Chapter 14

VYATKA—THE OFFICE AND DINING-ROOM OF HIS EXCELLENCY—K. Y. TYUFYAEV

The Governor of Vyatka did not receive me, but sent word that I was to present myself next morning at ten.

I found in the room next morning the district police-captain, the police-master, and two officials: they were all standing talking in whispers and looking uneasily at the door. The door opened and there walked in a short, broad-shouldered old man with a head set on his shoulders like a bull-dog’s, and with big jaws, which completed his resemblance to that animal and, moreover, wore a perpetual grin; the elderly and at the same time satyr-like expression of his face, the quick little grey eyes, and the sparse, stiff hair made an incredibly disgusting impression.

To begin with, he gave the district police-captain a good dressing down for the state of the roads on which he had driven the day before. The district police-captain stood with his head somewhat bowed in token of respect and submission, and replied to everything as servants used to do in old days, ‘I obey, your Excellency.’

When he had done with the district police-captain, he turned to me. He looked at me insolently and asked:

‘Did you finish your studies at the Moscow University?’

‘I took my degree.’

‘And then served?’

‘In the Kremlin department.’

‘Ha, ha, ha! a fine sort of service! Of course, you had plenty of time there for supper parties and singing songs. Alenitsyn!’ he shouted.

A scrofulous-looking young man walked in.

‘Here, my boy, here is a graduate of the Moscow University. I expect he knows everything except his duties in the service; it is His Majesty’s pleasure that he should learn them with us. Take him into your office and send me a special report on him. To-morrow you will come to the office at nine o’clock, and now you can go. But stay, I forgot to ask how you write.’

I did not understand for the moment.

‘Come, your handwriting.’

‘I have nothing with me.’

‘Bring paper and pen,’ and Alenitsyn handed me a pen.

‘What am I to write?’

‘What you like,’ observed the secretary. ‘Write, “On inquiry it appears——”’

‘Well, you won’t be corresponding with the Tsar,’ the governor remarked, laughing ironically.

Before I left Perm I had heard a great deal about Tyufyaev, but he far surpassed all my expectations.

What does not Russian life produce!

Tyufyaev was born at Tobolsk. His father was possibly a convict and belonged to the poorest class of artisan. At thirteen, young Tyufyaev joined a troupe of travelling acrobats who wandered from fair to fair, dancing on the tight-rope, turning somersaults, and so on. With these he travelled from Tobolsk to the Polish provinces, entertaining the good Russian people. There, I do not know why, he was arrested, and as he had no passport he was treated as a vagrant, and sent on foot with a party of convicts back to Tobolsk. His mother was by then a widow and was living in great poverty. The son rebuilt the stove with his own hands when it was broken: he had to find some calling; the boy had learned to read and write, and he was engaged as a copying clerk in the local court.

Being naturally of a free-and-easy character and having developed his abilities by a many-sided education in the troupe of acrobats and the party of convicts with whom he had passed from one end of Russia to the other, he became an energetic and practical man.

At the beginning of the reign of Alexander some sort of inspector came to Tobolsk. He needed capable clerks, and some one recommended Tyufyaev. The inspector was so well pleased with him that he proposed taking him along to Petersburg. Then Tyufyaev, whose ambition, to use his own words, had never risen above the post of secretary in a district court, formed a higher opinion of himself, and with iron will resolved to make his career.

And he did make it. Ten years later we find him the indefatigable secretary of Kankrin, who was at that time a general in the commissariat. A year later he was superintending a department in Araktcheyev’s secretariat which superintended all Russia. He was with Araktcheyev in Paris at the time when it was occupied by the allied troops. Tyufyaev spent the whole time sitting in the secretariat of the expeditionary army and literally did not see one street in Paris. He sat day and night collating and copying papers with his worthy colleague, Kleinmihel.

Araktcheyev’s secretariat was like those copper mines into which men are only sent to work for a few months, because if they remain longer they die. Even Tyufyaev was tired at last in that factory of orders and decrees, of regulations and commands, and began asking for a quieter post. Araktcheyev could not fail to like a man like Tyufyaev, a man free from higher pretensions, from all interests and opinions, formally honest, devoured by ambition, and regarding obedience as the foremost human virtue. Araktcheyev rewarded Tyufyaev with the post of deputy governor. A few years later he made him governor of the Perm Province. The province, through which Tyufyaev had once walked on a rope and once tied to a rope, lay at his feet.

A governor’s power increases in direct ratio to his distance from Petersburg, but it increases in geometrical progression in the provinces where there are no nobility, as in Perm, Vyatka, and Siberia. Such a region was just what Tyufyaev wanted.

He was an Oriental satrap, only an active, restless one, meddling in everything and for ever busy. Tyufyaev would have been a ferocious Commissaire of the Convention in 1794, a Carrier.[134]

Dissolute in his life, coarse in nature, intolerant of the slightest contradiction, his influence was extremely pernicious. He did not take bribes, though he did make his fortune, as it appeared after his death. He was severe to his subordinates, he punished without mercy those who were detected in wrongdoing, yet his officials were more dishonest than anywhere. He carried the abuse of influence to an incredible point; for instance, when he sent an official to an inquiry he would (that is, if he were interested in the case) tell him that probably this or that would be discovered, and woe to the official if something else were discovered.

Perm was still full of the fame of Tyufyaev; there was a party of his adherents there, hostile to the new governor, who, of course, had surrounded himself with his own partisans.

On the other hand, there were people who hated him. One of them, a rather original product of the warping influences of Russian life, particularly warned me what Tyufyaev was like. I am speaking of a doctor in one of the factories. This doctor, whose name was Tchebotarev, an intelligent and very nervous man, had made an unfortunate marriage soon after he had completed his studies, then he was transferred to Ekaterinburg and without any experience plunged into the bog of provincial life. Though placed in a fairly independent position in these surroundings, he yet was mastered by them; all his resistance took the form of sarcasms at the expense of the officials. He laughed at them to their faces, he said the most insulting things with grimaces and affectation. Since no one was spared, no one particularly resented the doctor’s spiteful tongue. He made himself a social position by his attacks and forced a flabby set of people to put up with the lash with which he chastised them incessantly. I was warned that he was a good doctor, but crazy and extremely impertinent.

His gossip and jokes were neither coarse nor pointless; quite the contrary, they were full of humour and concentrated bitterness; it was his poetry, his revenge, his outcry of anger and, to some extent, perhaps, of despair. He had studied the circle of officials as an artist and as a doctor, and, encouraged by their cowardice and lack of resource, took any liberty he liked with them.

At every word he would add, ‘It won’t make a ha’p’orth of difference to you.’

Once in joke I remarked upon his repeating this.

‘Why are you surprised?’ the doctor replied. ‘The object of everything that is said is to convince. I am in haste to add the strongest argument that exists. Convince a man that to kill his own father will not make a ha’p’orth of difference and he will kill him.’

Tchebotarev never refused to lend small sums of a hundred or two hundred roubles. When any one asked him for a loan, he would take out his notebook and inquire the exact date when the borrower would return the money.

‘Now,’ he would say, ‘allow me to make a bet of a silver rouble that you won’t repay it then.’

‘Upon my soul,’ the other would object, ‘what do you take me for?’

‘It makes not a ha’p’orth of difference what I take you for,’ the doctor would answer, ‘but the fact is I have been keeping a record for six years, and not one person has paid me up to time yet, and hardly any one has repaid me later either.’

The day fixed would pass and the doctor would very gravely ask for the silver rouble he had won.

A spirit-tax contractor at Perm was selling a travelling coach. The doctor presented himself before him and made the following speech: ‘You have a coach to sell, I need it; you are a wealthy man, you are a millionaire, every one respects you for it and I have therefore come to pay you my respects also; as you are a wealthy man, it makes not a ha’p’orth of difference to you whether you sell the coach or not, while I need it very much and have very little money. You want to squeeze me, to take advantage of my necessity and ask fifteen hundred for the coach. I offer you seven hundred roubles. I shall be coming every day to bargain with you and in a week you will let me have it for seven-fifty or eight hundred; wouldn’t it be better to begin with that? I am ready to give it.’

‘Much better,’ answered the astonished spirit-tax contractor, and he let him have the coach.

Tchebotarev’s anecdotes and mischievous tricks were endless. I will add two more.

‘Do you believe in magnetism?’ a rather intelligent and cultured lady asked him in my presence.

‘What do you mean by magnetism?’

The lady talked some vague nonsense in reply.

‘It makes not a ha’p’orth of difference to you whether I believe in magnetism or not, but if you like I will tell you what I have seen in that way.’

‘Please do.’

‘Only listen attentively.’

After this he described in a very lively and interesting way the experiments of a Harkov doctor, an acquaintance of his.

In the middle of the conversation, a servant brought some lunch in on a tray. As he was going out, the lady said to him, ‘You have forgotten to bring the mustard.’ Tchebotarev stopped. ‘Go on, go on,’ said the lady, a little scared already, ‘I am listening.’

‘Has he brought the salt?’

‘So you are angry already,’ said the lady, turning crimson.

‘Not in the least. I assure you I know that you were listening attentively. Besides, I know that, however intelligent a woman is and whatever is being talked about, she can never rise above the kitchen—so how could I dare to be angry with you personally?’

At Countess Polier’s factory he asked a lad, one of his patients there, to enter his service. The boy was willing, but the foreman said that he could not let him go without permission from the countess. Tchebotarev wrote to the lady. She told the foreman to let the lad have his passport on condition that the doctor paid five years’ _obrok_ in advance. The doctor promptly wrote to the countess that he agreed to her terms, but asked her as a preliminary to decide one point that troubled him, _i.e._ from whom could he recover the money if Encke’s Comet should, intersecting the earth’s orbit, turn it out of its course—which might occur a year and a half before the term fixed.

On the day of my departure for Vyatka the doctor appeared early in the morning and began with the following foolishness: ‘Like Horace, once you sang, and to this day you are translated.’[135] Then he took out his notebook and asked if I would not like some money for the journey. I thanked him and refused.

‘Why won’t you take any? It won’t make a ha’p’orth of difference to you.’

‘I have money.’

‘That’s bad,’ he said; ‘the end of the world must be at hand.’ He opened his notebook and wrote down: ‘After fifteen years of practice I have for the first time met a man who won’t borrow, even though he is going away.’

Having finished playing the fool, he sat down on my bed and said gravely: ‘You are going to a terrible man. Be on your guard against him and keep as far away from him as you can. If he likes you it will be a poor recommendation; if he dislikes you, he will ruin you by slander, by calumny, and I don’t know what, but he will ruin you, and it won’t make a ha’p’orth of difference to him.’

With this he told me an incident the truth of which I had an opportunity of verifying afterwards from documents in the secretariat of the Minister of Home Affairs.

Tyufyaev carried on an open intrigue with the sister of a poor government clerk. The brother was made a laughing-stock and he tried to break off the liaison, threatened to report it to the authorities, tried to write to Petersburg—in fact, made such a to-do that on one occasion the police seized him and brought him before the provincial authorities to be certified as a lunatic.

The provincial authorities, the president of the court, and the inspector of the medical board, an old German who was very much liked by the working people and whom I knew personally, all found that Petrovsky, as the man was called, was mad.

Our doctor knew Petrovsky, who was a patient of his. He was asked as a matter of form. He told the inspector that Petrovsky was not mad at all, and that he proposed that they should make a fresh inquiry into the case, otherwise he would have to pursue the matter further. The local authorities were not at all opposed to this, but unluckily Petrovsky died in the madhouse before the day fixed for the second inquiry, although he was a sturdy young fellow.

The report of the case reached Petersburg. Petrovsky’s sister was arrested (why not Tyufyaev?) and a secret investigation began. Tyufyaev dictated the answers; he surpassed himself on this occasion. To hush it up at once and to ward off the danger of a second involuntary journey to Siberia, Tyufyaev instructed the girl to say that her brother had been on bad terms with her ever since, carried away by youth and inexperience, she had been seduced by the Emperor Alexander on his visit to Perm, for which she had received five thousand roubles through General Solomka.

Alexander’s habits were such that there was nothing incredible in the story. To find out whether it was true was not easy, and in any case would have created a great deal of scandal. To Count Benckendorf’s inquiry, General Solomka answered that so much money had passed through his hands that he could not remember the five thousand.

‘_La regina ne aveva molto!_’ says the Improvisatore in Pushkin’s _Egyptian Nights_....

So this estimable pupil of Araktcheyev’s and worthy comrade of Kleinmihel’s, acrobat, vagrant, copying clerk, secretary, and governor, this tender heart, and disinterested man who put the sane into a madhouse and did them to death there, the man who slandered the Emperor Alexander to divert the attention of the Emperor Nicholas, was now undertaking to train me in the service.

I was almost completely dependent upon him. He had only to write some nonsense to the minister and I should have been sent off to some place in Irkutsk. No need to write, indeed he had the right to send me to any outlandish town, Kay or Tsarevo-Santchursk, without any discussion, without any formalities. Tyufyaev dispatched a young Pole to Glazov because the ladies preferred dancing the mazurka with him to dancing it with his Excellency.

In this way Prince Dolgoruky was transferred from Perm to Verhoturye. The latter place, lost in the mountains and the snows, is reckoned in the province of Perm, though it is as bad as Beryozov for climate and worse for desolation.

Prince Dolgoruky was one of the aristocratic scamps of the wrong sort such as are rarely met with in our day. He played all sorts of pranks in Petersburg, pranks in Moscow, and pranks in Paris.

His life was spent in this. He was an Izmailov on a small scale, a Prince E. Gruzinsky without his band of runaways at Lyskovo, that is, a spoilt, insolent, repulsive jester, a great gentleman and a great buffoon at once. When his doings went beyond all bounds, he was ordered to live in Perm.

He arrived in two carriages; in one he travelled with his dog, in the other, his French cook with his parrots. The people of Perm were delighted at the arrival of a wealthy visitor, and soon all the town was crowding into his dining-room. Dolgoruky got up an affair with a young lady at Perm; the latter, suspecting some infidelity, appeared unexpectedly at the prince’s house one morning and found him with his housemaid. This led to a scene which ended in the faithless lover taking his riding-whip from the wall; the lady, seeing his intention, took to flight, he followed her, scantily attired in a dressing-gown; overtaking her in the little square in which the battalion were usually drilled, he gave the jealous lady three or four lashes with the whip and calmly returned home as though he had done his duty.

Such charming pranks brought down upon him the censure of his Perm friends, and the authorities decided to send this mischievous urchin of forty to Verhoturye. On the eve of departure he gave a splendid dinner, and in spite of their differences the officials came to it. Dolgoruky promised to give them some wonderful pie for dinner.

The pie certainly was excellent and vanished with incredible rapidity. When nothing but scraps were left, Dolgoruky turned pathetically to his guests and said: ‘Never let it be said that I grudged you anything at parting. I ordered my Gardi to be killed yesterday for the pie.’

The officials looked at one another in horror, and looked round them for the big Dane they knew so well; he was not to be seen. The prince saw what they felt and bade the servant bring the rejected remnants of Gardi and his skin; the rest of him was in the stomachs of the Perm officials. Half the town was ill with horror.

Meanwhile Dolgoruky, pleased at having had a joke at the expense of his friends, drove in triumph to Verhoturye. A third conveyance carried a whole poultry yard, a poultry yard travelling with post horses! On the way he carried off the ledgers from several posting-stations, mixed them up, altered the entries and almost drove the posting superintendents out of their minds, for even with their books they did not find it easy to make their accounts balance.

The stifling emptiness and numbness of Russian life, strangely combined with the liveliness and even turbulence of the Russian character, develops every sort of eccentricity among us.

In Suvorov’s habit of crowing like a cock, just as in Prince Dolgoruky’s dog-pie, in the savage deeds of Izmailov,[136] in the half-voluntary madness of Mamonov,[137] in the violent crimes of Tolstoy ‘the American,’ I detect a kindred note, familiar to us all, though weakened in us by education, or directed to some other end.

I knew Tolstoy personally and just at the date when he lost his daughter Sarra, an exceptional girl with marked poetic gifts. One glance at the old man’s exterior, at his forehead covered with grey curls, at his sparkling eyes and athletic frame revealed how much energy and vigour nature had bestowed on him. He had developed only turbulent passions and evil propensities, and that is not surprising; everything vicious is allowed among us to develop for a long time without hindrance, while for humane passions a man is sent to a garrison or Siberia at the first step.... He rioted, gambled, fought, mutilated people and ruined families for twenty years on end, till at last he was sent to Siberia, from which he ‘returned an Aleutian’ as Griboyedov says, that is, he made his way through Kamtchatka to America, and thence obtained permission to return to Russia. Alexander pardoned him, and from the day after his arrival he carried on the same life as before. Married to a gypsy girl belonging to the Moscow camp and famous for her voice, he turned his house into a gambling den, spent all his time in orgies, all his nights at cards, and wild scenes of greed and drunkenness took place beside the cradle of the little Sarra. The story goes that on one occasion, to prove the nicety of his aim, he made his wife stand on the table and shot through the heel of her shoe.

His last prank almost sent him to Siberia again. He had long been angry with an artisan; he seized him in his house, bound him hand and foot, and pulled out one of his teeth. Will it be believed that this incident took place only ten or twelve years ago? The injured man lodged a complaint. Tolstoy bribed the police and the judge, and the man was put in prison for making a false accusation. At that time a well-known Russian literary tan, N. F. Pavlov, was serving on the prison commission. The artisan told him his story, the inexperienced official took it up, Tolstoy was scared in earnest, the case was obviously going to end in his condemnation; but great is the God of Russia. Count Orlov wrote to Prince Shtcherbatov a secret report, in which he advised him to hush up the case, so as not to allow the _open triumph of a man of inferior rank over a member of the higher classes_. To Pavlov, Count Orlov gave the advice to resign his post.... This is almost more incredible than the extraction of the tooth. I was in Moscow at the time and knew the imprudent official well. But let us return to Vyatka.

The government office was incomparably worse than prison. Not that the actual work was great, but the stifling atmosphere, as of the Cave of Dogs, of that scene of corruption, and the terrible, stupid waste of time made the office insufferable. Alenitsyn did not worry me, he was, indeed, more polite than I expected; he had been at the Kazan High School and consequently had a respect for a graduate of the Moscow University.

There were some twenty clerks in the office. For the most part they were persons of no education and no moral conceptions; sons of clerks and secretaries, accustomed from their cradle to regard the service as a source of profit, and the peasants as soil that yielded revenue, they sold their services, took twenty kopecks and quarter-roubles, cheated for a glass of wine, demeaned themselves and did all sorts of shabby things. My valet gave up going to the ‘billiard room,’ saying that the officials cheated there worse than anybody, and one could not give them a lesson because they were ‘officers.’ So with these people, whom my servant did not beat only on account of their rank, I had to sit every day from nine in the morning until two, and from five to eight in the evening.

Besides Alenitsyn, who was the head of the office, there was a head-clerk of the table at which I was put, who was also not a spiteful creature, though drunken and illiterate. At the same table sat four clerks. I had to talk to and become acquainted with these, and, indeed, with all the others, too. Apart from the fact that these people would have paid me out sooner or later for being ‘proud’ if I had not, it is simply impossible to spend several hours of every day with the same people without making their acquaintance. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that provincials make up to any one from outside and particularly to any one who comes from the capital, especially if there is some interesting story connected with him.

After spending the whole day in this bondage, I would sometimes come home with all my faculties in a state of stupefaction and fling myself on the sofa, worn out, humiliated, and incapable of any work or occupation. I heartily regretted my Krutitsky cell with its charcoal fumes and black beetles, with a gendarme on guard and a lock on the door. There I had freedom, I did what I liked and no one interfered with me; instead of these vulgar sayings, dirty people, mean ideas and coarse feelings, there had been the stillness of death and unbroken leisure. And when I remembered that after dinner I had to go again, and again to-morrow, I was at times overcome by fury and despair and tried to find comfort in drinking wine and vodka.

And then, to make things worse, one of my fellow-clerks would look in ‘on his way’ and relieve his boredom by staying on talking until it was time to go back to the office.

Within a few months, however, the position became somewhat easier.

Prolonged steady persecution is not in the Russian character unless a personal or mercenary element comes in; and that is not because the government does not want to stifle and crush a man, but is due to the Russian carelessness, to our _laissez-aller_. Russians in authority are as a rule ill-bred, coarse, and insolent; it is easy to provoke them to rudeness, but persistent oppression is not in their line, they have not enough patience for it, perhaps because it yields them no profit.

In the first heat to display, on the one hand, their zeal, on the other, their power, they do all sorts of stupid and unnecessary things, then, little by little, they leave a man in peace.

So it was with the office. The Ministry of Home Affairs had at that time a craze for statistics: it had given orders for committees to be formed everywhere, and had issued programmes which could hardly have been carried out even in Belgium or Switzerland; at the same time, all sorts of elaborate tables with maxima and minima, with averages and various deductions from the totals for periods of ten years (made up on evidence which had not been collected even a year beforehand!), with moral remarks and meteorological observations. Not a farthing was assigned for the expenses of the committees and the collection of evidence; all this was to be done from love for statistics through the rural police and put into proper shape in the government office. The clerks, overwhelmed with work, and the rural police, who hate all peaceful and theoretical tasks, looked upon a statistics committee as a useless luxury, as a caprice of the ministry; however, the reports had to be sent in with tabulated results and deductions.

This business seemed overwhelmingly difficult to the whole office; it was simply impossible; but no one troubled about that, all they worried about was that there should be no occasion for reprimands. I promised Alenitsyn to prepare a preface and introduction, and to draw up summaries of the tables with eloquent remarks introducing foreign words, quotations, and striking deductions, if he would allow me to undertake this very severe work not at the office but at home. Alenitsyn, after parleying with Tyufyaev, agreed.

The introduction to my record of the work of the committee, in which I discussed their hopes and their plans, for in reality nothing had been done at all, touched Alenitsyn to the depths of his soul. Tyufyaev himself thought it was written in masterly style. With that my labours in the statistical line ended, but they put the committee under my supervision. They no longer forced the hard labour of copying upon me, and the drunken head-clerk who had been my chief became almost my subordinate. Alenitsyn only insisted, from some consideration of propriety, that I should go every day for a short time to the office.

To show the complete impossibility of real statistics, I will quote the facts sent from the town of Kay. There, among various absurdities, were for instance the entries: Drowned—2. Causes of drowning not known—2, and in the column of totals these two figures were added together and the figure 4 was entered. Under the heading of extraordinary incidents occurred the following tragic anecdote: So-and-so, artisan, having deranged his intelligence by stimulating beverages, hanged himself. Under the heading of morality of the town’s inhabitants was the entry: ‘There are no Jews in the town of Kay.’ To the inquiry whether sums had been allotted for the building of a church, a stock exchange, or an almshouse, the answer ran thus: ‘For the building of a stock exchange was assigned—nothing.’

The statistics that saved me from work at the office had the unfortunate consequence of bringing me into personal relations with Tyufyaev.

There was a time when I hated that man; that time is long past and the man himself is past. He died on his Kazan estates about 1845. Now I think of him without anger, as of a peculiar wild beast met in a forest which ought to have been tamed, but with which one could not be angry for being a beast. At the time I could not help coming into conflict with him; that was inevitable for any decent man. Chance helped me or he would have done me great injury; to owe him a grudge for the harm he did not do me would be absurd and paltry.

Tyufyaev lived alone. His wife was separated from him. The governor’s favourite, the wife of a cook who for no fault but being married to her had been sent away to the country, was, with an awkwardness which almost seemed intentional, kept out of sight in the back rooms of his house. She did not make her appearance officially, but officials who were particularly devoted to the governor—that is, particularly afraid of not being so—formed a sort of court about the cook’s wife ‘who was in favour.’ Their wives and daughters paid her stealthy visits in the evening and did not boast of doing so. This lady was possessed of the same sort of tact as distinguished one of her brilliant predecessors—Potyomkin; knowing the old man’s disposition and afraid of being replaced, she herself sought out for him rivals that were not a danger to her. The grateful old man repaid this indulgent love with his devotion and they got on well together.

All the morning Tyufyaev worked and was in the office of the secretariat. The poetry of life only began at three o’clock. Dinner was for him no jesting matter. He liked a good dinner and he liked to eat it in company. Preparations were always made in his kitchen for twelve at table; if the guests were less than half that number he was mortified; if there were no more than two visitors he was wretched; if there was no one at all, he would go off on the verge of despair to dine in his Dulcinea’s apartments. To procure people in order to feed them to repletion is not a difficult task, but his official position and the terror he inspired in his subordinates did not permit them freely to enjoy his hospitality, nor him to turn his house into a tavern. He had to confine himself to councillors, presidents (but with half of these he was on bad terms), rich merchants, spirit-tax contractors, and the few visitors to the town and ‘oddities,’ who were something in the style of the _capacités_ whom Louis-Philippe wanted to introduce into elections. Of course I was an oddity of the first magnitude in Vyatka.

Persons exiled ‘for their opinions’ to remote towns are somewhat feared, but are never confounded with ordinary mortals. ‘Dangerous people’ have for provincials the same attraction that notorious Lovelaces have for women and courtesans for men. ‘Dangerous people’ are far more shunned by Petersburg officials and wealthy Moscow people than by provincials and especially by Siberians.

Those who were exiled in connection with the Fourteenth of December were looked upon with immense respect. The first visit on New Year’s Day was paid by officials to the widow of Yushnevsky. The senator Tolstoy when taking a census of Siberia was guided by evidence received from the exiled Decembrists in checking the facts furnished by the officials.

Minih[138] from his tower in Pelymo superintended the affairs of the Tobolsk Province. Governors used to go to consult him about matters of importance.

The working people are still less hostile to exiles: they are always on the side of those who are punished. The word ‘convict’ disappears near the Siberian frontier and is replaced by the word ‘unfortunate.’ In the eyes of the Russian peasant legal sentence is no disgrace to a man. The peasants of the Perm Province, living along the main road to Tobolsk, often put out kvass, milk, and bread in a little window in case an ‘unfortunate’ should be secretly passing that way from Siberia.

By the way, speaking of exiles, Polish exiles begin to be met beyond Nizhni and their number rapidly increases after Kazan. In Perm there were forty, in Vyatka not less; there were besides several in every district town.

They lived quite apart from the Russians and avoided all contact with the inhabitants. There was great unity among them, and the rich shared with the poor like brothers.

I never saw signs of either hatred or special goodwill towards them on the part of the inhabitants. They looked upon them as outsiders—the more so, as scarcely a single Pole knew Russian.

One tough old Sarmatian, who had been an officer in the Uhlans under Poniatowski and had taken part in Napoleon’s campaigns, received permission in 1837 to return to his Lithuanian domains. On the eve of his departure he invited me and several Poles to dinner. After dinner my cavalry officer came up to me, glass in hand, embraced me, and with a warrior’s simplicity whispered in my ear, ‘Oh, why are you a Russian!’ I did not answer a word, but this observation sank deeply into my heart. I realised that _this_ generation could never set Poland free.

From the time of Konarski,[139] the Poles have come to look quite differently upon the Russians.

As a rule Polish exiles are not oppressed, but the position is awful for those who have no private means. The government gives those who have nothing _fifteen roubles a month_; with that they must pay for lodging, food, clothes, and fuel. In the bigger towns, in Kazan and Tobolsk, it is possible to earn something by giving lessons or concerts, playing at balls, drawing portraits and teaching dancing. In Perm and Vyatka they had no such resources. And in spite of that they would ask nothing from Russians.

Tyufyaev’s invitations to his rich Siberian dinners were a real infliction to me. His dining-room was the same thing as the office only in another form, less dirty but more vulgar, because it had the appearance of free will and not of compulsion.

Tyufyaev knew his guests through and through, despised them, showed them his claws at times, and altogether treated them as a master treats his dogs, at one time with excessive familiarity, at another with a rudeness which was beyond all bounds—and yet he invited them to his dinners and they came to them in trembling and in joy, demeaning themselves, talking scandal, listening, trying to please, smiling, bowing.

I blushed for them and felt ashamed.

Our friendship did not last long. Tyufyaev soon perceived that I was not fit for ‘aristocratic’ Vyatka society.

A few months later he was displeased with me, a few months later still he hated me, and I not only went no more to his dinners but even gave up going to him at all. The visit of the Tsarevitch saved me from his persecution, as we shall see later on.

I must note that I had done absolutely nothing to deserve first his attentions and invitations, and afterwards his anger and disapproval. He could not endure to see in me a man who behaved independently, though not in the least insolently; I was always _en règle_ with him, and he demanded obsequiousness. He loved his power jealously. He had earned it and he exacted not only obedience but an appearance of absolute subordination. In this, unhappily, he was typically national.

A landowner says to his servant, ‘Hold your tongue; I won’t put up with your answering me!’

The head of a department observes, turning pale with anger, to a clerk who has made some criticism, ‘You forget yourself; do you know to whom you are speaking?’

The Tsar sends men to Siberia ‘for opinions,’ buries them in dungeons for a poem—and all three of them are readier to forgive stealing and bribe-taking, murder and robbery, than the impudence of human dignity and the insolence of an independent word.

Tyufyaev was a true servant of the Tsar. He was thought highly of, but not highly enough. Byzantine servility was in him wonderfully combined with official discipline. Obliteration of self, renunciation of will and thought before authority went hand in hand with savage oppression of subordinates. He might have been a civilian Kleinmihel, his ‘zeal’ might in the same way have conquered everything, and he might in the same way have plastered the walls with the dead bodies of men, have dried the palace with human lungs, and have thrashed the young men of the engineering corps even more severely for not being informers.

Tyufyaev had an intense secret hatred for everything aristocratic; he had gained it from bitter experience. The hard labour of Araktcheyev’s secretariat had been his first refuge, his first deliverance. Till then his superiors had never offered him a chair, but had employed him on menial errands. When he served in the commissariat, the officers had persecuted him in military fashion and one colonel had horsewhipped him in the street in Vilna.... All this had entered into the copying clerk’s soul and rankled there; now he was governor and it was his turn to oppress, to keep men standing, to address them familiarly, to shout at them, and sometimes to bring nobles of ancient lineage to trial.

From Perm, Tyufyaev had been transferred to Tver. The nobles of that province could not, for all their submissiveness and servility, put up with him. They petitioned the minister Bludov to remove him. Bludov transferred him to Vyatka.

There he was quite at home again. Officials and contractors, factory-owners and government clerks, a free hand with no one to interfere.... Every one trembled before him, every one remained standing in his presence, every one offered him drink and gave him dinners, every one waited on his slightest wish; at weddings and name-day parties, the first toast was ‘To the health of his Excellency!’