuttgart; much comfort she gets-nothing but fads and unpleasantness, and deadly dullness.'

'To be sure,' Vera Artamonovna would assent, 'but that's what ties her, hand and foot,' and she would point with her knittingneedle towards me. 'How can she take him with her-what to?

And as for leaving him here alone, with the way we live-why, even if one was no relation, one would have pity on him ! '

Children i n general have far more insight than is supposed ; they are quickly distracted and forget for a time what has struck them, but they go back to it persistently, especially if it is anything mysterious or frightPning and with wonderful perseverance and ingenuity they go on probing until they reach the truth.

Once I became curious, ,..,·ithin a few ,..,·eeks I had found o·,a all the details of my father's meeting with my mother, had heard how she had brought herself to leave her parents' home, how she had been hidden at the Senator's in the Russian Embassy at Cassel, and had crossed the frontier dressed as a boy; all this I found out without putting a single question to anyone.

The first result of these discoveries was to estrange me from my father because of the scenes of which I have spoken. I had seen them before, but I used to think all that quite normal-part of the regular order of things; for I was so accustomed to the fact that everyone in the house, not excepting the Senator, was afraid of my father, and that he \vas given to scolding everyone, that I saw nothing strange in it. Now I began to think so no longer, and the thought that some of it was endured on my account sometimes threw a dark, oppressive cloud over my bright, childish imagination.

A second idea that took root in me from that time was that I was far less dependPnt on my fathPr than children are as a rule.

I liked this f0eling of indept>ndence which I imagined for myself.

Two or three years later two of my father's old comrades in the regiment, P. K. Essen, the Governor-General of Orenburg,

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and A. N. Bakhmetev, formerly Governor in Bessarabia, a general who had lost his leg at Borodino, were sitting with my father. My room was next to the ballroom in which they were. Among other things my father told them that he had been speaking to Prince Yusupov about putting me into the civil service.

'There's no time to be lost,' he added ; 'you know that it will take him years to reach any kind of decent rank in the service.'

'vVhat a strange idea, dear friend, to make him a clerk,' Essen said, good-naturedly. 'Leave it to me, and I will get him into the Ural Cossacks. We'll get him a commission, that's all that matters: after that he will make his \vay, like the rest of us.'

My father did not agree and said that he had grown to dislike everything military, and that he hoped in time to get me a post on some mission to a warm country, where he would go to end his days.

Bakhmetev, who had taken little part in the conversation, got up on his crutches and said :

'It seems to me that you ought to think very seriously over Petr Kirillovich's advice. If you don't want to put his name down at Orenburg, you might put him down here. We are old friends, and it's my habit to say openly what I think ; if you put him into the civil service and the university you will do no good to your roung man, nor to society either. He is quite obviously in a false position; only the military service can open a career for him and put him right. Before he gets command of a company, all dangerous ideas will have subsided. Military discipline is a grand schooling, and after that it all depends on him. You say that he has abilities, but you don't mean to say that none but fools go into the army, do you? What about us and all our set?

There's only one objection you can make-that he will have to serve longer before he gets a commission, but it's just over that that we can help you.'

This conversation had as much effect as the remarks of Madame Proveau and Vera Artamonovna. By that time I was thirtern1 and such lessons, turned over and over, and analysed from every point of view during weeks and months of complete solitude, bore their fruit. The result of this conversation was that, although I had till then, like all boys, dreamed of the army and a uniform, and had been ready to cry at my father's wanting me to go into the civil service, my enthusiasm for soldiering suddenly cooled, and my craving and weakness for epaulettes, aiguillettes and striped trousers, were by degrees completely 1 Herzen was not more than eight at this time. (A.S.)

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eradicated. My dying passion for a uniform had, however, one last flicker. A cousin of ours, who had been at a boarding-school in Moscow and used sometimes to spend a holiday with us, had entered the Yamburgsky regiment of Uhlans. In 1 825 he came to Moscow as an ensign and stayed a few days with us. My heart throbbed when I saw him with all his little cords and laces, with a sword, and a four-cornered shako worn a little on one side and fastened with a chin-strap. He was a boy of seventeen and short for his age. Next morning I dressed up in his uniform, put on his sword and shako and looked at myself in the glass. Goodness!

how handsome I thought myself in the short dark-blue jacket with red braid ' And the tassels and the pompon, and the pouch

. . . what were the yellow nankeen breeches and the short camlet jacket which I used to wear at home, in comparison with these?

The cousin's visit might have destroyed the effect of the generals' talk, but soon circumstances turned me against the army again, and this time for good.

The spiritual result of my meditations on my 'false position'

was much the same as that which I had deduced from the talk of my two nurses. I felt myself more independent of society, of which I knew absolutely nothing, felt that in reality I was thrown on my own resources, and with somewhat childish conceit thought I \vould show the old generals what I was made of.

With all this it may well be imagined how drearily and monotonously the time passed in the strange convent-like seclusion of my father's house. I had neither encouragement nor distraction ; my father had spoilt me until I was ten, and now he was almost always dissatisfied with me; I had no companions, my teachers called to give lessons and went away, and, seeing them out of the yard, I used to run off on the sly, to play with the house-serf boys, which was strictly forbidden. The rest of my time I spent wandering aimlessly about the big, dark rooms, which had their windows shut all day and were only dimly lit in the evening, doing nothing or reading anything that turned up.

The servants' ha I I and tllP rna ids' room provided the only keen enjoyment left me. ThPn' I had comp!Pte liberty; I took the side of onP party aga i nst anothPr, d iscuswd their businPss with my friPmls, ilnd gave my opinion upon thPm, knew all their intimate a ff il irs, and nPver d ropp(•d a word in the dmwing-room about the SP(TPts of thr sPrva nts' hall.

I must pause upon this subject. Indeed, I do not intend to

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avoid digressions and episodes ; that is part of every conversation ; indeed of life itself.

Children as a rule are fond of servants; their parents forbid them, especially in Russia, to associate with servants; the children do not obey them because in the drawing-room it is dull, while in the maids' room it is lively. In this case, as in thousands of others, parents do not know what they are about. I do not imagine that our hall was a less wholesome place for children than our 'tea-room' or 'sitting-room.' In the servants' hall children pick up coarse expressions and bad manners, that is true; but in the drawing-room they pick up coarse ideas and bad feelings.

The very orders to children to keep away from those with whom they are continually in contact is immoral.

A great deal is said among us about the complete depravity of servants, especially when they are serfs. They certainly are not distinguished by exemplary strictness of conduct, and their moral degradation can be seen from the fact that they put up with too much and are too rarely moved to indignation and resistance. But that is not the point. I should like to know what class in Russia is less depraved ? The nobility or the officials? The clergy, perhaps?

Why do you laugh?

The peasants, perhaps, are the only ones who could put up some kind of claim to be different. . . .

The difference between the nobleman and the serving man is very small. I hate the demagogues' flattery of the mob, particularly since the troubles of 1 848, but the aristocrats' slander of the people I hate even more. By picturing servants and slaves as degraded animals, the slave-owners throw dust in people's eyes and stifle the voice of conscience in themselves. We are not often better than the lower classes, but we express ourselves more gently and conceal our egoism and our passions more adroitly; our desires are not so coarse, and the ease with which thev are satisfied and our habit of not controlling them make the� less conspicuous; we are simply wealthier and better fed and consequently more fastidious. When Count Almaviva recited to the Barber of Seville the catalogue of the qualities he expected from a servant, Figaro observed with a sigh: 'If a servant must have all these virtues, are there many gentlemen fit to be lackeys? '

Dissoluteness i n Russia as a rule does not g o deep ; it is more savage and dirty, noisy and coarse, dishevelled and shameless than profound. The clergy, shut up at home, drink and overeat themselves with the merchants. The nobility get drunk in pub-

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lie, play cards until they are ruined, thrash their servants, seduce their housemaids, manage their business affairs badly and their family life still worse. The officials do the same, but in a dirtier way, and in addition are guilty of grovelling before their superiors and pilfering. As far as stealing in the literal sense goes, the nobility are less guilty: they take openly what belongs to others; besides, when it suits them they are just as grasping as other people.

All these amiable weaknesses are to be met with in a still coarser form in officials who stand below the fourteenth grade,2

and in gentlefolk who are dependent not on the Tsar but on the landowners. But in what way they are worse than others as a class, I do not know.

Going over my recollections, not only of the serfs in our house and in the Senator's, but also of two or three households with which we were intimate for twenty-five years, I do not remember anything particularly vicious in their behaviour. Petty thefts, perhaps, . . . but on that matter all ideas are so dulled by the serfs' position, that it is difficult to judge; human property does not stand on much ceremony with its kith and kin, and is pretty cavalier with the master's goods. It would be only fair to exclude from this generalisation the confidential servants, the favourites of both sexes, masters' mistresses and tale-bearers; but in the first place they are an exception-these Kleinmikhels of the stable3 and Benckendorfs4 from the cellar, Perekusikhins5 in striped linen gowns, and barefoot Pompadours; moreover, they do behave better than any of the rest: they only get drunk at night and do not pawn their clothes at the gin-shop.

The simple-minded immorality of the rest revolves round a glass of vodka and a bottle of beer, a merry talk and a pipe, absences from home without leave, quarrels which sometimes end in fights, and cunning tricks played on masters who expect of them something inhuman and impossible. Of course, the lack of all education on the one hand, and on the other the simplicity 2 Peter I's Table of Ranks. 24th January, 1 722, was drawn up in three parallel columns. civil. military a nd court. each divided into fourteen ranks or classes, most of which were given Latin or German names. It established a bureaucratic hierarchy based on ability rather than birth.

(R.)

3 Kleinmikhel, Petr Andrcye\'ich, :\linister of :\1cans of Communication under Nicholas I. ( Tr.)

4Bcnckcndorf, Alexander Khristoforovich, Chief of Gendarmes, and fa\'ouritc of Nicholas I. ( Tr.)

;. Perekusikhin, Marya Sav\'ishna, favourite of Catherine II. ( Tr.)

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of the peasant serfs have introduced into their manners much that is ugly and distorted, but for all that, like the negroes in America, they have remained half infantile; trifles amuse them, trifles distress them ; their desires are limited, and are rather naive and human than vicious.

Alcohol and tea, the tavern and the eating-house, are the two permanent passions of the Russian servant; for their sake he steals, for their sake he is poor, on their account he endures persecution and punishmen t and leaves his family in poverty.

Nothing is easier than for a Father Mathew,6 from the height of his teetotal intoxication, to condemn drunkenness and, while sitting at the tea-table, to wonder why it is that se1·vants go for their tea to the eating-house, instead of drinking it at home, although at home it is cheaper.

Alcohol stupefies a man, it enables him to forget himself, stimulates him and induces an artificial gaiety; this stupefaction and stimulation are the more agreeable the less the man is developed and the more he is bound to a narrow, empty life.

How can a servant not drink when he is condemned to the everlasting waiting in the hall, to perpetual poverty, to being a slave, to being sold? He drinks to excess-when he can-because he cannot drink every day. In Italy and the South of France there are no drunkards, because there is plenty of wine. The savage drunkenness of the English working man is to be explained in exactly thf' same way. These men are broken in the helpless and unequal conflict with hunger and poverty; however hard they have struggled they have met everywhere a leaden legal code and harsh resistance that has flung them back into the dark depths of common life, and condemned them to the neve··ending, aimless toil that eats away mind and body alike. It is not surprising that a man who spends six days as a lever, a cog, a spring, a screw, on Saturday afternoon breaks savagely out of the penal servitude of factory work, and drinks himself silly in half an hour, the more so since his exhau�tion cannot stand much.

The moralists would do better to drink Irish or Scotch whisky themselves and hold their tongues, or their inhuman philanthropy may call down terrible retribution on them.

Drinking tea at the eating-house means something quite different to servants. Tea at home is not the same thing for the 6 Father Mathew ( 1 790-1856), an ! cish priPst. "-ho had remarkable success in a gn•at temperance campaign based on the r<'ligious appeal.

( Tr.)

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house-serf; at home everything reminds him that he is a servant; at home he is in the dirty servants' room, he must get the samovar himself; at home he has a cup with a broken handle, and any minute his master may ring for him. At the eatinghouse he is a free man, he is a gentleman; for him the table is laid and the lamps are lit; for him the waiter nms with the tray; the cup shines, the tea-pot glitters, he gives orders and is obeyed, he enjoys himself and gaily calls for pressed caviare or a turnover with his tea.

In all this there is more childish simplicity than dissoluteness.

Impressions quickly take possession of them but do not send down roots; their minds are continually occupied, or rather distracted, by casual subjects, small desires, trivial aims. A childish belief in everything marvellous turns a grown-up man into a coward, and the same childish belief comforts him at the most difficult moments. I was filled with wonder when I was present at the death of two or three of my father's servants; it was then that one could judge of the simple-hearted carelessness with which their lives had passed, of the absence of great sins upon their conscience ; if there \"•as anything, it had all been settled at confession with the priest.

This resemblance between servants and children accounts for their mutual attraction. Children hate the aristocratic ideas of the

and their benevolently condescending manners, because they are clever and understand that in the eyes of grownup people they are children, while in the eyes of servants they are people. Consequently they are much fonder of playing cards or lotto with the maids than with visitors. Visitors play for the children's benefit with condescension, give way to them, tease them and stop playing whenever they feel like it; the maids, as a rule, play as much for their own sakes as for the children's; and that gives the game interest.

Servants are extremely devoted to children, and this is not the devotion of a slave, but the mutual affection of the weak and the simple.

In old days there used to be a patriarchal dynastic affection between landowners and their house-servants, such as exists now in Turkey. To-day there are in Russia no more of those devoted servants, attached to the line and the family of their masters.

And that is easy to understand. The landowner no longer believes in his power, he does not believe that he will have to answer for his serfs at the terrible Day of Judgment, but simply makes use of his

·er for his OV'>n advantage. The servant does not believe in his subjection and endures violence not as a

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chastisement and trial from God, but simply because he is defenceless; the big fish swallows the little ones.

I used to know in my youth two or three examples of those zealots of slavery, of whom eighty-year-old landowners speak with a sigh, telling stories of their unflagging service and their great diligence, and forgetting to add in what way their fathers and themselves repaid such self-sacrifice.

On one of the Senator's estates a feeble old man called Andrey Stepanov was living in peace, that is, on free rations.

He had been valet to the Senator and my father when they were serving in the Guards, and was a good, honest, and sober man, who looked into his young masters' eyes, and, to use their own words, 'guessed from them what they wanted,' which, I imagine, was not an easy task. Afterwards he looked after the estate near Moscow. Cut off from the beginning of the war of 1812 from all communication, and afterwards left alone, without money, on the ashes of a village which had been burnt to the ground, he sold some beams to escape starvation. The Senator, on his return to Russia, proceeded to set his estate in order, and at last came to the beams. He punished his former valet by sending him away in disgrace, depriving him of his duties. The old man, burdened with a family, trudged off to pick up what food he could. vVe sometimes had to drive through the village where Andrey Stepanov lived, and stay there for a day or two. The feeble old man, crippled by paralysis, used to come every time leaning on his crutch, to pay his respects to my father and to have a talk with him.

The devotion and the gentleness with which he talked, his sorrowful appearance, the locks of yellowish grey hair on each side of his bald pate, touched me deeply.

'I have heard, sir,' he said on one occasion, 'that your brother has thought proper to receive another decoration. I am getting old, your honour, I shall soon give up my soul to God, and yet the Lord has not vouchsafed to me to see your brother in his decorations: if only I might once before my end behold his honour in his ribbons and all his i nsignia ! '

I looked at the old man: his face was so childishly candid, his bent figure, his painfully twisted face, lustreless eyes, and weak voice-all inspired confidence; he was not lying, he was not flattering, he really longed before his death to see, in 'his decorations and insignia,' the man who for fifteen years could not forgive him the loss of a few beams. "\Vas this a saint, or a madman? But perhaps it is only m'l.dmen who attain saintliness?

The new generation has not this idolatrous worship, and if

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there are cases of serfs not caring for freedom, that is simply due to indolence and material considerations. It is more depraved, there is no doubt, but it is a sign that it is nearer to its ending; if they want to see anything on their master's neck, it is certainly not the Vladimir ribbon.

Here I will say something of the situation of our 0\Vn servants.

Neither the Senator nor my father oppressed the house-serfs particularly: that is, they did not ill-treat them physically. The Senator was hasty and impatient, and consequently often rough and unjust, but he had so little contact with the house-serfs and took so little notice of them that they scarcely knew each other.

My father wearied them with his caprices, never let pass a look, a word or a movement, and was everlastingly lecturing them; to a Russian this is often worse than blows and abuse.

Corporal punishment was almost unknown in our house, and the hvo or three cases in which the Senator and my father resorted to the revolting method of the police station were so exceptional that all the servants talked about it for months afterwards; and it was only provoked by glaring offences.

More frequently house-serfs were sent for soldiers, and this punishment was a terror to all the young men ; without kith or kin, they still preferred to remain house-serfs, rather than to be in harness for twenty years. I \vas greatly affected by those terrible scenes . . . . Two soldiers of the police would appear at the summons . of the landowner: they would stealthily, in a casual, sudden way, seize the appointed victim. The village elder commonly announced at this point that the master had the evening before ordered that he was to be produced at the recruitingoffice, and the man would try through his tears to put a brave face on it, while the women wept: everyone made him presents and I gave him everything I could, that is, perhaps a neckerchief worth twenty kopecks.

I remember, too, my father's ordering some village elder's beard to be shaved off, because he had spent the obrok7 which he had collected. I did not understand this punishment, but was struck by the appearance of this old man of sixty; he was in floods of tears, and kept bowin�?: to the ground and begging for a fine of a hundred silver rouhlC's in addition to the obrok if only he might be spared this disgrace.

\VhC'n the Scnator was living with us, the common household 7 Payment in money or kind by a serf in lieu of lnbour for his master.

( Tr.)

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consisted of thirty men and almost as many women; the married women, however, performed no service: they looked after their own families; there were five or six maids and laundresses, who never came upstairs. To these must be added the boys and girls who were being trained in their duties, that is, in sloth and idleness, in lying and the use of corn-spirit.

To give an idea of the life in Russia of those days, I think it will not be out of place to say a few words on the maintenance of the house-serfs. At first they used to be given five paper roubles a month for victuals, and afterwards six. The \vomen had a rouble a month less, and children under ten had half the full allowance.

The servants made up 'artels'B and did not complain of the allowance being too small, which shows how extraordinarily cheap provisions were. The highest wage was a hundred roubles a year, while others received half that amount and some only thirty roubles. Boys under eighteen got no wages at all. In addition to their wages, servants were given clothes, greatcoats, shirts, sheets, blankets, towels and mattresses made of canvas; boys, who did not get wages, \vere allowed money for their physical and moral purification, that is, for the bath-house and for preparing for communion. Taking everything into account, a servant cost about three hundred paper roubles a year; if to this we add a share of medicine, of a doctor and of the surplus stores brought from the country, even then it is not over 350 roubles.

This is only a quarter of the cost of a servant in Paris or London.

Slave-owners usually take into account the insurance premium of slavery, that is, the maintenance of wife and children by the owner, and a meagre crust of bread somewhere in the village for the slave in old age. Of course this must be taken into account; but the cost is greatly lessened by the fear of corporal punishment, the impossibility of changing their condition, and a much lower scale of maintenance.

I have seen enough of the way in which the terrible consciousness of serfdom destroys and poisons the existence of house-serfs, the way in which it oppresses and stupefies their souls. Peasants, especially those who pay a fixed sum in lieu of labour, have less feeling of their personal bondage; they somehow succeed in not believing in their complete slavery. But for the house-serf, sitting on a dirty locker in the hall from morning till night, or standing with a plate at table, there is no room for doubt.

Of course there are people who live in the hall like fish in water, people whose souls have never awakened, who have B J.e., clubs or guilds for messing or working together. (Tr.)

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acquired a taste for their manner of life and who perform their duties with a sort of artistic relish.

Of that class we had one extremely interesting specimen, our footman Bakay, a man of tall figure and athletic build, with solid, dignified features and an air of the greatest profundity; he l ived to an advanced age, imagining that the position of a footman was one of the greatest consequence.

This worthy old man was perpetually angry or a little drunk, or angry and a little drunk at once. He took an exalted view of his duties and ascribed a solemn importance to them: with a peculiar bang and crash he would throw up the steps of the carriage and slam the carriage door with a report like a musketshot. With a gloomy air he stood up stiff and rigid behind the carriage, and every time there was a jolt over a rut he would shout in a thick and displeased voice to the coachman: 'Steady!'

regardless of the fact that the rut was already five paces behind.

Apart from going out with the carriage, his chief occupation, a duty he had voluntarily undertaken, consisted of training the serf-boys in the aristocratic manners to be employed in the hall.

When he was sober, things went fairly well, but when his head was a little dizzy, he became incredibly pedantic and tyrannical.

I sometimes stood up for my friends, but my authority had little influence on Bakay, whose temper was of a Roman severity; he would open the door into the salon for me and say:

'This is not the place for you ; be pleased to leave the room or I shall carry you out.'

He lost no opportunity of abusing the boys, and often added a cuff to his words, or 'beat butter,' that is, with his thumb and little finger dexterously gave them a sly flip on the head with the sharpness and force of a spring.

When at last he had chased the bovs out and was left alone, he transferred his persecution to his �nc friend, Macbeth, a big Newfoundland dog, whom he used to feed, comb and fondle.

After sitting in solitude for two or three minutes he would go out into the yard, call Macbeth to join him on the locker, and begin a conversation.

'What arc you sitting out there in the yard in the frost for, stupid, when there is a warm room for you? Whnt n beast! \-\'hat are you stnring for, ch? Have you nothing to say?'

Usually n slnp would follow these words. Mncbeth would somctimPs growl at his benefactor; and then Bakay would upbraid him in earnest:

'You may go on fePding a dog, but hP will still remain a dog ;

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3 1

he will show his teeth at anyone, without caring who it is the fleas would have eaten him up if it had not been for me! '

And offended by his friend's ingratitude h e would wrathfully take a pinch of snuff and fling what was left between his fingers on Macbeth's nose. Then the dog would sneeze, clumsily wipe out of his eyes with his paw the snuff that had fallen on his nose, and, leaving the locker indignantly, would scratch at the door; Bakay would open it with the word 'rascal' and give him a kick as he went. . . . Then the boys would come back, and he would set to flipping them on the head again.

Before Macbeth we had a setter called Berta ; she fell very ill and Bakay took her on to his mattress and looked after her for two or three weeks. Early one morning I went out into the hall.

Bakay tried to say something to me, but his voice broke and a big tear rolled down his cheek-the dog was dead. There is a fact for the student of human nature! I do not for a moment suppose that he disliked the boys; it was simply a case of a severe character, accentuated by drink and unconsciously grown accustomed to the spirit that prevailed in the hall.

But besides these amateurs of slavery, what gloomy images of martyrs, of hopeless victims, pass mournfully before my memory!

The Senator had a cook, Alexey, a sober, industrious man of exceptional talent who made his way in the world. The Senator himself got him taken into the Tsar's kitchen, where there was at that time a celebrated French cook. After being trained there he got a post in the English Club, grew rich, married and lived like a gentleman ; but the strings which tied him to serfdom would not let him sleep soundly at night, nor take pleasure in his situation.

After having a service celebrated to the Iversky Madonna, Alexey plucked up his courage and presented himself before the Senator to ask for his freedom for five thousand paper roubles.

The Senator was proud of his cook, just as he was proud of his painter, and so he would not take the money, but told the cook that he should be set free for nothing at his master's death.

The cook was thunderstruck ; he grieved, grew thin and worn, turned grey and . . . being a Russian, took to drink. He neglected his work ; the English Club dismissed him. He was engaged by the Princess Trubetskoy, who worried him by her petty niggardliness. Being on one occasion extremely offended by her, Alexey, who was fond of expressing himself eloquently, said, speaking though his nose with his air of dignity:

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'What an opaque soul dwells in your luminous body!'

The princess was furious; she turned the cook away, and, as might be expected from a Russian lady, wrote a complaint to the Senator. The Senator would have done nothing to him, but, as a courteous gentleman, he felt bound to send for the cook, gave him a good cursing and told him to go and beg the princess's pardon.

The cook did not go to the princess but went to the pot-house.

Within a year he had lost everything, from the capital he had saved up for his ransom to the last of his aprons. His wife struggled and struggled on with him, but at last went off and took a place as a nurse. Nothing was heard of him for a long time. Then the police brought Alexey, wild-looking and in tatters; he had been picked up in the street, he had no lodging, he migrated from tavern to tavern. The police insisted that his master should take him. The Senator was distressed and perhaps conscience-stricken, too; he received him rather mildly and gave him a room. Alexey went on drinking, was noisy \vhen he was drunk and imagined that he was composing verses; he certainly had some imagination of an incoherent sort. We were at that time at Vasilevskoye. The Senator, not knowing what to do with the cook, sent him there, thinking that my father ,,..·ould bring him to reason. But the man was too completely shattered. I saw in his case the concentrated anger and hatred against the masters which lies in the heart of the serf: he would talk with a grinding of the teeth and with gesticulations which, especially in a cook, might have been dangerous. He was not afraid to give full rein to his tongue in my presence; he \vas fond of me and would often, patting me familiarly on the shoulders, say that I was:

'A good branch of a rotten tree.'

After the Senator's death my father gave him his freedom at once. It \vas too late and simply meant getting rid of him; he just disappeared.

I will say only one thing more, to conclude this gloomy subject: the hall had no really bad influence upon me at all. On the contrary, it awakened in me from my earliest years an invincible hatred for every form of slawry and every form of tyranny. At times, when I was a child, Vt:>ra Artamonovna would say by way of the greatest rebuke for some naughtiness: ·�·ait a bit, you

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will grow up and turn into just such another master as the rest.'

I felt this a horrible insult. The old woman need not have worried herself-just such another as the rest, anyway, I have not become.

Besides the hall and the maids' room I had one other distraction, and in that I was not hindered in any way. I loved reading as much as I hated lessons. My passion for unsystematic reading was, indeed, one of the chief obstacles to serious study. I never could, for instance, then or later, endure the theoretical study of languages, but I very soon learnt to understand and gabble them incorrectly, and at that stage I remained, because it was sufficient for my reading.

My father and the Senator had between them a fairly large library, consisting of French books of the eighteenth century.

The books lay about in heaps in a damp, unused room on the ground floor of the Senator's house. Calot had the key. I was allowed to rummage in these literary granaries as I liked, and I read and read to my heart's content. My father saw two advantages in it, that I should learn French more quickly and that I was occupied-that is, I was sitting quiet and in my own room.

Besides, I did not show him all the books I read, nor lay them on the table ; some of them were hidden in a bureau.

What did I read? Novels and plays, of course. I read fifty volumes of the French Repertoire and the Russian Theatre; in every volume there were three or four plays. Besides French novels my mother had the tales of La Fontaine and the comedies of Kotzebue, and I read them two or three times. I cannot say that the novels had much influence on me; and though like all boys I pounced eagerly on all equivocal or somewhat improper scenes, they did not interest me particularly. A play which I liked beyond all measure and read over twenty times, (and moreover in the Russian translation in Theatre) the Marriage of Figaro,9 had much greater influence on me. I was in love with Cherubino and the Countess, and what is more, I was myself Cherubino; my heart throbbed as I read it and without clearly recognising it I was conscious of a new sensation. How enchanting I thought the scene in which the page is dressed up as a girl, how intensely I longed to hide somebody's ribbon in my bosom and kiss it in secret. In reality I had in those years no feminine society.

9 Le Mariage de Figaro, a satirical comedy by Beaumarchais (ne Caron, 1 732---99) , a watchmaker's son who rose to wealth and influence and by his writings helped to bring about the Revolution. ( Tr.)

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I only remember that occasionally on Sundays Bakhmetev's two daughters used to come from their boarding-school to visit us. The younger, a girl of sixteen, was strikingly beautiful. I was overwhelmed when she entered the room and never ventured to address a word to her, but kept stealing looks at her lovely dark eyes and dark curls. I never dropped a hint to any one on the subject and the first breath of love passed unknown to any one, even to her.

Years afterwards, when I met her, my heart throbbed violently and I remembered how at twelve years old I had worshipped her beauty.

I forgot to say that Werther interested me almost as much as the Marriage of Figaro; half the novel was beyond me and I skipped it, and hurried on to the terrible denouement, over which I wept like a madman. In 1 839 Werther happened to come into my hands again; this was when I was at Vladimir and I told my wife how as a boy I had cried over it and began reading her the last letters . . . and when I came to the same passage, my tears began flowing again and I had to stop.

Up to the age of fourteen I cannot say that my father greatly restricted my liberty, but the whole atmosphere of our house was oppressive for a lively boy. The persistent and unnecessary fussiness concerning my physical health, together with complete indifference to my moral \veil-being, was horribly wearisome.

There \vere ever-lasting prl'cautions against my taking a chill, or eating anything indigestible, and anxious solicitude over the slightest cough or cold in the head. In the winter I was kept indoors for weeks at a time and, when I was allowed to go out, it was only wearing warm high boots, thick scarves and such things. At home it was always insufferably hot from the stoves.

All this would inevitably have made me a frail and delicate child but for the iron health I inherited from my mother. She by no means shared my father's prejudices, and in her half of the house a llowed me everything which \Vas forbidden in his.

My education made slow progress without competition, encouragement, or approval ; I did my lessons lazily, without method or supervision, and thought to make a good memory and lively imagination take the place of hard work. I need hardly say that there was no supervision over my teachers either; once the terms upon which they were engaged were settled, they might, so long as they turned up at the proper time and sat through their hour, go on for years without rendering any account to any one.

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At twelve years old I was transferred from feminine to masculine hands. About that time my father made two unsuccessful attempts to engage a German to look after me.

A German who looks after children is neither a tutor nor a dyadka;10 it is quite a special profession. He does not teach the children and he does not dress them, but sees that they are taught and dressed, takes care of their health, goes out for walks with them and talks any nonsense to them so long as it is in German. If there is a tutor in the house, the German is under his orders; if there is a dyadka, he takes his orders from the German.

The visiting teachers who come late owing to unforeseen causes and leave early owing to circumstances over which they have no control, do their best to win the German's favour, and in spite of his complete illiteracy he begins to regard himself as a man of learning. Governesses employ the German in shopping for them and on all sorts of errands, but only allow him to pay his court to them if they suffer from striking physical defects or a complete lack of other admirers. Boys of fourteen will go, without their parents' knowledge, to the German's room to smoke, and he puts up with it because he must have powerful auxiliary resources in order to remain in the house. In fact what mostly happens is that at this time the German is thanked, presented with a watch and discharged. If he is tired of sauntering about the streets with children and receiving reprimands for their having colds, or stains on their clothes, the 'children's German' becomes simply a German, sets up a little shop, sells amber cigarette-holders, eaude-Cologne and cigars to his former nurslings and carries out for them secret commissions of another kind.

The first German who was engaged to look after me was a native of Silesia and was called Jokisch; to my mind the surname was more than sufficient reason not to have engaged him.

He was a tall, bald man, distinguished by an extreme l ack of cleanliness; he used to boast of his knowledge of agricultural science, and I imagine it must have been on that account that my father engaged him. I looked on the Silesian giant with aversion, and the only thing that reconciled me to him was that he used, as we walked about the Devichy grounds and to the 10 A man, usually 2 serf, "·hose duties resembled those of the paedagogus in a household in ancient Rome. ( R.)

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Presnensky ponds, to tell me smutty stories which I passed on to the hall. He st<�yed no more than a year; he did something disgraceful at our country place and the gardener tried to kill him with a scythe, so my father told him to take himself off.

HC' \Yas sucCC'C'ded by a Brunswick-\Yolfenbiittel soldier (probably a deserter) called Fedor Karlovich, who wa s distinguished by his fine handwriting and extreme stupidity. He had been in the same position in two families before and had acquired some experience, so adopted the tonp of a tutor; moreover, when he spoke French he would say 'sh' for 'zh', and invariably put the accent on the wrong syllable.n

I had uot a particle of respect for him and poisoned every moment of his existence, especially after I had convinced myself that he wa s incapable of understanding decimal fractions and the rule of threP. As a rule there is a great deal of ruthlessness and even cruelty in boys' hearts; with positive ferocity I persect1ted the poor \YolfC'nbi.ittd Jager with proportion sums; this so interested me that I triumphantly informed my father of Fedor Karlovich"s stupidity, though I was not given to discussing such subjects with him.

l\Ioreover, Fedor Karlovich boasted to me that he had a ne\v swallow-tail coat, dark blue with gold buttons, and I actually did see him on one occasion setting off to attend a wedding in a swallow-tail coat which was too big for him but had gold buttons. The boy whose duty it was to v\·ait upon him informed me that he had borrowed the coat from a friend who served at the counter of a perfumery shop. \Yithout the slightest sympathy I pestered the poor fellow to tell me where his blue dress-coat was.

'There are so many moths in your house,' he said, 'that I have left it with a tailor I know, to be taken care of.'

'\\'here does that tailor live?'

'\Vhat i s that to you?'

'\Vhv not tell me?'

'Yot; needn't poke your nose into other people's business.'

'V\'ell, perhaps not, but it is my name-day in a week, so please do get the blue coat from the tailor for that day.'

'l':o, I won't. You don't desPrve it because you are so impertinent.'

And I would threaten him with my finger.

For his final discomfiture Fedor Karlovich must needs one day 1 1 The English speak French worse than the Germans, but they only distort the language, while tiH' Germans dPgt adr it.

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brag before Bouchot, m:v French teacher, of having been a recruit at Waterloo, and of the Germans having given the French a terrible thrashing. Bouchot merely stared at him and took a pinch of snuff with such a terrible air that the conqueror of Napoleon was a good deal disconcerted. Bouchot walked off leaning angrily on his gnarled stick and never referred to him afterwards except as 'le soldat de Vilain-ton.' I did not know at the time that this pun was perpetrated by Beranger and could not boast of having sprung from Bouchot's fertile fancy.

At last Blucher's companion in arms had some quarrel with my father and left our house ; after that my father did not worry me with any more Germans.

While our Brunswick-Wolfenbii ttel friend held the field I sometimes used to visit some boys with whom a friend of his lived, also in the capacity of a 'German' ; and with these boys we used to take long walks; after his departure I was left again in complete solitude. I was bored, struggled to get out of it, and found no means of escape. As I had no chance of overriding my father's will I might perhaps have been broken in to this existence if a new intellf'ctual interest am! two meetings, of which I will speak in the following chapter, had not soon afterwards saved me. I am quite certain that my father had not the faintest notion what sort of l ife he was forcing upon me, or he would not have thwarted me in the most innocent desires nor have refused my most natural requests.

Sometimes he allowed me to go with the Senator to the French theatre, and this was the greatest enjoyment for me; I was passionately fond of seeing acting, but this pleasure brought me as much pain as joy. The Senator used to arrive with me when the play was half over and, as he invariably had an invitation for the evening, would take me, away before the end. The theatre was in Apraxin's house, at the Arbatsky Gate, and we lived in Old Konyushennaya Street, that is very close by, but my father sternly forbade my returning without the Senator.

I was about fifteen when my father engaged a priest to give me Divinity lessons, so far as was necessary for entering the University. The Catechism came into my hands after I had read Voltaire. Nowhere does religion play so modest a part in education as in Russia, and that, of course, is a great piece of good fortune. A priest is always paid half-price for lessons in religion, and, indeed, if the same priest gives Latin lessons also, he is paid more for them than for teaching the Catechism.

My father regarded religion as among the essential belongings of a well-bred man; he used to say that one must believe in the

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Holy Scriptures without criticism, because one could do nothing in that domain with reason, and all intellectual considerations merely obscured the subject; that one must observe the rites of the religion in which one was born, without, however, giving way to excessive devoutness, which was all right for old women, but not proper in men. Did he himself believe? I imagine that he did believe a little, from habit, from regard for propriety, and from a desire to be on the safe side. He did not himself, however, take part in any church observances, sheltering ·himself behind the delicate state of his health. He scarcely ever received a priest; at most he would ask him to perform a service in the empty salon and would send him out there a five-rouble note. In the winter he excused himself on the plea that the priest and the deacon always brought such chilliness with them that he invariably caught cold. In the country he used to go to church and have the priest to his house, but with an eye more to the considerations of society and authority than to God-fearing ones.

My mother was a Lutheran and therefore one degree more religious; on one or

Sundays in every month she would

drive to her church, or as Bakay persisted in calling it, to 'her Kirchc,' and, having nothing better to do, I went with her. There I learned to mimic the German pastors, their declamation and verbosity, with artistic finish, and I retained the talent in riper years.

Every p•ar my father commanded me to take the sacrament. I was afraid of confession, and the church mise en scene altogether impressed and alarmed me. With genuine awe I went up to take the sacrament, but I cannot call it a religious feeling; it was the awe which is inspired by everything incomprehensible and mysterious, especially when a grave and solemn significance is attributed to it; casting spells and telling fortunes affect one in the same way. I took the sacrament aftf'r the early service in Holy Week, and, after devouring eggs coloured red, paskha and Easter cakes, I thought no more of religion for the rest of the year.

But I used to read the Gospel a great deal and with love, both in the Slavonic and in the Lutheran translation. I read it without any guidance, and, though I did not understand everything, I felt a de!'p and genuine respect for what I read. In my early youth I \\'aS often influenced by Voltairianism, and ;vas fond of irony and mockery, but I do not remember tha t I ever took the Gospel in my hand with a cold feeling; and it has been the same

\vith me all my life ; at all ages and under various circumstances

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I have gone back to reading the Gospel, and every time its words have brought peace and meekness to my soul.

When the priest began giving me lessons he was surprised to find not only that I had a general knowledge of the Gospel but that I could quote texts, word for word. 'But the Lord God,' he said, 'though He has opened his mind, had not yet opened his heart.' And my theologian, shrugging his shoulders, marvelled at my 'double nature,' but was pleased with me, thinking that I should be able to pass my examination.

Soon a religion of a different sort took possession of my soul.

Politicctl Atvctkening

ONE WINTER MORNING the Senator arrived not at the time he usually visited us; looking anxious, he went with hurried footsteps into my father's study and closed the door, motioning me to remain in the salon.

Luckily I had not long to rack my brains guessing what was the matter. The door from the hall opened a little way and a red face, half-hidden in the wolf-fur of a livery overcoat, called me in a whisper; it was the Senator's footman. I rushed to the door.

'Haven't you heard? ' he asked.

'What?'

'The Tsar has just died at Taganrog.'

The news impressed me; I had never thought of the possibility of the Tsar's death ; I had grown up with a great respect for Alexander, and recalled mournfully how I had seen him not long before in Moscow. When we were out walking, we had met him beyond the Tverskoy Gate; he was slowly riding along with two or three generals, returning from Khodynki, where there had been a review. His face was gracious, his features soft and rounded, his expression tired and melancholy. When he was on a level with us I raised my hat, and he bowed to me, smiling.

What a contrast to Nicholas, who always looked like a slightly bald Medusa with cropped hair and moustaches. In the street, at the court, with his children and ministers, with his courtiers and maids of honour, Nicholas was al .vays trying whether his eyes

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had the power of a rattlesnake, of freezing blood in the veins.1

If Alexander's external gentleness \vas assumed, surely such hypocrisy is better than the naked candour of autocracy.

While vague ideas floated through my mind, while portraits of the new Emperor Constantine were sold in the shops, while appeals to take the oath of allegiance were being delivered, and good people were hastening to do so, rumours were suddenly afloat that the Tsarevich had refused the crown. Then that same footman of the Senator's who was greatly interested in political news and had a fine field for gathering it-in all the public offices and vestibules of senators, to one or other of which he was always driving from morning to night, for he did not share the privilege of the horses, who were changed after dinner-informed me that there had been rioting in Petersburg and that cannon were being fired in Galernaya Street.

On the following evening Count Komarovsky, a general of the gendarmes, was with us: he told us of the square formed in St.

Isaac's Square, of the Horse Guards' attack, of the death of Count Miloradovich.

Then followed a rrests; 'So-and-so has been taken,' 'So-and-so has been seized,' 'So-and-so has been brought up from the country,' terrified parents trembled for their children. The sky was overcast with gloomy storm-clouds.

In the reign of Alexander political oppression was rare; the Tsar did, it is true, banish Pushkin for his verses and Labzin for having, when he was secretary, proposed to elect the coachman, Ilya Baykov, a member of the Academy of Arts;2 but there was no systematic persecution. The secret police had not yet grown into I The story is told that on one occasion in his own household, in the presence. that is, of two or three heads of the secret police. two or three maids of honour and generals in waiting, he tried his Medusa glance on his daughter Marya Nikolayevna. She is like her father, and her eyes really do recall the terrible look in his. The daughter boldly endured her father's stare. The Tsar turned pale, his cheeks twitched, and his eyes grew still more ferocious; his daughter met him with the same look in hers. Everyone turned pale a nd trembled; the maids of honour and the generals in waiting dared not breathe, so panic-stricken were they at this cannibalistic imperial duel with the eyes, in the style of that described by Byron in Don Juan. • Nicholas got up: he felt that he had met his match.

2 The President of the Academy proposed Arakcheye'' as honorary member. Alexander Fedorovich Labzin ( 1 766-1825 ) , asked in what the

• 'Her father's blood before her father's face Boiled up, and proved her truly of his race.'

Don Juan, canto 1\', stanza 44

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an independent body of gendarmes, but consisted of a department under the control of de Sanglain, an old Voltairian, a wit, a great talker, and a humorist in the style of Jouy.3 Under Nicholas this gentleman himself was under the supervision of the police and he was considered a liberal, though he was exactly what he had always been; from this fact alone, it is easy to judge of the difference between the two reigns.

Nicholas was completely unknown until he came to the throne; in the reign of Alexander he was of no consequence; and no one was interested in him. Now everyone rushed to inquire about him; no one could answer questions but the officers of the Guards; they hated him for his cold cruelty, his petty fussiness and his vindictiveness. One of the first anecdotes that went the round of the town confirmed the officers' opinion of him. The story was that at some drill or other the Grand Duke had so far forgotten himself as to try and take an officer by the collar. The officer responded with the words: 'Your Highness, my sword is in my hand.' Nicholas drew back, said nothing, but never forgot the answer. After the Fourteenth of December he made inquiries on two occasions as to whether this officer was implicated. Fortunately he was not.4

Count's services to the arts consisted. The President was at a loss and answered that Arakcheyev was the man who was closest to the Tsar.

'If that is surficient reason. then I propose his coachman. Ilya Baykov,'

observed the secretary; 'he not only is c lose to the Tsar, but sits in front of him.' Labzin was a mystic and the editor of the /11essrnger of Zion; Alexander himself was a mystic of the same sort, but with the fall of Golitsyn's ministry he handed over his former 'brethrl'n of Christ and of the inner man' to Arakcheyev to do with as he pleased. Labzin was banished to Simbirsk.

:1 Victor Joseph Etienne de Jouy, a popular French writer ( 1 764-1 846) .

(Tr.)

4 The orficer, if I am not mistaken. Count Samoylov, had left the army and was living quietly in Moscow. Nicholas recognised him at the theatre, fancied that he was dressed with rather elaborate originality, and expressed the royal desire that such costumes should be ridiculed on the stage. The theatre director and patriot, Zagoskin, commissioned one of his actors to represent Samoylov in some vaudeville. The rumour of this was soon all over the town. \Vhen the performance was over. the real Samoylov went into the director's box and asked permission to say a few words to his double. The director was frightened but, afraid of a scene, summoned the actor. 'You have acted me very well,' the count said to him,

'and the only thing wanting to complete the likeness is this diamond which I always wear; al low me to hand it to you ; you will wear it next time you are ordered to represent me.' After this Samoylov calmly returned to his seat. The stupid jest at his expense fell as flat as the proclamation that Chaadayev was mad and other august pranks.

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The tone of society changed before one's eyes; the rapid deterioration in morals was a melancholy proof of how little the sense of personal dignity was developed among Russian aristocrats. Nobody (except women) dared utter a warm word about relations or friends, whose hands they had shaken only the day before they had been carried off at night by the police. On the contrary, there \vere savage fanatics for slavery, some from abjectness, others, worse still, from disinterested motives.

Women alone did not take part in this shameful abandonment of those who were near and dear . . . and women alone stood at the Cross too, and at the blood-stained guillotine there stood, first, Lucile Desmoulins,5 that Ophelia of the revolution, always beside the axe, waiting for her turn, and later, George Sand, who gave the hand of sympathy and friendship on the scaffold to the youthful fanatic Alibaud.6

The wives of men exiled to hard labour lost their civil rights, abandoned wealth and social position, and went to a lifetime of bondage in the terrible climate of Eastern Siberia, under the still more terrible oppression of the police there.i Sisters, who had not the right to go with their brothers, withdrew from court, and many left Russia ; almost all of them kept a feeling of love for the victims alive in their hearts; but there was no such love in the men: terror consumed it in their hearts, and not one of them dared mention the unfortunates.

The accounts of the rising and of the trial of the leaders, and the horror in Moscow, made a deep impression on me; a new world was revealed to me which became more and more the centre of my moral existence. I do not know how it came to pass, but, though I had no understanding, or only a very dim one, of what it all meant, I felt that I was not on the same side as the grape-shot and victory, prisons and chains. The execution of Pestel8 and his associates finally dissipated the childish dream of my soul.

5 "'ife of Camille Desmoulins. who at his execution appealed to the crowd, was arrested and also executed in 1 i9-k ( Tr. ) 6 Ali baud. Louis ( 1 8 1 0-36) , attempted to assassinate Louis Philippe in 1 836. ( Tr.)

i See' Russian Women ( 187 1-2) by Nikolay Alexeye,·ich Nekrasov ( 1 82 1 -78) . ( R. )

8 Peste!. Pavel hanoYich ( I 793-1 826 ) , leader of the officers in the Southern Army who supported the attempt to oYerthrow the autocracy and

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Everyone expected some mitigation of the sentence on the condemned men, since the coronation was about to take place.

Even my father, in spite of his caution and his scepticism, said that the death penalty would not be carried out, and that all this was done merely to impress people. But, like everyone else, he knew little of the youthful monarch. Nicholas left Petersburg, and, without visiting Moscow, stopped at the Petrovsky Palace .

. . . The inhabitants of Moscow could scarcely believe their eyes when they read in the Moscow News the terrible news of the fourteenth of July.

The Russian people had become unaccustomed to the death penalty; since the days of Mirovich,9 who was executed instead of Catherine II, and of Pugachev10 and his companions, there had been no executions; men had died under the knout, soldiers had run the gauntlet (contrary to the law) until they fell dead, but the death penalty de jure did not exist.ll The story is told that in the reign of Paul there was some partial rising of the Cossacks on the Don in which two officers were implicated. Paul ordered them to be tried by court-martial, and gave the hetman or general full authority. The court condemned them to death, establish constitutional government. The other four who were hanged were Ryleyev, Kakhovsky, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Muravev-Apostol.

(Tr.)

9 Mirovich, Vasily Yakovlevich ( 1 740-64) , in 1 762 tried to rescue from the Schliisselburg the legitimate heir to the Russian throne, known as Ivan VI, who perished in the attempt. It is said that Catherine had given orders that he was to be murdered if any attempt were made to release him. Mirovich was beheaded. ( Tr.)

lO Pugachev, Emelyan Ivanovich (c. 1 742-75) , tHe Cossack leader of the great rising of the serfs in 1 775. ( Tr.)

ll By an ukaz of Yelizaveta Petrovna of 30th September, 1 754, the death penalty (in case of the award of it) was commuted to another punishment (penal servitude, branding, etc. ) . Catherine II confirmed, by an ukaz of 6th April, 1 7 75, the legality of the ukaz of 1 754; but the ukaz o£

Yelizaveta Petrovna was interpreted as not being applicable to state (extraordinary) crimes (hence the executions of Mirovich and Pugachev ) .

The question o f capital punishment in Russia was put before the State Council in 1 823, in connection with the forming of a scheme for a universal code. Some members of the Council interpreted the ukaz of 1 754 as having abolished capital punishment for all crimes, including state crimes ; but the majority of the members, relying upon the fact that in the text of the ukaz of 1 754 only common crimes were spoken of, and finding support in the practice of Catherine IL pronounced that capital punishment in cases of state crimes was juridically valid. Nicholas I availed himself to this later in awardmg the sentences for the Decembrist affair. (A.S. )

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but no one dared to confirm the sentence ; the hetman submitted the matter to the Tsar. 'They are a pack of women,' said Paul;

'they want to throw the execution on me: very much obliged to them,' and he commuted the sentence to penal servitude.

Nicholas reintroduced the death penalty into our criminal proceedings, at first illegally, but afterwards he legitimised it into his Code.l2

The day after receiving the terrible news there \'\"as a religious service in the Kremlin.13 After celebrating the execution Nicholas made his triumphal entry into Moscow. I saw him then for the first time ; he was on horseback, riding beside a carriage in which the two empresses, his wife and Alexander's widow, were sitting. He was handsome, but there was a coldness about his looks; no face could have more mercilessly betrayed the character of the man than his. The sharply retreating forehead and the lower jaw developed at the expense of the skull were expressive of iron will and feeble intelligence, rather of cruelty than of sensuality; but the chief point in the face was the eyes, which were entirely without warmth, without a trace of mercy, wintry eyes. I do not believe that he ever passionately loved any woman, as Paul loved Anna Lopukhin,14 and as Alexander loved all women except his wife; 'he was favourably disposed to them,'

nothing more.

In the Vatican there is a new gallery in which Pius VII, I l2 By the Code of Laws published in 1 832 the death penalty was pre·

scribed for political crimes. military crimes (in time of military operations) and crimes against quarantine regulations. (A.S.) l� Nicholas's victory over the Five was celebrated by a religious sen·ice in Moscow. In the midst of the Kremlin the l\1etropolitan Filaret thanked God for the murders. The whole of the Royal Family took part in the service. ' near them the Senate and the ministers and in the immense space around, packed masses of the Guards knelt bareheaded, and also took part in the prayPrs: cannon thundered from the heights of the Kremlin. Never ha,·e the gallows been celebrated with such pomp; Nicholas knew the importance of the \'ictory!

I was present at that sen·ice. a boy of fourteen lost in the crowd. and on the spot, before that altar defiled by bloody rites. I swore to a,·enge the murdered men. and dedicated myself to the struggle with that throne, with that altar. with those cannon. I have not a\·enged them: the Guards and the throne. the altar and the cannon all remain, but for thirty years I have stood under that flag and ha,·e ne,·er once deserted it. ( The Pole Star, 1 8'55.)

14 Paul's mistress. the daughter of Lopukhin, the chief of the Moscow police, better known under her married name as Princess Gagarin. ( Tr. )

' Nicholas I was not present. ( A .S.)

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believe, placed an immense number of statues, busts, and statuettes, dug up in Rome and its environs. The whole history of the decline of Rome is there expressed in eyebrows, lips, foreheads; from the daughter of Augustus down to Poppaea the matrons have succeeded in transforming themselves into cocottes, and the type of cocotte is predominant and persists; the masculine type, surpassing itself, so to speak, in Antinous and Hermaphroditus, divides into two. On one hand there is sensual and moral degradation, low bro"vs and features defiled by vice and gluttony, bloodshed and every wickedness in the world, petty as in the hetaira Heliogabalus, or with pendulous cheeks like Galb8 ; the last type is wonderfully reproduced in the King of Naples . . . . But tht:'re is anothe1·-the type of military commander in whom everything that makes a good citizen, everything human, has died out, and there is left nothing but the passion f01 domination; the mind is narrow and there is no heart at all; they are the monks of the love of power; strength and harshness of will are manifest in their features. Such were the Emperors of the Praetorian Guard and of the army, whom mutinous legionaries raised to power for an hour. Among their number I found many }wads that rl'called Nicholas before he wore a moustache. I understand the necessity for these grim and inflexible guards beside one \vho is dying in frenzy, but what use are they to one who is young, whose career is just starting?

In spite of the fact that political dreams absorbed me day and

'night, my ideas were not distinguished by any peculiar insight ; they were so confused that I actually imagined that the object of the Petersburg rising was, among other things, to put the Tsarevich Constantine on the throw•, whiiP limiting his power. This led to my being devoted for a whole year to that eccentric creature. He was at that timl' more popular than Nicholas; for what reason I do not know, but the masses, for whom he had never done anything good, and the soldiers, to whom he had done nothing but harm, loved him. I well remember how during the coronation he walked beside the pale-faced Nicholas with puckered, light-yellow, bristling eyebrows, a bent figure with the shoulders hunched up to the ears, wearing the uniform of the Lettish Guards vvith a yellow collar. After giving away the bride at the wedding of Nicholas with Russia, he went away to complete the disaffection of Vvarsaw. Nothing more was heard of him until the Z9th of November, 1 830.1 5

15 The date when the Polish rebellion bn:•ke out. (Tr.)

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My hero was not handsome and you could not find such a type in the Vatican. I should have called it the Gatchina16 type, if I had not seen the King of Sardinia.

I need hardly say that now loneliness weighed upon me more than ever, for I longed to communicate my ideas and my dreams to someone, to test them and to hear them confirmed ; I was too proudly conscious of being 'ill-intentioned' to say nothing about it, or to speak of it indiscriminately.

Yly first choice of a confidant was my Russian tutor.

I. E. Protopopov was full of that vague and generous l iberalism which often passes away \Yith the first grey hair, with marriage and a post, but yet does ennoble a man. 1\lly teacher was touched, and as he was taking leave embraced me with the words: 'God grant that these feelings may ripen and grow stronger in you.' His sympathy was a great comfort to me. After this he began bringing me much-soiled manuscript copies, in small handwriting. of poems: 'An Ode to Freedom' and 'The Dagger' by Pushkin, and Ryleyev's 'Thoughts'. I used to copy them in secret . . . (and now I print them openly ' ) .

Of course my reading, too, took a different turn. Politics was now in the foreground, and above all the history of the Revolution, of which I knew nothing except from Madame Proveau's tales. In thf' l ibrary in thP basement I discovered a history of the

'nineties written by a Royalist. It was so partial that even at fourteen I did not believe it. I happened to hear from old Bouchot that he had been in Paris during the Revolution, and I longed to question him ; but Bouchot was a stern and forbidding man with an immense no�e and spectacles; he never indulged in superfluous conversation with me; he conjugated verbs, dictated copies, scolded me and went away, leaning on his thick gnarled stick.

'Why did they execute Louis XVI? ' I asked him in the middle of a lesson.

The old man looked at me, frowning with one grey eyebrow and lifting the other, pushed his spectacles up on his forehead like a visor, pulled out a large blue handkerchief and, wiping his nose with dignity. said:

'Puree qu'il a etc traitrc a Ia patric.'

1"' Gatchina \vas an !'stat!' which llild belong!'d to Grigory Orlov. CathPrine II bough t it from his exPrutors anrl presPnted it to Paul. He ran it like a barracks and drilled his battalions there, which wen' laraeh-

•

composed

of c riminals and runaways. ( R.)

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'If you had been one of the judges, would you have signed the death sentence?'

'With both hands.'

This lesson was of more value to me than all the subjunctives; it was enough for me; it was clear that the King had deserved to be executed.

Old Bouchot did not like me and thought me empty-headed and mischievous because I did not prepare my lessons properly, and he often used to say, 'You'll come to no good,' but when he noticed my sympathy with his regicide ideas, he began to be gracious instead of being cross, forgave my mistakes and used to tell me episodes of the year '93 and how he had left France, when 'the dissolute and the dishonest' got the upper hand. He would finish the lesson with the same dignity, without a smile, but now he would say indulgently:

'I really did think that you "·ere coming to no good, but your generous feelings will be your salvation.'

To this encouragement and sympathy from my teacher was soon added a warmer sympathy which had more influence on me.

The granddaughter17 of my father's eldest brother was living in a little town in the province of Tver. I had known her from my earliest childhood, but we rarely met; she used to come once a year for Christmas or for carnival to stay at Moscow with her aunt. Nevertheless, we became friends. She was five years older than I, but so small and young-looking that she might have been taken for the same age. ·what I particularly liked her for was that she was the first person who treated me as a human being, that is, did not continually express surprise at my having gro'l-vn, ask me what lessons I was doing, and ,vhether I was good at them, and whether I wanted to go into the army and into what regiment, but talked to me as people in general talk to each other-though she did retain that tone of authority which girls like to assume with boys who are a little younger than themselves.

We had been writing to each other since 1 82·1, and frequently, btu letters again mean pens and paper, again the schoolroom table with its blots and pictures carved with a penknife; I longed to see her, to talk to het· about my new ideas, and so it may be imagined with what joy I heard that my cousin was coming in l i Tatyana Kuchin. known in Russian litPrature under her married name, Passek. She wrote memoirs, which throw interesting sidelights on Herzen's narrative. ( Tr. )

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February ( 1 826), and would stay with us for some months. I scratched on my table the days of the month until her arrival and blotted them out as they passed, sometimes intentionally forgetting three days so as to have the pleasure of blotting out rather more at once, and yet the time dragged on very slowly; then the time fixed had passed and another was fixed, and that passed, as always happens.

I was sitting one evening 'vith my tutor Protopopov in my schoolroom, and he, as usual, taking a sip of fizzing kvas after every sentence, was talking of the hexameter, horribly chopping up, 'vith voice and hand, every line of Gnedich's Iliad into feet, when all of a sudden the snow in the yard crunched with a different sound from that made by town sledges, the tied-up bell gave the relic of a tinkle, there were voices in the courtyard . . .

I flushc>d crimson, I had no more thought for the wrath of

'Achilles. son of Peleus' ; I rushed headlong to the hall and my cousin from Tver, wrapped in fur coats, shawls, and scarves, wearing a hood and high. whit<> fur boots. flushed with the frost and, perhaps, with joy, rushed to kiss me.

People usually recall their early childhood, its griefs and joys,

\vith a smile of condescension, as though like Sofya Pavlovna in Woe from Wit,18 they would say. looking prim: 'Childishness! '

A s though they had grown better i n later years, as though their feelings were kec>ner or dc>c>per. \Vithin thrc>e vears children are ashamed of their plavthings-lc>t thc>m: they long to be grownup, they grow and chang-e so rapidly. they' sc>e that from their jackets and the pages of thPir schoolbooks. But one would have thought gro\m-up people might understand that childhood togethPr with two or thrN' years of youth is the fullest, most exquisite part of lif<>, th<' part that is most our own, and, indeed, almost the most important, for it imperceptibly shapes our future.

So long as a man is advancinf!; with swift footsteps without stopping or taking thought, so long as he does not come to a precipice or break his neck. he imagines that his life lies before him, looks down on the past and does not know how to appreciatf' th<' presc>nt. But whPn experience has crushed the flowers of spring and has chilled the glow on the cheeks of summer, when he begins to susp<'ct that life, prop<>rly speaking, is over, and what remains is its continuation, then he returns with different feelings to the bright, warm, lovely memories of early youth.

! 8 By A. S. G riboyedov. (Act I, scene 7.) (A.S.)

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Nature with her everlasting snares and economic devices gives man youth, but takes the formed man for herself; she draws him on, entangles him in a web of social and family relations, threefourths of which are independent of his will ; he, of course, gives his personal character to his actions but he belongs to himself far less than in youth; the lyrical element in the personality is feebler and therefore also his senses and his power of enjoyment-everything-is weaker, except the mind and the will.

My cousin's life was not a bed of roses. Her mother she lost when she was a child. Her father was a desperate gambler, and, like all who have gambling in their blood, he was a dozen times reduced to poverty and a dozen times rich again, and ended all the same by completely ruining himself. Les beaux restes of his property he devoted to a stud-farm on which he concentrated all his thoughts and feelings. His son, an ensign in the Uhlans, my cousin's only brother and a very good-natured youth, was going the straight road to ruin; at nineteen he was already a more passionate gambler than his father.

At fifty the father, for no reason at all, married an old maid who had been a pupil in the Smolny Convent.19 Such a complete, perfect type of the Petersburg boarding-school mistress it has never been my lot to meet. She had been one of the best pupils, and afterwards had become dame de classe in the school ; thin, fair, and short-sighted, there was something didactic and edifying in her very appearance. Not at all stupid, she was full of an icy exaltation in her speech, talked in hackneyed phrases of virtue and devotion, knew chronology and geography by heart, spoke French with a revolting correctness and concealed within her an egotism that bordered on the factitious modesty of a Jesuit. In addition to these traits of the 'seminarists in yellow shawls'20 she had others which '.Vere purely Nevsky or Smolny characteristics. She used to raise to heaven eyes full of tears as she spoke of the visits of their common mother (the Empress Marya Fedorovna ) , was in love with the Emperor Alexander and, I remember, used to wear a locket, or a signet ring, with an extract in it of a letter from the Empress Elizabeth, 'll a repris son sourire de bienveillance!'

The reader can picture the harmonious trio: the father a gam-19 Originally a convent, this was a famous girls' school founded by Catherine II. (Tr.) The Bolsheviks gave "Srnolny" an incongruous historical resonance when they commandeered the school buildings for their putsch, sometimes called a revolution, in October 1917. (D.M.) 20 A. S. Pushkin: Y evgeny One gin, III, 28. (A.S.)

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bler, passionately devoted to horses, gypsies, noise, carousaL;, races and trotting matches; the daughter brought up in a complete independence, accustomed to do what she liked in the house ; and the learned lady who, from an elderly schoolmistress, had been turned into a young wife. Of course, she did r:ot like her stepdaughter, and of course her stepdaughter did not like her; as a rule great affection can only exist between women of five-and-thirty and girls of seventeen when the former, with resolute self-sacrifice, determine to have no sex.

I am not at all surprised at the usual hostility between stepdaughters and stepmothers: it is natural and it is morally right.

The new person put into the mother's place excites aversion in the children; the second marriage is for them like a second funeral. The children's love is vividly expressed in this feeling and it whispers to the orphans: 'Your father's wife is not your mother at all.' At first Christianity understood that with the conception of marriage which it developed, with the immortality of the soul which it preached, a second marriage was altogether incongruous; but, making continual concessions to the world, the Church was too artful by half and was confronted with the implacable logic of life, with the simple childish heart that in practice revolts against the pious absurdity of regarding its father's companion as i ts mother.

On her side, too, the woman, who comes to her new home from her wedding and finds a ready-made family awaiting her, is in an awkward position; she has nothing to do \Vith them, she must affect feelings vvhich she cannot have, she must persuade herself and others that another woman's children are as dear to her as if they were her own.

And therefore I do not in the least blame the lady from the convent nor my cousin for their mutual dislike, but I understand how the young girl, unaccustomed to discipline, was fretting to escape to freedom, wherever that might be, out of the parental home. Her father was beginning to get old and was more and more under the thumb of his learned wife. Her brother, the Uhlan, was going from bad to worse and, in fact, life was not pleasant at home; at last she persuaded her stepmother to let her come for some months, possibly even for a year, to us.

The day after her arrival my cousin turned the whole order of my life, except my lessons, upside down, arbitrarily fixed hours for our reading together, advised me not to read novels, but recommended Segur's Universal History and the Travels of Anacharsis. Her stoical ideals led her to oppose my marked inclination for smoking in secret, which I did by rolling the

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tobacco i n paper (cigarettes did not exist in those days) ; in general, she liked preaching morality to me, and if I did not obey her teaching at least I listened meekly. Luckily she could not keep up to her own standards and, forgetting her rules, she read Zschokke's21 tales with me instead of an archaeological novel, and secretly sent a boy out to buy, in winter, buckwheat cakes and pease-pudding with vegetable oil, and in summer gooseberries and currants.

I think my cousin's influence over me was very good; a Warm element came with her into the cell-like seclusion of my youth ; it fostered and perhaps, indeed, preserved the scarcely developed feelings which might very well have been completely crushed by my father's irony. I learnt to be observant, to be wounded by a word, to care about my friends, to love; I learnt to talk about my feelings. She supported my political aspirations, predicted for me an unusual future and fame, and I, with childish vanity, believed her that I was a future 'Brutus or Fabricius.'

To me alone she confided the secret of her love for an officer in the Alexandriinsky Regiment of Hussars, in a black pelisse and black dolman; it was a genuine secret, for the hussar himself, as he commanded his squadron, never suspected what a pure flame was glowing for him in the bosom of a girl of eighteen. I do not know whether I envied his lot-probably I did a little-but I was proud of having been chosen as her confidant, and imagined (after Werther) that this was one of those tragic passions, which would have a great denouement a ccompanied by suicide, poison, and a dagger, and the idea even oc<::urred to me that I might go to him and tell him all about it.

My cousin had brought shuttlecocks from Korcheva, and in one of the shuttlecocks there was a pin ; she would never play with any other, and whenever it fell to me or anyone else she would take i t, saying she was used to playing with it. The demon of mischief, which was always my evil tempter, prompted me to change the pin, that is, to stick it in another shuttlecock.

The trick succeeded perfectly: my cousin always took the one with the pin in it. A fortnight later I told her ; her face changed, she dissolved into tears and went off to her own room. I was frightened and unhappy and, after waiting for half an hour, 21 Heinrich Zschokke ( 1 771-1848) wrote in German Tales of Swiss Life, in five vols., and also dramas-as well as a religious work Stunden der Andacht, in eight vols., which was widely read up to the middle of the nineteenth century and was attacked for ascribing more importance to religious feeling than to orthodox belief. (Tr. )

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went to see her; her door was locked. I begged her to open it; she refused to let me in and said that she was ill, that I was no friend of hers, but a heartless boy. I wrote her a note and besought her to forgive me ; after tea \Ve made it up, I kissed her hand, she embraced me and at once explained the full importance of the matter. A year before the hussar had dined with them and after dinner played battledore and shuttlecock with her

-it was his shuttlecock that had been marked with a pin. I had pangs of conscience: I thought that I had committed a real sacrilege.

My cousin stayed until October. Her father sent for her to come home, promising to let her come to us at Vasilevskoye the following year. \Ve were horrified at the idea of parting, but so it was: one autumn day a brichka came for her; her maid carried off boxes and baskets to pack in it, and our servants put in all sorts of provisions for a full week's journey, and crowded at the entrance to say good-bye. We hugged each other hard, she wept and I wept-the brichka drove out into the street, turned into a side-street near the very place where the buckwheat cakes and pease-pudding were sold, and vanished. I walked about in the courtyard: and there it was rather cold and nasty; I went up into my room-and there it seemed cold and empty. I set to work on my lesson for Protopopov, while I \vondered where the brichka was now, and whether it had passed the town-gate or not.

My only comfort was the thought of our being together again at Vasilevskoye the following June!

For me the country was always a time of renewa l ; I was passionately fond of country life. The forest, the fields, and the freedom-it was all so new for me who had been brought up in cotton-wool, within brick walls, not daring on any pretext to go out beyond the gate without asking leave and being accompanied by a footman. . . .

'Are we going to Vasilevskoye or not?' From early spring I was quite engrossed by this question. My father invariably said that this year he was going away early, that he longed to see the leaves come out; but hP could never be ready before July. Some years he was so much behiml that we never went at all. He VHote to the country every winter that the house was to be ready and thoroughly warmed, but this was done from deep considerations of policy rather than quite seriously, in order that the village head-man and the clerk to the Zcmstvo might be afraid he would soon be coming and look after their work more carefully.

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It seemed that we were going. My father told the Senator that he was longing to rest in the country and that the estate needed his inspection, but again weeks went by.

Little by little there seemed more ground for hope: provisions began to be sent off, sugar, tea, all sorts of cereals, and wine

-and again there was a pause ; then at last an order was despatched to the village elder to send so many peasants' horses by such a day-and so we were going, we \vere going!

I did not think then hO\v onerous the loss of four or five days, when work in the fields was at its height, must have been to the peasants, but rejoiced with all my heart and hastened to pack my lesson-books and exercise books. The horses were brought, and with inward satisfaction I heard their munching and snorting in the courtyard, and took great interest in the bustle of the coachmen, and the wrangling of the servants as to who should sit in which cart and where each should put his belongings. In the servants' quarters lights were burning until daybreak, and all were packing, dragging sacks and bags from place to place, and dressing for the journey (\vhich was fifty miles at most ! ) . My father's valet was the most exasperated of all, for he realised how important it was to stow things properly; with intense irritation he fiercPly ejected Pwrything which had been put in by others, ton' his hair with vexation and was quite unapproachable.

My father did not get up a hit earlier next day; in fact I think he got up later than usual, and drank his coffee just as slowly, but at last, at eleven o'clock, he ordered the horses to be put to.

Behind the carriage, which had four seats and was drawn by six of my father's own horses, there came three and sometimes four conveyances-a barouche, a brichka, a wagon or, instead of it, two carts; all these \vere filled with the house-serfs and their belongings and, although wagon-loads had been sent on beforehand, everything was so tightly packed that no one could sit with comfort.

\Ve stopped half-way to have dinner and to feed the horses in the big village of Perkhushkovo, the name of \vhich occurs in Napoleon's bulletins. This village belonged to the son of that elder brother of my father's of whom I have spoken in connection with the division of the property. The neglected house I'Jf the owner stood on the high-road, surrounded by flat, cheerlesslooking fiPlds ; but even this dusty vista delighted me after the cramped life of town. In the house the warped floors and stairs shook, noises and footsteps resounded loudly, and the walls echoed them as it were with astor.ishmcnt. The old-fashioned furniture from the former owner's cabinet of curiosities was

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living out its day here in exile; I wandered with curiosity from room to room, went upstairs and downstairs and finally into the kitchen. There our man-cook, with a cross and ironical expression, was preparing a hasty dinner. The steward, a grey-haired old man with a swelling on his head, was usually sitting in the kitchen; the cook addressed his remarks to him and criticised the stove and the hearth, while the steward listened to him and from time to time answered laconically: 'May-be; perhaps it's so,' and looked disconsolately at all the upset, wondering when the devil would carry us off again.

The dinner was served on a special English service, made of tin or some composition, bought ad hoc. Meanwhile the horses had been put in; in the hall and vestibule people who were iond of watching meetings and leave-takings of the gentry were gathering together: footmen who were finishing their lives on bread and pure country air, old women who had been prepossessing maids thirty years before, all the locusts of a landowner's household who through no fault of their own eat up the peasants' labour like real locusts. With them came children with flaxen hair; barefooted and dirty, they kept poking forward while the old women pulled them back. The children screamed and the old women screamed at them ; and they caught me at every opportunity, and marvelled every year that I had grown so much. My fathPr said a few \vords to them ; some went up to kiss his hand, which he never gave them, others bowed, and we set off.

A few miles from Prince Golitsyn's Pstate of Vyazma the headman of Vasilevskoye was waiting for us on horseback at the edge of the forest, and he escorted us on a by-road. In the village by the big house, approached by a long avenue of limes, we were met by the priest, his wife, the church servitors, the house-serfs, several pPasants, and Pronka, the fool, the only one with any fePling of human dignity, for he did not take off his greasy hat, but stood smiling at a little distance and took to his heels as soon as anyone from the town servants tried to come near him.

I have seen few palacPs more pleasant to look at than Vasilevskoye. For anyonp who knows Kuntsevo and Yusupov's Arkhangelskoye, or Lopu khin's estate facing the Savva monastery, i t i s enough to say that Vasilevskoy!' lies on a continuation of the same hank of tlw Moskva, twPnty miles from the monastery. On the sloping side of the river lie th!' village, the church, and the old manor house. On tlw other side there is a hill and a small vil lage, and th!'re my fathPr had built a new house. The view

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from i t embraced the country within a radius of ten miles; far and wide rolled seas of quivering corn ; homesteads and villages with white churches could be seen here and there; forests of various hues made a semi-circular setting, and the Moskva like a pale blue ribbon ran through it all. Early in the morning I opened the window in my"room upstairs and looked and listened and breathed.

And yet I regretted the old stone house, perhaps because it was in it that I first made acquaintance with the country; I so loved the long, shady avenue leading up to it and the garden that had run wild; the house was falling into ruins and a slender, graceful birch tree was growing out of a crack in the wall of the vestibule. On the left an avenue of willows ran along the riverside, beyond it there were reeds and the white sand down to the river; on that sand and among those reeds I used at eleven and twelve years old to play for a whole morning. A bent old man, the gardener, used nearly always to be sitting before the house; he used to triple-distil peppermint liquor, cook berries, and secretly regale me with all sorts of vegetables. There \Vere great numbers of crows in the garden: the tops of the trees were covered with their nests, and they used to circle round them, cawir..g; sometimes, especially towards the evening, they used to take wing, hundreds at a time, racing after one another with a great clamour; sometimes one \Vould fly hurriedly from tree to tree and then all would be still. . . . And towards night an owl would wail somewhere in the distance like a child, or go off into a peal of laughter . . . . I was afraid of these wild wailing sounds and yet I went to listen to them.

Every year, or, at least, every other year, we used to go to Vasilevskoye. As I went away I used to measure my height on the wall by the balcony, and I went at once on arriving to find how much I had grown. But in the country I could measure not only my physical grmvth: these periodical returns to the same objects showed me plainly the difference in my inner development. Other books \vere brought, other objects interested me. In 1 823 I was still quite a child; I had children's books with me, and even those I did not read, but was much more interested in a hare and a squirrel which lived in the loft near my room.

One of my principal enjoyments consisted in my father's permission to fire a small cannon every evening, an operation which of course entertained all the servants, and grey-haired old men of fifty were as much diverted as I was. In 1 827 I brought with me Plutarch and �chiller; tarly in the morning I used to go out into

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the forest, as far as I could into the thickest part of it and, imagining that I was in the Bohemian forests,22 read aloud to myself. Nevertheless, I was greatly interested also in a dam which I was making in a small stream with the help of a serfboy, and would run a dozen times a day to look at it and repair it. In 1 829 and 1830 I was writing a philosophical article on Schiller's Wallenstein, and of my old toys none but the cannon retained its charm.

Besides firing the cannon there was, however, another enjoyment for which I retained an unalterable passion-watching the evenings in the country; now as then such evenings are for me still times of devoutness, peace, and poetry. One of the last serenely bright moments in my life reminds me also of those village evenings. The sun was sinking majestically, brilliantly, into an ocean of fire, was dissolving into it . . . . All at once the rich purple was follO\wd by deep blue dusk, and everything was covered \Vith a smoky mist: in Italy the darkness falls quickly.

\Ve mount�d our mules ; on the way from Frascati to Rome \'l'e had to ride through a little village ; here and there lights were already twinkling; everything was still, the hoofs of the mules rang on the stone, a fresh and rather damp wind was blowing from the Apennines. As \W came out of the village, there was a little Madonna standing in a niche with a lamp burning before her; some peasant girls as they came from work with white kerchiefs on their heads sank on their knees and chanted a prayer; they were joined by some needy pifferari who were passing by. I was deeply affected, deeply touched. \Ve looked at each other . . . and rode on at a slow pace to the inn where a carriage was waiting for us. As we drove homewards I talked of the evenings at Vasilevskoye. But what was there to tell?

In silence stood the garden trees,

Among the hills the village lay,

And thither at the fall of night

The lingering cattle u·end their way.

N. P. 0GARh·. Humorous Verse

The shepherd c-racks his long whip and plays on his birchhark pipe ; there is the lowing and bleating and stamping of the herds rPturning on'r the bridge, the dog with a bark chases a str<)ying sheep while she runs with a sort of woodPn gallop; and then the songs of the peasant girls, on their way home from the 22 The scene of Schiller's Die Rauber. (/l.S.)

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fields, come closer and closer; but the path turns off t o the right and the sounds recede again. From the houses children, little girls, run out at the creaking gates to meet their cows and sheep; work is over. The children are playing in the street and on the river-bank, their voices ring out with shrill clarity over the river in the evening glow ; the scorched smell of barns mingles with the air, the dew begins little by little to spread like smoke over the fields, the wind moves over the forest with a sound as though the leaves were boiling, the summer lightning, quivering, lights up the landscape with a dying, tremulous azure, and Vera Artamonovna, grumbling rather than cross, says, coming upon me under a lime tree:

'How is it there's no finding you anywhere? And tea has been served long ago and everyone is at table. Here I have been looking and looking for you until my legs are tired. I can't go running about at my age; and why are you lying on the damp grass like that? . . . you'll have a cold to-morrow, I'll be bound.'

'Oh, that'll do, that'll do,' I say to the old woman with a laugh; 'I shan't have a cold and I don't want any tea, but you steal me the best of the cream from the very top.'

'Well, you really are a boy, there's no being angry with you

. . . what a sweet tooth you've got! I have got the cream ready for you without your asking. Look at the lightning . . . well, that's right! It brings the corn on.'

And I go home skipping and whistling.

We did not go to Vasilevskoye after 1 832. My father sold i t while I was i n exile. In 1843 w e stayed at another estate in the Moscow province, in the district of Zvenigorod, about fourteen miles from Vasilevskoye. I could not help going over to visit my old home. And here we were again riding along the same byroa d ; the familiar fir-wood and the hill covered with nut trees came into view, and then the ford over the river, the ford that had so delighted me twenty years before, the gurgling of the water, the crunching of the pebbles, the shouting coachman and the struggling horses . . . and here was the village and the priest's house where he used to sit on a bench in a dark-brown cassock, simple-hearted, good-natured, red-haired, always in a sweat, always nibbling something and always afflicted with a hiccup; and here was the counting-house where the clerk Vasily Yepifanov, who was never sober, used to write his accounts, huddled up over the paper, holding the pen by the very end with his third finger bent tightly uncle::- it. The priest is dead and Vasily Yepifanov is keeping accounts and getting drunk in

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another village. We stopped at the village head-man's hut, but found only the wife at horne, for her husband was in the fields.

A strange element had crept in during those ten years ; instead of our house on the hill there was a new one, and a new garden was laid out beside it. As we turned by the church and the graveyard we met a deformed-looking creature, dragging itself along almost on all fours; it was trying to show me something, and I went up; it was a hunchbacked, paralytic old woman, halfcrazy, who used to live on charity and work in the former priest's garden. She had been about seventy then and death had just passed by her. She recognised me, shed tears, shook her head and kept saying:

'Ough! why even you are getting old. I only knew you from your walk, while I-there, there, ough! ough ! don't talk of i t ! '

As w e were driving back, I saw in the fields i n the distance the village head-man, the same as in our time. At first he did not know me, but when we had driven by, as though suddenly corning to himself with a start, he took off his hat and bowed low. When we had driven a little farther I turned round; the head-man, Grigory Gorsky, was still standing in the same place, looking after us; his tall, bearded figure, bowing in the midst of the cornfield, gave us a friendly send-off from the horne which had passed into the hands of strangers.

Nick {tnd tlze

Sp{trrolv Hills

' Write then how in this place [ the Sparrow Hills] the story of our lives, yours and mine, began to unfold.

A LETTER, 1833

THREE YEARS before the time I am speaking of we were walking on the banks of the Moskva at Luzhniki, that is, on the other side of the Sparrow Hills. At the river's edge we met a French tutor of our acquaintance in nothing but his shirt; he was panicstricken and was shouting, 'He is drowning, he is drowning! ' But before our friend had time to take off his shirt or put on his

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trousers a Ural Cossack ran down from the Sparrow Hills, dashed into the water, vanished, and a minute later reappeared with a frail man, whose head and a rms vvere flopping about like clothes hung out in the wind. He laid him on the bank, saying,

'He'll stil l recover if we roll him about.'

The people standing round collected fifty roubles and offered it to the Cossack. The latter, without making faces over it, said very simply: 'It's a sin to take money for such a thing, and it was no trouble; come to think of it, he weighs no more than a cat.

We are poor people, though,' he added. 'Ask, we don't; but there, if people give, why not takeJ We are humbly thankful.' Then tying up the money in a handkerchief he went to graze his horses on the hill. My father asked his name and wrote about the incident next day to Essen. Essen promoted him to be a noncommissioned officer. A few months later the Cossack came to see us and with him a pock-marked, bald German, smelling of scent and wearing a curled, fair wig; he came to thank us on behalf of the Cossack-it was the drovvned man. From that time he took to coming to see us.

Karl lvanovich Sonnenberg, that was his name, was at that time completing the German part of the education of two young rascals; from them he went to a landowner of Simbirsk, and from him to a distant relati\·e of my father's. The boy, the care of whose health and German accent had been entrusted to him, and whom Sonnenberg called Nick, attracted me. There was something kind, gentle and pensive about him ; he was not at all like the other boys it had been my luck to meet. We became close friends. He was silent and pensive: I was high-spirited but afraid to rag him.

About the time when my cousin went back to Korcheva, Nick's grandmother died ; his mother he had lost in early childhood.

There was a great upset in the house and Sonnenberg, who really had nothing to do, fussed about too, and imagined that he was run off his legs; he brought Nick in the morning and asked that he might remain with us for the rest of the day. Nick was sad and frightened; I suppose he had been fond of his grandmother .

. . . After we had been sitting still a little I suggested reading Schiller. I was surprised at the similarity of our tastes; he knew far more by heart than I did and knew precisely the passages I liked best; we closed the book and, so to speak, began sounding each otl1er's sympathies.

From Moros who went with a dagger in his sleeve 'to free the city from the tyrant,' from Wilhelm Tell who waited for Vogt on

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the narrow path at Ki.isznacht, the transition to Nicholas and the Fourteenth of December was easy. These thoughts and these comparisons \vere not new to Nick; he, too, knew Pushkin's and Ryleyev's1 unpublished poems. The contrast between him and the empty-headed boys I had occasionally met was striking.

Not long before, walking near the Presnensky Ponds, full of my Bouchot terrorism, I had explained to a companion of my age the justice of the execution of Louis XVI.

'Quite so,' observed the youthful Prince 0., 'but you know he

,..,·as God's anointed ' '

I looked at him with compassion, ceased to care for him and never asked to go and see him again.

There were no such barriers \Vith Nick: his heart beat as mine did. He, too, had cast off from the grim conservative shore, and we had but to shove off together, and almost from the first day we resolved to \York in the interests of the Tsarevich Constantine!

Before that day we had few long conversations. Karl Ivanovich pestered us like an autumn fly and spoilt every conversation with his presence ; he interfered in everything without understanding, made remarks, straightened !\"ick's shirt collar, was in a hurry to get home: in fact, was detestable. After a month we could not pass two days without seeing each other or writing a letter; with all the impulsiveness of my nature I attached myself more and more to Nick, while he had a quiet, deep love for me.

From the very beginning our friendship was to take a serious tone. I do not remember that mischievous pranks \vere our foremost interest, particularly when we were alone. Of course we did not sit still: our age came into its own, and we laughed and played the fool, teased Sonnenberg and played with bows and arrows in our courtyard ; but at the bottom of it all there was something very different from idle companionship. Besides our bt>ing of the same age, besides our 'chemical affinity,' we were united by the faith that bound us. Nothing in the world so purifit>s and ennobles early youth, nothing keeps it so safe as a passionate interest in the whole of humanity. 'We respected our future in ourselves, we looked at each other as 'chosen vessels,'

predestined.

Nick and I often walked out into the country. vVe had our favourite places, the Sparrow Hills, the fields beyond the Dragomilovsky Gate. He would come with Sonnenberg to fetch me at six or seven in the morning, and if I were asleep would throw 1 Ryleye,·, Kondrati Fedorovich ( 1 i95-1 826) , one of the leaders of the Decembrists : he was hanged for his part in the conspiracy. (R.)

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sand and l ittle pebbles at my window. I would wake up smiling and hasten out to him.

These walks had been instituted by the indefatigable Karl Ivanovich.

In the old-fashioned patriarchal education of Ogarev, Sonnenberg plays the part of Biron.2 When he made his appearance the influence of the old male nurse who had looked after the boy was put aside; the discontented oligarchy of the hall were forced against the grain to silence, knowing that there was no overcoming the damned German who fed at the master's table. Sonnenberg made violent changes in the old order of things. The old man who had been nurse positively grew tearful when he learnt that the wretchPd German had taken the young master himself to buy ready-made boots at a shop ! Sonnenberg's revolution, like Peter I's, was distinguished by a military character even in the most peaceful matters. It does not follow from that that Karl Ivanovich's thin little shoulders had ever been adorned with epaulettes; but nature has so made the German that if he does not reach the slovenliness and sans-gene of a philologist or a theologian, he is inevitably of a military mind even though he be a civilian. By virtue of this peculiarity Karl Ivanovich liked tight-fitting clothes, buttoned up and cut with a waist; by virtue of it he was a strict observer of his own rules, and, if he proposed to get up at six o'clock in the morning, he would get Nick up at one minute to six, and in no case later than one minute past, and would go out into the open air with him.

The Sparrow Hills, at the foot of which Karl Ivanovich had been so nearly drowned, soon became our 'sacred hills.'

One day after dinner my father proposed to drive out into the country. Ogarev was with us and my father invited him and Sonnenberg to go too. These expeditions were not a joking ma tter. Before reaching the town gate we had to drive for an hour or more in a four-seated carriage 'built by Joachim,' which had not prevented it from becoming disgracefully shabby in its fifteen years of service, peaceful as they had been, and from being, as it a lways had been, heavier than a siege gun. The four horses of different sizes and colours which had grown fat and lazy in idleness were covered with sweat and foam within a quarter of an hour; the coachman Avdey was forbidden to let this happen, and so had no choice but to drive at a walk. The windows were usually up, however hot it might be ; and with all 2 Biron, favourite of the Empress Anna Ivanovna, was practically ruler of Russia during her reign and designated as successor by her. (Tr.)

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this we had the indifferently oppressive supervision of my father and the restlessly fussy and irritating supervision of Karl Ivanovich. But we gladly put up with everything for the sake of being together.

At Luzhniki we crossed the river Moskva in a boat at the very spot where the Cossack had pulled Karl Ivanovich out of the water. My father walked, bent and morose as a lways; beside him Karl Ivanovich tripped along, entertaining him with gossip and scandal. \Ve went on in front of them, and getting far ahead ran up to the Sparrow Hills at the spot where the first stone of Vitberg's t<>mple was laid.

Flushed and breathless, we stood there mopping our faces. The sun was setting, the cupolas glittered, beneath the hill the city extended farther than the eye could reach; a fresh breeze blew on our faces, we stood leaning against each other and, suddenly embracing, Yowed in sight of all Moscow to sacrifice our lives to the struggle we had chosen.

This scene may strike others as yery affected and theatrical, and yet twenty-six years afterwards I am moved to tears as I recall it; there was a sacred sincerity in it, and our whole life has proved this. But apparently a like destiny defeats all vows made on that spot ; Alexander was sincere, too, when he laid the first stone of that temple,3 which, as Joseph II4 said (although then mistakenly) at the laying of the first stone in some town in Novorossiya, was destined to be the last.

"'e did not know all the strength of the foe with whom we were entering into battle, but we took up the fight. That strength broke much in us, but it was not that strength that shattered us, and we did not surrender to it in spite of all its blovvs. The wounds received from it were honourable. Jacob's strained thigh \Vas the sign that he had wrestled in the night with God.

From that day the Sparrow Hills became a place of worship for us and once or twice a year we went there, and always by ourselves. There, five years later, Ogarev asked me timidly and shyly whether I believed in his poetic talent, and wrote to me afterwards ( 1 833) from his country house: 'I have come away and feel sad, as sad as I have never been before. And it's all the Sparrow Hills. For a long time I hid my enthusiasm in myself; 3 SP!' 'AIP.xander LauPn le,·ich \'itberg.' pp. 1 99-209. (R.) Alexander I laid thP founda tion stone on 1 2Lh October. 1 8 1 7. ( A.S.) 4 Joseph II of Austr·ia paid a famous visit to Catherine II of Russia in 1 780. ( Tr.)

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shyness or something else, I don't myself know what, prevented me from uttering it; but on the Sparrow Hills that enthusiasm was not burdened with solitude: you shared it with me and those moments have been unforgettable; like memories of past happiness they have followed me on my way, while round me I saw nothing but forest; it was all so blue, dark blue, and in my soul was darkness, darkness.

'Write then,' he concluded, 'how in this place' lthat is, on the Sparrow Hills) 'the story of our lives, yours and mine, began to unfold.'5

Five more years passed. I was far from the Sparrow Hills, but near me their Prometheus, A. L. Vitberg, stood, austere and gloomy. In 1 842, returning finally to Moscow, I again visited the Sparrow Hills, and once more we stood on the site of the foundation stone and gazed at the same view, two together, but the other was not Nick.

Since 1 827 we had not been parted. In every memory of that time, general and particular, he with his boyish features and his love for me was everywhere in the foreground. Early could be seen in him that sign of grace which is vouchsafed to few, whether for woe or for bliss I know not, but certainly in order not to be one of the crowd. A large portrait of Ogarev as he was at that time ( 1 827-8), painted in oils, remained for long afterwards in his father's house. In later days I often stood before it and gazed at him. He is shown with an open shirt collar; the painter has wonderfully caught the luxuriant chestnut hair, the undefined, youthful beauty of his irregular features and his rather swarthy colouring; there was a pensiveness in the portrait that gave promise of powerful thought; an unaccountable melancholy and extreme gentleness shone out from his big grey eyes that suggested the future stature of a mighty spirit; such indeed he grew to be. This portrait, presented to me, was taken by a woman who was a stranger; perhaps these l ines will meet her eyes and she will send it to me.

I do not know why the memories of first love are given such precedence over the memories of youthful friendship. The fragrance of first love lies in the fact that it forgets the difference of the sexes, that it is passionate friendship. On the other hand, friendship between the young has all the ardour of love and all its character, the same delicate fear of touching on i ts feelings 5 The Sparrow Hills are now the Lenin Hills and the site of some highrise paleostalinolithic buildings belongmg to Moscow University, which, in name at least, was Herzen's a nd Ogarev's alma mater. (D.l\1.)

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with a word, the same mistrust of self and absolute devotion, the same agony at separation, and the same jealous desire for exclusive affection.

I had long loved Nick and loved him passionately, but had not been able to resolve to call him my friend, and when he was spending the summer at Kuntsevo I wrote to him at the end of a letter: 'Whether your friend or not, I do not yet know.' He first used the second person singular in writing to me and used to call me his Agathon after Karamzin,6 while I called him my Raphael after Schiller.

You will smile, perhaps, but let it be a mild, good-natured smile, such as one smiles when one thinks of the time when one was fifteen. Or would it not be better to muse over the question,

'Was I like that when I was blossoming out?'7 and to bless your fate if you have had youth (merely being young is not enough for this) , and to bless it doubly if you had a friend then.

The language of that period seems affected and bookish to us now; we have become unaccustomed to its vague enthusiasm, its confused fervour that passes suddenly into languid tenderness or childish laughter. It would be as absurd in a man of thirty as the celebrated Bettina will schlafen,8 but in its proper time this language of youth, this jargon de la puberte, this change of the psychological voice is very sincere; even the shade of bookishness is natural to the age of theoretical knowledge and practical ignorance.

Schiller remained our favourite.9 The characters of his dramas were living persons for us; we analysed them, loved and hated them, not as poetic creations but as living men. Moreover we saw ourselves in them. I wrote to Nick, somewhat troubled by his being too fond of Fiesco, that behind every Fiesco stands his Verrina. My ideal was Karl Moor, but soon I was false to him and went over to the Marquis of Posa. I imagined in a hundred variations how I would speak to Nicholas, and how afterwards 6 Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich ( 1 766-1 826) , author of a great History of the Russian State, and also of novels in the sentimental romantic style of his period. (Tr. ) 7 From A. S. Pushkin: Onegin's Travels. (A.S.) 8 See the Tagebuch of Bettina von Arnim for the account of her famous first interview with Goethe. ( Tr. )

9 Schiller's poetry has not lost its influence on me. A few months ago I read Wallenstein, that titanic work, aloud to my son. The man who has lost his taste for Schiller has grown old or pedantic, has grown hard or forgotten himself. \Vhat is one to say of these precocious altkluge Burschen who know his defects so well at seventeen?

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he would send me to the mines or the scaffold. It is a strange thing that almost all our day-dreams ended in Siberia or the scaffold and hardly ever in triumph; can this be the way the Russian imagination turns, or is it the effect of Petersburg with its five gallows and its penal servitude reflected on the young generation?

And so, Ogarev, hand in hand we moved forward into life!

Fearlessly and proudly we advanced, generously we responded to every challenge and single-heartedly we surrendered to every inclination. The path we chose was no easy one ; we have never left it for one moment: wounded and broken we have gone forward and no one has outdistanced us. I have reached . . . not the goal but the spot where the road goes downhill, and involuntarily I seek thy hand that we may go down together, that I may press it and say, smiling mournfully, 'So this is all ! '

Meanwhile i n the dull leisure to \vhich events have condemned me, finding in myself neither strength nor freshness for new labours, I am writing down our memories. Much of that which united us so closely has settled in these pages. I present them to thee. For thee they have a double meaning, the meaning of tombstones on which we meet familiar names .

. . . And is it not strange to think that had Sonnenberg known how to swim, or had he been drowned then in the Moskva, had he been pulled out not by a Cossack of the Urals but by a soldier of the Apsheronsky infantry, I should not have met Nick or should have met him later, differently, not in that room in our old house, where, smoking cigars on the sly, we entered so deeply into each other's lives and drew strength from each other.

l\!JJ� Fctt!Ler

THE INSU FFERABLE DREARI:\'ESS of our house grew greater every year. If my time at the university had not been approaching, if it had not been for my new friendship, my political inclinations and the liveliness of my disposition, I should have run away or perished.

My father was hardly ever in a good humour; he was per-

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petually dissatisfied with everything. A man of great intelligence and great powers of observation, he had seen, heard, and remembered an immense amount; an accomplished man of the world, he could be extremely amiable and interesting, but he did not care to be so and sank more and more into wayward unsociability.

It is hard to say exactly what it was that put so much bitterness and spleen into his blood. Periods of passion, of great unhappiness, of mistakes and losses were completely absent from his life. I could never fully understand what was the origin of the spiteful mockery and irritability that filled his soul, the mistrustful unsociability and the vexation that consumed him.

Did he bear with him to the grave some memory which he confided to no one, or was this simply the result of the combination of two elements so absolutely opposed to each other as the eighteenth century and Russian life, with the intervention of a third, terribly conducive to the development of capricious humour: the idleness of the serf-owning landed gentlemanJ

Last century produced in the West, particularly in France, a wonderful lode of men endowed with all the weak points of the Regency and all the strong points of Rome and Sparta. These·