Chapter 16

ALEXANDER LAVRENTYEVITCH VITBERG

Among the grotesque and dirty, petty and loathsome scenes and figures, affairs and cases, in this setting of official routine and red-tape, I recall the noble and melancholy features of an artist, who was crushed by the government with cold and callous cruelty.

The leaden hand of the Tsar did not merely strangle a work of genius in its infancy, did not merely destroy the very creation of the artist, entangling him in judicial snares and police traps, but tried to snatch from him his honourable name together with his last crust of bread and to brand him as a taker of bribes and a pilferer of government funds.

After ruining and disgracing A. L. Vitberg, Nicholas exiled him to Vyatka. It was there that we met.

For two years and a half I lived with the great artist and saw the strong man, who had fallen a victim to the autocracy of red-tape officialdom and barrack-discipline, which measures everything in the world by the footrule of the recruiting officer and the copying clerk, breaking down under the weight of persecution and misery.

It cannot be said that he succumbed easily; he struggled desperately for full ten years. He came into exile still hoping to confound his enemies and justify himself, he came in fact still ready for conflict, bringing plans and projects. But he soon discerned that all was over.

Perhaps even this discovery would not have overwhelmed him, but he had at his side a wife and children and ahead of him years of exile, poverty, and privation; and Vitberg was turning grey, growing old, growing old not by days but by hours. When I left him in Vyatka at the end of two years he was quite ten years older.

Here is the story of this long martyrdom.

The Emperor Alexander did not believe in his victory over Napoleon, he was oppressed by the fame of it and genuinely gave the glory to God. Always disposed to mysticism and melancholy, in which many people saw the fretting of conscience, he gave way to it particularly after the series of victories over Napoleon.

When ‘the last soldier of the enemy had crossed the frontier,’ Alexander issued a proclamation in which he vowed to raise in Moscow an immense temple to the Saviour. Plans for such a temple were invited, and an immense competition began.

Vitberg was at that time a young artist who had just completed his studies and gained the gold medal for painting. A Swede by origin, he was born in Russia and at first was educated in the Engineers’ Cadet Corps. The artist was enthusiastic, eccentric, and given to mysticism: he read the proclamation, read the appeal for plans, and flung aside all other pursuits. For days and nights he wandered about the streets of Petersburg, tortured by a persistent idea; it was too strong for him, he locked himself up in his own room, took a pencil and set to work.

To no one in the world did the artist confide his design. After some months of work, he went to Moscow to study the city and the surrounding country and set to work again, shutting himself up for months together and keeping his design a secret.

The date of the competition arrived. The plans were numerous, there were designs from Italy and from Germany and our Academicians sent in theirs. And the unknown youth sent in his among the rest. Weeks passed before the Emperor examined the plans. These were the forty days in the wilderness, days of temptation, doubt, and agonising suspense.

Vitberg’s colossal design, filled with religious poetry, impressed Alexander. He came to a stop before it, and it was the first of which he inquired the authorship. They broke open the sealed envelope and found the unknown name of an Academy pupil.

Alexander wanted to see Vitberg. He had a long talk with the artist. His bold and fervent language, his genuine inspiration and the mystic tinge of his convictions impressed the Emperor. ‘You speak in stones,’ he observed, examining Vitberg’s design again.

That very day his design was accepted and Vitberg was chosen to be the architect and the director of the building committee. Alexander did not know that with the laurel wreath he was putting a crown of thorns on the artist’s head.

There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture; abstract, geometrical, mutely musical, passionless, it lives in symbol, in emblem, in suggestion. Simple lines, their harmonious combination, rhythm, numerical relations, make up something mysterious and at the same time incomplete. The building, the temple, is not its own object, as is a statue or a picture, a poem, or a symphony; a building requires an inmate; it is a place mapped and cleared for habitation, an environment, the shield of the tortoise, the shell of the mollusc; and the whole point of it is that the receptacle should correspond with its spirit, its object, its inmate, as the shell does with the tortoise. The walls of the temple, its vaults and columns, its portal and façade, its foundations and its cupola must bear the imprint of the divinity that dwells within it, just as the convolutions of the brain are imprinted on the bone of the skull.

The Egyptian temples were their holy books. The obelisks were sermons on the high-road. Solomon’s temple was the Bible turned into architecture; just as St. Peter’s at Rome is the architectural symbol of the escape from Catholicism, of the beginning of the lay world, of the beginning of the secularisation of mankind.

The very building of temples was so invariably accompanied by mystic rites, symbolical utterances, mysterious consecrations that the mediæval builders looked upon themselves as something apart, a kind of priesthood, the heirs of the builders of Solomon’s temple, and made up secret guilds of stonemasons, which afterwards passed into Freemasonry.

From the time of the Renaissance architecture loses its peculiar mystic character. The Christian faith is struggling with philosophic doubt, the Gothic arch with the Greek pediment, spiritual holiness with worldly beauty. What gives St. Peter’s its lofty significance is that in its colossal proportions Christianity struggles towards life, the church becomes pagan and on the walls of the Sistine Chapel Michael Angelo paints Jesus Christ as a broad-shouldered athlete, a Hercules in the flower of his age and strength.

After St. Peter’s, church architecture deteriorated completely and was reduced at last to simple repetition, on a larger or smaller scale, of the ancient Greek peripteras and of St. Peter’s.

One Parthenon is called St. Madeleine’s in Paris; the other is the Exchange in New York.

Without faith and without special circumstances, it was hard to create anything living: there is something of artificiality, of hypocrisy, of anachronism, about all new churches, such as the five-domed cruet-stands with onions instead of corks in them in the Indo-Byzantine manner, which Nicholas builds, with Ton for architect, or the angular Gothic churches offensive to the aristocratic eye, with which the English decorate their towns.

But the circumstances under which Vitberg created his design, his personality, and the state of mind of the Emperor were all exceptional.

The war of 1812 had caused a violent upheaval in men’s minds in Russia; it was long after the deliverance of Moscow before the ferment of thought and nervous irritation could subside. Events outside Russia, the taking of Paris, the story of the Hundred Days, the suspense, the rumours, Waterloo, Napoleon sailing over the ocean, the mourning for fallen kinsmen, the apprehension over the living, the returning troops, the soldiers going home, all produced a great effect even on the coarsest natures. Imagine a youthful artist, a mystic, gifted with creative force and at the same time a fanatic, under the influence of all that had happened, under the influence of the Tsar’s appeal and his own genius.

Near Moscow, between the Mozhaisk and Kaluga roads, there is a slight eminence which rises above the whole city. These are the Sparrow Hills of which I have spoken in my first reminiscences of childhood. The city lies stretched at their foot, and one of the most picturesque views of Moscow is from their top. Here Ivan the Terrible, at that time a young profligate, stood weeping and watching his capital burn; here the priest Sylvester appeared before him and with stern words transformed that monster of genius for twenty years.

Napoleon with his army skirted this hill, here his strength was broken, it was at the foot of the Sparrow Hills that his retreat began.

Could a better spot be found for a temple to commemorate the year 1812 than the furthest point which the enemy reached?

But this was not enough, the hill itself was to be turned into the lower part of the temple; the open ground down to the river was to be encircled by a colonnade, and on this base, built on three sides by nature itself, a second and a third temple were to be raised, making up a marvellous whole.

Vitberg’s temple, like the chief dogma of Christianity, was threefold and indivisible.

The lower temple carved out of the hill had the form of a parallelogram, a coffin, a body, it was a heavy portico supported by almost Egyptian columns, it merged into the hill, into rough, unhewn nature. This temple was lighted up by lamps in tall Etrurian candelabra, and the daylight filtered sparsely into it through the second temple, passing through a transparent picture of the Nativity. In this crypt all the heroes who had fallen in 1812 were to be laid at rest. An eternal requiem was to be sung for those slain on the field of battle, the names of all of them from the generals to the private soldiers were to be carved upon the walls.

Upon this tomb, upon this graveyard, the second temple—the temple of outstretched hands, of life, of suffering, of labour, was laid out in the form of a Greek cross with the four ends equal. The colonnade leading to it was decorated with statues from figures of the Old Testament. At the entrance stood the prophets, they stood outside the temple pointing the way which they were not destined to tread. The whole story of the Gospels and of the Acts of the Apostles was depicted within this temple.

Above it, crowning it and completing it, was a third temple in the form of a dome. This temple, brightly lighted, was the temple of the spirit of untroubled peace, of eternity, expressed in its circular plan. Here there were neither pictures nor sculpture, only on the outside it was encircled by a ring of archangels and was covered by a colossal cupola.

I am now giving from memory Vitberg’s leading idea. He had it worked out to the minutest detail and everywhere perfectly in harmony with Christian theology and architectural beauty.

The marvellous man spent his whole life over his design. During the ten years that he was on his trial he was occupied with nothing else and, though harassed by poverty and privation in exile, he devoted several hours every day to his temple. He lived in it, he did not believe that it would never be built; memories, consolations, glory, all were in the artist’s portfolio.

Perhaps one day some other artist, after the martyr’s death, will shake the dust off those sheets and with reverence publish that record of martyrdom, in which was spent and wasted a life full of strength, for a moment gladdened by the radiance of glory, then worn out and crushed between a drill-sergeant Tsar, serf-senators, and pettifogging ministers.

The design was a work of genius, terrifying, staggering; that was why Alexander chose it, that was why it ought to have been carried out. It was said that the hill could not have borne the weight of the temple. I find that incredible in face of all the new resources of the American and English engineers, the tunnels which a train takes eight minutes to pass through, the hanging bridges, and so on.

Miloradovitch advised Vitberg to make the thick columns of the lower temple of single blocks of granite. On this some one observed that it would be very expensive to bring the granite blocks from Finland. ‘That is just why we ought to get them,’ answered Miloradovitch, ‘if there were a quarry in the river Moskva there would be nothing wonderful in having them.’

Miloradovitch was a warrior poet and he understood poetry in general. Grand things are done by grand means.

Only nature does great things for nothing.

Even those who have no doubt of Vitberg’s honesty find great fault with him for having undertaken the duty of directing operations, though he was an inexperienced young artist who knew nothing of official business. He ought to have confined himself to the part of architect. That is true.

But it is easy to make such criticisms sitting at home in one’s study. He undertook it just because he was young, inexperienced, and an artist; he undertook it because after his design had been accepted, everything seemed easy to him; he undertook it because the Tsar himself had proposed it to him, encouraged him, supported him. Is there any man whose head would not have been turned?... Are there any so prudent, so sober, so self-restrained? Well, if there are, they do not design colossal temples nor do they make ‘stones speak’!

It need hardly be said that Vitberg was surrounded by a crowd of rogues, men who look on Russia as a field for plunder, on the service as a profitable line of business, on a public post as a lucky chance to make a fortune. It was easy to understand that they would dig a pit under Vitberg’s feet. But that, after falling into it, he should be unable to get out again, was due also to the envy of some and the wounded vanity of others.

Vitberg’s colleagues on the committee were the metropolitan Filaret, the Governor-General of Moscow, and the Senator Kushnikov; they were all offended to begin with by being associated with a young upstart, especially as he gave his opinion boldly and objected if he did not agree.

They helped to get him into trouble, they helped to slander him and with cold-blooded indifference completed his ruin afterwards.

They were helped in this by the fall of the mystically-minded minister Prince A. N. Golitsyn, and afterwards by the death of Alexander. Together with the fall of Golitsyn came the collapse of Freemasonry, of the Bible societies, of Lutheran pietism, which in the persons of Magnitsky at Kazan and of Runitch in Petersburg ran to grotesque extremes, to savage persecutions, to hysterical antics, to complete dementia and goodness knows what strange doings.

Savage, coarse, ignorant orthodoxy was supreme. It was preached by Fotiy the archimandrite of Novgorod, who lived on intimate (not physically, of course) terms with Countess Orlov. The daughter of the celebrated Alexey Grigoryevitch who strangled Peter III., she hoped to win the redemption of her father’s soul by devoting herself to frenzied fanaticism, by giving up to Fotiy and his monks the greater part of her enormous estates, which had been forcibly snatched from the monasteries by Catherine.

But the one thing in which the Petersburg government is persistent, the one thing in which it does not change, however its principles and religions may change, is its unjust oppression and persecution. The violence of the Runitches and the Magnitskys was turned against the Runitches and the Magnitskys. The Bible Society, only yesterday patronised and approved—the prop of morality and religion, was to-day closed and sealed, and its members put almost on the level with counterfeit coiners; the _Messenger of Zion_, only yesterday recommended to all fathers of families, was more severely prohibited than Voltaire and Diderot, and its editor, Labzin, was exiled to Vologda.

Prince A. N. Golitsyn’s fall involved Vitberg; everyone fell upon him, the committee complained of him, the metropolitan was offended and the governor-general was displeased. His answers were ‘insolent’ (‘insolence’ is one of the principal charges in the indictment of him); his subordinates were thieves—as though there were any one in the government service who was not a thief. Though indeed it is likely that there was more thieving among Vitberg’s subordinates than among others; he had had no practice in superintending houses of correction and official thieves.

Alexander commanded Araktcheyev to investigate the case. He was sorry for Vitberg; he let him know through one of his attendants that he believed in his rectitude.

But Alexander died and Araktcheyev fell. Under Nicholas, Vitberg’s case at once took a turn for the worse. It was dragged on for ten years with terrible absurdities. On the points on which he was found guilty by the Criminal Court he was acquitted by the Senate. On those on which he was acquitted by the Court he was found guilty by the Senate. The committee of ministers found him guilty on all the charges. The Tsar, taking advantage of the ‘most precious privilege of monarchs to show mercy and remit punishment,’ added exile to Vyatka to his sentence.

And so Vitberg was sent into exile, dismissed from the service ‘for abuse of the confidence of the Emperor Alexander and causing loss to the treasury.’ He was fined, I believe, a million roubles, all his property was seized and sold by public auction, and a rumour was circulated that he had transferred countless millions to America.

I lived in the same house with Vitberg for two years and remained on intimate terms with him up to the time I left Vyatka. He had not saved the barest crust of bread; his family lived in the most awful poverty.

To give an idea of this case and of all similar ones in Russia, I will quote two little details which have remained in my memory.

Vitberg bought for timber for the temple a copse from a merchant called Lobanov; before the trees were felled Vitberg saw another wood, also Lobanov’s, nearer to the river and asked him to exchange the one he had sold for the second one. The merchant consented. The trees were felled and the timber floated down the river. Later on more timber was needed, and Vitberg bought the first wood again. This was the celebrated accusation of having twice over bought the same copse. Poor Lobanov was put in prison for it and died there.

The second instance came before my own eyes. Vitberg bought an estate for the temple. His idea was that the peasants bought with the land for the temple should be bound to furnish a certain number of workmen for it, and by this means should obtain complete freedom for themselves and their villages. It is amusing that our serf-owning senators found a suggestion of slavery in this measure!

Among other things, Vitberg wanted to buy my father’s estate in the Ruzsky district on the bank of the Moskva. Marble had been found on it, and Vitberg asked permission to make a geological survey to discover what amount of it there was. My father gave permission. Vitberg went off to Petersburg.

Three months later my father learnt that quarrying was going forward on an immense scale, that the peasants’ cornfields were heaped up with marble. He protested; no notice was taken. A protracted lawsuit began. At first they tried to throw all the blame on Vitberg, but unluckily it appeared that he had given no orders, and that it all had been done by the committee in his absence.

The case was taken before the Senate. To the general surprise the Senate’s decision was not very far from common-sense. The marble quarried was to remain the property of the landowner as compensation for the ruined cornfields. The government money spent on quarrying and labour, mounting to a hundred thousand roubles, was to be made good by those who signed the contract for the work. Those who signed were Prince Golitsyn, Filaret, and Kushnikov. There was of course a great clamour and outcry. The case was taken before the Tsar. He had his system of justice. He directed that the offenders should be excused payment because—he wrote it with his own hand, as is printed in the minutes of the Senate—‘The members of the committee did not know what they were signing.’ Even if we admit that the metropolitan was professionally bound to show a meek spirit, what are we to think of the other two grand gentlemen who accepted the Imperial favour on grounds so courteously and graciously explained?

But from whom was the hundred thousand to be taken? Government property, they say, is not burnt in the fire nor drowned in the water. It is only stolen, we might add. No need to hesitate, an adjutant-general was sent off post-haste to Moscow to investigate the question.

Strekalov investigated everything, set everything straight, arranged and settled it all in a few days: the marble was to be taken from the landowner to make good the sum paid for the quarrying; if, however, the landowner wished to retain the marble he was required to pay the hundred thousand. The landowner needed no compensation, because the value of his property was increased by the discovery of a new form of wealth upon it (this was the _chef-d’œuvre_!), but for the damaged fields of the peasants so many kopecks per dessyatin were to be allotted in accordance with the law of flooded meadows and ruined hayfields passed by Peter I.

The person really punished in this case was my father. There is no need to add that the quarrying of this marble was nevertheless brought up against Vitberg in his indictment.

Two years after Vitberg’s exile the merchants of Vyatka formed a project of building a new church.

Nicholas, desirous of killing all spirit of independence, of individuality, of imagination, and of freedom, everywhere and in everything, published a whole volume of designs for churches sanctioned by the Most High. If any one wanted to build a church he was absolutely obliged to select one of the approved plans. He is said to have forbidden the writing of Russian operas, considering that even those written by the adjutant Lvov, in the very office of the secret police, were good for nothing. But that was not enough: he ought to have published a collection of musical airs sanctioned by the Most High!

The Vyatka merchants after turning over the approved plans had the boldness to differ from the Tsar’s taste. The design they sent in astonished Nicholas; he sanctioned it and sent instructions to the provincial authorities to see that the architect’s ideas were faithfully carried out.

‘Who made this design?’ he asked the secretary.

‘Vitberg, your Majesty.’

‘What, the same Vitberg?’

‘The same, your Majesty.’

And behold, like a bolt from the blue, comes permission for Vitberg to return to Moscow or Petersburg. The man had asked leave to clear his character and it had been refused; he made a successful design, and the Tsar bade him return—as though any one had ever doubted his artistic ability....

In Petersburg, almost perishing of want, he made one last effort to defend his honour. It was utterly unsuccessful. Vitberg asked the assistance of A. N. Golitsyn, but the latter thought it impossible to raise the case again, and advised Vitberg to write a very touching letter to the Tsarevitch begging for financial assistance. He undertook to do his best for him with the assistance of Zhukovsky,[149] and promised to get him a thousand silver roubles.

Vitberg refused.

I was in Petersburg for the last time in the beginning of the winter of 1846 and there saw Vitberg. He was completely crushed. Even his old wrath against his enemies which I had liked so much had begun to die down; he had no more hope, he did nothing to escape from his position, blank despair was bringing him to his end, his life was shattered, he was waiting for death. If this was what Nicholas wanted he may be satisfied.

Whether the victim is still living I do not know, but I doubt it.

‘If it were not for my family, my children,’ he said at parting, ‘I would escape from Russia and go begging alms about the world. With the Vladimir cross on my neck I would calmly hold out to passers-by the hand pressed by the Emperor Alexander and tell them of my design and the fate of an artist in Russia!’

‘They shall hear in Europe of your fate, poor martyr,’ I thought; ‘I will answer for that.’

The society of Vitberg was a great solace to me in Vyatka. A grave serenity and a sort of solemnity gave something priestly to his manner. He was a man of very pure morals and in general more disposed to asceticism than indulgence; but his severity did not detract from the wealth and luxuriance of his artistic nature. He could give to his mysticism so plastic a form and so artistic a colouring that criticism died away on one’s lips; one was sorry to analyse, to dissect the shining images and misty pictures of his imagination.

Vitberg’s mysticism was partly due to his Scandinavian blood, it was the same coldly-thought-out dreaminess which we see in Swedenborg, and which is like the fiery reflection of sunbeams in the icy mountains and snows of Norway.

Vitberg’s influence made me waver, but my realistic temperament nevertheless gained the upper hand. I was not destined to rise into the third heaven, I was born a quite earthly creature. No tables turn at the touch of my hands nor do rings shake at my glance. The daylight of thought is more akin to me than the moonlight of phantasy. But I was more disposed to mysticism at the period when I was living with Vitberg than at any other time. Separation, exile, the religious exaltation of the letters I received, the love which was filling my soul more and more intensely, and at the same time the oppressive feeling of remorse, all reinforced Vitberg’s influence.

And for two years afterwards I was under the influence of ideas of a mystical socialist tinge, drawn from the Gospel and Jean-Jacques, after the style of French thinkers like Pierre Leroux.[150]

Ogaryov plunged into the sea of mysticism even before I did. In 1833 he was beginning to write the words for Gebel’s[151] oratorio, _The Lost Paradise_. In the idea of a “Lost Paradise,” Ogaryov wrote to me, ‘there is the whole history of humanity’; so at that time, he too mistook the paradise of the ideal that we are seeking for a paradise we have lost.

In 1838 I wrote historical scenes in the religious socialist spirit, and at the time took them for dramas. In some I pictured the conflict of the pagan world with Christianity. In them Paul going to Rome raised a dead youth to new life. In others I described the conflict of the official Church with the Quakers and the departure of William Penn to America to the new world.[152]

The mysticism of the gospel was soon replaced in me by the mysticism of science; fortunately I rid myself of the second also.

But to return to our modest little town of Hlynov, the name of which was, I don’t know why, perhaps from Finnish patriotism, changed by Catherine II. to Vyatka.

In the desolation of my Vyatka exile, in the filthy atmosphere of government clerks, in that gloomy remote place, separated from all who were dear to me and put defenceless in the power of the governor, I spent many exquisite sacred moments, and met many warm hearts and friendly hands.

Where are you? What has happened to you, my friends of that snowy region? It is twenty years since we met. I dare say you have grown old as I have, you are marrying your daughters, you don’t now drink champagne by the bottle and liqueur by the little glass. Which of you has grown rich, which of you has come to ruin, who is high up in the service, who is paralysed? Above all, is the memory of our old talks still living in you, are those chords which vibrated so eagerly with love and indignation still vibrating within you?

I have remained the same, that you know; I dare say news of me reaches you even from the banks of the Thames. Sometimes I think of you, always with love; I have some letters of that time, some of them are exceedingly dear to me and I like reading them over.

‘I am not ashamed to own to you that I am passing through a very bitter time,’ a young man wrote to me on the 26th of January 1838. ‘Help me for the sake of that life to which you called me, help me with your advice. I want to study, tell me of books, tell me anything you like, I will do all I can, give me a chance; it will be too bad of you if you don’t help me.’

‘I bless you,’ another wrote to me after I had gone away, ‘as the husbandman blesses the rain that has made fruitful his arid soil.’

It is not from vanity that I have quoted these lines, but because they are very precious to me. For the sake of those youthful appeals and youthful love, for the sake of the yearnings aroused in those hearts, one could well resign oneself to nine months’ imprisonment and three years’ exile to Vyatka.

And then twice a week the post from Moscow came in; with what excitement I waited by the post-office while the letters were sorted, with what a tremor I broke the seal and looked in the letter from home for a tiny note on thin paper written in a wonderfully fine and elegant hand.

I never read it in the post-office, but walked quietly home, deferring the minute of reading it, happy in the mere thought that there was a letter.

Those letters were all kept. I left them in Moscow. I long to read them over again and dread to touch them....

Letters are more than memories, the very essence of events still lives in them; they are the very past just as it was, preserved and unfaded.

... Should one know it, see it all again? Should one touch with wrinkled hands one’s wedding garment?