Chapter 1: The Fogs of London

When at daybreak on the 25th of August 1852 I passed along a wet plank on to the shore of England and looked at its dirty white cliffs, I was very far indeed from imagining that years would pass before I should leave those chalk cliffs.

Entirely under the influence of the ideas with which I was leaving Italy, stunned and sick, bewildered by a series of blows which had followed one on the other with such brutal rapidity, I could not see clearly what I was doing. It seemed as though I had needed to be brought again and again into concrete contact with familiar truths in order that I might grasp again what I had known before or ought to have known.

I had been false to my own logic and forgotten how different the man of to-day is in opinions and in actions, how noisily he begins and how humbly he carries out his programme, how good are his desires and how feeble his muscles.

Two months had been filled with unnecessary meetings, fruitless seeking, painful and quite useless conversations, and I was still expecting something ... expecting something. But my realistic nature could not remain for long in that world of phantoms. I began little by little to grasp that the edifice I was raising had no foundation, that it would inevitably crumble into ruins.

I was humiliated, my pride was outraged, I was angry with myself. My conscience tormented me for the sacrilegious desecration of my grief, for the year wasted in petty agitation, and I was conscious of a terrible inexpressible weariness.... How I needed then a friend who, without judging and condemning, could have received my confession and have shared my unhappiness! but the wilderness about me grew more and more desolate, there was no one near to me, not one ... and perhaps that was for the best.

I had not meant to stay more than a month in London, but little by little I began to understand that I had absolutely nowhere to go and no reason to go anywhere. Nowhere could I have found the same hermit-like seclusion as in London.

Having made up my mind to remain there, I began by taking a house in one of the remotest parts of the town, beyond Regent’s Park, near Primrose Hill.

The little girls remained in Paris, only Sasha was with me. As the fashion is here, the house was divided into three storeys. The whole middle storey consisted of an immense, cold, uncomfortable drawing-room. I changed it into my study. The owner of the house was a sculptor and had piled up the whole room with all sorts of statuettes and models; a bust of Lola Montes[31] was always before my eyes, together with Queen Victoria.

When on the second or third day after moving there, having unpacked and settled in, I went into that room in the morning, sat down in a big armchair and spent some two hours in complete stillness, disturbed by no one, I felt myself somehow free, for the first time after years and years.

My heart was not the lighter for this freedom, but yet I looked gladly out of window at the gloomy trees in the park, dimly showing through the smoky fog, and was thankful to them for the peace.

For whole mornings together I used now to sit utterly alone, often doing nothing, not even reading; Sasha would sometimes run in, but he did not interfere with my solitude.

Haug, who lived with me, never without extreme necessity came in before dinner, and we dined between six and seven. In this leisure I went, fact by fact, over the whole past, myself and the words and letters of others. I found mistakes to the right, mistakes to the left, vacillation, weakness, uncertainty in action and over-readiness to be influenced by others. And in the course of this analysis, by degrees, a revolution took place within me ... there were bitter moments and more than once tears rolled down my cheeks; but there were other moments, not of gladness but of courage: I was conscious of power in myself. I no longer relied on any one else, but my confidence in myself grew stronger, I grew more independent of every one.

The emptiness around me strengthened me, gave me time to collect myself, I grew apart from others, that is, I did not seek real intimacy with them; I avoided no one, but I no longer cared for people—I saw that I had no ties that rested on really deep feelings. I was a stranger among strangers; I had more sympathy for some than for others, but was in no close intimacy with any. It had been so in the past, too, but I had not noticed it, being continually absorbed by my own thoughts; now the masquerade was over, the dominoes had been removed, the garlands were taken from the heads, the masks from the faces, and I saw features very different from those I had imagined. What was I to do? I could help showing that I liked many people less, that is, knew them better, but I could not help feeling it; and, as I have said, these discoveries did not rob me of my courage, but rather strengthened it.

London life was very favourable for such a change. There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London. The manner of life, the distances, the climate, the very multitude of the population in which the individual is lost, all this together with the absence of Continental diversions conduces to the same effect. One who knows how to live alone has nothing to fear from the dulness of London. The life here, like the atmosphere here, is bad for the weak, for the frail, for one who seeks a prop outside himself, for one who seeks cordiality, sympathy, attention; the moral lungs here must be as strong as the physical lungs, whose task it is to get rid of the sulphuric acid in the smoky fog. The masses are saved by the struggle for daily bread, the commercial classes by their absorption in heaping up wealth, and all by the fuss and hurry of business; but nervous and romantic temperaments, fond of living among their fellows, of intellectual sloth and emotional idleness, are bored to death and fall into despair.

Wandering lonely about London, through its stony lanes and through its stifling passages, sometimes not seeing a step before me for the thick, opaline fog, and running against flying shadows—I lived through a great deal.

In the evening when my son had gone to bed, I usually went out for a walk; I scarcely ever went to see any one; I read the newspapers and stared in taverns at the alien race, and stood on the bridges across the Thames.

On the one hand, the stalactites of the Houses of Parliament would loom through the darkness ready to vanish again, on the other, the inverted bowl of Saint Paul’s ... and street-lamps ... street-lamps without end in both directions. One city, full-fed, lay sleeping, while the other, hungry, was not yet awake—the streets were empty, nothing could be heard but the even tread of the policeman with his lantern. I used to sit and look, and my soul would grow quieter and more peaceful. And so through all this I came to love this dreadful ant-heap, where every night a hundred thousand men know not where they will lay their heads, and the police often find women and children dead of hunger beside hotels where one cannot dine for less than two pounds.

But such violent transitions, however rapid, are not achieved all at once, especially at forty. A long time passed while I was coming to terms with my new ideas. Though I had made up my mind to work, for a long time I did nothing, or did not what I meant to do.

The idea with which I had come to London, to seek the judgment of my own people, was a sound and right one. I repeat that even now with full and deliberate conviction. To whom, indeed, are we to appeal for judgment, for the establishment of the truth, for the unmasking of falsehood?

It is not for us to go suing for justice to our enemies, who judge by other principles, by laws which we do not recognise.

One can settle one’s quarrels for oneself; no doubt one can. To take the law in one’s own hands is to snatch back by force what has been taken by force, and so restore the balance; revenge is just as sound and simple a human feeling as gratitude; but neither revenge nor taking the law into one’s own hands explains anything. It may happen that a clear explanation is what matters most to a man. The establishment of the truth may be more precious for him than revenge. My own error lay not in the main proposition, it lay in the underlying assumption; to win the judgment of one’s own people one must first of all have one’s own people. Where were mine...?

I had had my own people once in Russia. But I was so completely cut off in a foreign land; I had at all costs to get into communication with my own people; I longed to tell them of the weight that lay on my heart. Letters could not get in, but books would get through of themselves; writing letters was useless—I would print; and little by little I set to work upon _My Past and Thoughts_, and upon founding a Russian printing-press.