Chapter 6 (2)

The second and third occasions of my appearance in public were very different. In 1836 I played the part of ‘Ugar’ in the old Russian farce, while the wife of the colonel of gendarmes was ‘Marfa,’ before all the _beau-monde_ of Vyatka, including Tyufyaev. We had been rehearsing for a month, but yet my heart beat violently and my hands trembled, when a deathly silence followed the overture and the curtain began rising with a sort of horrid shudder; Marfa and I were waiting behind the scenes. She was so sorry for me, or else so afraid that I should spoil the performance, that she gave me an immense glass of champagne, but even with that I was half dead.

After making my début under the auspices of a Minister of Education and a colonel of gendarmes, I appeared without any nervousness or self-conscious shyness at a Polish meeting in London and that was my third public appearance. The place of the Minister Uvarov was on that occasion filled by the ex-Minister, Ledru-Rollin.[94]

But is not this enough of student reminiscences? I am afraid it may be a sign of senility to linger so long over them; I will only add a few details concerning the cholera of 1831.

Cholera—the word so familiar now in Europe and so thoroughly at home in Russia that a patriotic poet calls the cholera the one faithful ally of Nicholas—was heard then for the first time in the North. Every one trembled before the terrible plague that was moving up the Volga towards Moscow. Exaggerated rumours filled the imagination with horror. The disease advanced capriciously, halting, skipping over places, and it seemed to have missed Moscow, when suddenly the terrible news, ‘The cholera is in Moscow!’ was all over the city.

In the morning a student in the political section felt ill, next day he died in the university hospital. We rushed to look at his body. He was emaciated, as though after a long illness, the eyes were sunk, the features were distorted, beside him lay a porter, who had been taken ill in the night.

We were informed that the university was to be closed. This order was read to our section by the professor of technology, Denisov; he was melancholy, perhaps frightened. Next morning he too died.

We assembled together from all sections in the big university courtyard; there was something touching in this crowd of young people bidden to disperse before the plague. Their faces were pale and particularly full of feeling; many were thinking of friends and relations. We said good-bye to the government scholars, who had been separated from us by quarantine measures, and were being distributed in small numbers in different houses. And at home we were all met by the stench of chloride of lime, vinegar—and a diet such as might well have laid a man up, apart from chloride and cholera.

Strange to say those gloomy days have remained as it were a time of ceremonial solemnity in my memory.

Moscow assumed quite a different aspect. The public activities, unknown at ordinary times, gave it a new life. There were fewer carriages in the streets, and gloomy crowds of people stood at the cross-roads and talked about poisoners. The conveyances that were taking the sick moved at a walking pace, escorted by police; people drew aside from black hearses with the dead. Bulletins concerning the disease were printed twice a day. The town was surrounded by a cordon as in time of war, and the soldiers shot a poor sacristan who was making his way across the river. All this absorbed men’s minds, terror of the plague ousted terror of the authorities; the people murmured, and then there came one piece of news upon another, that so-and-so had been taken ill, that so-and-so had died....

The Metropolitan, Filaret, arranged a universal service of prayer. On the same day and at the same hour, all the priests made the round of their parishes in procession with banners. The terrified inhabitants came out of their houses and fell on their knees, as the procession passed, praying with tears for the remission of sins. Even the priests, accustomed to address God on intimate terms, were grave and moved. Some of them went to the Kremlin. There in the open air, surrounded by the higher clergy, knelt the Metropolitan praying that this cup might pass away. On the same spot six years before, he had held a thanksgiving for the hanging of the Decembrists.

Filaret was by way of being a high priest in opposition; on behalf of what he was in opposition, I never could make out. Perhaps on behalf of his own personality. He was an intelligent and learned man, and a master of the Russian language, successfully introducing Church Slavonic into it; but all this gave him no ground for opposition. The common people did not like him and called him a freemason, because he was closely associated with Prince A. N. Golitsyn and was preaching in Petersburg in the palmy days of the Bible Society. The Synod forbade his catechism being used in teaching. The clergy under his sway went in terror of his despotism; possibly it was as rivals that Nicholas and he hated each other.

Filaret was very clever and ingenious in humiliating the temporal power; in his sermons there was the light of that vague Christian socialism for which Lacordaire and other far-sighted Catholics were distinguished. From his exalted ecclesiastical tribune, Filaret declared that a man can never lawfully be the tool of another, that there can be nothing between men but an exchange of services, and this, he said, in a state in which half the population were slaves.

He said to the fettered convicts in the forwarding prison on the Sparrow Hills: ‘The civil law has condemned you and drives you away, but the Church hastens after you, longing to say one more word, one more prayer for you and to give you her blessing on your journey.’ Then comforting them, he added ‘that they, condemned convicts, had broken with their past, that a new life lay before them, while among others (probably there were no others except officials present) there were far greater criminals,’ and he quoted the example of the robber at Christ’s side.

Filaret’s sermon at the service on the occasion of the cholera surpassed all his other efforts; he took as his text how the angel offered David the choice of war, famine or plague as a punishment; David chose plague. The Tsar came to Moscow furious, sent the Court Minister, Prince Volkonsky, to give Filaret a good ‘dressing down’ and threatened to send him to be Metropolitan in Georgia. The Metropolitan meekly submitted and sent a new message to all the churches, in which he explained that they would be wrong to look in the text of his first sermon for an application to their beloved Emperor, that by David was meant ourselves defiled by sin. Of course, this made the first sermon intelligible even to those who had not grasped its meaning at first.

This was how the Metropolitan of Moscow played at opposition.

The service had as little effect on the cholera as the chloride of lime; the disease spread further and further.

I was in Paris during the severest visitation of cholera in 1849. The plague was terrible. The hot days of June helped to spread it: the poor died like flies, the tradespeople fled from Paris while others sat behind locked doors. The government, exclusively occupied with its struggles against the revolutionaries, did not think of taking active measures. The scanty collections raised for relief were insufficient for the emergency. The poor working people were left abandoned to the caprice of destiny, the hospitals had not beds enough, the police had not coffins enough, and in the houses, packed to overflowing with families, the bodies remained two or three days in inner rooms. In Moscow it was not like that.

Prince D. V. Golitsyn, at that time governor-general, a weak but honourable man, cultured and much respected, aroused the enthusiasm of Moscow society, and somehow everything was arranged in a private way, that is, without the special interference of government. A committee was formed of citizens of standing—wealthy landowners and merchants. Every member undertook one quarter of Moscow. Within a few days twenty hospitals had been opened; they did not cost the government a farthing, everything was done by subscription. Shopkeepers gave gratis everything needed for the hospitals, bedclothes, linen, and warm clothing for the patients on recovery. Young men volunteered as superintendents of the hospitals to ensure that half of these contributions should not be stolen by the attendants.

The university did its full share. The whole medical faculty, students and doctors _en masse_, put themselves at the disposal of the cholera committee; they were assigned to the different hospitals and remained there until the cholera was over. For three or four months these admirable young men lived in the hospitals as orderlies, assistants, nurses, secretaries, and all this without any remuneration and at a time when there was such an exaggerated fear of the infection. I remember one student, a Little Russian, who at the very beginning of the cholera had asked for leave of absence on account of important family affairs. Leave is rarely given in term-time, but at last he obtained it; just as he was about to set off, the students went to the hospitals. The Little Russian put his leave in his pocket and went with them. When he came out of the hospital his leave was long overdue and he was the first to laugh over his trip.

Moscow, apparently so drowsy and apathetic, so absorbed in scandal and piety, weddings, and nothing at all, always wakes up when it is necessary, and is equal to the occasion when the storm breaks over Russia.

In 1612 she was joined in blood-stained nuptials with Russia, and their union was welded in fire in 1812.

She bowed her head before Peter because the future of Russia lay in his brutal clutch. But with murmurs and disdain Moscow received within her walls the woman stained with her husband’s blood, that impenitent Lady Macbeth, that Lucretia Borgia without her Italian blood, the Russian Empress of German birth[95]—and scowling and pouting, she quietly withdrew from Moscow.

Scowling and pouting, Napoleon waited for the keys of Moscow at the Dragomilovsky Gate, impatiently playing with his cigar-holder and tugging at his glove. He was not accustomed to enter foreign towns unescorted.

‘But my Moscow came not forth,’ as Pushkin says; but set fire to herself.

The cholera came and again the people’s city showed itself full of heart and energy!

In August 1830, we went to Vassilyevskoe, stopped, as we always did, at the Radcliffian[96] castle of Perhushkovo, and, after feeding ourselves and our horses, were preparing to continue our journey. Bakay, with a towel round his waist like a belt, had already shouted: ‘Off!’ when 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 news of the Revolution of July! There were two pages of the _Journal des Débats_ which he had brought with a letter; I read them over a hundred times and got to know them by heart, and for the first time I was bored in the country.

It was a glorious time, events came quickly. Scarcely had the meagre figure of Charles X. had time to disappear behind the mists of Holyrood, when Belgium flared up, the throne of the Citizen King tottered, and a warm revolutionary spirit began to be apparent in debates and literature. Novels, plays, poems, all once more became propaganda and conflict.

At that time we knew nothing of the artificial stage-setting of the revolution in France, and we took it all for the genuine thing.

Any one who cares to see how strongly the news of the revolution of July affected the younger generation should read Heine’s description of how he heard in Heligoland ‘that the great Pan of the Pagans is dead.’ There was no sham ardour there, Heine at thirty was as enthusiastic, as childishly excited, as we were at eighteen.

We followed step by step every word, every event, the bold questions and abrupt answers, the doings of General Lafayette, and the doings of General Lamarque; we not only knew every detail concerning them but loved all the leading men (the Radical ones, of course) and kept their portraits, from Manuel[97] and Benjamin Constant to Dupont de l’Eure[98] and Armand Carrel.[99]

In the midst of this ferment all at once, like a bomb exploding close by, the news of the rising in Warsaw overwhelmed us. This was not far away, this was at home, and we looked at each other with tears in our eyes, repeating our favourite line:

‘Nein! es sind keine leere Träume!’

We rejoiced at every defeat of Dibitch; refused to believe in the failures of the Poles, and I at once added to my shrine the portrait of Thaddeus Kosciuszko.

It was just then that I saw Nicholas for the second time and his face was still more strongly imprinted on my memory. The nobles were giving a ball in his honour. I was in the gallery of the Assembly Hall and could stare at him to my heart’s content. He had not yet begun to wear a moustache. His face was still young, but the change in it since the time of the Coronation struck me. He stood morosely by a column, staring coldly and grimly before him, without looking at any one. He had grown thinner. In those features, in those pewtery eyes one could read the fate of Poland and indeed of Russia also. He was shaken, frightened, he doubted[100] the security of his throne and was ready to revenge himself for what he had suffered, for his fear and his doubts.

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

The network of espionage cast about the university from the beginning of the reign began to be drawn tighter. In 1832 a Pole who was a student in our section was a victim. Sent to the university as a government scholar, not at his own initiative, he had been put in our course; we made friends with him; he was discreet and melancholy in his behaviour, we never heard a rash word from him, but we never heard a word of weakness either. One 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 been fetched away at night, that he had been summoned before the authorities, and then people had come for his papers and belongings and had told them not to speak of it. There the matter ended, _we never heard anything of the fate of this luckless young man_.[102]

A few months passed when suddenly there was a report in the lecture-room that several students had been seized in the night; among them were Kostenetsky, Kolreif, Antonovitch and others; we knew them well, they were all excellent fellows. Kolreif, the son of a Protestant pastor, was an extremely gifted musician. A court martial was appointed to try them; this meant in plain language that they were doomed to perish. We were all in a fever of suspense to know what would happen to them, but from the first they too vanished without trace. The storm that was crushing the rising blades of corn was everywhere. We no longer had a foreboding of its approach, we felt it, we saw it, and we huddled closer and closer together.

The danger strung up our tense nerves, made our hearts beat faster and made us love each other with greater devotion. There were five of us at first and now we met Vadim Passek.

In Vadim there was a great deal that was new to us. We had all with slight variations had a similar bringing up, that is, we knew nothing but Moscow and our country estates, we had all learned out of the same books, had lessons from the same 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 privation. 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 had put its imprint on him, which was quite unlike our provincial stamp; he was far from being so vulgar and petty, he was distinguished by more sturdiness and a tougher fibre. Vadim was a savage in comparison with us. His daring was of another kind, unlike ours, more that of the _bogatyr_, and sometimes conceited; the aristocracy of misfortune had developed a peculiar self-respect in him; 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. We made friends very quickly. Though, indeed, at that time, there was neither ceremony nor reasonable precaution, nothing like it, to be seen in our 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, then, at seven o’clock; don’t be late, he’ll be with me.’

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 Ketscher?’

A conversation began and grew more and more eager....

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

Our meeting with Vadim introduced a new element into our fraternity.

We met as before most frequently at Ogaryov’s. His invalid father had gone to live on his estate in Penza. Ogaryov lived alone on the lowest storey of their house at the Nikitsky Gate. This was not far from the University, and all were particularly attracted there. Ogaryov had that magnetic attraction which forms the first thread of crystallisation in every mass of casually meeting atoms, if only they have some affinity. Wherever such men are flung down, they imperceptibly become the heart of the organism.

But besides his bright, cheerful room, furnished with red and gold striped hangings, always haunted by the smoke of cigars and the smell of punch and other—I was going to say—edibles and beverages, but I stopped, because there rarely were any edibles except cheese—well, besides Ogaryov’s ultra-student-like abode where we argued for nights together, and sometimes caroused for nights also, another house, in which almost for the first time we learnt to respect family life, became more and more our favourite resort.

Vadim often left our conversations and went off home; he missed his mother and sisters if he did not see them for long together. To us who lived heart and soul in comradeship, it was strange that he could prefer his family to our company.

He introduced us to it. In that family everything bore traces of the Tsar’s _persecution_; only yesterday it had come from Siberia, it was ruined, harassed, and at the same time full of that dignity which misfortune lays, not upon every sufferer, but on the faces of those who have known how to bear it.

Their father had been seized in the reign of Paul in consequence of some political treachery, flung into the Schlüsselburg and exiled to Siberia. Alexander brought back thousands of those exiled by his insane father, but Passek was forgotten. He was the nephew of that Passek who took part in the murder of Peter III., and who was afterwards governor-general in the Polish provinces, and he might have claimed part of an inheritance which had already passed into other hands, and it was those ‘other hands’ which kept him in Siberia.

While in the Schlüsselburg Passek married the daughter of one of the officers in the garrison there. The young girl knew that things would go hard with her, but she was not deterred by fear of exile. At first they struggled on somehow in Siberia, selling the last of their belongings, but their poverty grew more and more terrible, and the more rapidly so as their family increased. Weighed down by privation, by hard work, deprived of warm clothing and at times even of bread, they yet succeeded in coming through and in bringing up a whole family of young lions; the father transmitted to them his proud, indomitable spirit and faith in himself, the secret of fortitude in misfortune; he educated them by his example, the mother by her self-sacrifice and bitter tears. The sisters were in no way inferior to the brothers in heroic fortitude. Yes—why be afraid of words—they were a family of heroes. What they had all borne for one another, what they had done for the family was incredible, and always with head erect, not in the least crushed.

In Siberia the three sisters had only one pair of shoes; they used to keep them for going on walks, that strangers might not see the extremity of their need.

At the beginning of 1826 Passek received permission to return to Russia. It was winter, and it was no easy matter to move with such a family, without fur coats, without money, from the province of Tobolsk, while on the other hand the heart yearned for Russia: exile is more than ever insufferable after it is over. Our martyrs struggled back somehow; a peasant woman, who had nursed one of the children during the mother’s illness, brought her hard-earned savings to help them on the way, asking only that they would take her too; the drivers brought them to the Russian frontier for a trifle, or for nothing; some of the family walked while others were driven, and the young people took turns; so they made the long winter journey from the Urals to Moscow. Moscow was the dream of the young ones, their hope—and there hunger awaited them.

While forgiving Passek, the government never thought of returning him some part of his property. Exhausted by his efforts and privations, the old man took to his bed; they knew not where to find bread for the morrow.

At that moment Nicholas celebrated his coronation, banquet followed upon banquet, Moscow was like a heavily decorated ballroom, everywhere lights, shields, and gay attire.... The two elder sisters, without consulting any one, wrote a petition to Nicholas, describing the position of the family, and begged him to inquire into the case and restore their property. They left the house secretly in the morning and went to the Kremlin, squeezing their way to the front, and awaited the Tsar, ‘crowned and exalted on high.’ When Nicholas came down the steps of the red staircase, the two girls quietly stepped forward and offered the petition. He passed by, pretending not to see them; an aide-de-camp took the paper and the police led them away.

Nicholas was about thirty at the time and already was capable of such heartlessness. This coldness, this caution is characteristic of little commonplace natures, cashiers, and petty clerks. I have often noticed this unyielding firmness of character in postal officials, salesmen of theatre and railway tickets, and people who are continually bothered and interrupted at every minute. They learn not to see a man, though he is standing by. But how did this autocratic clerk train himself not to see, and what need had he not to be a minute late for a function?

The girls were kept in custody until evening. Frightened and insulted, they besought the police superintendent to let them go home, where their absence must have upset the whole family. Nothing was done about the petition.

The father could endure no more, his sufferings had been too great; he died. The children were left with their mother, struggling on from day to day. The greater the need, the harder the sons worked; all three finished their university course brilliantly and took their degrees. The two elder ones went off to Petersburg; there, being excellent mathematicians, they gave lessons in addition to their work in the service (one in the Admiralty and the other in the Engineers) and, denying themselves everything, sent the money they earned home to the family.

I vividly remember the old mother in her dark gown and white cap; her thin, pale face was covered with wrinkles, she looked far older than she was, only her eyes retained something of her youth; so much gentleness, love, anxiety, and so many past tears could be seen in them. She adored her children; she was rich, famous, young in them; with deep and devout feeling she spoke of them in her weak voice, which sometimes broke and quivered with suppressed tears.

When they were all gathered together in Moscow and sitting round their simple repast, the old woman was beside herself with joy; she walked round the table, looked after their wants, and, suddenly stopping, would gaze at all her young people with such pride, with such happiness, and then lift her eyes to me as though asking: ‘They really are fine, aren’t they?’ At such times I longed to throw myself on her neck and kiss her hands; and, moreover, they really were all of them very handsome, too.

She was happy then, why did she not die at one of those dinners?...

In two years, she had lost the three elder sons. One died, gloriously, his heroism acknowledged by his enemies in the midst of victory and glory, though it was not for his own cause he sacrificed his life. He was the young general killed by the Circassians at Dargo. Laurels do not heal a mother’s grief.... The others did not have so happy an end; the hardness of Russian life weighed upon them, weighed upon them till it crushed them. Poor mother! and poor Russia!

Vadim died in February 1843. I was with him at the end, and for the first time looked upon the death of a man dear to me, and at the same time death in its full horror, in all its meaningless fortuitousness, in all its blind, immoral injustice.

Ten years before his death Vadim married my cousin[103] and I was best man at his wedding. Married life and the change in his habits parted us somewhat. He was happy in his private life, but unfortunate in his outward circumstances, and unsuccessful in his undertakings. Not long before our arrest, he went to Harkov, where he had been promised a lecturer’s chair at the university. His going there saved him indeed from prison, but his name was not forgotten by the police. Vadim was refused the post. The assistant-director admitted to him that they had received a document by which they were forbidden to give him the chair, on account of connections with evilly-disposed persons of which the government had obtained knowledge.

Vadim was left without a post, that is, without bread—that was his Vyatka.

We were exiled. Relations with us were dangerous. Black years of poverty followed for him; in seven years of struggle to get a bare living, in mortifying contact with coarse and heartless people, far from friends and from all possibility of corresponding with them, his health gave way.

‘Once we had spent all our money to the last farthing,’ his wife told me afterwards; ‘on the previous evening I had tried to get hold of ten roubles somehow, but had not succeeded. I had already borrowed from every one from whom it was possible to borrow a little. In the shops they refused to give us provisions except for cash, we thought of nothing but what would the children have to eat next day. Vadim sat gloomily by the window, then he got up, took his hat and said he would like a walk. I saw that he was very much depressed; I felt frightened, but still I was glad that he should distract his mind a little. When he was gone I flung myself on the bed and wept very bitterly, then I began thinking what to do—everything we had of the slightest value, our rings and our spoons, had long ago been pawned; I saw no resource left but to apply to my people and beg their bitter, cold assistance. Meanwhile Vadim wandered aimlessly about the streets and so reached Petrovsky Boulevard. As he passed by Shiryaev’s shop it occurred to him to inquire whether the bookseller had sold even one copy of his book; he had been in the shop five days before, but had found nothing for him; he walked despondently into the shop.

‘Very glad to see you,’ Shiryaev said to him, ‘there is a letter from our Petersburg agent, he has sold three hundred roubles’ worth of your book; would you like to have the money?’ And Shiryaev counted him out fifteen gold roubles. Vadim lost his head in his delight, rushed into the first restaurant for provisions, bought a bottle of wine and fruit and dashed home in a cab in triumph. At the moment I was watering the remainder of some broth for the children, and was meaning to put a little aside for him and to assure him that I had already had some, when he suddenly came in with the parcel and the bottle, gay and joyous.’ And she sobbed and could not utter another word.

After my exile I met him casually in Petersburg and found him very much changed. He kept his convictions, but he kept them like a warrior who will not let the sword drop out of his hand, though he feels that he is wounded to death. He was by then exhausted and looked coldly into the future. So, too, I found him in Moscow in 1842, his circumstances had somewhat improved, his work had begun to be appreciated; but all this came too late—it was like the epaulettes of Polezhaev or the release of Kolreif—granted not by the Russian Tsar but by Russian life.

Vadim was wasting away; in the autumn of 1842 tuberculosis was discovered, that terrible disease which I was destined to see once again.

A month before his death I began to notice with horror that his mental faculties were growing dimmer and weaker, like candles smouldering out and leaving the room darker and gloomier. Soon it was with difficulty and effort that he could find the words for incoherent speech, then he scarcely spoke at all and only inquired anxiously for his medicines and whether it was not time to take them.

At three o’clock one night in February, Vadim’s wife sent for me; the sick man was very bad, he had asked for me. I went in to him and gently took his hand, his wife mentioned my name; he gazed long and wearily at me but did not recognise me and closed his eyes. The children were brought in; he looked at them but I think did not recognise them either. His moaning became more painful, he would subside for minutes and then suddenly give a prolonged sigh and groan; then a bell pealed in a neighbouring church, Vadim listened and said, ‘That’s matins,’ after that he did not utter another word.... His wife knelt sobbing by the dead man’s bedside; a good, kind lad, one of their university comrades, who had been looking after him of late, bustled about, moving back the medicine table, raising the curtains.... I went away—it was bright and frosty, the rising sun shone brilliantly on the snow as though something good had happened; I went to order the coffin.

When I went back a deathlike stillness reigned in the little house, the dead man in accordance with Russian custom lay on a table in the drawing-room, at a little distance from it sat his friend, the artist Rabus, making a pencil sketch of him through his tears; beside the dead man stood a tall woman with silently folded arms and an expression of infinite sorrow; no artist could have moulded a nobler and finer figure of grief. The woman was not young, but retained traces of a stern, majestic beauty; she stood motionless, wrapped in a long black velvet cloak lined with ermine fur.

I stopped in the doorway.

Two or three minutes passed in the same stillness, when all at once she bent down, warmly kissed the dead man on the forehead, and said, ‘Farewell! farewell, friend Vadim,’ and with resolute steps walked into the inner rooms. Rabus went on drawing, he nodded to me, we had no inclination to speak. I sat down by the window in silence.

That woman was Madame E. Tchertkov, the sister of Count Zahar Tchernyshev, exiled for the Fourteenth of December.

The Simonovsky archimandrite, Melhisedek, of his own accord offered a grave within the precincts of his monastery. Melhisedek had once been a humble carpenter and a desperate dissenter, had afterwards gone back to orthodoxy, become a monk, been made Father Superior and afterwards archimandrite. With all that, he remained a carpenter, that is, he kept his heart and his broad shoulders and his red, healthy face. He knew Vadim and respected him for his historical researches concerning Moscow.

When the dead man’s body arrived before the monastery gates, they were opened and Melhisedek came out with all the monks to meet the martyr’s poor coffin with soft, mournful chanting, and to follow it to the grave. Not far from Vadim’s grave lie the ashes of another dear friend, Venevitinov,[104] with the inscription ‘How well he knew life, how little he lived!’ How well Vadim, too, knew life!

This was not enough for fate. Why did the old mother live so long? She had seen the end of their exile, had seen her children in all the beauty of their youth, in all the brilliance of their talent, what more had she to live for! Who prizes happiness should seek an early death. Happiness that lasts is no more to be found than ice which never melts.

Vadim’s eldest brother died a few months after the second, Diomid, had been killed; he caught cold, neglected his illness, and his undermined organism succumbed. He was barely forty and he was the eldest.

These three graves of three friends cast long dark shadows over the past; the last months of my youth are seen through funeral crape and the smoke of incense....

A year passed, the trial of my university comrades was over. They were found guilty (just as we were later on, and later still the Petrashevsky group[105]) 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 deprivation of rights of property and exile to Siberia.

‘What could a handful of young students do, they ruined themselves for nothing!’ All that is very sensible, and people who argue in that way ought to be gratified at the _good sense_ of the young generation that followed us. After our affair which 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 ruined, the elder lost in debauchery, and the younger, poisoned from childhood, whose sickly representatives we are seeing to-day.

After the Decembrists, all attempts to form societies were, indeed, unsuccessful; the scantiness of our forces and the vagueness of our aims pointed to the necessity for another kind of work—preparatory, spiritual. All that is true.

But what would young men be made of who could wait for solutions to theoretical problems while calmly looking on at what was being done around them, at the hundreds of Poles clanking their fetters on the Vladimir Road, at serfdom, at the soldiers flogged in the Hodynsky Field by some General Lashkevitch, at fellow-students lost and 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 terrible lesson and in a way a hardening process; the cruel blows aimed at every one of us by a heartless monster dispelled for good all rosy hopes of indulgence for youth. It was dangerous to jest with Liberalism, and no one could dream of playing at conspiracy. For one carelessly concealed tear over Poland, for one boldly uttered word, there were years of exile, of the white strap,[106] and sometimes even of the fortress; that was why it was important that those words were uttered and that those tears were shed. Young people perished sometimes, but they perished without checking the mental activity that was solving the sphinx riddle of Russian life, indeed they even justified its hope.

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

When our condemned comrades were being sent off to Orenburg by étape, on foot without sufficient warm clothing, Ogaryov in our circle, I. Kireyevsky 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 give the money and asked Kireyevsky, ‘But what are these lists for?’ ‘The names of those who subscribed,’ answered Kireyevsky, ‘and the amounts.’ ‘You do believe that I will give them the money?’ asked the old man. ‘Of course.’ ‘And I imagine that those who have given it to you trust you. And so what is the use of our keeping their names?’ With these words Staal threw the lists into the fire, and, of course, he did very well.

Ogaryov himself took the money to the barracks, and this went off without a hitch, but the prisoners took it into their heads to send their thanks from Orenburg to their comrades, and, as a government official was going to Moscow, they seized the opportunity 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 for proving all the ardour of his loyal sentiments and presented the letter to the general of gendarmes in Moscow.

The general of gendarmes at this time was Lissovsky, 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![107]).

Lissovsky, himself a Pole, was neither spiteful nor ill-disposed: 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 debtors’ prison of the same city.

Lissovsky summoned Ogaryov, Ketscher, S. Vadim, I. Obolensky and others, and charged them with being in relations with political criminals. On Ogaryov’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, Lissovsky answered: ‘You got up a subscription for them, _that’s still worse_. As it is the first offence the Sovereign is _so merciful_ as to _pardon_ you; only I warn you, gentlemen, a strict supervision will be kept over you; be careful.’

Lissovsky looked round at 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 position.’ It might have been supposed that Ketscher was vice-chancellor of the Russian Heraldry Office, while as a matter of fact he was only a humble district doctor.

I 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. Lissovsky’s advice threw oil on the fire, and as though to make their future task easier for the police we put on velvet _bérets à la_ Karl Sand[108] and tied tricolor scarves round our necks.

Colonel Shubensky, who was quietly and softly with velvet steps creeping into Lissovsky’s place, pounced upon his weakness with us; we were to serve him for a step in his promotion—and we did so serve him.

But first I will add a few words concerning the fate of Sungurov and his companions. Nicholas let Kolreif return ten years later from Orenburg, where his regiment was stationed. He pardoned him on the ground of his being in consumption, just as, because he was in consumption, Polezhaev was promoted to be an officer, and because he was dead Bestuzhev was given a cross. Kolreif returned to Moscow and died in the arms of his old, grief-stricken father.

Kostenetsky distinguished himself in the Caucasus and was promoted to the rank of an officer. It was the same with Antonovitch. The fate of the luckless Sungurov was incomparably more dreadful. On reaching the first étape on the Sparrow Hills, Sungurov asked leave from the officer in charge to go out into the fresh air, as the hut, packed to overflowing with exiles, was suffocating. The officer, a young man of twenty, went out himself into the road with him. Sungurov, choosing a favourable moment, turned off the road and disappeared. Probably he knew the locality well. He succeeded in getting away from the officer, but next day the gendarmes got on his track. When Sungurov saw that it was impossible to escape, he cut his throat. The gendarmes took him to Moscow unconscious and losing blood.

The unfortunate officer was degraded to the ranks.

Sungurov did not die. He was tried again, this time not as a political prisoner, but as a runaway convict: half his head was shaved: it is an original method (probably inherited from the Tatars) in use for preventing escapes and it shows even more than corporal punishment the complete contempt for human dignity of the Russian legislature. To this external disgrace the sentence added one stroke of the lash within the walls of the prison. Whether this sentence was carried out I do not know. After that, Sungurov was sent to Nertchinsk to the mines.

I heard his name pronounced once more and then it vanished for ever.

In Vyatka I once met in the street a young doctor, a fellow-student at the university, who was on his way to some post in a factory. We talked of old days and common acquaintances.

‘My God!’ said the doctor, ‘do you know whom I saw on my way here in the Nizhni-Novgorod Province? I was sitting in the posting-station waiting for horses. It was very nasty weather. An étape officer, in charge of a party of convicts, came in to get warm. We got into conversation; hearing that I was a doctor, he asked me to go to the étape to look at one of the convicts and see whether he were shamming or really were seriously ill. I went, of course, with the intention of declaring in any case that the convict was ill. In the small étape there were eighty men in chains, shaven and unshaven, women and children; they all moved apart as the officer went up, and we saw, lying on straw in a corner on the dirty floor, a figure wrapped in a convict’s greatcoat.

‘“This is the invalid,” said the officer.

‘I had no need to lie, the poor wretch was in a high fever; emaciated and exhausted by prison and the journey, with half his head shaven and his beard uncut, he looked terrible as he stared about aimlessly, and continually asked for water.

‘“Well, brother, are you very bad?” I said to the sick man, and added to the officer: “it is impossible for him to go on.”

‘The sick man fixed his eyes upon me and muttered “Is that you?”—he mentioned my name. “You don’t know me?” he added in a voice which went to my heart like a knife.

‘“Forgive me,” I said, taking his dry and burning hand, “I can’t recall you.”

‘“I am Sungurov,” he answered.

‘Poor Sungurov!’ repeated the doctor, shaking his head.

‘Well, did they leave him?’ I asked.

‘No, but they got a cart for him.’

After I had written this I learned that Sungurov died at Nertchinsk. His property which consisted of two hundred and fifty souls in the Bronnitsky district near Moscow, and four hundred souls in the Arzamas district of the Nizhni-Novgorod Province, _went to pay for the keep of him and his comrades in prison while awaiting trial_.

His family was ruined; the first care of the authorities, however, was to diminish it. _Sungurov’s wife was seized with her two children, and spent six months_ in the Pretchistensky prison, and her baby died there. May the rule of Nicholas be damned for ever and ever! Amen!