Chapter 7

THE END OF MY STUDIES—THE SCHILLER PERIOD—EARLY YOUTH AND BOHEMIANISM—SAINT-SIMONISM AND N. POLEVOY

Before the storm had broken over our heads my time at the university was coming to an end. The ordinary anxieties, the nights without sleep spent in trying to learn useless things by heart, the superficial study in a hurry and the thought of the examination stifling all interest in science—all that was as it always is. I wrote a dissertation on astronomy for the gold medal, but only got the silver one. I am certain that I am incapable of understanding now what I wrote then, and that it was worth its weight—in silver.

It sometimes happens to me to dream that I am a student going in for an examination—I think with horror how much I have forgotten and feel that I shall be plucked,—and I wake up rejoicing from the bottom of my heart that the sea and passports, and years and crimes cut me off from the university, that no one is going to torture me, and no one dare give me a disgusting minimum. And, indeed, the professors would be surprised that I should have gone so far back in so few years. One did, indeed, express this to me.[109]

After the final examination the professors shut themselves up to reckon the marks, while we, excited by hopes and doubts, hung about the corridors and entrance in little groups. Sometimes some one would come out of the council-room. We rushed to learn our fate, but for a long time it was not settled. At last Heiman came out. ‘I congratulate you,’ he said to me, ‘you are a graduate.’ ‘Who else, who else?’ ‘So-and-so, and So-and-so.’ I felt at once sad and gay; as I went out at the university gates I thought that I should not go out at them again as I had yesterday and every day; I was shut out of the university, of that common home where I had spent four years, so youthfully and so well; on the other hand I was comforted by the feeling of being accepted as completely grown-up, and, why not admit it? by the title of graduate I had gained all at once.[110]

Alma Mater! I am so greatly indebted to the university, and lived in its life and with it so long after I had finished my studies, that I cannot think of it without love and respect. It cannot charge me with ingratitude, though in relation with the university gratitude is easy, it is inseparable from the love and bright memories of youth ... and I send it my blessing from this far-off foreign land!

The year we spent after taking our degrees made a glorious end to early youth. It was one prolonged feast of friendship, exchange of ideas, inspiration, carousing....

A little group of university friends who had succeeded in surviving did not part, but went on living in their common sympathies and fancies, and no one thought of his material prospects or future career. I should not think well of this in men of mature age, but I prize it in the young. Youth when it has not been sapped by the moral corruption of petty-bourgeois ideas is everywhere impractical, and is especially bound to be so in a young country which is full of such great strivings and has attained so little. Moreover, to be impractical need not imply anything false, everything turned toward the future is bound to have a share of idealism. If it were not for the impractical characters, all the practical people would remain at the same dull stage of perpetual repetition.

Some enthusiasm preserves a man from real degradation far more than all the moral admonitions in the world. I remember youthful orgies, moments of revelry that sometimes went beyond bounds, but I do not remember one really immoral affair in our circle, nothing of which a man would have to feel seriously ashamed, which he would try to forget and conceal. Everything was done openly, and what is bad is rarely done openly. Half, more than half, of the heart was turned away from idle sensuality and morbid egoism, which concentrate on impure thoughts and accentuate vice.

I consider it a great misfortune for a nation when their young generation has no youth; we have already observed that being young is not enough. The most grotesque period of German student life is a hundred times better than the petty-bourgeois maturity of young men in France and England. To my mind the elderly Americans of fifteen are simply disgusting.

In France there was at one time a brilliant aristocratic youth, and later on a brilliant revolutionary youth. All the St. Justs[111] and Hoches,[112] Marceaux and Desmoulins,[113] the heroic children who grew up on the gloomy poetry of Jean-Jacques, were real youth. The Revolution was the work of young men, neither Danton nor Robespierre nor Louis XVI. himself outlived their thirty-fifth year. With Napoleon the young men were turned into orderlies, with the Restoration, ‘the revival of old age,’—youth was utterly incompatible—everything became mature, businesslike, that is, petty-bourgeois.

The last youths of France were the Saint-Simonists and the Fourierists. The few exceptions cannot alter the prosaically dull character of French youth. Escousse and Lebras[114] shot themselves because they were young in a society of old men. Others struggled like fish thrown out of the water on to the muddy bank, till some fell at the barricades, others were caught in the Jesuit snares.

But since youth asserts its rights, the greater number of young Frenchmen work off their youth in a Bohemian period, that is, if they have no money, live in little cafés with little grisettes in the Quartier Latin, and in grand cafés with grand lorettes, if they have money. Instead of a Schiller period, they have a Paul de Kock period; in it, strength, energy, everything young is rapidly and rather wretchedly wasted and the man is ready—for a _commis_ in a commercial house. The Bohemian period leaves at the bottom of the soul one passion only—the thirst for money, and the whole future is sacrificed to it, there are no other interests; these practical people laugh at theoretical questions and despise women (the result of numerous conquests over those whose trade it is to be conquered). As a rule, the Bohemian period is passed under the guidance of some worn-out sinner, of some faded celebrity, _d’un vieux prostitué_, living at some one else’s expense, an actor who has lost his voice, or a painter whose hands tremble, and he is the model who is imitated in accent, in dress, and above all in a haughty view of human affairs and a profound understanding of good fare.

In England the Bohemian period is replaced by a paroxysm of charming originalities and amiable eccentricities. For instance, senseless tricks, absurd squandering of money, ponderous practical jokes, heavy, but carefully concealed vice, profitless trips to Calabria or Quito, to the North and to the South—with horses, dogs, races, and stuffy dinners by the way, then a wife and an enormous number of fat and rosy babies; business transactions, the _Times_, Parliament, and the old port which weighs them to the earth.

We played pranks too and we caroused, but the fundamental tone was not the same, the diapason was too elevated. Mischief and dissipation never became our goal. Our goal was faith in our vocation; supposing that we were mistaken, still, believing it as a fact, we respected in ourselves and in each other the instruments of the common cause. And in what did our feasts and orgies consist? Suddenly it would occur to us that in another two days it would be the sixth of December, St. Nikolay’s day. The supply of Nikolays was terrific, Nikolay Ogaryov, Nikolay S——, Nikolay Ketscher, Nikolay Sazonov....

‘I say, who is going to celebrate the name-day?’

‘I! I!...’

‘I will next day then.’

‘That’s all nonsense, what’s the good of next day? We will keep it in common, by subscription! And what a feast it will be!’

‘Yes! yes! at whose rooms are we to assemble?’

‘S—— is ill, so it’s clear it must be at his.’

And so plans and calculations are made, and it is incredibly absorbing for the future guests and hosts. One Nikolay drives off to Yar’s to order supper, another to Materne’s for cheese and salami. Wine, of course, is bought in Petrovka from Depré’s, on whose price-list Ogaryov wrote the epigram:

‘De près ou de loin, Mais je fournis toujours.’

Our inexperienced taste went no further than champagne, and was so young that we sometimes even preferred _Rivesaltes mousseux_ to champagne. I once saw the name on a wine-list in Paris, remembered 1833 and tried a bottle, but, alas, even my memories did not help me to drink more than a glass.

Before the festive day, the wines would be tried, and so it would be necessary to send a messenger for more, as it appeared they were liked.

While we are on the subject, I cannot refrain from describing what happened to Sokolovsky. He was perpetually without money and immediately spent everything he received. A year before his arrest, he arrived in Moscow and stayed with S——. He had, I remember, succeeded in selling the manuscript of _Heveri_, and so resolved to give a feast not only for us but also _pour les gros bonnets_, _i.e._ invited Polevoy, Maximovitch, and others. On the morning of the previous day, he set out with Polezhaev, who was at that time in Moscow with his regiment, to make purchases, bought cups and even a samovar and all sorts of unnecessary things and finally wines and eatables, that is, pasties, stuffed turkeys, and soon. In the evening we arrived at S——’s. Sokolovsky suggested uncorking one bottle, and then another, and by the end of the evening, it appeared that there was no more wine and no more money. Sokolovsky had spent everything he had left over after paying some small debts. Sokolovsky was mortified, but controlled his feeling; he thought and thought, then wrote to the _gros bonnets_ that he had been taken seriously ill and was putting off the feast.

For the celebration of the four name-days, I wrote out a complete programme, which was deemed worthy of the special attention of the inquisitor Golitsyn, who asked me at the committee whether the programme had really been carried out.

‘_À la lettre_,’ I replied. He shrugged his shoulders as though he had spent his whole life in the Smolny Convent or keeping Good Friday.

After supper as a rule a vital question, a question that aroused controversy arose, _i.e._ how to prepare the punch. Other things were usually eaten and drunk in good faith, like the voting in Parliament, without dispute, but in this every one must have a hand and, moreover, it was after supper.... ‘Light it—don’t light it yet—light it how?—put it out with champagne or Sauterne?—put the fruit and pineapple in while it is burning or afterwards?’

‘Evidently when it is burning, and then the whole aroma will go into punch.’

‘But, I say, the pineapple will swim, the edges will be scorched, it is simply a waste.’

‘That’s all nonsense,’ Ketscher would shout louder than all, ‘but what’s not nonsense is that you must put out the candles.’

The candles were put out; all the faces looked blue, and the features seemed to quiver with the movement of the flame. And meantime the temperature in the little room was becoming tropical. Every one was thirsty and the punch was not ready. But Joseph the Frenchman sent from Yar’s was ready; he had prepared something, the antithesis of punch, an iced beverage of various wines _à la base de cognac_. A genuine son of the ‘_grand peuple_,’ he explained to us, as he put in the French wine, that it was so good because it had twice passed the Equator. ‘_Oui, oui, messieurs, deux fois l’équateur, messieurs!_’

When the beverage remarkable for its arctic iciness had been finished and in fact there was no need of more drink, Ketscher shouted, stirring the fiery lake in the soup-tureen and making the last lumps of sugar melt with a hiss and a wail, ‘It’s time to put it out! time to put it out!’

The flame turns red with the champagne, and races over the surface of the punch with a look of despair and foreboding.

Then comes a voice of despair, ‘But I say, old man, you’re mad, the wax is melting right into the punch.’

‘Well, you try holding the bottle yourself in such heat so that the wax does not melt.’

‘Well, something ought to have been wrapped round it first,’ the distressed voice continues.

‘Cups, cups, have you enough? How many are there of us? Nine, ten, fourteen, yes, yes!’

‘Where’s one to find fourteen cups?’

‘Well any one who hasn’t got a cup must take a glass.’

‘The glasses will crack.’

‘Never, never, you’ve only to put a spoon in them.’

Candles are brought, the last flicker of flame runs across the middle, makes a pirouette and vanishes.

‘The punch is a success!’

‘It is a great success!’ is said on all sides.

Next day my head aches—I feel sick. That’s evidently from the punch, too mixed! And on the spot I make a sincere resolution never to drink punch for the future; it is a poison.

Pyotr Fyodorovitch comes in.

‘You came home in somebody else’s hat, our hat is a much better one.’

‘The devil take it entirely.’

‘Should I run to Nikolay Mihailovitch’s Kuzma?’

‘Why, do you imagine some one went home without a hat?’

‘It would be just as well anyway.’

At this point I guess that the hat is only a pretext, and that Kuzma has invited Pyotr Fyodorovitch to the field of battle.

‘You go and see Kuzma; only first ask the cook to let me have some sour cabbage.’

‘So, Alexandr Ivanitch, the gentlemen kept their name-days in fine style?’

‘Yes, indeed, there hasn’t been such a supper in our time.’

‘So we shan’t be going to the university to-day?’

My conscience pricks me and I make no answer.

‘Your papa was asking me, “How is it,” says he, “he is not up yet?” Without thinking, I said, “His honour’s head aches; he complained of it from early morning, so I did not even pull up the blinds.” “Well,” said he, “you did right there.”’

‘But do let me go to sleep, for Christ’s sake. You want to go and see Kuzma, so go.’

‘This minute, this minute, sir; first I’ll run for the cabbage.’

A heavy sleep closes my eyes again; two or three hours later I wake up much better. What are they doing there? I wonder. Ketscher and Ogaryov stayed the night. It’s vexatious that punch has such an effect on the head, for it must be owned it’s very nice. It is a mistake to drink punch by the glassful; henceforth and for ever I will certainly drink no more than a small cupful.

Meantime my father has already finished interviewing the cook and reading the newspapers.

‘You have a headache to-day?’

‘Yes, a bad one.’

‘Perhaps you have been working too hard?’ And as he asks the question I can see that he has his doubts already.

‘I forgot though, I believe you spent the evening with Nikolasha[115] and Ogaryov.’

‘Of course.’

‘Did they regale you with anything ... for the name-day? Madeira in the soup again? Ah, I don’t like all that. Nikolasha is too fond of wine I know, and where he gets that weakness from I don’t understand. Poor Pavel Ivanovitch ... why, on the twenty-ninth of June, his name-day, he would invite all the relations and have a dinner in the regular way, quiet and proper. But the fashion nowadays, champagne and sardines in oil, it’s a disgusting sight. As for that luckless young Ogaryov, I say nothing about him, he is alone and abandoned! Moscow ... with plenty of money, his coachman Eremey “goes to fetch wine.” The coachman’s glad to, he gets ten kopecks at the shop for it.’

‘Yes, I lunched with Nikolay Pavlovitch. But I don’t think that that’s why my head aches. I will go for a little walk; that always does me good.’

‘By all means; you will dine at home, I hope.’

‘Of course, I am only going out for a little.’

To explain the Madeira in the soup, it must be said that about a year before the famous celebration of the four name-days, Ogaryov and I had gone off for a spree in Easter-week and, to get out of dining at home, I had said that I had been invited to dinner by Ogaryov’s father.

My father disliked my friends as a rule; he used to call them by the wrong surnames, invariably making the same mistake, thus he never failed to call S—— Sakeny and Sazonov, Snaziny. He liked Ogaryov least of all, both because he wore his hair long and because he smoked without asking his leave. On the other hand, he regarded him as a distant cousin and so could not distort the name of a relation. Moreover, his father, Platon Bogdanovitch, belonged both by family and by fortune to the little circle of persons recognised by my father, and he liked my being intimate with the family. He would have liked it better still, if Platon Bogdanovitch had had no son.

And so to refuse the invitation was considered impossible.

Instead of settling ourselves in Platon Bogdanovitch’s respectable dining-room, we set off first to the Prices’ booth (I was delighted later on to meet this family of acrobats in Geneva and in London). There was a little girl there, over whom we raved and whom we had named Mignon.

After gazing at Mignon and resolving to see her again in the evening, we set off to dine at Yar’s. I had a gold piece and Ogaryov about the same. We were at that time complete novices and so, after long consultation, we ordered fish soup with champagne in it, a bottle of Rhine-wine, and some tiny bird, so that when we got up from the dinner, which was frightfully expensive, we were quite hungry and so went off to look at Mignon again.

When my father said good-night to me, he observed that he thought I smelt of wine.

‘That must be because there was Madeira in the soup.’ ‘_Au madère_—that must be Platon Bogdanovitch’s son-in-law’s idea; _cela sent les casernes de la garde_.’

From that time forth, if my father fancied that I had been drinking, or that my face was red, he would be sure to say to me, ‘I suppose you have had Madeira in your soup to-day!’

And so I hastened off to S——’s.

Ogaryov and Ketscher were, of course, on the spot. Ketscher, looking tousled, was displeased with some arrangements that were being made and was criticising them severely. Ogaryov, on the homeopathic system of driving out one nail with another, was drinking up what was left, not merely after the supper but after the foraging of Pyotr Fyodorovitch, who was already singing, whistling, and playing a tattoo in S——’s kitchen.

Recalling the days of our youth, of all our circle, I do not remember a single incident which would weigh on the conscience, which one would be ashamed to think of. And that applies to all our friends without exception.

There were, of course, Platonic dreamers and disillusioned youths of seventeen among us. Vadim even wrote a drama in which he tried to depict ‘the terrible ordeal of his spent heart.’ The drama began like this: ‘A garden—house in distance—windows lighted—storm raging—no one in sight—garden gate not fastened, it flaps to and fro and creaks.’

‘Are there any characters in the drama besides the gate in the garden?’ I asked Vadim.

And Vadim, rather nettled, said, ‘You’re always playing the fool! It’s not a jest, it’s the record of my heart; if you go on like that I won’t read it’—and proceeded to read it.

There were follies, too, that were not at all Platonic; even some that ended not in writing plays but in the chemist’s shop. But there were no vulgar intrigues ruining a woman or humiliating a man, there were no kept mistresses (indeed the vulgar word for them did not exist among us). Tranquil, secure, prosaic, petty-bourgeois vice, vice by contract, passed our circle by.

‘Then you do admit the worse form of vice, prostitution?’ I shall be asked.

Not I, but you do! that is, not you individually, but all of you. It is so firmly established in the social structure that it asks for no sanction from me.

Social enthusiasm, general theories, were our salvation; and not they alone but also a high development of scientific and artistic interest. Like fumigating paper, they burnt out the grease spots. I have preserved some of Ogaryov’s letters of that period, and the background of our lives can be easily judged from them. On June 7, 1833, Ogaryov, for instance, wrote to me:

‘I believe we know each other, I believe we can be open. You will not show my letters to any one else. And so tell me—for some time past I have been so absolutely brimming over, I may say, suffocated with sensations and thoughts, that I fancy, it’s more than fancy, the idea sticks in my head, that it is my vocation to be a poet, a creative artist or a musician, _alles eins_, but I feel that I must live in that thought, for I have a feeling in myself that I am a poet;—granted that I have written rubbish so far, yet the fire in my soul, the exuberance of my feelings, gives me the hope that I shall write decently (excuse the vulgar expression). Tell me, friend, am I to believe in my vocation? You know me, maybe, better than I know myself, and will not make a mistake.’—_June 7, 1833._

‘You write: but you are a poet, a real poet! Friend, can you conceive all that those words do for me? And so all that I feel, to which I strive, in which I live is not an illusion! It is not an illusion! Are you telling the truth? It is not the delirium of fever—that I feel. You know me better than any one, don’t you? I certainly feel that you do. No, this exalted life is not the delirium of fever, not the illusion of imagination, it is too exalted for deception, it is real, I live in it, I cannot imagine myself with any other life. Why don’t I understand music, what a symphony would rise out of my soul now! One can catch the stately _adagio_, but I have no power to express myself; I want to say more than has been said, _presto, presto_, I want a tempestuous, irrepressible _presto_. _Adagio_ and _presto_, the two extremes. Away with these compromises, _andante_, _allegro_, _moderato_, faltering or feeble-minded, they can neither speak strongly nor feel strongly.’—TCHERTKOVO, _Aug. 18, 1833_.

We have grown out of the habit of this enthusiastic bubble of youth and it is strange to us, but in these lines, written by a youth under twenty, it can clearly be seen that he is insured against vulgar vice and vulgar virtue, and that even if he is not saved from the mire, he will come out of it unsullied.

It is not lack of self-confidence, it is the hesitation of faith, it is the passionate desire for confirmation, for the superfluous word of love, so precious to us. Yes, it is the uneasiness of creative conception, it is the anxious searchings of a soul in travail.

‘I cannot yet,’ he writes in the same letter, ‘catch the notes which are resounding in my soul, physical incapacity limits the imagination. But, hang it all! I am a poet, poetry whispers the truth to me where I could not have grasped it with cold reason.’

So ends the first part of our youth; the second begins in prison. But before we go on to it, I must say something of the tendencies, of the ideas, with which it found us.

The period that followed the suppression of the Polish insurrection educated us rapidly. We were not merely troubled that Nicholas had grown to his full stature and was firmly established in severity; we began with inward horror to discover that in Europe, too, and especially in France, to which we looked for our political watchword and battle-cry, things were not going well; we began to look upon our theories with suspicion.

The childish liberalism of 1826, which gradually passed into the French political theory expounded by the Lafayettes and Benjamin Constant and sung by Béranger, lost its magic power over us after the ruin of Poland.

Then one section of the young people, and among them Vadim, threw themselves into a close and earnest study of Russian history.

Another set took to the study of German philosophy.

Ogaryov and I belonged to neither of these sets. We had grown too closely attached to certain ideas to part with them readily.

Our faith in revolution of the festive Béranger stamp was shaken, but we looked for something which we could find neither in the _Chronicle_ of Nestor[116] nor in the transcendental idealism of Schelling.

In the midst of this ferment, in the midst of surmises, of confused efforts to understand the doubts which frightened us, the pamphlets of Saint Simon and his followers, their tracts and their trial came into our hands. They impressed us.

Critics, superficial and not superficial, have laughed enough at Father Enfantin[117] and his apostles; the time has now come for some recognition of these forerunners of socialism.

These enthusiastic youths with their strange waistcoats and their budding beards made a magnificent and poetic appearance in the midst of the petty-bourgeois world. They heralded a new faith, they had something to say, they had something in the name of which to judge the old order of things, fain to judge them by the Code Napoleon and the religion of Orleans.

On the one hand came the emancipation of woman, the call to her to join in common labour, the giving of her destiny into her own hands, alliance with her as with an equal.

On the other hand the justification, the _redemption_ of the flesh, _Réhabilitation de la chair_!

Grand words, involving a whole world of new relations between human beings; a world of health, a world of spirit, a world of beauty, the world of natural morality, and therefore of moral purity. Many have scoffed at emancipation of women and at the recognition of the rights of the flesh, giving to those words a filthy and vulgar meaning; our monastically depraved imagination fears the flesh, fears woman. Simple-hearted people grasped that the purifying sanctification of the flesh is the death knell of Christianity; the religion of life had come to replace the religion of death, the religion of beauty to replace the religion of castigation and mortification by prayer and fasting. The crucified body had risen again in its turn and was no longer ashamed; man attained a harmonious unity and divined that he was a whole being and not made up like a pendulum of two different metals restraining each other, that the enemy bound up with him had disappeared.

What courage was needed in France to proclaim in the hearing of all those words of deliverance from the spiritual ideas which are so strong in the minds of the French and so completely absent from their conduct!

The old world, ridiculed by Voltaire, undermined by the Revolution, but fortified, patched up and made secure by the petty-bourgeois for their own personal convenience, had never experienced this before. It tried to judge the heretics on the basis of its secret conspiracy of hypocrisy, but these young men unmasked it. They were accused of being apostates from Christianity, and they pointed above their judge’s head to the holy picture that had been covered with a curtain after the Revolution of 1830. They were charged with justifying sensuality, and they asked their judge, was his life chaste?

The new world was pushing at the door, and our hearts opened wide to meet it. Saint-Simonism lay at the foundation of our convictions and remained so in its essentials unalterably.

Impressionable, genuinely youthful, we were easily caught up in its mighty current and passed early over that boundary at which whole crowds of people remain standing with their hands folded, go back or seek from side to side a ford—to cross the ocean!

But not all ventured with us. Socialism and Realism remain to this day the touchstones flung on the paths of revolution and science. Groups of travellers, tossed up against these rocks by the current of events, or by process of reasoning, immediately divide and make two everlasting parties which, in various disguises, cut across the whole of history, across all upheavals, across innumerable political parties and even circles of no more than a dozen youths. One stands for logic, the other for history; one for dialectics, the other for embryology. One is more correct, the other more practical.

There can be no talk of choice; it is harder to bridle thought than any passion, it leads one on unconsciously; any one who can chain it by feeling, by dreams, by dread of consequences, will chain it, but not all can. If thought gets the upper hand in any one, he does not inquire about its practicability, or whether it will make things easier or harder; he seeks the truth, and inflexibly, impartially lays down his principles, as the Saint-Simonists did at one time, as Proudhon does to this day.

Our circle drew in closer. Even then, in 1833, the Liberals looked at us askance, as having strayed from the true path. Just before we went to prison, Saint-Simonism became a barrier between N. A. Polevoy and me. Polevoy was a man of extraordinarily ingenious and active mind, which readily absorbed every kind of nutriment; he was born to be a journalist, a chronicler of successes, of discoveries, of political and learned controversies. I made his acquaintance at the end of my time at the university—and was sometimes in his house and at his brother Ksenofont’s. This was the time when his reputation was at its highest, the period just before the prohibition of the _Telegraph_.

This man who lived in the latest discovery, in the question of the hour, in the last novelty, in theories and in events, and who changed like a chameleon, could not, for all the liveliness of his mind, understand Saint-Simonism. For us Saint-Simonism was a revelation, for him it was insanity, a silly Utopia, hindering social development. To all my rhetoric, my expositions and arguments, Polevoy was deaf; he lost his temper and grew vindictive. Opposition from a student was particularly annoying to him, for he greatly prized his influence on the young, and saw in this dispute that it was slipping away from him.

On one occasion, offended by the absurdity of his objections, I observed that he was just as old-fashioned a Conservative as those against whom he had been fighting all his life. Polevoy was deeply offended by my words and, shaking his head, said to me: ‘The time will come when you will be rewarded for a whole lifetime of toil and effort by some young man’s saying with a smile, “Be off, you are behind the times.”’ I felt sorry for him and ashamed of having hurt his feelings, but at the same time I felt that his sentence could be heard in his melancholy words. They were not those of a mighty champion, but of an exhausted and aged gladiator. I realised then that he would not advance, and was incapable of standing still at the same point with a mind so active and a basis so insecure.

You know what happened to him afterwards: he set to work upon his _Parasha, the Siberian_.[118]

What luck a timely death is for a man who can at the right moment neither leave the stage nor move forward! I have thought that looking at Polevoy, looking at Pius IX., and at many others!

Appendix A. POLEZHAEV

To complete the gloomy record of that period, I ought to add a few details about A. Polezhaev.

As a student, Polezhaev was renowned for his excellent verses. Amongst other things he wrote a humorous parody of ‘_Onyegin_,’ called ‘_Sashka_,’ in which, regardless of proprieties, he attacked many things in a jesting tone, in very charming verses.

In the autumn of 1826, Nicholas, after hanging Pestel, Muravyov, and their friends, celebrated his coronation in Moscow. For other sovereigns these ceremonies are occasions for amnesties and pardons: Nicholas, after celebrating his apotheosis, proceeded again to ‘strike down the foes of the father-land,’ like Robespierre after his ‘Fête-Dieu.’

The secret police brought him Polezhaev’s poem.

And so at three o’clock one night, the rector woke Polezhaev, told him to put on his uniform and go to the office. There the director was awaiting him. After looking to see that all the necessary buttons were on his uniform and no unnecessary ones, he invited Polezhaev without any explanation to get into his carriage and drove off with him.

He conducted him to the Minister of Public Instruction. The latter put Polezhaev into his carriage and he too drove him off—but this time straight to the Tsar.

Prince Lieven left Polezhaev in the drawing-room—where several courtiers and higher officials were already waiting although it was only six o’clock in the morning—and went into the inner apartments. The courtiers imagined that the young man had distinguished himself in some way and at once entered into conversation with him. A senator suggested that he might give lessons to his son.

Polezhaev was summoned to the study. The Tsar was standing leaning on the bureau and talking to Lieven. He flung a searching and malignant glance at the newcomer; there was a manuscript in his hand.

‘Did you write these verses?’ he inquired.

‘Yes,’ answered Polezhaev.

‘Here, prince,’ the Tsar continued, ‘I will give you a specimen of university education, I will show you what young men learn there. Read the manuscript aloud,’ he added, addressing Polezhaev.

The agitation of the latter was so great that he could not read. Nicholas’s eyes were fixed immovably upon him. I know them and know nothing so terrible, so hopeless, as those colourless, cold, pewtery eyes.

‘I cannot,’ said Polezhaev.

‘Read!’ shouted the imperial drum-major.

That shout restored Polezhaev’s faculties; he opened the manuscript. Never, he told us, had he seen ‘_Sashka_’ so carefully copied and on such splendid paper.

At first it was hard for him to read; then as he got more and more into the spirit of the thing, he read the poem in a loud and lively voice. At particularly startling passages, the Tsar made a sign with his hand to the Minister and the latter covered his eyes with horror.

‘What do you say to that?’ Nicholas inquired at the end of the reading. ‘I will put a stop to this corruption; these are the _last traces, the last remnants_; I will root them out. What is his record?’

The minister, of course, knew nothing of his record, but some human feeling must have stirred in him, for he said: ‘He has an excellent record, your Majesty.’

‘That record has saved you, but you must be punished, as an example to others. Would you like to go into the army?’

Polezhaev was silent.

‘I give you a chance of clearing your name in the army. Well?’

‘I must obey,’ answered Polezhaev.

The Tsar went up to him, laid his hand on his shoulder and, saying to him, ‘Your fate is in your own hands, if I forget you you can _write_ to me,’ _kissed him on the forehead_.

I made Polezhaev repeat the story of the kiss a dozen times, it seemed to me so incredible. He swore that it was true.

From the Tsar, he was led off to Dibitch, who lived on the spot in the palace. Dibitch was asleep; he was awakened, came out yawning, and, after reading the paper handed to him, asked the aide-de-camp: ‘Is this he?’—‘Yes, your Excellency.’

‘Well! it’s a capital thing; you will serve in the army. I have always been in the army, and you see what I’ve risen to, and maybe you’ll be made a field-marshal.’ This stupid, inappropriate, German joke was Dibitch’s equivalent to a kiss. Polezhaev was led off to the camp and handed over to the soldiers.

Three years passed. Polezhaev remembered the Tsar’s words and wrote him a letter. No answer came. A few months later he wrote a second; again there was no answer. Convinced that his letters did not reach the Tsar, he ran away, and ran away in order to present a petition in person. He behaved carelessly, saw his old friends in Moscow and was entertained by them; of course, that could not be kept secret. In Tver he was seized and sent back to his regiment, as a runaway soldier, on foot and in chains. The court martial condemned him to run the gauntlet; the sentence was despatched to the Tsar for ratification.

Polezhaev wanted to kill himself before the punishment. After searching in vain in his prison for a sharp instrument, he confided in an old soldier who liked him. The soldier understood him and respected his wishes. When the old man learned that the answer had come, he brought him a bayonet and, as he gave him it, said through his tears: ‘I have sharpened it myself.’

The Tsar did not confirm Polezhaev’s sentence.

Then it was that he wrote the fine poem beginning:

‘I perished lonely, No help was nigh. My evil genius Passed mocking by.’[119]

Polezhaev was sent to the Caucasus. There for distinguished service he was promoted to be a non-commissioned officer. Years and years passed; his hopeless, dreary position broke him down; become a police poet and sing the glories of Nicholas he could not, and that was the only way of escape from the army.

There was, however, another means of escape, and he preferred it; he drank to win forgetfulness. There is a terrible poem of his, ‘To Vodka.’

He succeeded in getting transferred to a regiment of the Carabineers stationed in Moscow. This was a considerable alleviation of his lot, but malignant consumption had already laid its grip upon him.

It was at this period that I made his acquaintance, about 1833. He struggled on another four years and died in the military hospital.

When one of his friends went to ask for the body for burial, no one knew where it was; the military hospital did a trade in corpses; they sold them to the university and to the Medical Academy, made them into skeletons, and so on. At last he found poor Polezhaev’s body in a cellar; he was lying under a heap of others and the rats had gnawed off one foot.

After his death, his poems were published, and his portrait in a soldier’s uniform was to have been included in the edition. The censor thought this unseemly, and the poor martyr was portrayed with the epaulettes of an officer—he had been promoted in the hospital.

PART II PRISON & EXILE (1834–1838)