My Past and Thoughts

. . . But now within my heart by tempests chastened Silence and lassitude prevail, unchallenged,

And with a glow of tender inspiration

Upon the stone by friendship sanctified

l write our names . . _24

Nothing in the world was more opposed to the Slavophils than the hopeless pessimism "vhich was Chaadayev's vengeance on Russian life, the deliberate curse wrung out of him by suffering, with which he summed up his melancholy existence and the existence of a whole period of Russian history. He was bound to awaken violent opposition in them ; with bitterness and dismal malice he offended all that was dear to them, from Moscow downwards.

'In Moscow,' Chaadayev used to say, 'every foreigner is taken to look at the great cannon and the great bell-the cannon which cannot be fired and the bell which fell down before it was rung. It is an amazing town in which the objects of interest are distinguished by their absurdity; or perhaps that great bell without a tongue is a hieroglyph symbolic of this huge, dumb 23 Translated by Juliet Soskice. (R.)

�4 Translated by Juliet Soskice. (R.) These and the preceding verses are quotations. not always exact. from two of A. S. Pushkin's poems To Chaadayev ( 1 8 1 8 and 1 824) . H. attributes a wrong date to the second poem. (A.S.)

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land, inhabited by a race calling themselves Slavs as though wondering at the possession of human speech.'25

Chaadayev and the Slavoph ils alike stood facing the unsolved Sphinx of Russian life, the Sphinx sleeping under the overcoat of the soldier and the watchful eye of the Tsa r; they alike were asking: 'What will come of this? To live like this is impossible: the oppressiveness and absurdity of the present situation 1s obvious and unendurable-where is the way out?'

'There is none,' answered the man of the Petrine epoch of exclusively "'estern civilisation, who in Alexander's reign had believed in th!' European future of Russia. He sadly pointed to what the efforts of a whole age had led to. Culture had only gi,·en new methods of oppression, the church had become a mere shadow undl'r which the police lay hidden ; the people still tolerated and endured, the government still crushed and oppressed.

The history of other nations is the story of their emancipation.

Russian history is the development of serfdom and autocracy.'

Peter's uplll'aval made us into the worst that men can be made into-l'nlightcrzed slaves. \Ve have suffered enough, in this oppressiw, troubled moral condition, misunderstood by the p!'ople, struck down by the gowrnment-it is time to find rest, time to bring peace to one's soul, to find something to lean on . . . this almost meant 'time to die,' and Chaadayev thought to find in the Catholic Church the rest promised to all that labour anu arc heavy laden.

From the point of view of "'estern civilisation in the form in which it found expression at the time of restorations, from the point of view of Petrine Russia, this atti tude was completely j ustifieu. The Sla vophils solved the question in a different way.

Their solution impl ied a true consciousness of the living soul in the pPople ; their instinct was more penetrating than their reasoning. Thcv saw that the existing condition of Russia, however oppr<'ssive. was not a fatal disease. And while Chaadayev had a faint glimmer of the possibility of saving individuals, but not the people. the Slavophils had a clear perception of the ruin of individuals in the grip of that epoch, and faith in the salvation of the people.

'The way out is with 11s.' said thP Slavophils, 'the way out lies in renouncing tlH• PPtPrslnu·g period, in going back to the people from whom wp h avp hPen sPparated by foreign education and fon•ign go\·Prnment; let us return to the old ways ' '

2:; Tlw uam<' Slew i s probably derin•d from slo1•o, word. (Tr.)

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But history does not turn back; life is rich in materials, a nd never needs old clothes. All reinstatements, all restorations have always been masquerades. We have seen two; the Legitimists did not go back to the days of Louis XIV nor the Republicans to the 8th of Thermidor. What has once happened is stronger than anything written; no axe can hew it away.

More than this, we have nothing to go back to. The political life of Russia before Peter was ugly, poor and savage, yet it was to this that the Slavophils wanted to return, though they did not admit the fact; how else are we to explain all their antiquarian revivals, their worship of the manners and customs of old days, and their very attempts to return, not to the existing (and excellent) dress of the peasants but to the clumsy, antiquated costumes?

In all Russia no one wears the murmolka but the Slavophils.

K. S. Aksakov wore a dress so national that people in the street took him for a Persian, as Chaadayev used to tell for a joke.

They took the return to the people in a very crude sense too, as the majority of Western democrats did also, accepting the people as something complete and finished. They supposed that sharing the prejudices of the people meant being at one with them, that it was a great act of humility to sacrifice their own reason instead of developing reason in the people. This led to an affectation of devoutness, the observance of rites which are touching when there i s a naive faith in them and offensive when there is vis.ible premeditation. The best proof of the lack of reality in the Slavophils' return to the people lies in the fact that they did not arouse in them the slightest sympathy. Neither the Byzantine Church nor the Granovitaya Palata26 will do anything more for the future development of the Slav world. To go back to the village, to the workmen's guild, to the meeting of the mir,27 to the Cossack system is a different matter; but we must return to them not in order that they may be fixed fast in immovable Asiatic crystallisations, but to develop and set free the elements on which they were founded, to purify them from all that is extraneous and distorting, from the proud flesh with which they are overgrown-this, of course, is our vocation. But we must make no mistake; all this lies outside the purview of the State: the Moscow pPriod will help here as little as the Petersburg-26 Granovitaya Palata, the hall in the Kremlin in which the Tsar and his councillors used to meet before the tim� of Peter the Great. ( Tr.) 2i Village council. (R.)

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indeed at no time was it better. The Novgorocl28 bell which used to call the citizens to their ancient moot was merely melted into a cannon by Peter but had been taken down from the belfry by Ivan III; serfdom was only confirmed by the census under Peter but had been introduced by Boris Goclunov; in the Vlo

::.heni_rc29 there is no longer any mention of sworn witnesses, and the knout, the rods and the lash made their appearance long before the clay of Spiessruten and Fuchteln.

The mistake of the Slavophils lay in their thinking that Russia once had an individual culture, obscured by various events and finally by the Petersburg epoch. Russia never had this culture and never could have had it. That which is now reaching our consciousness, that of which we are beginning to have a presentiment, a glimmer in our thoughts, that which existed unconsciously in the peasants' hut and in the open country, is only now beginning to grow in the pastures of history, manured by the blood, the tears and the S\veat of twenty generations.

The foundations of our life are not memories; they are the living elements, existing not in chronicles but in the actual present; but they have merely survived under the difficult historical process of building up a single state and under the oppression of the state tht:'y have only been preserved not developed. I even doubt whether the inner forces for their development would have been found without the Petrine epoch, without the period of European culture.

The immediate foundations of our way of life are insufficient.

In India there has existed for ages and exists to this day a village commune very like our own and based on the partition of fields; yet the people of India have not gone very far with it.

Only the mighty thought of the \Vest, with which all its long history is united, is able to fertilise the seeds slumbering in the patriarchal mode of the life of the Slavs. The workmen's guild and the village commune. the sharing of profits and the partition of fields, the meeting of the mir and the union of villages into self-governing volosts, are all the corner-stones on which the mansion of our futurE', freely communal existence will be built.

2.� Nm·gorocl. the most famous city in the earliest period of Russian hislory. was to some extPnt a rPpuhlic undPr the ruiC' of its princes from Hurik onwnnls. I t wns n l most destroyed and was dPprin•d of its liberties by lvnn III in 1 -1-7 1 . ( Tr. )

�!J The Ulodzrniye was till' codC" of laws of Tsar Alexis Mikhaylovich ( fa ther of l'etPr the Grea t ) . issued in 1 6-1-9. ( Tr. )

Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 303

But these corner-stones are only stones . . . and without the thought of the West our future cathedral would not rise above its foundations.

This is what happens with everything truly social: it involuntarily attracts into the reciprocal security of peoples . . . . Holding themselves aloof, isolating themselves, some remain at the barbaric stage of the commune, others get no further than the abstract idea of communism which, like the Christian soul, hovers over the decaying body.

The receptive character of the Slavs, their femininity, their lack of initiative, and their great capacity for assimilation and adaptation, made them pre-eminently a people that stands in need of other peoples; they are not fully self-sufficing. Left to themselves the Slavs readily 'lull themselves to sleep with their own songs' as a Byzantine chronicler observed, 'and doze.'

Awakened by others they go to extreme consequences; there is no people which might more deeply and completely absorb the thought of other peoples while remaining true to itself. The persistent misunderstanding which exists to-day, as it has for a thousand years, between the Germanic and the Latin peoples does not exist between them and the Slavs. The need to surrender and to be carried away is innate in their sympathetic, readily assimilative, receptive nature.

To be formed into a princedom, Russia needed the Varangians;30 to be formed into a kingdom, the Mongols.

Contact \vith Europe developed the kingdom of Muscovy into the colossal empire ruled from Petersburg.

'But for all their receptiveness, have not the Slavs shown everywhere a complete incapacity for developing a modPrn European political order without continually falling into the most hopeless despotism or helpless disorganisation?'

This incapacity and this incompleteness are great talents in our eyes.

All Europe has now reached the inevitability of despotism in order to uphold somehow the existing political order against the pr�ssure of social ideas striving to instal a new s tructure, towards which Western Europe, though frightened and recalcitrant, is being carried \vith incredible force.

:Jo The Varan�ians \vere Scnndinavian and N"orman trihPs whose rulers were, according to tradition. summoned in 862 hy the northern Sla,·s to rule over them. ( Tr.)

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There was a time when the half-free West looked proudly at a Russia crushed under the throne of the Tsars, and cultivated Russia gazed sighing at the good fortune of its elder brothers.

That time has passed. The equality of slavery has been established.

We are present now at an amazing spectacle: even those lands in which free institutions have survived are offering themselves to despotism. Humanity has seen nothing like it since the days of Constantine, when free Romans sought to become slaves in order to escape civic burdens.

Despotism or socialism-there is no other choice.

Meanwhile Europe has shown a surprising incapacity for social revolution.

We believe that Russia is not so incapable of it, and in this we are at one with the Slavophils. On this our faith in its future is founded, the faith which I have been preaching since the end of 1 848.

Europe has chosen despotism, has preferred imperialism. Despotism means a military camp, empires mean ·war, the emperor is the commander-in-chief. Everyone is under arms, there will be war, but where is the real enero"yJ At home-down below in the depths-and yonder beyond the Niemen.

The war now beginning31 may have intervals of truce but will not end before the beginning of the general revolution which will shuffle a I I the cards and begin a new game. It is impossible that the two great historical powers, the two veteran champions of all \Vest EuropPan history, representatives of two worlds, two tr

-

Paci.fic Ocean.

\Vhether these three will try their strength and shatter each other in thP trving: whethPr Russia will break up into pieces or Europe, cnfPebiPd, sink into Byzantine dotage ; whether they will giw each other tlwir hancls, reanimated for a new lease of life and for an amicable stPp forward, or will slaughter each otlwr pndlPsslv-onP thing WP havP clisconrPd for cPrtain nnd it will not lw Pradicntf'll from thP consciousnPss of thP coming generntions: this is: thn t thP frrc and rational drl'rlopmrnl of

:n \Yri tlC'll at the linw of tiH' CrimPan \\'ar.

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Russian national life coincides with the aspirations of Western socialism.

To PetersbuJ1S·for

a Passport

A FEW MONTHS before my father's death Count Orlov was appointed to succeed Benckendorf.l I then wrote to Olga Alexandrovna to ask .,vhether she could manage to procure me a passport for abroad or permission on some pretext or other to go to Petersburg to get one for myself. My old friend answered that the latter was easier to arrange and a few days later I received from Orlov His Majesty's permission to go to Petersburg for a short time to arrange my affairs. My father's illness, his death, the actual arrangement of my affairs, and some months spent in the country, delayed me till winter. At the end of November I set off for Petersburg, having first sent a request for a passport to the Governor-General. I knew that he could not grant it because I was still under strict police supervision: all I wanted was that he should send on the request to Petersburg.

On the day of my departure I sent in the morning for a permit from the police, but instead of a permit there came a policeman to say that there were certain difficulties and that the local policesuperintendent himself would come to me. He did come, and, asking me to see him alone, he mysteriously made known to me the news that five years before I had been forbidden to go to Petersburg, and, without His Majesty's orders he would not sign the permit.

'That won't stand in our way,' I said, laughing, and took the letter out of my pocket.

The police-superintendent was greatly astonished; he read it and asked permission to show it to the oberpolitsmeyster, and two hours later sent me my permit and the letter.

1 This happened in September 1844; i.tc., nearly two years before the death of H.'s father. ( A.S. )

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I must mention that my police-superintendent carried on half the conversation in unusually polished French. How mischievous it is for a police-superintendent, or indeed any Russian policeman, to know French, he had learnt by very bitter experience.

Some years previously a French traveller, the Legitimist Chevalier Preaux, arrived in Moscow from the Caucasus. He had been in Persia and in Georgia, had seen a great deal, and was so incautious as to be severely critical of the military operations in the Causasus at that time, and especially of the administration.

Afraid that Preaux would say the same thing in Petersburg, the Governor-General of the Caucasus prudently wrote to the Minister of War that Preaux was a very dangerous military agent of the French government. Preaux was living with an easy mind in Moscow and had been well received by Prince D. V. Golitsyn, when suddenly the latter got an order to send the Frenchman from Moscow across the frontier accompanied by a police-officer.

To do anything so stupid and so rude is always more difficult to an acquaintance, and so after two days of hesitation Golitsyn invited Preaux to his house, and beginning with an eloquent introduction told him finally that reports of some sort, probably from the Caucasus, had reached the Tsar, who had ordered that he should leave Russia ; that he would, however, even be given an escort. . . .

Preaux was incensed and observed to Golitsyn that, seeing that the government had the right to eject him he was prepared to go, but that he would not accept an escort, since he did not consider himself a criminal who needed to be escorted.

Next day when the politsmcyster came to Preaux, that latter met him with a pistol in his hand and told him point-blank that he would not permit a police-officer to enter his room or his carriage, and that he would put a bullet through his head if he attempted to use force.

Golitsyn was, on the whole, a very decent man, which made it the more difficult for him; he sent for Weyer, the French consul, to ask his advice what to do. \'Veyer found an expedient; he asked for a police-officer who spoke French well and promised to present him to Preaux as a traveller who was asking Preaux to let him have a place in his carriage in return for half the travelling expenses.

From the consul's first words Preaux guessed what was up.

'I don't deal in seats in my carriage,' he said to the consul.

'This man will be desperate.'

'Vf!ry wPll,' said Prem1x, 'I'll take him for nothing, but he

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must undertake a few little services in return ; he's not an illhumoured fellow I suppose: if he is I shall leave him in the road.'

'The most obliging man in the world; he will be entirely at your disposal. I thank you on his behalf.' And the consul galloped off to Prince Golitsyn to announce his success.

In the evening Preaux and the bona fide traveller set off.

Preaux did not speak all the way; at the first posting-station he went indoors and lay down on a sofa .

'Hi,' he shouted to his companion, 'come here and take off my boots.'

'Upon my word, why should I?'

'I tell you, take off my boots, or I shall leave you in the road ; I am not keeping you, you know.'

The police-officer took off the boots.

'Knock the dirt off and polish them.'

'That's really too much! '

'Very well : stay here! '

The officer polished the boots.

At the next station there was the same story with his clothes, and so Preaux went on tormenting him till they reached the frontier. To console this martyr of the secret service, the Sovereign's special attention was drawn to him and eventually he was made a police-superintendent.

The second day after my arrival in Petersburg the house porter came to ask me from the local police: 'With what papers have you come to Petersburg?' The only paper I had, the decree concerning my retirement from the service, I had sent to the Governor-General with my request for a passport. I gave the house-porter my permit, but he came back to say that it was valid for leaving Moscow but not for entering Petersburg. A police-officer came too, with an invitation to the oberpolitsmeystcr's office. I went to Kokoshkin's office, which was lit by lamps although it was daytime, and after an hour he arrived.

Kokoshkin more than other persons of the same selection was the picture of a servant of the Tsar with no ulterior designs, a man in favour, ready to do any dirty job, a favourite with no conscience and no bent for reflection. He served and made his pile as naturally as birds sing.

Perovsky told Nicholas that Kokoshkin was a great bribe-taker.

'Yes,' answered Nicholas, 'but I sleep peacefully at night knowing that he is politsmcyster in Petersburg.'

I looked at him while he was dealing with other people . . . .

What a battered, senile, depraved face he had ; he was wearing a

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curled wig which was glaringly incongruous with his sunken features and wrinkles.

After conversing with some German women in German and with a familiarity that showed they were old acquaintances, which was evident also from the way the women laughed and whispered, Kokoshkin came up to me, and looking down asked in a rather rude voice:

'\Vhy, are not you forbidden by His Majesty to enter Petersburg?'

'Yes, but I have permission.'

'Where is it?'

'I have it here.'

'Show it. How's this? You are using the same permit twice.'

'Twice?'

'I remember that you came here before.'

'I didn't.'

'And what is your business here? '

' I have business with Count Orlov.'

'Have you been at the Count's, then?'

'No, but I have been at the Third Division.'

'Have you seen Dubelt?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I saw Orlov himself yesterday and he says that he has sent you no permit.'

'It's in your hands.'

'God knows when this was written, and the time has expired.'

'It would be an odd thing for me to do, wouldn't it? to come

\Vithout permission and begin with a visit to General Dubelt.'

'If you don't want any trouble, be so good as to go back, and not later than the next twenty-four hours.'

'I was not proposing to remain here long, but I must wait for Count Orlov's answer.'

'I cannot give you leave to do so; besides, Count Orlov is much displeased at your coming without permission.'

'Kindly give me my permit and I will go to the Count at once.'

'It must remain with me.'

'But it is a letter to me, addressed to me personally, the only document on the strength of which I am here.'

'The document will remain with me as a proof that you have been in Petersburg. I earnestly advise you to go to-morrow m order that nothing worse may befall you.'

Be nodded and went out. Much good it is talking to them!

Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 309

Old General Tuchkov had a lawsuit with the Treasury. His village head-man undertook a contract, did some swindling and was caught with a deficit. The court ordered that the money should be paid by the landowner who had given the head-man the authorisation. But no authorisation in regard to this undertaking ever had been given and Tuchkov said so in his answer.

The case was brought before the Senate, and the Senate again decided : 'Inasmuch as Lieutenant-General Tuchkov, retired, gave an authorisation . . . then . . .' To which Tuchkov again answered: 'But inasmuch as Lieutenant-General Tuchkov, retired, gave no authorisation . . . then . . .' A year passed, and the police made their pronouncement again, sternly repeating:

'Inasmuch as Lieutenant-General, etc.,' and once more the old gentleman wrote his answer. I do not know how this interesting case ended. I left Russia without waiting for the decision.

All this is not at all exceptional but quite the normal thing.

Kokoshkin holds in his hands a document of the genuineness of which there is no doubt, on which there is a number and date so that it can be easily verified, in which it is written that I am permitted to visit Petersburg, and says: 'Since you have come without permi�sion you must go back,' and puts the document in his pocket.

Chaadayev was right indeed when he said of these gentry:

'What rogues they all are!'

I went to the Third Division and told Dubelt what had happened. He burst out laughing. 'What a muddle they everlastingly niake of everything! Kokoshkin reported to the Count you had come without permission and the Count said you were to be sent away, but I explained the position to him afterwards ; you can stay as long as you like. I'll have the police written to at once.

But now about your petition: the Count does not think it would be of any use to ask permission for you to go abroad. The Tsar has refused you twice, the last time when Count Strogonov interceded for you; if he refuses a third time, you won't get to the waters during this reign, for certain.'

'What am I to do?' I asked in horror, for the idea of travel and freedom had taken such deep root in my heart.

'Go to Moscow: the Count will write a private letter to the Governor-General telling him that you want to go abroad for the sake of your wife's health, assuring him that he knows nothing of you but what is good, and asking him whether he thinks it would be possib](' to rr]i('vc yon from polin' supervision. He can make no answer but "yes" to such a question. We shall report to the Tsar the removal of police supervision, then you take out a

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passport for yourself like anybody else, and you can go to any watering-place you like, and good luck to you.'

All this seemed to me extraordinarily complicated, and indeed I fancied it was a device simply to get rid of me. They could not refuse me point-blank, for it would have brought down upon them the wrath of Olga Alexandrovna, "'\·hom I visited every day.

"When once I had left Petersburg I could not come back again; corresponding with these gentry is a difficult business. I communicated some of my doubts to Dubelt; he began frowning, that is, grinning more than ever with his lips and screwing up his eyes.

'General,' I said in conclusion, 'I do not know, but the fact is I do not even feel certain that Strogonov's representation reached the Tsar.'

Dubelt rang the bell and ordered the file about me to be brought. 'Vhile waiting for it he said to me goodnaturedly: The Count and I are suggesting to you the course of proceeding by which we think you most likely to get your passport; if you have more certain mt>ans at your disposal, make use of them; you may be sure that we shall not hinder you.'

'Leonty Vasilevich is perfectly right,' observed a sepulchral voice. I turned round; beside me, looking older and more greyheaded than ever, stood Sakhtynsky, who had received me five years before at the same Third Division. 'I advise you to be guided by his opinion if you want to go.'

I thanked him.

'And here's the file,' said Dubelt, taking a thick writing-book from the hands of a clerk (\\·hat would I not have given to read the whole of it! In 1 R50 I saw my dossier in Carlier's office in Paris; it would have been interesting to compare them ) . After rummaging in it he handed it to me open ; there was Benckendorf's report after Strogonov's letter petitioning for permission for me to go for six months to a watering-place in Germany. In the margin was written in big letters in pencil: 'Too soon.' The pencil marks were glazed over with varnish, and below was written in ink: ' "Too soon" written by the hand of his Imperial Majesty.-Count A. Benckendorf.'�

2 Benchndorf"s report to the Tsar of i April 1 843. contained the solicila·

tion of S. G. StrogonO\·. then \\"arden of :\Ioscow University, that H.

might he permitted. in consequence of his wife's illness, to go to Italy for some months. The report is endorsed in the hand of Nicholas I :

'prregororim'-'Let us talk i t on•r'. and there i s a postscript by Bencken-

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'Do you believe me now?' asked Dubelt.

'Yes, I do,' I answered, 'and I am so sure of your words that I shall go to Moscow to-morrow.'

'Well, you can stay and amuse yourself here a little; the police will not worry you now, and before you go away look in, and I'll tell them to show you the letter to Shcherbatov. Good-bye. Bon voyage, if we don't meet again.'

'A pleasant journey,' added Sakhtynsky.

We parted, as you see, on friendly terms.

On reaching home I found an invitation, from the superintendent of the Second Admiralty Police Station I believe it was. He asked me when I was going.

'To-morrow evening.'

'Upon my word, but I believe, I thought . . . the general said to-day. His Excellency will put it off, of course. But will you allow me to make certain of it?'

'Oh yes, oh yes; by the way, give me a permit.'

'I will write it in the police station and send it to you in two hours' time. By what convenience are you thinking of going?'

'The Serapinsky, if I can get a seat.'

'Very good, and if you do not succeed in getting a seat kindly let us know.'

'With pleasure.'

In the evening a policeman turned up again; the superintendent sent to tell me that he could not give me the permit, and that I must go at eight o'clock next morning to the oberpolitsmcyster's.

What a plague and what a bore ! I did not go at eight o'clock, but in the course of the morning I looked in at the office of the oberpolitsmeyster. The police station superintendent was there; he said to me:

'You cannot go away: there is a paper from the Third Division.'

'What has happened?'

'I don't know. The general gave orders you were not to be given a permit.'

'Does the director know?'

'Of course he knows,' and he pointed out to me a colonel in uniform and wearing a sword sitting at a big table in another room; I asked him what was the matter.

'To be sure,' he said, 'there was a paper, and here it is.' He dorf: 'ne po::volyayet'-'He does not gl\ e leave'; the document was countersigned by Dubelt on 9 April 1 843. (A.S.)

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read i t through and handed it t o me. Dubelt wrote that I had a perfect right to come to Petersburg and could remain as long as I liked.

'And is that why you \von't let me go? Excuse me, I can't help laughing; yesterday the oberpolitsmerster was chasing me away against my will, to-day he is keeping me against my will, and all this on the ground that the document gives me leave to remain as long as / like.'

The absurdity \Vas so evident that even the colonel-secretary laughed.

'But why should I throw money away, paying for a place in the diligence t\vice over? Please tell them to write me a permit.'

'I cannot, but I will go and inform the general.'

Kokoshkin ordered them to write me a permit, and as he walked through the office said to me reproachfully: 'It's beyond anything. First you want to stay, then you want to go ; why, you have bePn told that you can stay.'

I made no answer.

V\·hen we had driven out of the city gates in the evening and I sa\v once more the endless plain stretching away towards the Four Hands,3 I looked at the sky and vowed with all my heart never to return to that city of the despotism of blue, green, and variegated police, of official muddle, of flunkeyish insolence, of gendarme romance, in which the only civil man was Dubelt, and he chief of the Third Division.

Shcherbatov ans\vered Orlov reluctantly. He had at that time a secretary who was not a colonel but a pietist, who because of my articles hated me as an 'atheist and Hegt>lian.' I went myself to deal with him. The pious secn•tan•. in an oily voice and \Vith Christian unction, told me that the Governor-General knew nothing about nw, that h(' did not doubt my lofty moral qualities, but that he would have to make inquiries of the oberpolitsmcntcr. He want('d to drag the business out; moreover, this gentleman did not take bribes. In the Russian servicp disintereste(l men are the most frightful of all; the only ones who do not take' bribes in all simplicity an• Germans; if a Russian does not take mmwy hP will takP it out in something else. and from such villains God spare us. FortunatPly obcrpolitsmcntcr Luzhin gave mP a good charact(•r.

On rPturuing home ten days later I bumped into a g('ndarme 3 ThP name of the first stagP·post on the way from PetPrsburg to !\loscow. A sign-post stood at the cross-roads indicating the directions of

;\1oscow. Tsarskoye SP!o. Peterhof and PPtersburg. ( A .S. )

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31 3

at my door. The appearance of a police-officer in Russia is as bad as a tile falling on one's head, and therefore it was not without a particularly unpleasant feeling that I waited to hear what he had to say to me; he handed me an envelope. Count Orlov informed me of his Imperial Majesty's command that I should be relieved from police supervision. Together with this I received the right to a foreign passport.

Rejoice with me, for I am free at last!

Free to set forth to foreign lands at will!

But is it not a dream, deceiving me?

Not so! To-morrow come the post-horses,

And then "von Ort zu Ort" I'll gallop on, Paying for passports what the price may be.

Well, I'll set forth! And then-what shall I find?

I know not! I have faith! And yet-and yet

God knows alone what still may be mr fate.

With fear and doubt I stand before the gate

Of Europe. And my heart is full

Of hope, of troubled, shadowy dreams.

I am in doubt, my friend, you see,

I shake my head despondinglr . . . .

N. P. 0GAREV, Humorous Verse, Part IP

'Six or seven sledges accompanied us as far as Chernaya Gryaz. There for the last time we clinked glasses and parted, sobbing.

'It was evening, the covered sledge crunched through the snow

. . . you looked sadly after us but did not guess that it meant a funeral and eternal separation. All were there, only one was missing, the nearest of the near: he alone was ill, and by

- his

absence, as it were, washed his hands of my departure.

'It was the 21st of January, 1 847 . . .'

The sergeant gave me back the passports; a little old soldier in a clumsy shako covered with oilskin, carrying a rifle of incredible size and weight, lifted the barrier; a Ural Cossack with narrow little eyes and broad cheekbones, holding the reins of his little, shaggy, dishevelled nag, which was covered all over with little icicles, rode up to wish me a happy journey; the pale, thin, dirty little Jewish driver with rags twisted four times round his neck clambered on the box.

'Good-bye ! Good-bye! ' said our old acquaintance, Karl Ivana-4 Translated by Juliet Soskice. (R.)

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vich, who was seeing us as far as Taurogen, and Tata's wetnurse, a handsome peasant woman, dissolved in tears as she said farewell.

The little Jew whipped up his horses, the sledge moved off. I looked back, the barrier had been lowered, the wind swept the snow from Russia on to the road and blew to one side the tail and mane of the Cossack's horse.

The nurse in a sarafan and a warm jacket was still looking after us and weeping; Sonnenberg, that symbol of the parental home, that comic figure from the days of childhood, waved his silk handkerchief-all round us was the endless steppe of snow.

'Good-bye, Tatyana ! Good-bye, Karl lvanovich! '

Here was a milestone and o n it, covered with snow, a thin, single-headed eagle with outspread wings . . . and that's a good thing: one head less.

P A R I S

I T A L Y

P A R I S

( 1 8 4 7 - 1 8 5 2 )

When I began to publish yet another part of My Past and Thoughts, I paused in hesitation before the discontinuity of the narratives, the pictures and of m_r, so to speak, interlinear comments on them. There is less external unity in them than in the earlier parts. I cannot weld them into one. In filling in the gaps it is very easy to give the whole thing a different background and a different lighting-the twth of that timP would be lost.

My Past and Thoughts is not an historical monograph, but the reflection of historical events on a man who has accidentally found himself in their path. That is why I have decided to leave my disconnected chapters as the.l· were, stringing them together like the mosaic pictures in Italian bracelets-all of which refer to one subiect but are onl_r held together br the setting and the chain.

l\1y Ll.'tters from France and Italy are essential for completing this part, especially in regard to the year 18-18; I had meant to make extracts from them, but that would hm·e involved so much reprinting that I could not make up my mind to it.

l\1any things that have not appeared in The Pole Star have been put into this edition, but I cannot give cvcr_rthing to my rcadrrs yet, for reasons both personal and public. The time is not far off when not onl_r the pages and chapters here omitted, but the u·hole volume, !dlicll is the most dear to me, will be published.

GE!'iEVA, 29th July, 1 866

1ne Journey

AT LAUTZAGEN the Prussian gendarmes invited me into the guard-room. An old sergeant took the passports, put on his spectacles, and with extraordinary precision began reading aloud all that was unnecessary:

Auf Befehl s.k. M. Nikolai des Ersten . . . . allen und jeden denen daran gelegen,

etc. etc . . . . Unterzeichner Peroffski,

Minister des lnnern, Kammerherr, Senator und Ritter des Ordens St. Wladimir . . . lnhaber eins goldenen Degens mit der lnschrift fur Tapferkeit . . .

This sergeant who was so fond of reading reminds me of another one. Between Terracino and Naples a Neapolitan carabineer came to the diligence four times, asking every time for our visas. I showed him the Neapolitan visa : this and the half carlino were not enough for him; he carried off the passports to the office, and returned twenty minutes later with the request that my companion and I should go to see the brigadier. The latter, a drunken old non-commissioned officer, asked me rather rudely:

'What is your surname and where do you come from?'

'Why, that is all in the passport.'

'I can't read it.'

We conjectured that reading was not the brigadier's strong point.

'By what law,' asked my companion, 'are we bound ro read you our passports aloud? We are bound to have them and to show them, but not to dictate them; I might dictate anything.'

'Accidenti!' muttered the old man, 'va ben, va ben!' and he gave back our passports without writing anything.

The learned gendarme at Lautzagen was of a different type; after reading three times in the three passports all General Perovsky's decorations, including his clasp for an unblemished record, he asked me:

'But who are you, Euer Hochwohlgeboren?'

I stared, not understanding what he wanted of me.

'Fraulein Maria E., Fraulein Maria K., Frau H.1-they are women, there is not one man's passport here.'

I looked : there really were only the passes of my mother and 1 Maria Kasparovna Ern (Reichel) , M<�ria Fedorovna Karsh and Luiza Ivanovna Haag, H.'s mother. (R.)

3 1 9

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two ladies we knew who were travelling with us; a cold shudder ran down my back.

'They would not have let me through at Taurogen without passport.'

'Bereits so, but you can't go further.'

'What am I to do?'

'Perhaps you have forgotten it at the guard-room. I'll tell them to harness a sledge for you; you can go yourself, and your people can warm themselves here meanwhile. Heh! Kerf! Lass er mal den Braunen anspannen.'

I cannot remember this stupid incident without laughing, just because I was so utterly disconcerted by it. I was overwhelmed by losing that passport of which I had been dreaming for several years, which I had been trying to obtain for two years, and losing it the minute after crossing the frontier. I was certain I had put it in my pocket, so I must have dropped it-where could I look for it? It would be covered by snow . . . . I should have to ask for a new one, to write to Riga, perhaps to go myself: and then they would send in a report, would notice that I was going to the mineral waters in January. In short, I felt as though I were in Petersburg again; visions of Kokoshkin and Sakhtynsky, Dubelt and Nicholas, passed through my mind. Good-bye to my journey, good-bye to Paris, to freedom of the press, to concerts and theatres . . . . once more I should see the clerks in the ministry, police-and every other sort of watcher, town constables with the two bright buttons on their backs that they use for looking behind them . . . and first of all I should see again the little scowling soldier in a heavy shako with the mysterious number '4' inscribed on it, the frozen Cossack horse . . .

Meanwhile they put a big, melancholy, angular horse into a tiny sledge. I got in beside a driver in a military overcoat and high boots; he gave the traditional crack of the traditional whip-and suddenly the learned sergeant ran out into the porch wearing only his breeches, and shouted : 'Halt! Halt! Da ist der vermaledeite Pass,' and he held it unfolded in his hands.

I was overtaken by hysterical laughter.

'What's this you're doing to me? Where did you find it?'

'Look,' he said, 'your Russian sergeant folded them one inside the other: who could tell it was there? I never thought of unfolding them.'

And yet he had read three times over: Es ergehet dcshalb an alle lwhcrz Miichtc urzd an allc und jcdc, wclchen Standcs und welcher Wurde sie auch sein mogen . . . .

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'I reached Ki:inigsberg2 tired out by the journey, by anxiety, by many things. After a good sleep in an abyss of feathers, I went out next day to look at the town. It was a warm \Vinter's day: the hotel-keeper suggested that we should take a sledge.

There were bells on the horses and ostrich feathers on their heads . . . and we were gay; a load was lifted from our hearts: the unpleasant sensation of fear, the gnawing feeling of suspicion, had flown away. Caricatures of Nicholas were exhibited in the window of a bookshop, and I rushed in at once to buy a whole stock of them. In the evening I went to a small, dirty, inferior theatre, but came back from it excited, not by the actors but by the audience, which consisted mostly of workmen and young people; in the intervals everyone talked freely and loudly, and all put on their hats (an extremely important thing, as important as the right to wear a beard, etc. ) . This ease and freedom, this element of greater serenity and liveliness impresses the Russian when he arrives abroad. The Petersburg government is still so coarse and unpolished, so absolutely nothing but despotism, that it positively likes to inspire fear; it wants everything to tremble before it-in short. it desires not only power but the theatrical display of it. To the Petersburg Tsars the ideal of public order is the ante-room and the barracks.'

. . . When we set off for Berlin I got into the carriage, and a gentleman muffled up in wraps took the seat beside me; it \vas evening and I could not examine him as we drove. Learning that I was a Russian he began to question me about the strictness of the police and about passports; and of course I told him all I knew. Then \Ye passed on to Prussia ; he spoke highly of the disinterestedness of the Prussian officials, the excellence of the administration, praised the King, and concluded with a violent attack on the Poles of Posen on the ground that they were not good Germans. This surprised me; I objected, and told him bluntly that I did not share his views at all, and then said no more.

Meanwhile it had got light; I noticed only then that my conversative neighbour spoke through his nose, not because he had a cold in it, but because he had not one, or at least had not the most conspicuous part. He probably noticed that this discO\·ery did not afford me any particular satisfaction, and so thought it necessary to tell me, by way of apology, the story of how he had lost his nose and how it had been restored. The first 2 From Letters from France and Italy, Letter I. (A.S.)

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part was somewhat confused, but the second was very circumstantial: Diffenbach himself had carved him a new nose out of his hand ; his hand had been bound to his face for six weeks; Maiestiit had come to the hospital to look at it, and was graciously pleased to wonder and approve.

Le roi de Prusse, en le voyant,

A dit: c'est vraiment etonnant.

Apparently Diffenbach had been busy at the time with something else and had carved him a very ugly nose; but I soon discovered that his hand-made nose was the least of his defects.

Travelling from Konigsberg to Berlin was the most difficult part of our journey. The belief has somehow gained ground among us that the Prussian posting service is well organised: that is all nonsense. Travelling by post-chaise is good only in France, Switzerland, and England. In England the post-chaises are so well built, the horses so elegant, and the drivers so skilful that one may travel for pleasure. The carriage moves at full speed over the very longest stages, whether the road runs uphill or downhill. Now, thanks to the railway, this question is becoming one of historical interest, but in those days we learned by experience what German posting-chaises and their screws could be.

They were worse than anything in the world except the German coachmen.

The way from Konigsberg to Berlin is very long; we took seven places in the diligence and set off. At the first station the guard told us to take our luggage and get into another diligence, sensibly warning us that he would not be responsible for the safety of our things. I observed that I had inquired at Konigsberg and was told that we should keep the same seats: the guard pleaded the snow, and said that we must get into a diligence provided with runners; there was nothing to be said against that. V\'e began to transfer ourselves with our belongings and our children in the middle of the night in the wet snow. At the next station there was the same business again, and the guard did not even trouble himself to explain the change of carriages.

We did half the journey in this way; then he informed us quite simply that we 'should be given only five seats.'

'Five? Here are my tickets.'

'There are no more sPats.'

I began to argue; a window in the posting-station was thrown open with a bang and a grey-heuded man with moustaches asked rudely what the wrangling was about. The guard said that I demanded seven seats, and that he had only five; I added that I

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had tickets and a receipt for the fares for seven seats. Paying no attention to me, the head said to the guard in a strangled, insolent, Russo-German military voice:

'Well, if this gentleman does not want the five seats, throw his things out, let him wait till there are seven seats free.'

Whereupon the worthy station-master, whom the guard addressed as Herr Major, and whose name was Schwerin, shut the window with a slam. After considering the matter, being Russians, we decided to go on. Benvenuto Cellini in like circumstances would, being an Italian, have fired his pistol and killed the station-master.

My neighbour who had been repaired by Diffenbach was in the restaurant at the time; when he had clambered on to his seat and we had set off, I told him the story. He was in a very genial mood, having had a drop too much; he showed the greatest sympathy with us and asked me to give him a note on the subject when we got to Berlin.

'Are you an official in the posting service?' I asked.

'No,' he answered, still more through his nose; 'but that doesn't matter . . . you . . . see _ . . I am in what is called the central police service.'

I found this revelati

The first person to whom I expressed my liberal opinions in Europe was a spy-but he was not the last.

Berlin, Cologne, Belgium-all flashed past before our eyes ; we looked at everything half absent-mindedly, in passing; we were in haste to arrive, and at last we did arrive.

. . . I opened the heavy, old-fashioned window in the Hotel du Rhin; before me stood a column:

. . . with a cast-iron doll,

With scowling face and hat on head,

And arms crossed tightly on his breast.3

And so I was really in Paris, not in a dream but in reality: this was the Vendome column and the Rue de Ia Paix.

In Paris-the word meant scarcely less to me than the word

'Moscow' ! Of that minute I had been dreaming since my childhood. If I might only see the Hotel de Ville, the Cafe Foy in the Palais Royal, "·here Camille Desmoulins picked a green leaf, stuck it on his hat for a cockade and shouted 'a la Bastille!'

I could not stay indoors; I dressed and went out to stroll about 3 From A. S. Pushkin's Yevgenr Onegin, VII, 1 9. (A.S.)

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at random . . . to look up Bakunin, Sazonov: here was Rue St

Honore, the Champs-Elysees-all those names to which I had felt akin for long years . . . and here was Bakunin himself. . . .

I met him at a street corner; he was walking with three friends and, just as in Moscow, discoursing to them, continually stopping and waving his cigarette. On this occasion the discourse remained unfinished ; I interrupted it and took him with me to find Sazonov and surprise him with my arrival.

I was beside myself with happiness!

And on that happiness I shall stop.

I am not going to describe Paris once more. My first acquaintance with European life, the triumphant tour of an Italy that had just leapt up from sleep, the revolution at the foot of Vesuvius, the revolution before St Peter's, and finally the newslike a flash of lightning-of the 24th of February-all that I have described in my Letters from France and Italy. I could not now with the same vividness reproduce impressions half effaced and overlaid by others. They make an essential part of my Notes

-for what are letters but notes of a brief period?

Tlze HoneJ111100Jl of

tile Repltblic

'ToMORROW WE ARE GOING to Paris; I am leaving Rome full of animation and excitt>ment. vVhat will come of it all? Can it last?

The sky is not free from clouds; at times there is a chilly blast from the sepulchral vaults bringing the smell of a corpse, the odour of the past; the historical tramontana is strong, but whatever happens I am grateful to Rome for the five months I have spent there. The feelings I have passed through remain in the soul, and the reaction will not extinguish quite everything.'

This is what I wrote at the end of April 1 848, sitting at a window in the Via del Corso and looking out into the People's Square, in which I had seen and felt so much.

I left Italy in love with her and sorry for her: there I had met not only great events but also the first people I had found nmpathiques-but still I went away. It would have seemed like a betrayal of all my convictions not to be in Paris when there

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was a republic there. Doubts are apparent in the lines I have quoted, but faith got the upper hand, and with inward pleasure I looked at the consul's seal on my visa at Civita on which were engraved the formidable words, 'Republique Frant;aise'-I did not reflect that the very fact that a visa was needed showed that France was not a republic.

We went by a mail steamer. There were a great many passengers on board, and as usual they were of all sorts: there were passengers from Alexandria, Smyrna, and Malta. One of the fearful winds common in spring blew up just after we passed Leghorn: it drove the ship along with incredible swiftness and with insufferable rolling; within two or three hours the deck was covered with sea-sick ladies; by degrees the men too succumbed, except a grey-headed old Frenchman, an Englishman from Canada in a fur-jacket and a fur-cap, and myself. The cabins, too, were full of sufferers, and the stuffiness and heat in them alone were enough to make one ill. At night we three sat on deck amidships on our portmanteaus, covered with our overcoats and railway rugs, amid the howling of the wind and the splashing of the waves, which at times broke over the fore-deck.

I knew the Englishman; the year before I had travelled in the same steamer with him from Genoa to Civita Vecchia. It happened we were the only two at dinner; he did not say a word all through the meal, but over the dessert, softened by the Marsala and seeing that I on my side had no intention of entering upon a conversation, he gave me a cigar and said that he had brought his cigars himself from Havana. Then we talked: he had been in South America and California, and told me that he had often intended to visit Petersburg and Moscow, but should not go until there were regular and direct communications between London and Petersburg.1

'Are you going to Rome?' I asked, as we approached Civita.

'I don't know,' he answered.

I said no more, supposing that he considered my question indiscreet, but he immediately added:

'That depends on whether I like the climate in Civita .'

'Then you are stopping here?'

'Yes; the steamer leaves to-morrow.'

At that time I knew very few Englishmen, and so I could hardly conceal my laughter, and was quite unable to do so when I met him next day, as I was strolling in front of the hotel, in 1 There is this now.

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the same fur-coat, carrying a portfolio, a field-glass, and a little dressing-case, followed by a servant laden with his portmanteau and various belongings.

'I am off to Naples,' he said as he came up to me.

'"\Yhy, don't you like the climate?'

'It's horrid.'

I forgot to mention that on our first journey together he occupied the berth which was directly over mine. On three occasions during the night he almost killed me, first with fright, and then with his feet; it was deadly hot in the cabin and he went several times to have a drink of brandy and \Vater and each time, climbing down or climbing up, he trod on me and shouted loudly in alarm: 'Oh-beg pardon-l'ai avais soif.'

'Pas de mal!'

So on this journey we met like old friends; he highly praised my immunity from sea-sickness, and offered me his Havana cigars. As was perfectly natural the conversation soon turned on the revolution of February. The Englishman, of course, looked upon revolution in Europe as an interesting spectacle, as a source of curious, new observations and experiences, and he described the revolution in the Republic of J\ew Colombia.2

The Frenchman took a d ifferent part in these matters . . .

within five minutes an argument had sprung up between him and me: he answered evasively, intelligently and with the utmost courtesy, conceding nothing, however. I defended the republic and revolution. Without directly attacking it, the old gentleman championed the traditional forms of government as the only ones durable, popular and capable of satisfying the just claims of progress and the necessity for settled security.

'You cannot imagine,' I said to him jokingly, 'what a peculiar satisfaction you give me by what you leave out. I have been for fifteen years speaking about the monarchy just as you speak about the republic. Our roles are changed ; in defending the republic, I am the consen·ative, ,...-hile you, defending the legitimist monarchy, are a perturbateur de l'ordre politique.'

The old gentleman and the Englishman burst out laughing.

The Comte d'Argout,3 a tall, gaunt gentleman, whose nose has 2 That is the rising of Colombia against Spanish domination m 1 8 1 0.

( A .S.)

3 Antoine l\taurice. Comte d'Argout ( 1 782--1 858) , had much to do in bringing about the fall of Charles X, and held several i mportant ministerial appointments under Louis-Philippe. ( Tr.)

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been immortalised by Charivari4 and Philipon came up to us.

(Charivari used to declare that his daughter did not marry because she did not want to sign herself 'So-and-so, nee d'Argout.') He joined in the conversation, addressed the old gentleman with deference, but looked at me with a surprise not far removed from repulsion; I noticed this, and began to be at least four times redder in my remarks.

'It is a very remarkable thing,' the grey-headed old Frenchman sai d to me: 'you are not the first Russian I have met of the same way of thinking. You Russians are either the most absolute slaves of your Tsar, or-passez-moi le mot-anarchists. And it follows from that, that it will be a long time before you are free.'5

Our political conversation continued in that strain.

When we were approaching Marseilles and all the passengers were busy looking after their luggage, I went up to the old gentleman and, giving him my card, said that I was glad to think that our discussion on the rolling boat had left no unpleasant results. The old gentleman said good-bye to me very nicely, delivered himself of another epigram at the expense of the republicans whom I should see at last at closer quarters, and gave me his card. It was the Due de Noailles, a kinsman of the Bourbons and one of the leading counsellors of Henri V.6

Though this incident is quite unimportant, I have told it for the benefit and education of our 'dukes' of the first three ranks. If some senator or privy councillor had been in Noaillcs's place he would simply have taken what I said for insolent breach of discipline and would have sent for the captain of the ship.

In the year 1 850 a certain Russian mini5ter7 sat with his family in his carriage on the steamer to avoid all contact with passengers who were common mortals. Can one imagine anything more ridiculous than sitting in an unharnessed carriage 4 Le Charivari was the French Punch (earlier in date, howeYer, Punch being called 'The London ChariYari' as a sub-title), founded in 1 83 1 by Charles Philipon ( 1 802-62) , a caricaturist of greal talent. ( Tr.) 5 I have heard this criticism a dozen times since.

6 The Comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X, was by the royalists called Henri V. (Tr. ) In part of an early edition of Leiters from France and Italy H. speaks of a 'court('OUS old gentleman,' who is called the Due de Rohan. There was a D. de R. who participated (as H. writes there) in Napoleon's Russian campaign. It has been impossible to establish whether there was such a Due de Noailles as he describes here. (A .S.) 7 The celebrated Victor Panin.

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and on the sea, too, and for a man double the ordinary size into the bargain!

The arrogance of our great dignitaries is not due to aristocratic feeling-the grand gentleman is dying out; it is the feeling of liveried and powerful flunkeys in great houses, extremely abject in one direction and extremely insolent in the other. The aristocrat is a personality, while our faithful servants of the throne are entirely without personality; they are like Paul's medals, which bear the inscription:8 'Not unto us, not unto us, but unto thy name.' Their whole training leads up to this: the soldier imagines that the only reason why he must not be beaten with rods is that he wears the Anna ribbon ; the station superintendent considers his position as an officer the barrier that protects his cheek from the traveller's hand; a n insulted clerk points to his Stanislav o r Vladimir ribbon-'not by us, not by us . . . but by our rank ! '

O n leaving the steamer at Marseilles, I met a great procession of the National Guard, which was carrying to the Hotel de Ville the figure of Liberty, i.e. of a woman with huge curls and a Phrygian cap. With shouts of 'Vive la Republique!' thousands of armed citizens were marching in it, among them workmen in blouses who had joined the National Guard after 24th of February. I need hardly say that I followed them. When the procession reached the Hotel de Ville, the general, the mayor, and the commissaire of the Provisional Government, Demosthene 01-l ivier, came out into the portico. Demosthene, as might be expected from his name, prepared to make a speech. A big circle of people formed about him : the crO\vd, of course, moved forward, the National Guards pressed it back, the crowd would not yield; this offended the armed workmen: they lowered their rifles, turned round and began to squash with the butts the toes of the people who stood in front; the citizens of the 'one and indivisible Republic' stepped back . . . .

This proceeding surprised me the more because I was still completely under the influence of the manners of Italy, and especially of Rome, where the proud sense of personal dignity and the inviolability of the person is fully developed in every man-not merely in the facclzino and the postman, but even in the beggar who holds out his hand for alms. In the Romagna such insolence would have been greeted with twenty coltellate.9

s This is the inscription not on 'Paul's medals' but on those issued by Alexander I as memorials of the Patriotic 'War of 1 8 12. (A.S. ) 9 I.e., stabs with a dagger. (Tr.)

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The French drew back-perhaps they had corns?

This incident affected me unpleasantly. Moreover, when I reached the hotel I read in the newspapers what had happened at Rouen.10 What could be the meaning of it? Surely the Due de Noailles was not right?

But when a man wants to believe, his belief is not easily uprooted, and before I reached Avignon I had forgotten the riflebutts at Marseilles and the bayonets at Rauen.

In the diligence with us there was a full-bodied, middle-aged abbe of stately deportment and pleasant appearance. For the sake of propriety he at first took to his breviary, but to avoid dropping asleep put it back soon afterwards in his pocket and began talking pleasantly and intelligently. With the classical correctness of the language of Port-Royal and the Sorbonne, and with many quotations and chaste witticisms.

Indeed, it is only the French who know how to talk. The Germans can make declarations of love, confide their secrets, preach sermons or swear. In England routs are so much liked just because they make conversation impossible . . . there is a crowd, no room to move, everyone is pushing and being pushed, no one knows anybody ; while if people come together in a small party they immediately have \'\Tetchedly poor music, singing out of tune, or boring little games, or with extraordinary heaviness the hosts and guests try to keep the ball of conversation rolling, with sighs and pauses, reminding one of the luckless horses on the to\v-path who almost at their last gasp drag a loaded barge against the current.

I wanted to tease the abbe about the republic, but I did not succeed. He was very glad that liberty had come without excesses, above all without bloodshed and fighting, and looked upon Lamartine as a great man, something in the style of Pericles.

'And of Sappho,' I added, without, however, entering upon an argument. I was grateful to him for not saying a word about religion. So talking we arrived at Avignon at eleven o'clock at night.

'Allow me,' I said to the abbe as I filled his glass at supper, 'to 1 " At the Rouen elections for the Constituent Assembly in April the Socialist candidates \H'fe hPa,·ilv ddt>ated ; the workmPn. suspectin" some fraurl. assembled. una rmed. hPfore the Hotel de Ville. to protest." They were attnchd bv soldiers nnd �ational Gunrds; ele,·en were killed and many \\·oumled . . ( Tr.)

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propose a rather unusual toast: "To the Republic, et pour les hommes d'eglise qui sont republicains." The abbe got up, and concluded some Ciceronian sentences with the words: "A la Republique future en Russie."

'A la Rcpublique univcrsellc!' shouted the guard of the diligence and three men who were sitting at the table. We clinked glasses.

A Catholic priest, two or three shopmen, the guard and some Russians-we might well drink to the universal republic!

But it really was very jolly.

'Where are you bound for?' I inquired of the abbe, as we took our seats in the diligence once more, and I asked his pastoral blessing on my smoking a cigar.

'For Paris,' he answered ; 'I have been elected to the National Assembly. I shall be delighted to see you if you will call; this is my address.' He was the Abbe Sibour, doyen of something or other and brother of the Archbishop of Paris.

A fortnight later there came the fifteenth of May, that sinister ritournelle which was followed by the fearful days of June. That all belongs not to my biography but to the biography of mankind . . . .

I have written a great deal about those days.

I might end here like the old captain in the old song: -

Te souvicns-tu? . . . mais ici ie m'arrete,

lei finit tout noble souvenir.

But with these accursed days the last part of my life begins.

1/Vestern EztrOJJC(I/1

Ar{lbesques, I

1 . T i l E D H E :\. \1

Do YOU REMEMBER, friends, how lovely was that winter day, bright and sunny, when six or seven sledges accompanied us to Chc:rnaya Gryaz, when for the last time we clinked glasses and parted, sobbing?

. . . Evening \vas coming on, the sledge crunched over the

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snow; you looked sadly after u s and d i d not divine that it was a funeral and a parting for ever. All were there but one, the dearest of all; he alone was far away, and by his absence seemed to wash his hands of my departure.1

That was the 1 9th January, 1 847.

Seven years have passed since then, and what years! Among them were 1848 and 1 852.

All sorts of things happened in those years, and everything was shattered-public and private: the European revolution and my home, the freedom of the world and my personal happiness.

Of the old life not one stone was left upon another. Then my powers had reached their fullest development; the previous years had given me pledges for the future. I left you boldly, with headlong self-reliance, with haughty confidence in life. I was i n haste t o tear myself away from the little group o f people who were so thoroughly accustomed to each other and had come so close, bound by a deep love and a common grief. I was beckoned to by distance, space, open conflict, a nd free speech. I was seeking an independent arena, I longed to try my powers in freedom . . . .

Now I no longer expect anything: after what I have seen and experienced nothing will move me to any particular wonder or to deep joy; joy and wonder are curbed by memories of the past and fear of the future. Almost everything has become a matter of indifference to me, and I desire as little to die to-morrow as to live long ; let the end come as casually and senselessly as the beginning.

And yet I have found all that I sought, even recognition from this old, complacent world-and along with this I experienced the loss of all my beliefs, all that was precious to me meeting with betrayal, treacherous blows from behind, and in general a moral corruption of which you have no conception.

It is hard for me, very hard, to begin this part of my story; I have avoided it while I wrote the preceding parts, but at last I am face to face with it. But away with weakness: he who could live through it must have the strength to remember.

From the middle of the year 1 848 I have nothing to tell of but agonising experiences, unavenged offences, undeserved blows.

My memory holds nothing but melancholy images, my own mistakes and other people's: mistakes of individuals, mistakes of 1 I.e .. N. P. Ogarev, then living on his Penza estate, Staroye Aksheno.

( A .S.)

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whole peoples. Where there was a possibility of salvation, death crossed the path . . . .

. . . The last days of our life in Rome conclude the bright part of my memories, that begin with the awakening of thought in childhood and our youthful vow on the Sparrow Hills.

Alarmed by the Paris of 1847, I had opened my eyes to the truth for a moment, but was carried away again by the events that seethed about me. All Italy was 'awakening' before my eyes! I saw the King of Naples tamed and the Pope humbly asking the alms of the people's love-the whirlwind which set everything in movement carried me, too, off my feet; all Europe took up its bed and walked-in a fit of somnambulism which we took for awakening. When I came to myself, it had all vanished ; la Sonnambula, frightened by the police, had fallen from the roof; friends were scattered or were furiously slaughtering one another . . . . And I found myself alone, utterly alone, among graves and cradles-their guardian, defender, avenger, and I coulrl do nothing because I tried to do more than was usual.

And now I sit in London where chance has flung me-and I stay here because I do not know what to make of myself. An alien race swarms confusedly about me, wrapped in the heavy breath of ocean ; a world dissolving into chaos, lost in a fog in which outlines are blurred, in which a lamp gives only murky glimmers of light.

. . . And that other land-washed by the dark-blue sea under the canopy of a dark-blue sky . . . it is the one shining region ll:'ft until the far side of the grave.

0 Rome, how I love to return to your deceptions, how eagerly I run over day by day the time when I was intoxicated with you !

. . . A dark night. The Corso is filled with people, and here and there are torches. It is a month since a republic was proclaimed in Paris. :\'ews has come from Milan-there they are fighting, the people demand war,2 there is a rumour that Charles Albert is on the way \vith troops. The talk of the angry crowd is like the intermittent roar of a wave, which alternately comes noisily up the beach and then pauses to draw breath.

The crowds form into ranks. They go to the Piedmontese ambassador to find out whether war has been declared.

'Fall in, fall in with us,' shout dozens of voices.

2 This refers to the successful rising in Milan on 1 8th March, 1848

against the A ustrian dominion in LombaHly. Clwrlcs Albert, King of Piedmont, also declared war on A ustria. (A.S. )

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'We are foreigners.'

'All the better; Santo Dio, you are our guests.'

We joined the ranks.

'The front place for the guests, the front place for the ladies, le donne forestiere!'

And with passionate shouts of approval the crowd parted to make way. Ciceruacchio and with him a young Russian poet, a poet of popular songs, pushed their way forward with a flag, the tribune shook hands with the ladies and with them stood at the head of ten or twelve thousand people-and all moved forward in that majestic and harmonious order which is peculiar to the Roman people.

The leaders went into the Palazzo, and a few minutes later the drawing-room doors opened on the balcony. The ambassador came out to appease the people and to confirm the news of war ; his words were received with frantic joy. Ciceruacchio was o n the balcony in the glaring light o f torches and candelabra, and beside him under the Italian flag stood four young women, all four Russians-was it not strange? I can see them now on that stone platform, and below them the swaying, innumerable multitude, mingling with shouts for war and curses for the Jesuits, loud cries of 'Evviva le donne forestiere!'

In England they and we should have been greeted with hisses, abuse, and perhaps stones. In France we should have been taken for venal agents. But here the aristocratic proletariat, the descendants of Marius and the ancient tribunes, gave us a warm and genuine welcome. We were received by them into the European struggle . . . and with Italy alone the bond of love, or at least of warm memory, is still unbroken.

And was all that . . . intoxication, delirium? Perhaps-but I do not envy those who were not carried away by that exquisite dream. The sleep could not last long in any case: the inexorable Macbeth of real life had already raised his hand to murder sleep and . . .

My dream was past-it has no further change.

2. T H E R E A L I T Y

ON THE EVENING of the 24th of June [ 1 848 ] coming back from the Place Maubert, I went into a cafe on the Quai d'Orsay. A few minutes later I heard discordant shouting, which came nearer and nearer. I went to the window: a grotesque comic banlieue was coming in from the surrounding districts to the support of

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order; clumsy, rascally fellows, half peasants, half shopkeepers, somewhat drunk, in wretched uniforms and old-fashioned shakos, they moved rapidly but in disorder, with shouts of 'Vive Louis-Napoleon!'

That ominous shout I now heard for the first time. I could not restrain myself, and when they reached the cafe I shouted at the top of my voice: 'Vive Ia Republique!' Those who were near the

\vindows shook their fists at me and an officer muttered some abuse, threatening mP with his sword ; and for a long time afterwards I could hear their shouts of greeting to the man who had come to destroy half the revolution, to kill half the republic, to inflict himself upon France, as a punishment for forgetting in her arrogance both other nations and her own proletariat.

At eight o'clock in the morning of the 2"ith or 26th of June Annenkov and I went out to the Champs-Elysees. The cannonade we had heard in the night was now silent ; only from time to time there was the crackle of rifle-fire and the beating of drums.

The streets were empty, but the National Guards stood on either side of them. On the Place de la Concorde there was a detachment of the Garde mobile; near them were standing several poor women with brooms and some ragpickers and concierges from the houses near by. All their faces were gloomy and shocked. A lad of seventeen was leaning on a rifle and telling them something; we went up to them. He and all his comrades, boys like himself, were half drunk, their faces l;lackened with gunpowder and their eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights and drink ; many

\vere dozing with their chins resting on the muzzles of their rifles.

'And what happened then can't be described.' He paused, and then went on: 'Yes, and they fought well, too, but we paid them out for our romrades! A lot of them really caught it! I stuck my bayonPt right up to the hilt in live or six of them ; they'll remember us,' he added, trying to assume the air of a hardened malefactor. The women were pale and silent ; a man who looked like a concierge observed: 'Serve them right, the blackguards!'

. . . but this savage comment evoked not the slightest response.

They were all of too ignorant a class to sympathise with the massacre and with the unfortunate boy who had been made into a murderer.

Silent and sad, we went to the Madeleine. Here we were stopped by a cordon of the National Guard. At first, after searching our pockets, they asked where we were going, and let us through ; but the next cordon, beyond the Madeleine, refused to

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let us through and sent us back; when we went back to the first cordon we were stopped once more.

'But you saw us pass here just now! '

'Don't let them pass,' shouted an officer.

'Arc you making fools of us, or what? ' I asked.

'It's no use talking,' a shopman in uniform answered rudely.

'Take them up-and to the police: I kno\v one of them' (he pointed at me) ; 'I have seen him more than once at meetings.

The other must be the same sort too; they arc neither of them Frenchmen. I'll answer for everything-march.'

We were taken away by two soldiers with rifles in front, two behind, and one on each side. The first man we mPt was a representant du peuple with a silly badge in his button-hole; it was Tocqueville, who had written about America. I addressed myself to him and told him what had happened: it was not a joking matter; they kept people in prison without any sort of trial, threw them into the cellars of the Tuileries, and shot them .

Tocqueville did not even ask who we were; he very politely bowed himself off, delivering himself of the following banality:

'The legislative authority has no right to interfere with the executive.' How could he have helped being a minister under Napoleon III!

The 'executive authority' led us along the boulevard to the Chaussee d'Antin to the commissaire de police. By the way, it will do no harm to mention that neither when we wPre arrested, nor when we were searched, nor when we were on our way, did I see a single policeman; all was done by the bourgeois-warriors.

The boulevard was completely empty, all the shops were closed and the inmates rushed to their doors and windows when they heard our footsteps, and kept asking who we were: 'Des emeutiers etrangers,' answered our escort, and the worthy bourgeois looked at us and gnashed their teeth.

From the police station we were sent to the Hotel des Capucines; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had its quarters there, but at that time there was some temporary police committee there.

We went with our escort into a large study. A bald old gentleman in spectacles, dressed entirely in black, was sitting alone at a table; he asked us over again all the questions that the commissaire had asked us.

'Where are your passports?'

'We never carry them with us when we are out for a walk.'

He took up a manuscript book, looked through it for a long time, apparently found nothing, and asked one of our escort:

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'Why did you arrest them?'

'The officer gave the order; he says they are very suspicious characters.'

'Very well,' said the old gentleman; 'I will inquire into the case ; you may go.'

VVhen the escort had gone the old gentleman asked us to explain the cause of our arrest. I put the facts before him, adding that the officer might perhaps have seen me on the frfteenth of May at the Assembly; and then I told him of an incident of the previous day. I had been sitting in the Cafe Caurnartin when suddenly there was a false alarm, a squadron of dragoons rode by at full gallop and the National Guard began to form ranks.

Together with some five people who were in the cafe, I went up to a window; a National Guardsman standing below shouted rudely,

'Didn't you hear that windows were to be shut?'

His tone justified me in supposing that he was not addressing me, and I did not take the slightest notice of his words; besides, I was not alone, though I happened to be standing in front. Then the defender of order raised his rifle and, since this was taking place on the rez-de-chaussee, tried to thrust at me with his bayonet, but I saw his movement and stepped back and said to the others:

'Gentlemen, you are witnesses that I have done nothing to him-or is it the habit of the National Guard to bayonet foreigners?'

'lHais c'est indigne, mais cela n'a pas de nom!' my neighbours chimed in.

The frightened cafe-keeper rushed to shut the windows; a vilelooking sergeant appPared with an order to turn everyone out of the cafe-1 fancied he was the same gentleman who had ordered us to be stopped. Moreover, the Cafe Caumartin was a couple of steps from the :vladeleine.

'So that's how it is, gentlemen: you see what imprudence leads to. VVhy walk out at such a tirne?-rninds are exasperated, blood is flowing . . . .'

At that moment a National Guardsman brought in a maidservant, saying that an officer had caught her in the very act of trying to post a letter addressed to Berlin. The old gentleman took the envelope and told the soldier to go.

'You can go horne,' he said to us; 'only, please do not go by the same streets as before, and especially not by the cordon which arrested you. But stay, I'll send someone to escort you ! he'll take vou to the Champs- Uyscf's-you can g!'t through that \vay.'

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'And you,' he said, addressing the servant, giving her back the letter which he had not touched, 'post it in another letter-box, further away.'

And so the police gave protection from the armed bourgeois!

On the night of the 26th-27th of June, so Pierre Leroux relates, he went to Senart to beg him to do something for the prisoners who were being suffocated in the cellars of the Tuileries. Senart, a man well known as a desperate conservative, said to Pierre Leroux:

'And who will answer for their lives on the way? The National Guard will kill them. If you had come an hour earlier you would have found two colonels here: I had the greatest difficulty in bringing them to reason, and ended by telling them if these horrors went on I should give up the president's chair i n the Assembly and take my place behind the barricades.'

Two hours later, on our returning home, the concierge made his appearance accompanied by a stranger in a dress-coat and four men in workmen's blouses which badly disguised the moustaches of municipales and the deportment of gendarmes.

The stranger unbuttoned his coat and waistcoat and, pointing with dignity tu a tricoloured scarf, said that he was Barlet, the commissaire of police (the man who on the 2nd of December, in the National Assembly, took by the collar the man who in his time had taken Rome-General Oudinot) , and that he had orders to search my quarters. I gave him my key, and he set to work exactly as politsmeyster Miller had in 1 834.

My wife came in: the commissairc, like the officer of gendarmes who once carne to us from Dubelt, began apologising. My wife looked at him calmly and directly and, when at the end of his speech he begged her indulgence, said:

'It would be cruelty on my part not to imagine myself in your place; you are sufficiently punished already by being obliged to do what you are doing.'

The commissaire blushed, but did not say a word. Rummaging among the papers and laying aside a whole heap of them, he suddenly went up to the fireplace, sniffed, touched the ashes and, turning to me with an important air, asked:

'What was your object in burning papers?'

'I haven't been burning papers.'

'Upon my word, the ash is still warm.'

'No, it is not warm.'

'Monsieur, vous parlez a un magistral!'

'The ash is cold, all the same, tho.:.gh,' I said, flaring up and raising my voice.

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'Why, am I lying?'

'What right have you to doubt my word? . . . here are some honest workmen with you, let them test it. Besides, even if I had burnt papers: in the first place, I have a right to burn them; and in the second, what are you going to do?'

'Have you no other papers?'

'No.'

'I have a few letters besides, and very interesting ones; come into my room,' said my wife.

'Oh, your letters . . .'

'Please don't stand on ceremony . . . why, you are only doing your duty; come along.'

The commissaire \vent in, glanced very slightly at the letters, which were for the most part from Italy, and was about to go . . . .

'But you haven't seen what is underneath here-a letter from the Conciergerie, from a prisoner, you see; don't you want to take it with you?'

'Really, Madame,' answered the policeman of the republic,

'you are so prejudiced ; I don't want that letter at all.'

'What do you intend to do with the Russian papers?' I asked.

'They will be translated.'

'The point is, where you will take your translator from. If he is from the Russian Embassy, it will be as good as laying information ; you will destroy five or six people. You will greatly oblige me if you will mention at the proces-verbal that I beg most urgently that a Polish emigre shall be chosen as a translator.'

'I believe that can be done.'

'I thank you; and I have another request: do you know Italian at all?'

'A little.'

'I will show you two letters ; in them the word France is not mentioned. The man who wrote them is in the hands of the Sardinian police; you \vill see by the contents that it will go badly with him if they get hold of the letters.'

'i'liais, ah r;:a!' observed the commissairc, his dignity as a man beginning to be aroused ; 'you seem to imagine that we are connected with the police of all the despotic powers. We have nothing to do wi th other countries. We are unwillingly compelled to take measures at home when blood is flowing in the streets and when foreigners interfere in our affairs.'

'Very well : then you can leave the letters here.'

The commissaire had not lied ; he really did know a little

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Italian, and so, after turning the letters over, he put them in his pocket, promising to return them.

With that his visit ended. The letters from the Italian he gave back next day, but my papers vanished completely. A month passed; I wrote a letter to Cavaignac,3 inquiring why the police did not return my papers nor say what they had found i n them-a matter o f very little consequence t o them, perhaps, but of the greatest importance for my honour.

What gave rise to this last phrase was as follows. Several persons of my acquaintance had intervened on my behalf, considering the visit of the commissaire and the retention of my papers outrageous.

'We wanted to make certain,' Lamoriciere4 told them.,

'whether he was not an agent of the Russian government.'

This was the first time I heard of this abominable suspicion; it was something quite new for me. My life had been as open, as public, as though it had been lived in a glass hive, and now all at once this filthy accusation, and from whom?-from a republican government!

A week later I was summoned to the prefecture. Barlet was with me. We were received in Ducoux's room by a young official very like some free and easy Petersburg head-clerk.

'General Cavaignac,' he told me, 'has charged the Prefect to return your papers without any examination. The information collected concerning you renders it quite superfluous; no suspicion rests upon you ; here is your portfolio. Will you be good enough to sign this paper first?'

It was a receipt stating that all the papers had been returned to me complete.

I stopped and asked whether it would not be more in order for me to look the papers through.

'They have not been touched. Besides, here is the seal.'

'The seal has not been broken,' observed Barlet soothingly.

'My seal is not here. Indeed, it was not put on them.'

'It is my seal, but you know you had the key.'

Not wishing to reply with rudeness, I smiled. This enraged 3 Ca,·aignac, Louis-Eugene ( 1 802-57 ) , the youngest of the three dis·

tinguished Frenchmen of that name, was Commander-in-Chief in 1 848, and an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the republic when Louis-Napoleon (afterward;; Napoleon Ill) was elected on 1 0th December, 1 848. ( Tr. ) 4 Lamoriciere, Louis de ( 1806-65) , a prominent politician and general, was exiled in December 1 848, and afterwarJs took command of the Papal troops. ( Tr. )

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them both: the head-clerk became the head of a department; he snatched up a penknife and, cutting the seal, said rudely enough: 'Pray look, if you don't believe, but I have not so much time to waste,' and walked out with a dignified bow. Their resentment convinced me that they really had not looked at the papers, and so, after a cursory glance at them, I signed the receipt and went home.

Tlze llevolzttioJl

of 1 848 irt Fra1zce

I LEFT PARIS in the autumn of 1 847, without having form!'d any ties there; I remained completely outside the literary and political circles. There were many reasons for that. No immediate occasion of contact with them presented itself, and I did not care to seek one. To visit them simply in order to look at celebrities, I thought unseemly. Moreover, I particularly disliked the tone of condescending superiority which Frenchmen assume with Russians: they approve of us, encourage us, commend our pronunciation and our wealth; we put up with it all, and behave as though we were asking them a favour, or were even partly guilty, delighted when, from politeness, they take us for Frenchmen.

The Fr!'nch overwhl'lm us with a flood of words, we cannot keep pace with them ; we think of an answer, but they do not care to hear it; we are ashamed to show that we notice their blunders and their ignorance-they take advantage of all that with hopeless complacency.

To get on to a different footing with them one would have to impress them with one's consequence; to do this one must possess various rights, which I had not at that time, and of which I took advantage at once when they came to be at my disposal.

Moreover, it must be remembered that there are no people in the world with whom it is easier to strike up a nodding acquaintance than the French-and no people with whom it is more difficult to get on to really intimate terms. A Frenchman likes to live in company, in order to display himself, to have an audience, and in that respect he is as much a contrast to the Englishman as in everything else. An Englishman looks at

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people because he is bored; he looks at men as though from a stall in a theatre; he makes use of people as an entertainment, or as a means of obtaining information. The Englishman is always asking questions, the Frenchman is always giving answers. The Englishman is always wondering, always thinking things over; the Frenchman knows everything for certain, he is finished and complete, he will go no further: he is fond of preaching, talking, holding forth-about what, to whom, he does not care. He feels no need for personal intimacy; the cafe satisfies him completely.

Like Repetilov in Woe from Wit, he does not notice that Chatsky is gone and Skalozub is in his place, that Skalozub is gone and Zagoretsky is in his place-and goes on holding forth about the jury-room, about Byron ( whom he calls 'Biron'), and other important matters.

Coming back from Italy not yet cooled from the February Revolution, I stumbled on the 1 5th of May, and then lived through the agony of the June days and the state of siege. It was then that I obtained a deeper insight into the tigre-singe of Voltaireand I lost even the desire to become acquainted with the mighty ones of this republic.

On one occasion a possibility almost arose of common work which would have brought me into contact with many persons, but that did not come off either. Count KsaV''ery Branicki gave seventy thousand francs to found a magazine to deal principally with foreign politics and other nations, and especially with the Polish question. The usefulness and appropriateness of such a magazine were obvious. French papers deal little and badly with what is happening outside France; during the republic, they thought it sufficient to encourage all the heathen nations now and then with the phrase solidarite des peuples, and the promise that as soon as they had time to turn round at home they would build a world-wide republic based upon universal brotherhood.