My Past and Thoughts

men, Faublas1 and Regulus together, opened wide the doors of the Revolution and were the first to rush in, crowding each other in their haste to reach the 'window' of the guillotine. Our age no longer produces these single-minded, violent natures; the eighteenth century, on the contrary, called them forth everywhere, even where they were not needed, even where they could not develop except into something grotesque. In Russia men exposed to the influence of this mighty \Vestern wind became eccentric, but not historical figures. Foreigners at home, foreigners abroad, idle spectators, spoilt for Russia by Western prejudices and for the \Vest by Russian habits, they were a sort of intellectual superfluity and were lost in artificial life, in sensual pleasure and in unbearable egoism.

To this circle belonged the Tatar Prince, N. B. Yusupov, a Russian grandee and a European grand seigneur, a foremost figurP in MoscO\v, conspicuous for his intelligence and his

\Walth. About him gathered a perfect galaxy of grey-headed gallants and esprits forts. They were all quite cultured, well

Pr!ucated people; having no work in life they flung themselves I The hero of La Vii' du Chn·alil'r dl' Faublas ( 1 78 7 ) . by Louvet de Couuay, is the type of the effeminate rake and fashionable exquisite of the period. (Tr.)

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upon pleasure, pampered themselves, loved themselves, goodnaturedly forgave themselves all transgressions, exalted their gastronomy to the level of a Platonic passion and reduced love for women to a sort of voracious gourmandise.

The old sceptic and epicurean Yusupov, a friend of Voltaire and Beaumarchais, of Diderot and Casti,2 really was gifted with artistic taste. To convince oneself of this, it is enough to make one visit to Arkhangelskoye and look at his galleries, that is, if they have not yet been sold bit by bit by his heir. He was magnificently fading out of life at eighty, surrounded by marble, painted and living beauty. In his house near Moscow Pushkin conversed with him, and dedicated to him a wonderful epistle, and Gonzagaa painted, to whom Yusupov dedicated his theatre.

By his education, by his service in the Guards, by position and connections, my father belonged to this circle, but neither his character nor his health permitted him to lead a frivolous life to the age of seventy: and he went to the opposite extreme. He tried to organise for himself a life of solitude, and there he found waiting for him a deadly dullness, the more because he tried to arrange it entirely for himself. His strength of will changed into obstinate caprice, and his unemployed energies spoilt his character, and made it disagreeable.

When he was being educated, European civilisation was still so new in Russia that to be educated meant being so much the less Russian. To the end of his days he wrote more fluently and correctly in French than in Russian. He had literally not read one single book in Russian, not even the Bible, though, indeed, he had not read the Bible in other languages either; he knew the subject-matter of the Holy Scriptures generally from hearsay and from extracts, and had no curio,sity to look further into it.

He had, it is true, a respect for Derzhavin4 and Krylov:5

2 Casti ( 1 721-1803) , an Italian poet, 'attached by habit and taste to the polished and frivolous society of the ancien regime, his sympathies were nevertheless liberal,' satirised Catherine II, and when exiled on that account from Vienna, had the spirit to resign his Austrian pension. The Talking Animals, a satire on the predominance of the foreigner in political life. is his best work. The influence of his poems on Byron is apparent in Don Juan. (Tr.)

3 Gonzaga was a Venetian painter who came to Petersburg in 1 792 to paint scenery for the Court Theatre. He planned the celebrated park at Pavlovsk. (Tr.)

4 Derzhavin, Gavril Romanovich ( 1 743-1 8 1 6 ) , was poet-laureate to Catherine I I, and wrote numerous patriotic and a few other odes. ( Tr.) 5 Krylov, Ivan Andreyevich ( 1 768- 1 8+4), was a very popular writer of fables in verse. ( Tr. )

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Derzhavin because he had written an ode on the death of his uncle, Prince Meshchersky, and Krylov because he had been a second with him a t N . N. Bakhmetev's duel. My father did once pick up Karamzin's History of the Russian State, having heard that the Emperor Alexander had read it, but he laid it aside, saying contemptuously : 'It is nothing but Izyaslaviches and Olgoviches : to whom can it be of interest?'

For people he had an open, undisguised contempt-for everyone. �ever under any circumstances did he count upon anybody, and I do not remember that he ever applied to any one with any consider·able requpst. He himself did nothing for any one. In his relations with outsiders he dPmanded one thing only, the observance of thP propri!'liPs; [,•s apfl{lf'CIICI'S. /es COIII '1'TUU1CCS made up thP \vhole of h i s moral religion. He was ready to forgive much, or rather to overlook it, but breaches of good form and good mannPrs put him beside himself, and in such cases he was without any tolerancl', without the slightest indulgence or compassion. I was rC'bellious so long against thi s injustice that at last I uml<>rstood it. Be was convinced beforehand that every man is capable of any evil act; and that, if he does not commit i t, i t is eitlwr tha t he has no need to, or that the opportunity does not present itself; in the disn•gard of formalities he saw a personal affi'Ont, a disrespect to himsel f; or a 'plebeian education,' which in his opinion excluded a man from all human society.

'The soul of man,' he used to say, 'is darknes-, and who knows what is in any man's soul? I have too much business of my own to be interested in other people's, much less to judge and criticise tht>ir intentions; but I cannot b(' in the same room with an illbrPd man : he offPnds me, il me froissc; of course he may be the IJpst-hearted man in the world and for that he will have a place in paradise, but I don't want him. "'hat is mosl important in life is esprit de conduite, it is more important than the most superior intPllect or any kind of learning. To know how to be al ease everywhere, to put yourself forward nowhere ; the utmost courtesy with all and no familiarity with any one.'

My father disliked evC'ry sort of abandon, every sort of franknC'ss; all this he callPd familiari ty, just as he called every feeling sentimPTitality. He pPrsistently posPd as a man superior to all such pPtty Lrifies ; for the sake of what, with what objPct? \\'hilt was the higher interest to \vhich the heart was sacrificed?-! do not know. And for whom did this haughty old man, who despis('d men so gcnuin('ly <�nd knew them so well, play his part of impartial jwlg('?-for a woman whose will he had broken although she sometimes con tradicted him ; for an invalid who lay

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always at the mercy of the surgeon's knife; for a boy whose high spirits he had developed into disobedience ; for a dozen lackeys whom he did not reckon as human beings!

And how much energy, how much patience were spent on it, how much perseverance; and with what marvellous sureness the part was played through to the end in spite of age and illness.

Truly the soul of man is darkness.

Later on when I was arrested, and afterwards when I was sent into exile, I saw that the old man's heart was more open to love and even to tenderness than I had thought. I never thanked him for it, not knowing how he would take my gratitude.

Of course he was not happy: always on his guard, always dissatisfied, he saw with a pang the hostile feelings he roused in all his household; he saw the smile vanish from the face and the words checked at his entrance; he spoke of it with mockery, with vexation, but made not a single concession and went his way with extreme persistence. Mockery, irony and cold, caustic, utter contempt-these were the tools he wielded like an artist, employing them equally against us and against the servants.

In early youth one can bear many things better than jeers.

Until I went to prison I was actually estranged from my father and joined with the maids and men-servants in waging a little war against him.

Add to everything else the fact that he had persuaded himself that he was dangerously ill, and was continually undergoing treatment; besides our own household doctor he was visited by two or three others and had three or four consultations a year at least. Visitors, seeing his continually unfriendly face and hearing nothing but complaints of his health, which was far from being so bad as he thought, became fewer. He was angry at this but never reproached a single person nor invited one. A terrible dullness reigned in the house, particularly on the endless winter evenings-two lamps lit a whole suite of rooms; wearing high cloth or lamb's-wool boots, a velvet cap and a long, white lambskin coat, bowed, with his hands clasped behind his back, the old man walked up and down, followed by two or three brown dogs, and never uttering a word.

A cautiousness, directed towards objects of no value, grew with his melancholy. He managed the estate badly for himself and badly for his peasants. The head-man and his missi dominici robbed their master and the peasants; yet everything that could be seen was subjected to double supervision: candles were saved and the thin vin de Graves was replaced by sour Crimean wine at the very time when a whole forest was cut down in one

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village, and in another he was sold his own oats. He had his privileged thieves; the peasant whom he made collector of obrok payments in Moscow and whom he sent every summer to inspect the hec.d-man, the kitchen-garden, the forest, and the field work, in ten years bought a house in Moscow. From a child I hated this 'minister without portfolio' ; on one occasion he beat an old peasant in the courtyard in my presence. I was so furious that I clutched him by the beard and almost fainted. From that time until he died in 1 845 I could not look at him calmly. I several times asked my father where did Shkun get the money to buy a house.

'That's what sobriety does,' the old man answered; 'he never takes a drop of liquor.'

To give a full idea of our manner of life I will describe a whole day from the morning; it was just the monotony that was one of the most deadly things: our life went like an English clock regulated to go slowly-quietly, evenly, loudly recording each second.

At nine o'clock in the morning the valet who sat in the room next to the bedroom informed Vera Artamonovna, my ex-nurse, that the master was getting up. She went to prepare the coffee which he always drank alone in his study. Everything in the house assumed a different look: the servants began sweeping the rooms, or at any rate made a show of doing something. The hall, empty until then, filled up, and even the big Newfoundland dog Macbeth sat before the stove and watched the fire without blinking.

Over his coffee the old man read th� Moscow News and the Journal de St PC!ersbourg. I may mention that orders had been given for the l'vloscow News to be warmed, so his hands might not be chilled by the dampness of the paper, and that he read the political news in the French text, finding the Russian obscure. At one time lw used to take in a Hamburg nPwspaper but could not reconcile himself to the fact that Germans printed in the German lPttPrs, and each time pointed out to me the difference between the French print and the German, saying that these f1·cakish Gothic ]PttPrs with their little tails wPakPned the PyPsight. LatPr on hP subsrribcd to the Journal de Franefort, but in thP end he confined himself to the newspapers of his own country.

\Vhen he had finished reading he would observe that Karl

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Ivanovich Sonnenberg was already in the room. When Nick was fifteen Karl Ivanovich had tried setting up a shop but, having neither goods nor customers, after wasting on this profitable undertaking the money he had somehow scraped up, he retired from it with the honourable title of 'merchant of Reval.' He was by then well over forty, and at that agreeable age he led the life of a bird of the air or a boy of fourteen, that is, did not know where he would sleep next day nor on what he would dine. He took advantage of my father's being somewhat well-disposed towards him ; we shall now see what this meant.

In 1 830 my father bought near our house another-bigger, better, and with a garden. The house had belonged to Countess Rostopchin, wife of the celebrated Governor of Moscow. We moved into it; after that he bought a third house which was quite unnecessary, but was next to it. Both these houses stood empty; they were not let for fear of fire (the houses were insured) and disturbance from tenants. Moreover they were not kept in repair, so they were on the sure road to ruin. In one of them the homeless Karl lvanovich was permitted to live on condition that he did not open the gates after ten o'clock (not a difficult condition, since the gates were never closed) , and that he bought his ovm firewood and did not get it from our store supplies (he did indeed buy it-from our coachman), and that he served my father in the capacity of an agent for private errands, that is, he came in the morning to inquire whether there were any orders, appeared for dinner and came in the evening, if there was no one else there, to entertain him with stories and the news.

Simple as Karl Ivanovich's duties might appear to be, my father knew hovv to inject so much bitterness into them that my poor merchant of Reval, accustomed to all the calamities which can fall upon the head of a man with no money, with no brains, who is small in stature, pock-marked and a German, could not endure it perpetually. At intervals of two years or eighteen months, Karl Ivanovich, deeply offended, would declare that

'this is absolutely intolerable,' would pack up, buy or exchange various articles of questionable soundness and dubious quality, and set off for the Caucasus. Ill-luck usually pursued him \vith ferocity. On one occasion his wretched nag-he was driving his own horse to Tiflis and the Kale Redoubt-fell down not far from the land of the Don Cossacks; on another, half his load \Vas stolen from him; on another his two-wheeled gig upset and his French perfumes were spilt over the broken wheel, unappreciated by any one, at the foot of Elbrus; then he would lose something, and when he had nothing left to lose he lost his

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passport. Ten months later, as a rule, Karl Ivanovich, a littlf'

older, a little more battered, a little poorer, with still fewer teeth and less hair, would quite meekly present himself before my father with a store of Persian flea and bed-bug powder, of faded silks and rusty Circassian daggers, and would settle once more in the empty house on the conditions of running errands and using his own firewood to heat his stove.

Observing Karl Ivanovich, my father would at once commence some slight military operations against him. Karl Ivanovich would inquire after his health, the old man would thank him with a bow and then after a moment's thought would inquire, for instance;

'Where do you buy your pomade?'

I must mention here that Karl Ivanovich, the ugliest of mortals, was a fearful dangler after women, considered himself a Lovelace, dressed with pretensions to smartness and wore a curled golden wig. All this, of course, had long ago been weighed and assessed by my father.

'At Boui's's on the Kuznetsky Most,' Karl Ivanovich would answer abruptly, somewhat piqued, and he would cross one leg over the other like a man ready to stand up for himself.

'What's the scent called?'

'Nachtviolen,' answered Karl Ivanovich.

'He cheats you: la violette is a delicate scent, e'est un parfum; but that's something strong, repellent-they embalm bodies with something of that sort! My nerves have gro\vn so weak it's made me feel positively sick; tell them to give me the eau-de-Cologne.'

Karl Ivanovich would himself dash for the flask.

'Oh no, you must call someone, or you will come still closer. I shall be ill ; I shall faint.'

Karl Ivanovich, who was reckoning on the effect of his pomade in the maids' room, would be deeply chagrined.

After sprinkling the room with eau-de-Cologne my father would invent some errands: to buy some French snuff and English magnesia, and to look at a carriage advertised for sale in the papers (he never bought anything) . Karl Ivanovich, pleasantly bowing himself out and sincerely glad to get away, would be gone till dinner.

After Karl Ivanovich the cook appeared; whatever he had bought or whatever he had written down, my father thought extremely_ expensive.

'Ough, ough, how expensive! Why, is it because no supplies have come in?'

'Just so, sir,' answered the cook, 'the roads are very bad.'

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'Oh very well, till they are mended you and I \viii buy less.'

After this he would sit down to his writing-table and write reports and orders to the villages, cast up his accounts, between whiles scolding me, receiving the doctor and, chiefly, quarrelling with his valet. The latter was the greatest sufferer in the whole house. A l ittle, sanguine man, hasty and hot-tempered, he seemed to have been expressly created to irritate my father and provoke his sermons. The scenes that were repeated between them every day might have filled a farce, but it was all perfe-ctly serious. My father knew very well that the man was indispensable to him and often put up with his rude answers, but never ceased trying to train him, in spite of his unsuccessful efforts for thirty-five years. The valet on his side would not have put up with such a life if he had not had his own distractions: more often than not he was somewhat tipsy by dinner-time. My father noticed this, but confined himself to roundabout allusions, advising him, for instance, to munch a l ittle black bread and salt that he might not smell of vodka. Nikita Andreyevich had a habit, when he had had too much to drink, of bowing and scraping in a peculiar way as he handed the' dishes. As soon as my father noticed this, he would invent some errand for himwould send him, for instance, to ask the barber Anton if he had changed his address, adding to me in French,

'I know he has not moved, but the fellow is not sober, he will drop the soup-tureen and smash it, drench the cloth and give me a turn. Let him go out for an airing. Lc grand air will help.'

To such stratagems the valet usually made some reply, but if he could find nothing to say he would go out, muttering between his teeth. Then his master would call him and in the same calm voice ask him what he had said.

'I didn't address a single word to you.'

'To whom were you speaking, then? Except you and me there is no one in this room or the next.'

'To myself.'

'That's very dangerous; that's the way madness begins.'

The valet "vould depart in a rage and go to his room next to my father's bedroom ; there he used to read the Jl.1oscow News and plait hair for wigs for sale. Probably to relieve his anger he would take snuff furiously; whether his snuff was particularly strong or the nerves of his nose were weak I cannot say, but this was almost always followed by his sneezing violently five or six times.

The master would ring. The vale� would fling down his handful of hair and go in.

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'Was that you sneezing?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Bless you.' And he would give a sign with his hand for the valet to withdraw.

On the last day of carnival, all the servants, according to ancient custom, would come in the evening to ask their master's forgiveness: on these solemn occasions my father used to go into the great hall, accompanied by his valet. Then he would pretend not to recognise some of them.

'\Vho is that venerable old man standing there in the corner?'

he would ask the valet.

'Danilo, the coachman,' the valet would answer abruptly, knowing that all this was only a dramatic performance.

'Good gracious! how he has changed. I reaily believe that it is entirely from drink that men get old so quickly; what does he do?'

'He hauls the firewood in for the stoves.'

Thr old man assumed an expression of insufferable pain.

'How is it that in thirty years you have not learned how to speak? . . . Hauls: what's that-hauling firewood?-firewood is carried, not hauled. \Veil, Danilo, thank God, the Lord has thought me worthy to see you once more. I forgive you all your sins for this year, the oats which you waste so immoderately, and for not cleaning the horses, and do you forgive me. Go on hauling firewood while you have the strength, but now Lent is coming, so take less drink; it is bad for us at our age, and besides it is a sin.'

In this style he conducted the whole inspection.

\Ve used to dine b('tween three and four o'clock. The dinner lasted a long time and \vas very boring. Spiridon was an excellent cook, but my father's economy on the one hand, and his own on the other, rendered the dinner somewhat meagre, in spite of the fact that there were a great many dishes. Beside my father stood a red clay bowl into \vhich he himself put various bits of food for the dogs; mot·eover, he used to feed them from his own fork, which gave fearful offence to the servants and consequently to me. Why? It is hard to say . . . .

Visitors on the whole seldom called upon us and dined more rarely still . I rem<>mbcr out of all those who visi ted us one man whose arrival to dinner would sometimes smooth the wrinkles out of my father's face, N. N. Bakhmetev. He was the brother of the lame general of that name and was himself a general also, though long on tlw retired list. My father and he had been friends as long before as the time when both had been officers in

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the lzmaylovsky regiment. They had indulged themselves together in the days of Catherine, and in the reign of Paul had both been court-martialled, Bakhmetev for having fought a duel with someone and my father for having been his second; then one of them had gone away to foreign lands as a tourist, and the other to Ufa as Governor. There was no likeness between them.

Bakhmetev, a stout, healthy and handsome old man, liked a meal and getting a little drunk after it; was fond of lively conversation and many other things. He used to boast that he had eaten as many as a hundred sour-dough pies at a time; and when he was about sixty he could, with complete impunity, make away with up to a dozen buckwheat pancakes drowned in a pool of butter. These experiments I have witnessed more than once.

Bakhmetev had some shade of influence over my father, or at any rate did keep him in check. When Bakhmetev noticed that my father's ill-humour was beyond bounds, he would put on his hat and say with a military scrape:

'Good-bye-you are ill and stupid to-day; I meant to stay to dinner, but I cannot endure sour faces at table! Gehorsamer Diener!'

And my father by way of explanation would say to me: 'The impresario! What a lively fellow N. N. still is! Thank God, he's a healthy man and cannot understand a suffering Job like me; there are twenty degrees of frost, but he dashes here all the way from Pokrovka in his sledge as though it were nothing . . .

while I thank the Creator every morning that I have woken up alive, that I am still breathing. Oh . . . oh . . . ough . . . ! it's a true proverb; the well-fed don't understand the hungry!'

This was the utmost indulgence that could be expected from him.

From time to time there were family dinners at which the Senator, the Golokhvastovs and others were present, and these dinners were not given casually, nor for the sake of any pleasure to be derived from them, but were due to profound considerations of economy and policy. Thus on the 20th February, the Senator's name-day, there was a dinner at our house, and on the 24th June, my father's name-day, the dinner was at the Senator's, an arrangement which, besides setting a moral example of brotherly love, saved each of them from giving a much bigger dinner at home.

Then there were various habitues; Sonnenberg would appear ex officio, and having just before dinner swallowed a glass of vodka and had a bite of Reval anch..,vy at home he would refuse a minute glass of some specially infused vodka ; sometimes my

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last French tutor would come, a miserly old fellow with saucy phiz, fond of talking scandal. Monsieur Thirie so often made mistakes, pouring wine into his tumbler instead of beer and drinking it off apologetically, that at last my father would say to him,

'The vin de Graves stands on your right side, so you won't make a mistake again,' and Thiric, stuffing a huge pinch of snuff into his broad nose tha t turned up on one side, would spill snuff on his plate.

But the real souf]rc-douleurs at dinner were various old women, the needy, nomadic hangers-on of Princess :\1. A. Khovansky, my father's sister. For the sake of a change, and also partly to find out how everything was going on in our house, \vhether there had been any qua rrPls in the family, whether the cook had not had a fight with his wife, and whetlwr tlw master had not found out tha t Palashka or Clyasha was with child, they would sometimes come on hol idays to spend a whole day. I t must be noted that these widows had forty or fifty years before, when they

\H're still lmmarriPd. bPt•n dPJlPlHh•nts in th<' housPl10ld of my father's aunt, old Princt:>ss ::VIeshchPrsky, and a fterwards in that of lwr daughtPr, all<] had kno\Yl! my father since those days ; that in this intPrval bctwet•n thPir unsPttlPd youth and the nomadic lif<' of their old age they had spent somP twenty years qua rrelli ng \\· ith thei1· husbands, restraining them from drunkenness, looking aftPr them when they \\"Crt' paralysPd, a nd taking them to the dmrchvard. Some had been trail ing from one place to another in BPssa rabia with a garl"ison officer and an armful of children : otlwrs had spent years with a criminal charge hanging over their husb; mds; and all these experiences of life had left upon them the marks of government offices and provincial towns, a d read of the powers of this world, a spirit of abasement and a sort of dull-witted bigotry.

Amazing scenes took place with them.

··why is this, Anna YakimoYna ; are you ill that you don't cat anything?' my father would ask.

Shriuking togdlwr, tht· \Yidow of some inspPctor in KrPmenchug, a wre tclwd old woman with a \vorn, faded face, who a lways srrwlt strongly of sticking plaster, would answer vvith cringing eyes and dep,·ecatiug fingers:

'Forgi,·e me, Ivan Alexeyevich, sir, I am rPally ashamed, but

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there, it is my old-fashioned ways, su. Ha, ha, ha, it's the fast before the Assumption now.'

'Oh, how tiresome! You are always so pious! It's not what goes into the mouth, dear lady, that defiles, but what comes out of it; whether you eat one thing or another, it all goes the same way; now what comes out of the mouth, you must watch over . . .

your judgments of your neighbours. Come, you had better dine at home on such days, or we shall have a Turk coming next asking for pilau ; I don't keep a restaurant a la carte.'

The frightened old woman, who had intended as well to ask for some dish made of flour or cereals, would fall upon the kvas and salad, making a show of eating a terrific meal.

But it is noteworthy thnt she, or any of the others, had only to begin eating meat during a fast for my father, though he never touched Lenten food himself, to say, shaking his head sadly:

'I should not have thought it was worth-while for you, Anna Yakimovna, to forsake the customs of your forefathers for the last few years of your life. I sin and eat meat, as comports with my many infirmities; but you, as you're allowed, thank God, have kept the fasts all your l ife and suddenly . . . what an example for them.'

He motioned towards the servants. And the poor old woman had to betake herself to kvas and salad again.

These scenes made me very indignant; sometimes I was so bold as to intervene nnd remind him of the contrary opinion he had expressed. Then my father would rise from his seat, take off his velvet cap by the tassel and, holding it in the air, thank me for the lesson and beg pardon for his forgetfulness; then he would say to the old lady:

'It's a terrible age! It's no wonder you cat meat during a fast, when children teach their parents! \Vhat are we coming to? It's dreadful to think of it' Luckily you and I won't see it.'

After dinner my father lay down to rest for an hour and a half. The servants at once dispersed to beer-shops and eatinghouses. At seven o'clock tea was served ; then sometimes someone would arrive, the Senator more often than any one: it was a time of leisure for all of us. The Senator usually brought various items of ne\vs and told them eagerly. My father affected complete inattention as he listened to him: he assumed a serious face, when his brother had expected him to be dying of laughter, and would cross-question him, as though he had not heard the point, when the Senator had been telling some astonishing story.

The Senator came in for it in a very different way when he

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contradicted or differed from his younger brother (which rarely happened, however) , and sometimes, indeed, 'vhen he did not contradict at all, if my father ,..,·as particularly ill-humoured. In these tragi-comic scenes, what was funniest \Vas the Senator's natural vehemence and my father's factitious sang froid.

'\Yell, you are ill to-day,' the Senator would say impatiently, and he would seize his hat and rush off.

Once in his vexation he could not open the door and pushed at it with all his might, saying, 'What a confounded door!' My father went up, coolly opened the door inwards, and in a perfectly composed voice observed:

'This door does its duty: it opens this way, and you try to open it that way, and lose your temper.'

It may 110t be out of place to mention that the Senator was two years older than my father and addressed him in the second person singular, while the latter as the younger brother used the plural form, 'you.'

\Vhen the Senator had gone, my father would retire to his bedroom, would each time inquire whether the gates were closed, would receive an answer in the affirmative, \Vould express doubts on the subject but do nothing to make sure. Then began a lengthy routine of washings, fomentations, and medicines; his valet made ready on a little table by the bed a perfect arsenal of diffNent objects-phials, nightlights, pill-boxes. The old man as a rule read for an hour Bourrienne's !11emorial de Saint Helene6

and other memoirs; then came the night.

Such was our household v11hen I left it in 1 834: so I found it in 1 840, and so it continued until his death in 1 846.

At thirty, when I returned from exile, I realised that my father had been right in many things, that he had unhappily an offensively good understanding of men. But was it my fault that he preached thP truth itself in a way so provoking to a youthful heart? His mind. chilled by a long life in a circie of depraved men, put him on his guard against everyone. and his callous heart did not cravP for rPconciliation ; so he remained on hostile

[{'!"IllS \Vith PW'fVOIIP on earth.

I found him i� 1 839,

( A .S.)

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just the same: only his physical powers were changed ; there was the same spiteful intelligepce, the same tenacious memory, he still persecuted everyone over trifles, and Sonnenberg, still unchanged, had his nomad's camp in the old house as before, and ran errands.

Only then did I apprecia te all the cheerlessness of his life; I looked with an a ching heart at the melancholy significance of this lonely, abandoned existence, dying out in the arid, harsh, stony wilderness which he had created about himself, but which he had not the will to change ; he knew this; he saw death approaching and, overcoming weakness and infirmity, he jealously and obstinately controlled himself. I was dreadfully sorry for the old man, but there was nothing to be done: he was unapproachable.

Sometimes I passed softly by his study where, sitting in a hard, uncomfortable, deep &rmchair, surrounded by his dogs, he was playing all alone with my three-year-old son. It seemed as though the clenched hands and numbed nerves of the old man relaxed at the sight of the child, and he found rest from the incessant agitation, conflict, and vexation in which he had kept himself, as his dying hand touched the cradle.

Tl1e l!n inersitr

t /

Oh, years of boundless ecstasies,

Of visions bright and free!

Where now your mirth untouched br spite,

Your hopeful toil and noin· glee?

N. P. 0GARE.\", Humorous Verse

IN sf>ITE OF the lame general's sinister predictions my father nevertheless put my name down with Prince N. B. Yusnpov for employment in the Kremlin Department. I signed a paper and there the matter ended ; I heard nothing more of the service, except that about three years later Yusupov sent the Palace architect, who always shouted as though he were standing on the scaffolding of the fifth storey and there giving orders to workmen in the basement, to announce that I had received the first

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officer's grade. All these miracles, I may remark in passing, were unnecessary, for I rose at one jump, with the grades I received in the service, by passing the examination for my degree-it was not worth-while giving oneself much trouble for the sake of two or three years' seniority. And meanwhile this supposed post in the service almost prevented me from entering the university.

The Council, seeing that I was reckoned as in the office of the Kremlin Department, refused me the right to take the examination.

For those in the government service there were special afterdinner courses of study, extremely limited in scope and qualifying one for entrance into the so-called 'committee examinations.'

All the wealthy idlers, the young noblemen's sons who had learnt nothing, all those who did not want to serve in the army and were in a hurry to get the rank of assessor took the 'committee examinations' ; they were by way of being gold mines presented to the old professors, who coached them privatissime for twenty roubles a lesson.

To begin my life with such a disaster of the Caudine Forks of learning was far from suiting my ideas. I told my father resolutely that if he could not find some other means I should resign from the service.

My father was angry, said that with my caprices I was preventing him from organising a career for me, and abused the teachers who had stuffed me \vith this nonsense; but, seeing that all this had very little effect upon me, he made up his mind to go to Yusupov.

Yusupov settled the matter in a trice, partly l ike a lord and partly like a Tatar. He called his secretary and told him to write me a leave of absence for three years. The secretary hesitated and hesitated, and at last, with some apprehension, submitted that leave of absence for longer than four months could not be given without the sanction of His Majesty.

'VVhat nonsense, my man,' the prince said to him. 'Where is the difficulty? \\'ell, if leave of absence is impossible, write that I commission him to attend the university course, to perfect himself in the sciences.'

His secretary wrote this and next day I was sitting in the amphitheatre of the Physico-Mathematical auditorium.

The University of Moscow and the Lycee of Tsarkoye Selo play a significant part in the history of Russian education and in the life of the last two generations.

Moscow University grew in importance together with the city itself after 1 8 1 2. Degraded by the Emperor Peter from being the

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capital of the Tsars, Moscow was promoted by the Emperor Napoleon (partly intentionally, but twice as much unintentionally) to being the capital of the Russian people. The people realised their ties of blood 'vith Moscow from the pain they felt at the news of its occupation by the enemy. From that time a new epoch began for the city. Its university became more and more the centre of Russian culture. All the conditions necessary for its development were combined-historical importance, geographical position, and the absence of the Tsar.

The intensified mental activity of Petersburg after the death of Paul came to a gloomy close on the Fourteenth of December ( 1 825) . Nicholas appeared with his five gibbets, with penal servitude, with the white strap and the light blue uniform of Benckendorf.1

Everything ran backwards: the blood rushed to the heart, the activity that was out\vardly concealed boiled inwardly in secret.

Moscow University remained firm and was the foremost to stand out in sharp relief from the general fog. The Tsar began to hate it from the time of the Polezhayev a ffair.2 He sent A. Pisarev, the major-general of the En·rzings at Kalut;a.3 as Director. commanded the students to be dressed in uniform, ordered them to wear a svvord, then forbade them to wear a sword, condemned Polezhayev to be a common soldier for his verses and Kostenetsky and his comrades for their prose, destroyed the Kritskys4 for a bust, sentenced us to exile for Saint-Simonism, then made Prince Sergey Mikhaylovich Golitsyn Director, and took no further notice of that 'hot-bed of depravity,' piously advising young men who had finished their studies at the lyceum or at the School of Jurisprudence not to enter it.

Golitsyn was an astonishing person: it was long before he could accustom himself to the irregularity of there being no lecture when a professor was ill ; he thought the next on the list ought to take his place, so that Father Ternovsky sometimes had to lecture in the clinic on women's diseases and Richter, the gyn

1 The uniform of the gendarmes of the Third Division, the political police, of which Benckendorf was head, was light blue with a white strap. ( Tr.) 2 See pp. 1 1 7- 1 9 for a full account of this. (D.M. ) 3 A collection of the works of various authors published in two parts by A. A. Pisarev in 1 825.

4 It was a young man called Zubov who was put in a madhouse for hacking a bust of the Tsar. The Kritsky brothers were punished for addressing insulting words to his portraits. (A.S. )

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But in spite of that the university that had fallen into disgrace grew in influence ; the youthful strength of Russia streamed to it from all sides, from all classes of society, as into a common reservoir ; in its halls they were purified from the prejudices they had picked up at the domestic hearth, reached a common level, became like brothers and dispersed again to all parts of Russia and among all classes of its people.

Until 1 8·1-8 tl!f' organisation of our universities was purely democratic. Their doors were op£>n to everyone \vho could pass the examination, who was neither a serf, a peasant, nor a man excluded from his commune. Nicholas spoilt all this; he restricted the admission of students, increased the fees of those who paid their own expenses, and permitted none to be relieved of payment but poor noblemen. All these belonged to the series of senseless measures which will disappear with the last breath of that drag on the Russian wheel, together with the law about passports, about religious intolerance and so on.

Young men of all sorts and conditions coming from above and from below, from the south and from the north, were quickly fused into a compact mass of comrades. Social distinctions had not among us the offensive influence which \Ve find in English schools and barracks; I am not speaking of the English universities: they exist exclusively for the aristocracy and for the rich.

A student who thought fit to boast among us of his blue blood or his wealth would have been excluded from 'fire and water' and made the butt of his comrades.

The external distinctions-and they did not go very deep-that divided the students arose from other causes. Thus, for instance, the medical section which was on the other side of the garden was not so clos£>ly united with us as the other faculties ; moreover, the majority of the medical students consisted of seminarists and Germans. The Germans kept a little apart and were deeply imbued with the Western bourgeois spirit. All the education of the luckless seminarists, all their ideas, were utterly different from ours; we spoke different languages. Brought up under the oppression of monastic despotism, stuffed with rhetoric and theology, they envied us our ease of manner; we were vexed by their Christian meekness.5

I entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in spite of 5 Immense progress has been made in this respect. All that I have heard of late of the theological academies, and even of the seminaries. confirms it. I need hardly say that it is not the ecclesiastical authorities but the spirit of the pupils tha t is responsible for this improvement.

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the fact that I had never had a marked ability nor much liking for mathematics. Nick and I had been taught mathematics together by a teacher whom we lo\'ed for his anecdotes and stories; interesting as he was, he can hardly have developed any particular passion for his subject. His knowledge of mathematics extended only to conic sections, that is, exactly as far as was necessary for preparing high-school boys for the university; a real philosopher, he ne\'er had the curiosity to glance at the

'university' branches of mathematics. What \Yas particula-rly remarkable, too, \vas that he never read more than one book, and that book, Francoeur's Course, he read constantly for ten years; but, being abstemious by temperament and having no love for luxury, he never went beyond a certain page.

I chose the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics because the natural sciences \Vere taught in that Faculty, and just at that time I developed a great passion for natural science.

A rather strange meeting had led me to these studies.

After the famous division of the family property in 1 822, which I have described, my father's older brother, Alexander, went to live in Petersburg. For a long time nothing was heard of him; then suddenly a rumour spread that he was getting married. He was at that time over sixty, and everyone knew that besides a grO\vn-up son he had other children. He did in fact marry the mother of his eldest son; the 'young woman,' was over fifty.

With this marriage he legitimised, as they said in the old days, his son. Why not all the children? It would be hard to say why, if we had not known his main purpose in doing what he did; his one desire was to deprive his brothers of the inheritance, and this he completely attained by legitimising the son. In the famous inundation of Petersburg in 1 824 the old man was drenched with water in his carriage. He caught cold, took to his bed, and at the beginning of 1 825 he died.

Of the son there were strange rumours. It was said that he was unsociable, refused to make acquaintances, sat alone for ever absorbed in chemistry, spent his life at his microscope, read even at dinner and hated feminine society. Of him it had been said in Woe from Wit,s

G Griboyedov's famous comedy, which appeared and had a large rirculation in manuscript copies in 182<�. its performance and publication being prevented by the censorship. \Vhen performt>d later it was in a very mutilated form. It was a lively satire on Moscow society and full of references to well-known persons, such as lzmaylov and Tolstoy 'the

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He is a chemist, lze is a botanist,

Our nephew, Prince Fedor,

He flies from women and even from me.

His uncles, who transferred to him the rancour they had felt for his father, never spoke of him except as 'the Chemist,' using this word as a term of disparagement, and assuming that chemistry was a subject that could by no means be studied by a gentleman.

Before his death the father used to persecute his son dreadfully, not merely affronting him with the spectacle of his greyheaded father's cynical debauchery, but actually being j ealous of him as a possible rival in his seraglio. The Chemist on one occasion tried to escape from this ignoble existence by means of laudanum. He happened to be rescued by a comrade, with whom he used to \York at chemistry. His father was thoroughly frightened, and before his death had begun to treat his son better.

After his father's death the Chemist released the luckless odalisques, halved the heavy obrok laid by his father on the peasants, forgave all arrears and presented them gratis with the army receipts for the full quota of recruits, which the old man had used to sell when he sent his house-serfs for soldiers.

A year and a half later he came to Moscow. I wanted to see him, for I liked him for the way he treated his peasants and because of the undes<>rv<>d ill-will his uncles bore him.

One morning a small man in gold spectacles, with a big nose, who had lost half his hair, and \vhose fingers were burnt by chemical reagents, called upon my father. My father met him coldly, sarcastically; his nephew responded in the same coin and gave him quite as good as he got: after taking each other's measure they began speaking of extraneous matters with external indifference, and parted politely but with concealed dislike.

l\1y father saw that here was a fighter who would not give in to him.

Th<>y did not become more intimate later. The Chemist very rarely visited his uncles; the last time he saw my father was aft<>r the Senator's death, when he came to ask him for a loan of thirty thousand roubl!•s for the purchase of some land. My father would not lend it. The Chemist was moved to anger and, rub-American.' Griboyedov was imprisoned in 1 825 in connection with the Fourteenth of December. ( Tr.)

This passage, not entirely accura tely quoted, is from Act III, scene 2.

( A .S. )

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bing his nose, observed with a smile, 'There is no risk whatever in it; my estate is entailed ; I am borrowing money for its improvement. I have no children and we are each other's heirs.'

The old man of seventy-five never forgave his nephew for this sally.

I took to visiting the Chemist from time to time. He lived in a way that was very much his own. In his big house on the Tverskoy Boulevard he used one tiny room for himself and one as a laboratory. His old mother occupied another l ittle room· on the other side of the corridor; the rest of the house \Vas neglected and remained exactly as it had been when his father left it to go to Petersburg. The blackened candelabra, the unusual furniture, all sorts of rarities, a clock said to have been bought by Peter I in Amsterdam, an arm-chair said to have come from the house of Stanislas Leszczynski/ frames without pictures in them, pictures turned to the wall, were all l eft anyhow, filling up three big, unheated and unlighted rooms. Servants were usually playing the torban and smoking in the hall, where i n old days they had scarcely dared to breathe or say their prayers. A manservant would light a candle and escort one through this arsenal, observing every time that I had better not take my cloak off for it was very cold in the big rooms. Thick layers of dust covered the horned trophies and various curios, the reflections of which moved together with the candle in the elaborate mirrors ; straw left from packing lay undisturbed here and there together with scraps of paper and bits of string.

Through a row of these rooms one reached at last a door hung with a rug, which led to the terribly overheated study. In this the Chemist, in a soiled dressing-gown lined with squirrel fur, was invariably sitting, surrounded by piles of books, and rows of phials, rctorts, crucibles, and other apparatus. In that study where Chevalier's microscope now reigned supreme and there was always a smell of chlorine, and where a few years before terrible piteous deeds had been perpetrated-in that study I was born. My father, on his return from foreign parts, before his quarrel with his brother, stayed for some months in his house, and in the same house my wife was born in 181 7. The Chemist sold the house two years later, and it chanced that I was in the house again at evening parties of Sverbeyev's,8 arguing there 7 Stanislas Leszczynski, King- of Poland from 1 702 to 1 709. His daughter Maria was married to Louis XV of France. (Tr. ) 8 Sverbeyev, Dmitry 1\"ikolayevich ( 1 799-1876). Representatives of the

'Slavophils' and '\'\'estemers' used to meet in his house in l\1oscow. (A.S.)

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about Pan-Slavism and getting angry with Khomyakov, vvho never lost his temper about anything. The rooms had been altered, but the front entrance, the vestibule, the stairs, the hall were all left as before, and so was the little study.

The Chemist's housekeeping was even less complicated, especially when his mother had gone away for the summer to their estate near Moscow and with her the cook. His valet used to appear at four o'clock with a coffee-pot, pour into it a little strong broth and, taking advantage of the chemical furnace,

\vould set it there to warm, along with various poisons. Then he would bring bread and half a hazel-hen from an eating-house, and that made up the whole dinner. When it was over the valet would wash the coffee-pot and it would return to its natural duties. In the evening the valet would appear again, take from the sofa a heap of books, and a tiger-skin that had come down to the Chemist from his father, spread a sheet and bring pillows and a blanket, and the study was as easily transformed into a bedroom as it had been into a kitchen and a dining-room.

From the very beginning of our acquaintance the Chemist saw that I was interested in earnest, and began to try to persuade me to give up the 'empty' study of literature and the 'dangerous and quite useless pursuit of politics,' and take to natural science. He gave me Cuvier's speech on geological revolutions and Candolle's Plant 11/orphologr. Seeing that these were not thrown away upon me he offered me the use of his Pxcellent collections, apparatus, herbariums, and even his guidance. He was very interesting on his own ground, extremely learned, witty and even amiable; but for this one had to go no further than the a pes; from the rocks to the orang-utan everything interested him, but he did not care to be drawn beyond them, particularly into philosophy, which he regarded as twaddle. He wa s neither a conservative nor a reactionary: he simply did not believe in people, that is, he believed that egoism is the sole source of all actions, and thought that it was restrained merely by the senselessness of some and the ignorance of others.

I was revolted by his materialism. The superficial Voltairianism of our fathers, \vhich they were half afraid of, was not in the least like the Chemist's materialism. His outlook was calm, consistent, comp!Pte. flp reminded me of the celebrated answer madP by Lalande!' to Napoleon. 'Kant accepts the hypothesis of

!I Lalande. Jos<"ph-.h;rome de ( 1 n2- 1 807 ) . a French astronoml'r. ( Tr. ) This n•mark is usually alt ribu red to l'il'rTe Simon. 1\larquis de Laplac!'

( 1 H9- J 827 ) . ( R. )

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God,' Bonaparte said to him. 'Sire,' replied the astronomer, 'in my studies I have never had occasion to make use of that hypothesis.'

The Chemist's atheism went far beyond the sphere of theology.

He considered Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire10 a mystic and Oken1 1

simply deranged. He · closed the works of the natural philosophers with the same contempt with which my father had put aside Karamzin's Historr. 'They themselves invented first causes and spiritual forces, and then are surprised that they can neither find them nor understand them,' he said. This was a second edition of my father, in a different age and differently educated.

His views became still more comfortless on all the problems of life. He thought that there was as little responsibility for good and evil in man as in the beasts; that it was all a matter of organisation, circumstances, and condition of the nervous system in general, of which he said more was expected than it was capable of giving. He did not like family life, spoke with horror of marriage, and naively acknowledged that in tlw thirty years of his life he had ne,·er loved one woman. However, there remained one current of '"armth in this frigid man and it could be seen in his attitude to his old mother ; they had suffered a great deal together at the hands of his father, and their troubles had welded them firmly together; he touchingly surrounded her solitary and infirm old age, so far as he could, with tranquillity and attention.

He never advocated his theories, except those that concerned chemistry; they came out casually, evoked by me. He even showed reluctance in answering my romantic and philosophic objections; his answers were brief, and he made them with a smile and with the considerateness with which a big. old mastiff plays with a puppy, allowing him to tousle him and only gently pushing him away with his paw. But it was just that which provoked me most, and I would return to the charge \vithout weariness-never gaining an inch of ground, however. Later on, twelve years afterwards, that is, I frequently recalled the Chemist's, just as I recallPd my fathpr's, observations. Of course, he had been right in three-quarters of everything that I had objected to; 1 o Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire ( 1 772- 1 8·14) , French naturalist and author of many books on zoology and biology, in "·hich, in opposition to Cm·i<'r, he ad,·anced the theory of the variation of species under the influence of environment. ( Tr. )

I I Oken, Lorenz ( 1 779-1 85 1 ) . a German naturalist, who aimed at deducing a system of natural philosophy from !1 priori propositions, and incidentally threw off some ,-aluable and suggestive ideas. ( Tr.)

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but I had been right too, you know. There are truths (we have spoken of this already) which like political rights are not given to those under a certain age.

The Chemist's influence made me choose the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics; perhaps I should have done still better to enter the Medical Faculty, but there was no great harm in my first acquiring some degree of knowledge of the differential and integral calculus, and then completely forgetting it.

Without the natural sciences there is no salvation for modem man. Without that wholesome food, without that strict training of the mind by facts, without that closeness to the life surrounding us, without humility before its independence, the monastic cell remains hidden somewhere in the soul, and in it the drop of mysticism which might have flooded the whole understanding with its dark waters.

Before I completed my studies the Chemist had gone away to Petersburg, and I did not see him again until I came back from Vyatka. Some months after my marriage I went half secretly for a few days to the estate near Moscow where my father was then living. The object of this journey was to effect a final reconciliation with him, for he was still angry with me for my marriage.

On the way I halted at Perkhushkovo where we had so many times broken our journey in old days. The Chemist was expecting me there and had actually got a dinner and two bottles of champagne ready for me. In those four or five years he had not changed at all except for being a little older. Before dinner he asked me quite seriously:

'Tell me, please, frankly, how do you find married life: is it a good thing? or not very?'

I laughed.

'How venturesome of you,' he went on. 'I wonder at you ; in a normal condition a man can never determine on such a terrible step. Two or three very good matches have been proposed to me, but when I imagine a woman taking up her abode in my room, setting everything in order a ccording to her ideas, perhaps forbidding me to smoke my tobacco (he used to smoke rootlets from Nezhin),12 making a fuss and an upset, I am so frightened that I prder to die in solitude.'

'Shall I stay the night with you or go on to Pokrovskoye?' I askPd him after dinner.

'I have no lack of room lwre,' he answered, 'but for you I think 12 11/akhorka, a strong, cheap tobacco produced, among other places, at Nezhin in the Ukraine. ( fl.)

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it would be better to go on; you will reach your father at ten o'clock. You know, of course, that he is still angry with you ; well-in the evening before going to bed old people's nerves are usually relaxed and drowsy-he will probably receive you much better to-day than he would to-morrow; in the morning you would find him quite ready for battle.'

'Ha, ha, ha! I recognise my teacher in physiology and materialism,' said I, laughing heartily. 'How your remark recalls those blissful days when I used to go to you like Goethe's Wagner to weary you with my idealism and listen with some indignation to your chilling opinions.'

'Since then,' he answered, laughing too, 'you have lived enough to know that all human a ffairs depend simply on the nerves and the chemical composition.'

Later on we had a difference: probably we were both wrong .

. . . Nevertheless in 1 846 he wrote me a letter. I was then beginning to be the fashion after the publication of the first part of Who Is At Fault? The Chemist wrote to me that he saw with grief that I was wasting my talent on idle pursuits.

'I became reconciled to you for the sake of your Letters on the Study of Nature. In them I understood German philosophy (so far as it is possible for the mind of man to do so)-why then instead of going on with serious work are you writing fairytales? ' I sent him a few friendly lines in reply, and with that our intercourse ended.

If the Chemist's ovvn eyes ever rest upon these l ines, I would beg him to read them just after going to bed at night when his nerves arc relaxed, and then I am sure he will forgive me this affectionate gossip, the more so since I retain a very genuine, kind memory of him.

And so at last the seclusion of the parental home was over. I was au large. Instead of solitude in our little room, instead of quiet, half-concealed meetings with Ogarev alone, I was surrounded by a noisy family, seven hundred in number. I was more at home in it in a fortnight than I had been in my father's house from the day of my birth.

But the paternal home pursued me even at the university, in the shape of a footman whom my father ordered to accompany me, particularly when I \vent on foot. For a whol� year I tried to get rid of my escort and only \vith difficulty succeeded in doing so officially. I say 'officially,' because my valet Petr Fedorovich, upon whom the duty was laid, very quickly grasped, first, that I disliked being accompanied, and, secondly, that i t was a great

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deal more pleasant for him in various places of entertainment than in the hall of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, where the only pleasures open to him were conversation 'vith the two porters and the three of them treating each other and themselves to snuff.

VVhat was the object of sending an escort to walk after me?

Could Petr, who from his youth had been given to getting drunk for several days at a time, have prevented me from doing anything? I imagine that my father did not even suppose so, but his own peace of mind took steps, which were ineffective but were still steps, like people who do not believe but take the sacrament.

It was part of the old-fashioned education of landowners. Up to seven years old, orders had been given that I should be led by the hand on the staircase, which was rather steep; up to eleven I was washed in my bath by Vera Artamonovna ; therefore, very consistently, a servant was sent to walk behind me when I was a student; and until I was twenty-one, I was not allowed to be out after half-past ten. In practice I found myself at liberty, standing on my own feet, when I was in exile ; had I not been exiled, probably the same regime would have continued up to hventyfive or even thirty-five.

Like the majority of lively boys brought up in solitude, I flung myself on everyone's neck with such sincerity and impulsiveness, built myself up with such senseless imprudence, and was so candidly fond of everyone, that I could not fail to call forth a warm response from my hearers, who consisted of lads of about my own age. (I was then in my seventeenth year.) The sage rules-to be courteous to all, intimate with no one and to trust no one-did as much to promote this readiness to make friends as the ever-present thought with which we entered the university, the thought that here our dreams would be accomplished, that here we should sow the seeds and lay the foundation of a league. We were persuaded that out of this lecture-room would come the company which would follow in the footsteps of Pestel and Ryleyev, and that we should be in it.

They were a splendid set of young men in our year. It was just at that time that theoretical tendencies were becoming more and more marked among us. The scholastic method of learning and aristocratic indolence were alike disappearing, and had not yet been replaced by that German utilitarianism which enriches men's minds "·ith science, as the fields with manure, for the sake of an increased crop. A tolerably large group of students no longer regarded science as a necessary but wearisome short-cut

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by which they would come to be collegiate assessors. The problems that were arising amongst us had no reference whatever to the Table of Ranks.

On the other hand the interest in science had not yet had time to degenerate into doctrinairianism ; science did not draw us away from the life and suffering around us. Our sympathy with it raised the social morality of the students to an unusual extent.

We said openly in the lecture-room everything that came into our heads; manuscript copies of prohibited poems passed ftom hand to hand, prohibited books were read with commentaries, but for all that I do not remember a single case of tale-bearing from the lecture-room or of betrayal. There were timid young men who turned away and held aloof, but they too were silent.13

One silly boy, questioned by his mother on the Malov affair,14

under threat of the birch, did tell her something. The fond mother-an aristocrat and a princess-flew to the rector and passed on her son's information as proof of his penitence. We heard of this and tormented him so that he did not stay till the end of the course.

This affair, for which I too was imprisoned, deserves to be described.

Malov was a stupid, coarse, and uncultured professor in the Political Faculty. The students despised him and laughed at him.

'How many professors have you in your faculty?' the Director one day asked a student in the Politics lecture-room.

'Nine, not counting Malov,' answered the student.15

Well, this professor, who had to be left out of the reckoning in order that nine should remain, began to be more and more insolPnt in his treatment of the students; the latter made up their minds to drive him out of the lecture-room. After deliberating together they sent two delegates to our faculty to invite me to come with an auxiliary force. I at once proclaimed a declaration of war on Malov, and sevPral students \VPnt with me; when we went into the Politics lecture-room l\1alov was present and saw us.

On the faces of all the students was written the same fear: that on that day he might say nothing rude to them. This fear soon 13 At that time there were none of the inspectors and sub-inspectors who played the part of my Pctr FPdorovich in the lecture-rooms.

14 The MaloY affair happened on 1 6th March, 1 83 1 . (A.S.) 15 A pun on the name-the phrase meaning also 'Nine all but a little.'

(Tr.)

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passed. The overflowing lecture-room was restless and a vague subdued hum rose from it. Malov made some observation; there began a scraping of feet.

'You express your thoughts like horses, with your feet,' observed Malov, probably imagining that horses think at a gallop or a trot; and a storm arose, whistling, hisses, shouts; 'Out with him, pcreat!' Malov, white as a sheet, made a desperate effort to control the uproar but could not; the students jumped on to the benches. Malov quietly left the dais and, cowering down, tried to slip through to the door; his audience followed, saw him through the university court into the stref't and flung his galoshes after him. The last circumstance was important, for in the street the case at once assumed a very different character; but where in the world are there lads of seventeen or eighteen who would consider that?

The University Council was alarmed and persuaded the Director to present the affair as disposed of, and for that purpose to put the culprits, or somebody anyhow, in prison. This was prudent; it might otherwise easily have happened that the Tsar would have sent an aide-de-camp who, with a view to gaining a cross, would have turned the affair into a conspiracy, a rising, a rebellion, and "vould have proposed sendin� everyone to penal servitudf', which the Tsar would graciously have commuted to service as common soldiers. Seeing that vice was punished and virtue triumphant, the Tsar confined himself to giving His Majesty's sanction to the confirmation of the wishes of the students, and dismissed the professor. We had driven Malov out as far as the university gates and he turned him out of them. It was vae victis with Nicholas, but this time we had no cause to reproach him.

And so the affair went merrily on ; after dinner next day the watchman from the head office shuffled up to me, a grey-headed old man, who conscientiously assumed that the students' tips (given na vodku) were for vodka and therefore kept himself continually in a condition approximating more to drunkenness than sobriety. In the cuff of his greatcoat he brought a note from the rector; I was ordered to present myself before him at seven o'clock that evening. When he had gone a pale and frightened studf'nt appeared, a baron from the Baltic provinces, who had received a similar invitation and was one of the luckless victims led on by me. He began showering reproaches upon me and then asked advice as to what he was to say.

'Lie desperately, deny everything, except that there was an uproar and that you were in the lecture-room.'

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'But the rector will ask why I was in the Politics lecture-room and not in ours.'

'What of it? Why, don't you know that Rodion Heyman did not come to give his lecture, so you, not wishing to waste your time, went to hear another.'

'He won't believe it.'

'Well, that's his affair.'

As we were going into the university courtyard I looked at my baron: his plump little cheeks were very pale and altogether he was in a bad way.

'Listen,' I said, 'you may be sure that the rector will begin with me and not with you, so you say exactly the same with variations. You did not do anything in particular, as a matter of fact.

Don't forget one thing: for making an uproar and for telling lies ever so many of you will be put in prison, but if you blab, and implicate anyone in front of me, I'll tell the others and we'll poison your existence for you.'

The baron promised and kept his word honourably.

The rector at that time was Dvigubsky, one of the relics and patterns of the professors before the flood, or to be more accurate, before the fire, that is, before 1 8 1 2. They are extinct now; with the directorship of Prince Obolensky the patriarchal period of Moscow University comes to an end. In those days the government did not trouble itself about the university; the professors lectured or did not lecture, the students attended or did not attend ; besides, if they did attend, it was not in uniform jackets ad instar of light-cavalry officers, but in all sorts of outrageous and eccentric garments, in tiny little forage-caps that would scarcely stay on their virginal locks. The professors consisted of two camps or strata who quietly hated each other. One group was composed exclusively of Germans, the other of non-Germans.

The Germans, among whom were good-natured and learned men, were distinguished by their ignorance of the Russian language and their disinclination to learn it, their indifference to the students, their spirit of Western favouritism and uninspired routine, their immoderate smoking of cigars and the immense quantity of decorations which they never took off. The non

Germans for their part knew not a single (living) language except Russian, were servile in their patriotism, as uncouth as seminarists, were sat upon, and instead of an immoderate consumption of cigars indulged in an immoderate consumption of liquor. The Germans for the most part hailed from Gottingen and the non-Germans were sons of priests.

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Dvigubsky was one of the non-Germans: his appearance was so edifying that a student from a seminary, who carne in for a list of classes, went up to kiss his hand and ask for his blessing, and ah,·ays called him 'Father Rector.' At the same time he was awfully like an owl with an Anna ribbon round its neck, in which form another student, who had received a more worldly t>ducation, drew his portrait. When he carne into our lectureroom either with the dean, Churnakov, or with Kotelnitsky, who had charge of a cupboard inscribed Materia McdJca, kept for some unknown reason in the Mathematical lecture-room-or with Reiss, who had bet>n bespoken from Germany because his unclt> was a very goorl chemist, and who, when he read French, used to call a lamp-wick a beton de colon, and poison, poisson, and pronounced the word for 'lightning' so unfortunately that many people supposed he was swearing-we looked at them \vith round eyes as at a collection of fossils.

But Dvigubsky was not at all a good-natured professor; he receiver! us extremely curtly and was rude. I reeler! off a fearful rigmarole and was disrespectful ; the baron served the same story warmed up. The rector, irritilterl, told us to present ourselves next morning beforE' tlw Council ; and there for half an hour they questioned, condemned and sentenced us and sent the sentence to Prince Golitsyn for confirmation.

I had scarcely had time to give an imitation of the trial and the sentPnce of the Unin•rsity St>nate to tht:> students five or six times in the lecture-room when all at once, at the beginning of a lecture_ the inspector, who was a major in the Russian army and a French dancing-master, made his appearance with a noncommissioned officPr, bringing an order to take me and conduct me to the university prison. Some of the students came to see me on my way, and in the courtyard, too, there was a crowd of young men, so Pvidently I was not the first taken ; as we passed they all waved their caps and their hands ; the university soldiers tried to rnon• tlu'rn back but the students would not go.

In the dirty cellar which sPrved as a prison I found t\vo of the arrpsted mPn, Arapetov and Orlov; Prince Andrey Obolensky and RosPnheirn had bePn put in another room; in all, there were six of us punislwd for the Malov nffair. OrdPrs \Wre given that we should bP kPpt on bread and water; tlw rPctor sent some sort of soup, which we refused, and it was well we did so. As soon as it got dark and the university gre\Y empty, our comrades brought us chPPse, garnP, cigars, wine, and liqueurs. The soldier in chargP ''"a' nngry and started gmrnbling, but accepted twenty kopecks and carried in the provisions. After midnight he went

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further and let several visitors come in to us; so we spent our time feasting by night and going to bed by day.

On one occasion it happened that the assistant-director, Panin, the brother of the Minister of Justice, faithful to his Horse

Guard habits, took it into his head to go the round of the State prison in the university cellar by night. We had only just lit a candle and put it under a chair so that the light could not be seen from outside, and were beginning on our nocturnal luncheon, when we heard a knock at the outer door; not the sort of knock that meekly begs a soldier to open, which is more afraid of being heard than of not being heard ; no, this was a peremptory knock, a knock of authority. The soldier was petrified ; we hid the bottles and our visitors in a little cupboard, blew out the candle and threw ourselves on our pallets. Panin came in.

'I believe you are smoking?' he said, so lost in thick clouds of smoke that we could hardly distinguish him from the inspector who was carrying a lantern. 'Where do they get a light? Do you give it to them?'

The soldier swore that he did not. \Ve answered that we had tinder with us. The inspector undertook to remove it and to take away the cigars, and Panin withdrew without noticing that the number of caps in the room was double the number of heads.

On Saturday evening the inspector made his appearance and announced that I and one other of us might go home, but that the rest would remain until Monday. This proposal seemed to me insulting and I asked the inspector whether I might remain; he drew back a step, looked at me with that menacingly graceful air with which tsars and heroes in a ballet depict anger in a dance, and saying, 'Stay by all means,' went away. I got into more trouble at home for this last escapade than for the whole business.

And so the first nights I slept away from home were spent i n prison. Not long afterwards it was m y lot t o have experience o f a different prison, and there I stayed not eight days16 btU nine months, after which I went not home but into exile. All that comes later, however.

From that time forward I enjoyed the greatest popularity in the lecture-room. From the first I had been accepted as a good comrade. After the Malov affair I became, like Gogol's famous lady, a comrade 'agreeable in all respects.'

! G In a written deposition r;iven to th<> Commission of Inquiry in 1 834, Herzen testified that he had been under aaest for seventy-two hours in 1 83 1 in connection with the Malov case. ( A .S. )

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Did we learn anything with all this going on? Could Y>e study? I suppose we did. The teaching was more meagre and its scope narrower than in the 'forties. It is not the function of a university, however, to give a complete training in any branch of knowledge ; its business is to put a man in a position to continue to study on his own account; its work is to provoke inquiry, to teach men to ask questions. And this was certainly done by such professors as M. G. Pavlov, and on the other hand by such as Kachenovsky. But contact with other young men in the lecture-rooms and the exchange of ideas and of what they had been reading did more to develop the students than lectures and professors . . . . Moscow University did its work ; the professors whose lectures contributed to the development of Lermontov, Belinsky,1' Turgenev, Kavelin,IB and Pirogov19 may play their game of boston in tranquillity and still more tranquilly lie under the earth.

And what originals, what prodigies, there were among themfrom Fedor lvanovich Chumakov, who adjusted formulas to those in Poinsot's course with the perfect liberty of a privileged landowner, adding letters and taking them away, taking squares for roots and x for the known quantity, to Gavriil Myagkov, who lectured on military tactics, the toughest science in the world.

From perpetually dealing with heroic subjects Myagkov's very appearance had acquired a military mien; buttoned up to the throat and wearing a cravat that was quite unbending, he delivered his lectures as though giving words of command.

'Gentlemen! ' he would shout; 'Into the field!-Artillery!'

This did not mean that cannon were advancing into the field of battle, but simply that such was the heading in the margin.

What a pity Nicholas avoided visiting the university! If he had seen Myagkov, he would certainly have made him Director.

And Fedor Fcdorovich Reiss, who in his chemistry lectures 17 Belinsky, Vissarion Grigorevich ( 1 8 1 0-48), was the greatest of Russian critics. See below. "Return to Moscow and Intellectual Debate," pp.

229-53. ( D.M. )

18 Kavelin. Konstantin Dmitriyevich ( 1 818-85 ), a writer of brilliant articles on political and econom.ic questions. A friend of Turgenev. ( Tr.) 19 Pirogov, Nikolay Ivanovich ( 1 8 1 0-81 ) , the great surgeon and medical authority, was the first in Russia to investigate disease by experiments on animals, and to use anaesthetics for operations. He took an actiYe part in education and the reforms of the early years of Alexander I I's reign, and published many treatises on medical subjects. To his genius and influence as Professor of Medicine in Petersburg UniYersity is largely due the very high standard of medical training in Russia. (Tr.)

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never went beyond the second person of the chemical divinity, i.e. hydrogen! Reiss, who had actually been made Professor of Chemistry because not he, but his uncle, had at one time studied that science! Towards the end of the reign of Catherine, the old uncle had been invited to Russia ; he did not want to come, so sent his nephew instead . . . .

Among the exceptional incidents of my course, which lasted four years (for the university was closed for a whole academic -year during the cholera ) , were the cholera itself, the arrival of Humboldt and the visit of Uvarov.

Humboldt, on his return from the Urals, was greeted in Moscow at a solemn session of the Society of Natural Scientists at the university, the members of which were various senators and governors-people, on the whole, who took no interest in the sciences, natural or unnatural. The fame of Humboldt, a privy councillor of His Prussian Majesty, on whom the Tsar had graciously bestowed the Anna, and to whom he had also commanded that the insignia and diploma should be presented free of charge, had reached even them. They were determined to keep up their dignity before a man who had been on Chimborazo and had lived at Sans-Souci .

To this day ·we look upon Europeans and upon Europe in the same way as provincials look upon those who live in the capital, with deference and a feeling of our own inferiority, knuckling under and imitating them, taking everything in which we are different for a defect, blushing for our peculiarities and concealing them. The fact is that we \'\"ere intimidated, and had not recovered from the jeers of Peter I, from Biron's insults, from the arrogance of Germans in the services and of French instructors.

They tal k in Western Europe of our duplicity and vvily cunning; they mistake the desire to show off and swagger a bit for the desire to deceive. Among us the same man is ready to be naively liberal \vith a Liberal or to pretend to agrPe with a Legitimist, and this with no ulterior motive, simply from politeness and a desire to please; the bump de l' approbativite is strongly developed on our skulls.

'Prince Dmitry Golitsyn,' observed Lord Durham, 'is a true Whig, a Whig in soul ! '

Prince D . V . Golitsyn was a respectable Russian gentleman, but why he was a Whig and in what way he was a Whig I do not understand. You may be certain that in his old age the prince wanted to please Durham ar:d so played the Whig.

The reception of Humboldt in Moscow and in the university

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was no jesting matter. The Governor-General, various military and civic chiefs, and the members of the Senate, all turned up with ribbons across their shoulders, in full uniform, and the professors wore swords like warriors and carried three-cornered hats under their arms. Humboldt, suspecting nothing, came in a dark-blue dress-coat with gold buttons, and, of course, was overwhelmed with confusion. From the vestibule to the great hall of the Society of Natural Scientists ambushes were prepared for him m � all sides: here stood the rector, there a dean, here a budding professor, there a veteran whose career was over and who for that reason spoke very slowly; everyone welcomed him in Latin, in German, in French, and all this took place in those awful stone tubes, called corridors, in which one cannot stop for a minute without being laid up with a cold for a month. Humboldt, hat in hand, listened to everything and replied to everything-! feel certain that all the savages among ,.,.hom he had been. r!'d-skinm•d and copper-coloured, caused him less trouble than his Moscow reception.

As soon as he reached the hall and sat down, he had to get up again. The Director, Pisarev, thought it necessary, in brief but vigorous language, to issue an order of the day in Russian concerning the services of his Excellency, the celebrated traveller; after which Sergey Glinka,20 'the officer,' with an 1812 voice, deep and hoarse, recited his poem which began:

Humboldt-Promethce de nos jours!

While Humboldt wanted to talk about his observation on the magnetic needle and to compare his meteorological records on the Urals with those of Moscow, the rector came up to show him instead something plaited of the imperial hair of Peter I . . .

and Ehrenberg and Rose had difficulty in finding a chance to tell him something about their discoveries.21

20 S. N. Glinka, author of patriotic Yerses of no merit. Referred to as

'the officer' by Pushkin in a poem. ( Tr.)

21 How diversely Humboldt's travels were understood in Russia may be gathered from the account of a Ural Cossack who sen·ed in the office of the Governor of Perm; he likPd to describe how he had escorted the mad Prussian prince, Gumplot. \Yhat did he do? '\Veil, the silliest things, collecting grasses, looking at the sand; in the saltings he says to me, through the interpreter, "Get into the water and fptch what's at the bottom ;" well, I got just what is usually at the hottom, and he asks, "Is the water very cold at the hottom?" No, my lad, I thought, you won't catch me. So I d rew myself up at attention, and answered, "\Vhen it's our duty, your Highness, it's of no consequence: we are glad to do our

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Things are not much better among us in the non-official world: ten years later Liszt was received in Moscow society in much the same way. Enough silly things were done in his honour in Germany, but here his reception was of quite a different quality. In Germany it was all old-maidish exaltation, sentimentality, all Blumcnstreuen, while with us it was all servility, homage paid to power, rigid standing at attention; with us it was all 'I have the honour to present myself to your Excellency.'

And here, unfortunately, there was also Liszt's fame as a celebrated Lovelace to add to it all. The ladies flocked round him, as peasant-boys on country roads flock round a traveller while his horses are being harnessed, inquisitively examining himself, his carriage, his cap . . . . No one listened to anybody but Liszt, no one spoke to anybody else, nor ans"vered anybody else. I remember that at one evening party Khomyakov, blushing for the honourable company, said to me,

'Please let us argue about something, that Liszt may see that there are people in the room not exclusively occupied with him.'

For the consolation of our ladies I can only say one thing, that in just the same wa::' Englishwomen dashed about, crowded round, pestered and obstructed other celebrities such as Kossuth and afterwards Garibaldi and others. But alas for those who want to learn good manners from Englishwomen and their husbands!

Our second 'famous' traveller was also in a certain sense 'the Prometheus of our day,' only he stole the light not from Jupiter but from men. This Prometheus, sung not by Glinka but by Pushkin himself in his 'Epistle to Lucullus,' was the Assistant Minister of Public Instruction, S. S. (not yet Count) Uvarov. He amazed us by the multitude of language5 and the heterogeneous hotch-potch which he knew; a veritable shopman behind the counter of enlightenment, he preserved in his memory samples of all the sciences, the concluding summaries, or, better, the rudiments. In the reign of Alexander, he wrote Liberal brochures in French; later on he corresponded on Greek subjects with Goethe in German. When he became Minister he discoursed on Slavonic poetry of the fourth century, upon which Kachenovsky observed to him that in those days our forefathers had enough to do to fight the bears, let alone singing ballads about the gods of Samothrace and the mercy of tyrants. He used to carry in his pocket, by way of a testimonial, a letter from best." ' ('\Ve are glad, etc.,' was the formula which soldiers were expected to shout when addressed on parade by a senior officer.) (R.)

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Goethe, in which the latter paid him an extremely odd compliment, saying: 'There is no need for you to apologise for your style-you have succeeded in what I never could succeed i n doing-forgetting German grammar.'

�·

In August 1830 we went to Vasilevskoye, stopped, as we usually did, at the Radcliffian castle of Perkhushkovo and, after feeding ourseh·es and our horses, \\·ere preparing to continue our journey. Bakay, with a tov•el round his waist like a belt, had already shouted: 'Off ! ' whf'n a man galloped up on horseback, signalling to us to stop, and one of the Senator's postillions, covered with dust and sweat, leapt off his horse and handed my father an envelope. In the envelope was the ne\vs of the Revolution of July ' There Wf're two pages of the Journal des Debats which he had brought with the letter; I read them over a hundred times and got to know them by heart, and for the first time I found the country dull.

It was a glorious time; events came quickly. Scarcely had the meagre> figure of Charles X had time to disapprar into the mists of Holyrood. whcn Belgium flarrd up, thr throne of thf' Citizen King tottrrrd. and a hot, revolutionary brf'eze began to blow in drbates and literature. Novels, plays, porms, all once more brcame propaganda and conflict.

At that time we knew nothing of the artificial stage-setting of thf' rf'volution in France>. and \Yf' took it all fo1· honrst cash.

Anyone who cares to see how strongly the ne\vs of the July Revolution affectf'd thr younger generation should read Heine's description of how he heard in Hf'ligoland 'that the great pagan Pan was drad.' There was no sham ardour there: Heine at thirtv was o.s enthusiastic, as childishly excited, as we were at eighteeri..

\Ye followed stcp by step every word, every event, the bold questions and abrupt answers. the doings of Gf'nf'ral Lafayette.

and of Gf'neral Lamarque; we not only knew every detail concerning them but lovcd all the leading men (the Radicals, of coursP) and lf'pt thPir portraits.

In dw midst of this ff'rment all at once, like a bomb exploding closP hv. the news of tlw rising in \\'arsaw stunnPd us. This was not far away : this was at home, aml we looked at each other with t!'at·s in our <':V(''· repf'ating our favourite line: N cin ' rs sind keinr !cere Triiumc! 22

�� From J. "'· ,·an Goethe's 1/offnung. ( For l..cinr read nicht.) (A.S.)

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We rejoiced at every defeat of Dibich; refused to believe in the failures of the Poles, and I at once added to my ikonostasis the portrait of Thaddeus Kokiuszko.

It was just then that I saw Nicholas for the second time and his face was still more strongly engraved on my memory. The nobility and gentry \vere giving a ball in his honour. I was i n the gallery of the Assembly Hall and could stare at him t o my heart's content. He had not yet begun to wear a moustache. His face was still young, but I was struck by the change in it since the time of the coronation. He stood morosely by a column, staring coldly and grimly before him, without looking at anyone. He had grown thinner. In those features, in those pewtery eyes one distinctly could read the fate of Poland, and indeed of Russia as well. He was shaken, frightened; he doubted23 the securi ty of his throne and was ready to avenge himself for what he had suffered, for his fear and his doubts.

With the subjection of Poland all the restrained malignancy of the man was let loose. Soon we felt it, too.

The network of espionage cast about the university from the beginning of the reign began to be drawn tighter. In 1 832 a Pole who was a student in our faculty disappeared. Sent to the university as a government scholar, not at his own initiative, he had been put in our course; I made friends with him; he was discreet and melancholy in his behaviour; we never heard a bitter word from him, but we never heard a word of weakness either. One 23 Here i; what Denis Davydov• tells in his memoirs: 'The Tsar said one day to A. P. Yermolov: "I was once in a very terrible situation during the Polish 'Var. My wife was expecting her confinement; rebellion had broken out in Novgorod; I had only two squadrons of the Horse Guards left me; the news from the army was only reaching me through Kiinigsber�. I, �vas forced to surround myself with soldiers discharged from hospital.

The memoirs of this partisan leave no room for doubt that Nicholas, like Arakcheyev, like all cold-hearted, cruel and vindictive people was a coward. Here is what General Chechensky told Davydov: 'You know that I can appreciate manliness and so you will believe my words. I was near the Tsar on the 1 4th December. and I watched him all the time.

I can assure you on my honour that the Tsar, who was very pale all the time, had his heart in his boots.'

And Davydov himself tells us: 'During the riot in the Haymarket the Tsar only visited the capital on the second day, when order was restored.

The Tsar was at Peterhof, and himself once observed casually, "Volkon-

• Davydov (see Tolstoy's War and Peace) and Yerrnolov were both leaders of the partisan or guerilla warfare against the French in 1 8 1 2. ( Tr.)

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morning he was missing from the lectures; next day he was missing still. We began to make inquiries; the government scholars told us in secret that he had bee-n fetched away at night, that he had been summoned before the authorities, and then people had come for his papers and belongings and had ordered them not to speak of it. There the matter ended: we never heard anything of the fate of this unfortunate young man.

A few months passed when suddenly there was a rumour in the lecture-room that several students had been seized in the night; among them were Kostenetsky, Kohlreif, Antonovich and others; we knew them well : they were all excellent fellows.

Kohlreif, the son of a Protestant pastor, was an extremely gifted musician. A court-martial wa s appointed to try them; this meant in plain language that they \Vere doomed to perish. We were all in a fever of suspense to know what would happen to them,24

but from the first thev too vanished without trace. The storm that was crushing the sprouts was close at hand. We no longer had a foreboding of its approach: we heard it, we saw i t, and we huddl<'d closer and closer together.

The danger strung up our exasperated nerves even tighter, made our hearts beat faster and made us love each other with greater fervour. There were five of us at first25 and now we met Vadim Passek.

In Vadim there was a great deal that was new to us. With slight variations we had all developNl in similar ways: that is, we knew nothing but Moscow and our country estates, we had all lenrned out of the same books, had lessons from the same sky and I wen' standing il l! day on a mound in the garden, l istening for the sound of cilnnon-shot from the dirPction of Petersburg." Instead of anxiously l istPning in the garden. ilnrl continually sending couriers to Petersburg." Dm·ydov adds. 'he ought to have hastened there himself; anyone of the slightest manliness would haYe don!' so. On the following dily (when 1'\·ery thinr; was quiet) th<' Tsm· dmYe in h is carriage into the crowd which lill<>d the sr1uare. illl!l shouted to it. "On your knees!"

and the crowd hurri<>rlly ohPyed the order. ThP Tsar, seeing se\·eral people dressed in ciYil ian clothes ( ilmong ! hose following the carriage) .

imagined thil t they wen' suspicious cililracters. and ordered the poor

\H!'tches to he takl'n to the lock-up and. turning to the peoplP. began shouting: ''Tlwy are all Yile Poll's; th<'y haYe <>gg<'rl you on." Such iln ill-timed Sillly compl<'t<'ly ruinl'd the effpct. in my opinion.'

A strilng<' sort of hinl was this Nirholilsl

�4 They wPre made to sen-!' in thl' ilrmy as priYiltes. ( ,t.S.)

�a Herz<>n. Ogarcv, N. I. Sazonm·, N. M. Satin, A. N. Savich. ( A.S.)

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tutors, and been educated at home or at a boarding-school preparatory for the university. Vadim had been born in Siberia during his father's exile, in the midst of want and privations.

His father had been himself his teacher. He had grown up in a large family of brothers and sisters, under a crushing weight of poverty but in complete freedom. Siberia sets its own imprint on a man, which is quite unlike our provincial stamp; it is far from being so vulgar and petty; it displays more healthiness and better tempering. Vadim was a savage in comparison with us.

His daring was of another kind, unlike ours, more that of the bogatyr, 20 and sometimes arrogant; the aristocracy of misfortune had developed in him a peculiar self-esteem ; but he knew how to love others, too, and gave himself to them without stint.

He was bold, even reckless to excess-a man born in Siberia, and in an exiled family too, has an advantage over us in not being afraid of Siberia.

Vadim from family tradition hated the autocracy with his whole soul, and he took us to his heart as soon as we met. vVe made friends very quickly-though, indeed, at that time, there was neither ceremony nor reasonable precaution, nothing like it, to be seen in uur circle.

'Would you like to make the acquaintance of Ketscher, of whom you have heard so much? ' Vadim said to me.

'I certainly should.'

'Come to-morrow evening, then, at seven o'clock; don't be late: he'll be at my place.'

I went-Vadim was not at home. A tall man with an expressive face and a good-naturedly menacing look behind his spectacles was waiting for him. I took up a book: he took up a book.

'But perhaps you,' he said as he opened it, 'perhaps you are Herzen?'

'Yes; and you're Ketscher?'

A conversation began and grew more and more lively.

'Allow me,' Ketscher interrupted me roughly. 'Allow me: do me the kindness to use "thou" to me.'

'Let us use "thou." '

And from that minute (which may have been at the end of 1831 ) we were inseparable friends ; from that minute the anger and kindness, the laugh and the shout of Ketscher have resounded at all the stages, in all the adventures of our life.

20 Legendary hero. (R.)

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Our meeting with Vadim introduced a new element into our Cossack brotherhood.

A year passed, the trial of my arrested comrades was over. They were found guilty (just as we were later on, and later still the Petrashevsky group) 27 of a design to form a secret society, and of criminal conversations; for this they were sent as common soldiers to Orenburg. Nicholas made an exception of one of them, Sungurov. He had completed his studies, and was in the service, married and had children. He was condemned to be deprived of his rights of status and to be exiled to Siberia.

'What could a handful of young students do? They destroyed themselves for nothing ! ' All that is very sensible, and people who argue in that wa.v ought to be gratified at the good sense of the younger generation of Russians that followed us. After our affair, \"·:hich followed that of Sungurov, fifteen years passed in tranquillity before the Petrashevsky affair, and it was those fifteen years from which Russia is only just beginning to recover and by which two generations were broken, the elder smothered in violence, and the younger poisoned from childhood, whose sickly representatives we are seeing to-day.

After the Decembrists all attempts to form societies were, i n effect, unsuccessful ; the scantiness o f our forces and the vagueness of our aims pointed to the necessity for another kind of work-for preliminnry work upon ourselves. All that is true.

But what would young men be made of who could wait for theoretical solutions while calmly looking on at what was being done round them, at the hundreds of Poles clanking their fetters on the Vladimir Road, at serfdom, at the soldiers flogged in the Khodynsky field by some General Lashkevich, at fellow-students who disnppeared and were never heard of again? For the moral purification of the generation, as a pledge of the future, they were bound to be so indignant as to be senseless in their attempts and disdainful of danger. The savage punishments inflicted on boys of sixteen or seventeen served as a stern lesson and a kind of hardening process; the paw of the beast hung over every one of us, proceeding from a brenst without a heart, and dispelled for good all rosy hopes of indulgence for youth. It was dangerous to 27 The members of the Petrashevsky group. of whom Dostoevsky was one, were condemned to death. and led out to the scaffold. At the last moment their sentence was commuted to penal servitude in Siberia. ( Tr.)

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play at Liberalism, and no one could dream of playing at conspiracy. For one badly concealed tear over Poland, for one boldly uttered word, there were years of exile, of the white strap,28 and sometimes even the fortress; that was why it was important that those words were uttered and those tears were shed. YoWlg people sometimes perished but they perished without checking the mental activity that was trying to solve the sphinx riddle of Russian life; indeed, they even justified its hop('S.

Our turn came now. Our names were already on the list-s of the secret police.29 The first play of the light-blue cat with the mouse began as follows.

When the young men who had been condemned were being sent off to Orenburg on foot under escort without sufficient warm clothing, Ogarev in our circle, I. Kircyevsky in his, got up subscriptions. All the condemned men were without money. Kireyevsky brought the money collected to the commander, Staal, a good-natured old man of whom I shall have more to say later.

Staal promised to remit the money and asked Kireyevsky,

'But what arc these papers?'

'The names of those who subscribed,' answered Kireycvsky,

'and the amounts.'

'You do believe that I shall remit the money?' asked the old man.

'There's no doubt of that.'

'And I imagine that those who have given it to you trust you.

And so what is the usc of our keeping their names?' With thcsc words Staal thre\v the list into the fire, and of course it was an exccllent thing to do.

Ogarev himsclf took the money to the barracks, and this went off without a hitch; but the young men took it into their heads to send their thanks from Orenburg to their comrades, and, as a govcrnmcnt official was going to Moscow, they seized the opporttmity and asked him to take a letter, which they were afraid to trust to the post. The official did not fail to take advantage of this rare chance to prove all the ardour of his loyal sentiments, and presented the letter to the general of gendarmes in Moscow.

28 I.e., of supervision by the political police, "·hose light blue uniform was worn with a white strap. ( Tr.)

29 Ogarev and Satin had been under secrt:'t police sunt:'illance since the summer of 1 833, in connection "·ith the Sungurov affair. In December 1 83 1. the police observed Ogarev and Sokolovsky singing the 'Marseillaise'

at the entrance to the Maly Theatre. Oblensky had been under surveillance by the police since 1 832. ( A.S.)

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The general of gendarmes at this time was Lesovsky, who was appointed to the post when A. A. Volkov went out of his mind, imagining that the Poles wanted to offer him the crown of Poland (an ironical trick of destiny to send a general of gendarmes mad over the crown of the Jagellons! 30 ) . Lesovsky, himself a Pole, was not a bad man, and was no fool : having wasted his property over cards and a French actress, he philosophically preferred the place of general of gendarmes in Moscow to a place in the debturs' prison of the same city.

Lesovsky summoned Ogarcv, Ketschcr, Satin, Vadim, I. Obolensky and the others, and charged them with being in communication with political criminals. On Ogarcv's observing that he had not written to any one, and that if any one had written to him he could not be responsible for it, and that, moreover, no letter had reached him, Lesovsky answered:

'You got up a subscription for them, that's still worse. For the first time the Sovereign is so merciful as to pardon you ; only I warn you, gentlemen, a strict supervision will be kept over you: be careful.'

Lesovsky looked round at them all with a significant glance and, his eyes resting upon Ketscher, who was taller and a little older than the rest and who raised his eyebrows so fiercely, he added:

'You, my good sir, ought to be ashamed, in your station in life.'

It might have been supposed that Ketscher was vice-chancellor of the Russian Heraldry Office, while as a matter of fact he was onlv a humble district doctor.

(was not sent for: probably my name was not in the letter.

This threat was like a promotion, a consecration, a winning of our spurs. Lesovsky's advice thre\v oil on the fire, and as though to make their future task easier for the police we put on velvet hercts a Ia Karl Sand31 and tied identical tricolour scarves round our necks.

30 Th<:' dynasty of kings of Poland from 1 386 to 1 5 72. (Tr.) 3 1 Karl San

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After tiLe UniversitJi

BEFORE THE STORM BROKE over our heads my time at the university was coming to an end. The ordinary anxieties, the nights without sleep spent in useless mnemonic tortures, the superficial study in a hurry and the thought of the examination overcoming all interest in science-all that was as it a lways is. I wrote a dissertation on astronomy for the gold medal, and got the silver one. I am certain that I am incapable of understanding now what I wrote then, and that it was worth its weight-in silver.

It has sometimes happened to me to dream that I am a student going in for an examination-! think with horror how much I have forgotten and feel that I shall be plucked-and I have woken up rejoicing from the bottom of my heart that the sea and passports, and years and visas cut me off from the university, that no one is going to torture me, and no one will dare to give me a horrid 'one.'1 And, indeed, the professors would be surprised that I should have gone so far back in so few years.

Indeed, this did once happen to me.2

After the final examination the professors shut themselves up to rE'ckon the marks, while we, excited by hopes and doubts, hung about the corridors and entrance in little groups. Sometimes someone would come out of the council-room. We rushed to learn our fate, but for a long time there was still nothing settled. At last Heyman came out.

1 Marks in Russian educational establishments range from one to five.

(R. )

2 In 1 844 I met PereYoshchikov at Shchepkin's and sat beside him at dinner. Towards the end he could not resist saying: 'It is a pity, a very great pity, that circumstances preYented you from taking up work. You had excellent abilities.'

'But you know it's not for everyone to climb up to heaven behind you.

\Ve are busv here on earth at work of some sort.'

'Upon my word, to be sure that may be work of a sort. Hegelian philosophy perhaps. I have read your articles, and there is no understanding them; bird's language, that's queer sort of work. No, indeed! '

For a long while I was amused a t this Yerdict, that is, for a long while I could not understand that our language really was poor; if it was a bird's it must haYe been the bird that was Minerva's favourite.

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'I congratulate you,' he said to me, 'you are a graduate.'

'Who else, who else?'

'So-and-so, and So-and-so.'

I felt a t once sad and gay; as I went out at the university gates I thought that I was not going out at them again as I had yesterday and every day; I was becoming estranged from the university, from that parental home where I had spent four years, so youthfully and so well; on the other hand I was comforted by the feeling of being accepted as completely grown-up, and, why not admit it? by the title of graduate I had gained all at once.3

Alma Mater! I am so greatly indebted to the university, and li,·ed its life and with it so long after I had finished my studies, that I cannot think of it without love and respect. It ,..,.ill not charge me with ingratitude, though at least as regards the university gratitude is easy; it is inseparable from the love and bright memories of youth . . . and I send it my blessing from this far-off foreign land!

The year we spent after taking our degrees made a triumphant end to our early youth. It was one prolonged feast of friendship, exchange of ideas, inspiration, carousing . . . .

The little group of university friends who had survived the course did not part, but went on living in their common sympathies and fancies, and no one thought of his material situation or of arranging his future. I should not think \veil of this in men of mature age, but I prize it in the young. Youth, if only it has not been desiccated by the moral corruption of petit bourgeois ideas, is everywhere impractical, and is especially bound to be so in a young country which is full of strivings and has attained so littlP. Moreover, to be impractical is far from implying anything false: everything turned towards the future is bound to have a share of idealism. If it were not for the impractical characters, all the practical people \vould remain at the same dull stage of perpetual repetition.

:l Among the papers sent me from Moscow I found a note in which I informed my cousin who \vas then in the country with the princess that I had taken my d!'grP!'. 'The !'xamination is oYer, and I am a graduate!

You cannot imagine the sweet feeling of freedom after four years of

"·ork. Did you think of me on Thursday? It was a stining day, and the torture lasted from nine in the morning till nine in th!' PYcning.' (26th 1 mw, 1 8B.) I fane�· I adclt•d two hours for effect or to round off the sentrnc!'. But for all my satisfMtion my ,·anity was stung by another studPnt's ( AlexandPr DrashusoY ) winning the gold medal. In a second lettPr of the 6th July. I find : 'To-day was the prizegiYing, but I was not there. I did not care to be the second to receiYe a medal.'

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Some enthusiasm preserves a man from real spills far more than any moral admonitions. I remember youthful orgies, moments of rcvclrv that sometimes went beyond bounds, but I do not remember o"nc really immoral a ffair i;; our circle, nothing of which a man would have to feel seriously ashamed, which he would try to forget and conceal. Everything was done openly, and what is bad is rarely done openly. Half, more than half, of the heart was turned awav from idle sensuality and morbid egoism, which concentrate "on impure thoughts �nd accen tuate vices.

I consider it a great misfortune for a nation when their young generation has no youth ; we have already observed that for this being young is not enough by itself. The most grotesque period of German student life is a hundred times better than the petit bourgeois maturity of young men in France and England. To my mind the elderly Americans of fifteen arc simply repulsive.

In France there was at one time a brilliant aristocratic youth, and latc>r on a revolutionary youth. All the Saint-Justs4 and HochPs,5 Marceaux" and Dc>smoulins," t}w heroic children who grew up on the> gloomy poetry of Jean-Jacques, were real youths.

The Rc>volution was the work of young men: neither Danton nor Robespi<>rre nor Louis XIV himsPlf outliw'd his thirty-fifth year. vVith Napoleon the young men were turnPd into orderlies ;

\vith the Restoration. 'the revival of old age'-youth was utterly incompatible-everything became mature, businesslike, that is, petit bourgeois.

The last vouth of France \YPre the Saint-Simonists and the Fouricrists. The few exceptions cannot alter the prosaically dull character of French youth. Escousse and Lebras7 shot themsPlvcs because they were young in a socictv of old mPn. Others 4 Louis de Saint-Just ( 1 767-94) was a mC'mhPr of thP ConvPntion and the Committee of Public Safety. a follower of nohPspierre and beheaded with him at the age of twenty-se,·en. ( Tr.) 5 Lazare Hoch<> ( 1 768-97) and Franc;ois-Se,·erin ;\larceau ( 1 769-96) , were generals of the FrPnch Revolutionary Army. Both wen' engagC'd in the pacification of La Vendee. Both pcrished before reaching the age of thiPtv. ( Tr.)

6 Ca�ille Desmoulins ( 1 760-9·�) was one of the earlv leaders of thC'

French Revolution. and IH•aded the a ttack on thP Bastifle; he was afterwards accused of bC'ing a 1\todcrnte and beheaded together with Danton at the age of thirty-four. (Tr.)

7 Victor Escousse (b. 1 8 1 3 ) and Auguste Lcbras (h. 1 8 1 6) were poets who wrote in collaboration a successful play. Farruck lc Maurc. followed by an unsuccessful one caller! Ra)·mond. On the failur£' of the latter they committed suicide in 1 832. Beranger wrote a poem on them. (Tr. )

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struggled like fish thrown out of the water on to the muddy bank, till some were caught on the barricades and others on the hooks of the Jesuits.

But, since youth asserts its rights, the greater number of young Frenchmen work off their youth in a Bohemian period ; that is, if they have no money, they live in little cafes with little grisettes in the Quartier Latin, and in grand cafes with grand lorettes, if they have money. Instead of a Schiller period, they have a Paul de Kock period; in this strength, energy, evl:!rything young is rJ.pidly and rather wretchedly wasted and the man is ready-for a commis in a commercial house. The Bohemian period leaves at the bottom of the soul one passion only-the thirst for money, and the whole future is sacrificed to it-there are no other interests ; these practical people laugh at theoretical questions and despise women (the result of numerous conquests over those whose trade it is to be conquered) . As a rule the Bohemian period is passed under the guidance of some worn-out sinner, a faded celebrity, d'un vieux prostituc, lh·ing at someone else's expense, an actor who has lost his voice, or a painter whose hands tremble, and he is the model who is imitated in accent, in dress, and above all in a haughty view of human affairs and a profound understanding of good fare.

In England the Bohemian period is replan•d by a paroxysm of pleasing originalities and amiable eccentricities. For instance, senseless tricks, absurd squandering of money, ponderous practical jokes, heavy. but carefully concealed vice, profitlE'ss trips to Calabria or Quito, to the north and to the south-with horses, dogs, races, and stuffy dinners by the way. and then a wife and an incredible number of fat, rosy babies ; business transactions, The Times, Parliament, and the old port which weighs them to the earth.

We played prank,, too. and we carou,ed, but thP funrlamPntal tone was not the same, the diapason was too elevated. Mischief and dissipation never became our goal. Our goal was faith in our vocation; supposing that we were mistaken, still, believing it as a fact, \Ve respected in ourselves and in each other the instruments of the common cause.

And in ,vhat did our feasts and orgies consist/ Suddenly it

\vould occur to us that in anotlwr two dnys it would he the sixth of December, St. Nicholas's day. Tlw supply of Nikolays was t<>rrific Nikolay Ogari_;v, N i kolay Satin, N ikolay Kctscher, i\' i kolav Sa zonov . . . .

'Gentlemen, who is going to celebrate the name-day?'

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'I ! I ! . . .'

'I shall the next day then.'

'That's all nonsense, what's the good of the next day? We will keep it in common-club together! And what a feast it will be! '

'Yes! yes! A t whose rooms are w e to meet?'

'Satin is ill, so obviously it must be at his.'

And so plans and calculations are made, and it is incredibly absorbing for the future guests and hosts. One N ikolay drives ·off to the Yar to order supper, another to Materne's for cheese and salami. Wine, of course, is bought in the Petrovka from Depre's, on whose price-list Ogarev wrote the epigram:

De pres ou de loin,

Mais je fournis toujours.

Our inexperienced taste went no further than champagne, and was so young that we sometimes even exchanged Rivesaltes mousseux for champagne. I once saw the name on a wine-list in Paris, remembered 1 833 and ordered a bottle, but, alas, even my memories did not help me to drink more than one glass.

Before the festive day the wines would be tried, and so it would be necessary to send a messenger for more, for clearly the samples were liked.

For the celebration of the four name-days I wrote out a complete programme, which was deemed worthy of the special attention of the inquisitor Golitsyn, who asked me at the enquiry whether the programme had been carried out exactly.

'A Ia lettre,' I replied. He shrugged his shoulders as though he had spent his whole life in the Smolny Convent or keeping Good Friday.

After supper as a rule a vital question arose; a question that aroused controversy, i .e. how to prepare the punch. Other things were usually eaten and drunk in good faith, like the voting in Parliament, without dispute, but in this everyone must have a hand and, moreover, it was after supper.

'Light it-don't light it yet-light it how?-put it out with champagne or Sauternes?-put the fruit and pineapple in while it is burning or afterwards?'

'Obviously when it is burning, and then the whole aroma will go into the punch.'

'But, I say, pineapples float, the edges will be scorched, simply a calamity.'

'That's all nonsense,' Ketscher would shout louder than all,

'but what's not nonsense is that you must put out the candles.'

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The candles were put out; all the faces looked blue, and the features seemed to quiver with the movement of the flame. And meantime the temperature in the little room was becoming tropical from the hot rum. Everyone was thirsty and the punch was not ready. But Joseph, the Frenchman sent from the Yar, was ready; he had prepared something, the antithesis of punch, an iced beverage of various wines a la base de cognac. A genuine son of the 'grand peuple,' he explained to us, as he put in the French wine, that it was so good because it had twice passed the Equator. 'Oui oui, messieurs; deux fois l'equateur, messieurs!'

When the beverage, remarkable for its arctic iciness, had been finished and in fact there was no n('ed of more drink, Ketscher shouted, stirring the fiery lake in the soup-tureen and making the last lumps of sugar melt with a hiss and a wail,

'It's time to put it out! time to put it out ! '

The flame blushes from the champagne, and runs along the surface of the punch, with a kind of anguish and foreboding.

Then comes a voice of despair:

'But I say, old man, you're mad: don't you see the wax 1s melting right into the punch ?'

'Well, you try holding the bottle yourself in such heat so that the wax does not melt.'

'Well, something ought to be have been wrapped round it first,'

the distressed voice continues.

'Cups, cups, have you enough? How many are there of us?

Nine, ten, fourteen, yes, yes!'

'Where's one to find fourteen cups?'

'Well any one who hasn't got a cup must usc a glass.'

'The glasses will crack.'

'Never, never; you've only to put a spoon in them.'

Candles are brought, the last flicker of flame runs across the middle, makes a pirouette and vanishes.

'The punch is a success ! '

'It i s a great success ! ' i s said on all sides.

Next day my h('ad aches-1 feel sick. That's evidently from the punch, too mixed ! Am! on the spot I make a sincere resolution never to drink punch for the future ; it is a poison.

Petr Fedorovich comes in.

'You came home in somebody else's hat, sir: our hat is a better one.'

'The devil take it entirely.'

'Should I run to Nikolay. Mikhaylovich's Kuzma?'

'\Vhy, do you imagine someone went home without a hat?'

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'It won't hurt to go just in case.'

At this point I guess that the hat is only a pretext, and that Kuzma has invited Petr Fedorovich to the field of battle.

'You go and see Kuzma; only first ask the cook to let me have some sour cabbage.'

'So, Lexandr Ivanych, the gentlemen kept their name-days in fine style?'

'Yes, indeed: there hasn't been such a supper in our time.'

'So we shan't be going to the university to-day?'

My conscience pricks me and I make no answer.

'Your papa was asking me, "How is it," says he, "he is not up yet?" I was pretty smart. I said, "His honour's head aches; he complained of it from early morning, so I did not even pull up the blinds.'' "Well," said he, "you did right there." '

'But do let me go to sleep, for Christ's sake. You wanted to go and see Kuzma, so go.'

'This minute, this minute, sir; first I'll run for the cabbage.'

A heavy sleep closes my eyes again; two or three hours later I wake up much refreshed. vVhat can they be doing there?

Ketscher and Ogarev stayed the night. It's annoying that punch has such an effect on the head, for it must be owned it's very nice. It is a mistake to drink punch by the glass; henceforth and for ever I will certainly drink no more than a small cupful.

So ends the first part of our youth ; the second begins with prison. But before we enter upon it I must say something of the tendencies, of the ideas, with which it found us.

The period that followed the suppression of the Polish insurrection educated us rapidly. '\Ve were not tormented only by the fact that Nicholas had grown to his full stature and was firmly established in severity; we began with inward horror to perceive that in Europe, too, and especially in France, to which we looked for our political \vatchword and battle-cry, things were not going well ; we began to look upon our theories with suspicion.

The childish liberalism of 1 826, which gradually passed into the French political view preached by the Lafayettes and Benjamin Constant and sung by Beranger, lost its magic power over us after the ruin of Poland.

Then some of the young people, and Vadim among them, threw themselves into a profound, earnest study of Russian history.

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Others took to the study of German philosophy.