But you will never link hearts togetherUnless the linking springs from your own heart.
But you will never link hearts togetherUnless the linking springs from your own heart.
But you will never link hearts togetherUnless the linking springs from your own heart.
But you will never link hearts together
Unless the linking springs from your own heart.
Alexander, in the meantime, had embraced with his usual passion the Lutheran faith. He had read Michelet’s book on Servetus, and had worked out for himself a religion on the lines of that great fighter. He studied with enthusiasm the Augsburg declaration, which he copied out and sent me, and our letters now became full of discussions about grace, and of texts from the apostles Paul and James. I followed my brother, but theological discussions did not deeply interest me. Since I had recovered from the typhoid fever I had taken to quite different reading.
Our sister Hélène, who was now married, was at St. Petersburg, and every Saturday night I went to visit her. Her husband had a good library, in which the French philosophers of the last century and the modern French historians were well represented, and I plunged into them. Such books were prohibited in Russia, and evidently could not be taken to school; so I spent most of the night, every Saturday, in reading the works of the encyclopædists, the ‘Philosophical Dictionary’ of Voltaire, the writings of the Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius, and so on. The infinite immensity of the universe, the greatness of nature, its poetry, its ever throbbing life, impressed me more and more; and that never-ceasing life and its harmonies gave me the ecstasy of admiration which the young soul thirsts for, while my favourite poets supplied me with an expression in words of that awakening love of mankind and faith in its progress which make the best part of youth and impress man for a life.
Alexander, by this time, had gradually come to a Kantian agnosticism, and the ‘relativity of perceptions,’ ‘perceptions in time and space, and time only,’ and so on, filled pages and pages in our letters, the writing of which became more and more microscopical as the subjects under discussion grew in importance. But neither then nor later on, when we used to spend hours and hours in discussing Kant’s philosophy, could my brotherconvert me to become a disciple of the Königsberg philosopher.
Natural sciences—that is, mathematics, physics, and astronomy—were my chief studies. In the year 1858, before Darwin had brought out his immortal work, a professor of zoology at the Moscow University, Roulier, published three lectures on transformism, and my brother took up at once his ideas concerning the variability of species. He was not satisfied, however, with approximate proofs only, and began to study a number of special books on heredity and the like, communicating to me in his letters the main facts, as well as his ideas and his doubts. The appearance of the ‘Origin of Species’ did not settle his doubts on several special points, but only raised new questions and gave him the impulse for further studies. We afterward discussed—and that discussion lasted for many years—various questions relative to the origin of variations, their chances of being transmitted and being accentuated; in short, those questions which have been raised quite lately in the Weismann-Spencer controversy, in Galton’s researches, and in the works of the modern Neo-Lamarckians. Owing to his philosophical and critical mind, Alexander had noticed at once the fundamental importance of these questions for the theory of variability of species, even though they were so often overlooked then by many naturalists.
I must also mention a temporary excursion into the domain of political economy. In the years 1858 and 1859 everyone in Russia spoke of political economy; lectures on free trade and protective duties attracted crowds of people, and my brother, who was not yet absorbed by the variability of species, took a lively though temporary interest in economical matters, sending me for reading the ‘Political Economy’ of Jean Baptiste Say. I read a few chapters only: tariffs and banking operations did not interest me in the least; but Alexander took up these matters so passionately that he even wroteletters to our stepmother, trying to interest her in the intricacies of the customs duties. Later on, in Siberia, as we were re-reading some of the letters of that period, we laughed like children when we fell upon one of his epistles in which he complained of our stepmother’s incapacity to be moved even by such burning questions, and raged against a greengrocer whom he had caught in the street, and who, ‘would you believe it,’ he wrote with signs of exclamation, ‘although he was a tradesman, affected a pig-headed indifference to tariff questions!’
Every summer about one-half of the pages were taken to a camp at Peterhof. The lower forms, however, were dispensed from joining the camp, and I spent the first two summers at Nikólskoye. To leave the school, to take the train to Moscow, and there to meet Alexander was such a happy prospect that I used to count the days that had to pass till that glorious one should arrive. But on one occasion a great disappointment awaited me at Moscow. Alexander had not passed his examinations, and was left for another year in the same form. He was, in fact, too young to enter the special classes; but our father was very angry with him, nevertheless, and would not permit us to see each other. I felt very sad. We were not children any more, and had so much to say to each other. I tried to obtain permission to go to our aunt Sulíma, at whose house I might meet Alexander, but it was absolutely refused. After our father remarried we were never allowed to see our mother’s relations.
That spring our Moscow house was full of guests. Every night the reception-rooms were flooded with lights, the band played, the confectioner was busy making ices and pastry, and card-playing went on in the great hall till a late hour. I strolled aimlessly about in the brilliantly illuminated rooms, and felt unhappy.
One night, after ten, a servant beckoned me, telling me to come out to the entrance hall. I went. ‘Cometo the coachmen’s house,’ the old major-domo Frol whispered to me. ‘Alexander Alexéievich is here.’
I dashed across the yard, up the flight of steps leading to the coachmen’s house, and into a wide, half-dark room, where, at the immense dining-table of the servants, I saw Alexander.
‘Sásha, dear, how did you come?’ and in a moment we rushed into each other’s arms, hugging each other and unable to speak from emotion.
‘Hush, hush! they may overhear you,’ said the servants’ cook, Praskóvia, wiping away her tears with her apron. ‘Poor orphans! If your mother were only alive——’
Old Frol stood, his head deeply bent, his eyes also twinkling.
‘Look here, Pétya, not a word to anyone; to no one,’ he said, while Praskóvia placed on the table an earthenware jar full of porridge for Alexander.
He, glowing with health, in his cadet uniform, already had begun to talk about all sorts of matters, while he rapidly emptied the porridge pot. I could hardly make him tell me how he came there at such a late hour. We lived then near the Smolénsky boulevard, within a stone’s throw of the house where our mother died, and the corps of cadets was at the opposite outskirts of Moscow, full five miles away.
He had made a doll out of bedclothes, and had put it in his bed, under the blankets; then he went to the tower, descended from a window, came out unnoticed, and walked the whole distance.
‘Were you not afraid at night in the deserted fields round your corps?’ I asked.
‘What had I to fear? Only lots of dogs were upon me; I had teased them myself. To-morrow I shall take my sword with me.’
The coachmen and other servants came in and out; they sighed as they looked at us, and took seats at a distance,along the walls, exchanging words in a subdued tone so as not to disturb us; while we two, in each other’s arms, sat there till midnight, talking about nebulæ and Laplace’s hypothesis, the structure of matter, the struggles of the papacy under Boniface VIII. with the imperial power, and so on.
From time to time one of the servants would hurriedly run in, saying, ‘Pétinka, go and show thyself in the hall; they may ask for thee.’
I implored Sásha not to come next night; but he came, nevertheless—not without having had a scrimmage with the dogs, against whom he had taken his sword. I responded with feverish haste, when, earlier than the day before, I was called once more to the coachmen’s house. Alexander had made part of the journey in a cab. The previous night, one of the servants had brought him what he had got from the card-players and asked him to take it. He took some small coin to hire a cab, and so he came earlier than on his first visit.
He intended to come next night, too, but for some reason it would have been dangerous for the servants, and we decided to part till the autumn. A short ‘official’ note made me understand next day that his nocturnal escapades had passed unnoticed. How terrible would have been the punishment, if they had been discovered. It is awful to think of it: flogging before the corps till he was carried away unconscious on a sheet, and then degradation to a soldiers’ sons’ battalion—anything was possible, in those times.
What our servants would have suffered for hiding us, if information of the affair had reached our father’s ears, would have been equally terrible; but they knew how to keep secrets and not to betray one another. They all knew of the visits of Alexander, but none of them whispered a word to anyone of the family. They and I were the only ones in the house who ever knew anything about it.
That same year I made my first start as an explorer of popular life, and this little work brought me one step nearer to our peasants, making me see them under a new light; it also helped me later on a great deal in Siberia.
Every year in July, on the day of ‘the Holy Virgin of Kazán’ which was the fête of our church, a pretty large fair was held in Nikólskoye. Tradesmen came from the neighbouring towns, and many thousands of peasants flocked from thirty miles round to our village, which for a couple of days had a most animated aspect. A remarkable description of the village fairs of South Russia had just been published that year by the Slavophile Aksákoff, and my brother, who was then at the height of his politico-economical enthusiasm, advised me to make a statistical description of our fair, and to determine the return of goods brought in and sold. I followed his advice, and to my great amazement I really succeeded: my estimate of returns, so far as I can judge now, was not more unreliable than manysimilarestimates in books of statistics.
Our fair lasted only a little more than twenty-four hours. On the eve of the fête, the great open space given to it was full of life and animation. Long rows of stalls, to be used for the sale of cottons, ribbons, and all sorts of peasant women’s attire, were hurriedly built. The restaurant, a substantial stone building, was furnished with tables, chairs and benches, and its floor was strewn over with bright yellow sand. Three wine-shops were erected in three different places, and freshly cut brooms, planted on high poles, rose high in the air to attract the peasants from a distance. Rows and rows of light shops for the sale of crockery, boots, stoneware, ginger-bread, and all sorts of small things, rose as if by a magic wand; while in a special corner holes were dug in the ground to receive immense cauldrons in which bushels of millet and sarrasinand whole sheep were boiled, for supplying the thousands of visitors with hotschiandkásha(soup and porridge). In the afternoon, the four roads leading to the fair were blocked by hundreds of peasant carts, and cattle, corn, casks filled with tar, and heaps of pottery were exhibited along the roadsides.
The night service on the eve of the fête was performed in our church with great solemnity. Half a dozen priests and deacons from the neighbouring villages took part in it, and their chanters, reinforced by young tradespeople, sang in the choir with such ritornellos as could only be heard at the bishop’s in Kalúga. The church was crowded; all prayed fervently. The tradespeople vied with each other in the number and sizes of the wax candles which they lighted before the ikons, as offerings to the local saints for the success of their trade; and the crowd being so thick as not to allow the last comers to reach the altar, candles of all sizes—thick and thin, white and yellow, according to the offerer’s wealth—were transmitted from the back of the church through the crowd, with whispers: ‘To the Holy Virgin of Kazán, our Protector,’ ‘To Nicholas the Favourite,’ ‘To Frol and Laur’ (the horse saints—that was from those who had horses to sell), or simply ‘the Saints’ without a further specification.
Immediately after the night service was over, the ‘fore-fair’ began, and I had now to plunge headlong into my work of asking hundreds of people what was the value of the goods they had brought in. To my great astonishment my task went on admirably. Of course, I was myself asked questions: ‘Why do you do this?’ ‘Is it not for the old prince, who intends increasing the market dues?’ But the assurance that the ‘old prince’ knew and would know nothing of it (he would have found it a disgraceful occupation) settled all doubts at once. I soon caught the proper way of asking questions, and after I had taken half a dozen cups of tea in the restaurant with some tradespeople (oh, horror, if myfather had learned that!), all went on very well. Vasíly Ivánoff, the elder of Nikólskoye, a beautiful young peasant with a fine intelligent face and a silky fair beard, took an interest in my work. ‘Well, if thou wantest it for thy learning, get at it; thou wilt tell us later on what thou hast found out’—was his conclusion, and he told some of the people that it was ‘all right.’ Everyone knew him for miles round, and the word passed round the fair that no harm would ensue to the peasants by giving me the information.
In short, the ‘imports’ were determined very nicely. But next day, the ‘sales’ offered certain difficulties, chiefly with the dry goods’ merchants, who did not themselves yet know how much they had sold. On the day of the fête the young peasant women simply stormed the shops, each of them having sold some linen of her own making and now buying some cotton print for a dress and a bright kerchief for herself, a coloured handkerchief for her husband, perhaps some neck lace, a ribbon or two, and a number of small gifts to grandmother, grandfather, and the children who had remained at home. As to the peasants who sold crockery, or ginger-cakes, or cattle and hemp, they at once determined their sales, especially the old women. ‘Good sale, grandmother?’ I would ask. ‘No need to complain, my son. Why should I anger God? Nearly all is sold.’ And out of their small items the tens of thousand roubles grew in my note-book. One point only remained unsettled. A wide space was given up to many hundreds of peasant women who stood in the burning sun, each with her piece of handwoven linen, sometimes exquisitely fine, which she had brought for sale—scores of buyers, with gypsy faces and shark-like looks, moving about in the crowd and buying. Only rough estimates of these sales could evidently be made.
I made no reflections at that time about this new experience of mine; I was simply happy to see that it was not a failure. But the serious good sense and soundjudgment of the Russian peasants which I witnessed during this couple of days, left upon me a lasting impression. Later on, when we were making socialist propaganda among the peasants, I could not but wonder why some of my friends, who had received a seemingly far more democratic education than myself, did not know how to talk to the peasants or to the factory workers from the country. They tried to imitate the ‘peasants’ talk,’ by introducing into it lots of so-called ‘popular phrases,’ and only rendered it the more incomprehensible.
Nothing of this sort is needed, either in talking to peasants or in writing for them. The Great Russian peasant perfectly well understands the educated man’s talk, provided that it is not stuffed with words taken from foreign languages. What the peasant does not understand is abstract notions when they are not illustrated by concrete examples. But when you speak to the Russian peasant plainly, and start from concrete facts—and the same is true with regard to village-folk of all nationalities—my experience is that there is no generalization from the whole world of science, social or natural, which could not be conveyed to the averagely intelligent man if you yourself understand it concretely. The chief difference between the educated and the uneducated man is, I should say, in the latter not being able to follow a chain of conclusions. He grasps the first of them, and maybe the second, but he gets tired at the third, if he does not see what you are driving at. But, how often do we meet with the same difficulty in educated people!
One more impression I gathered from that work of my boyhood—an impression which I formulated but later on, and which will probably astonish many a reader. It is the spirit of equality which is highly developed in the Russian peasant and, in fact, in the rural population everywhere. The Russian peasant is capable of much servile obedience to the landlord or to the police officer; he will bend before their will in a servile manner; but hedoes not consider them superior men, and if the next moment that same landlord or officer talks to the same peasant about hay or ducks, the latter will converse with them as an equal to an equal. I never saw in a Russian peasant that servility, grown to be a second nature, with which a small functionary talks to a highly placed one, or a valet to his master. The peasant much too easily submits to force, but he does not worship it.
I returned that summer from Nikólskoye to Moscow in a new fashion. There being then no railway between Kalúga and Moscow, a man, Buck by name, kept some sort of carriages running between the two towns. Our people never thought of travelling in such a way: they had their own horses and conveyances; but when my father, in order to save my stepmother a double journey, offered me, half in joke, to travel alone in that way, I accepted his offer with delight.
An old and very stout tradesman’s wife and myself on the back seats, and a small tradesman or artisan on the front seat, were the only occupants of the carriage. I found the journey very pleasant—first of all because I travelled by myself (I was not yet sixteen), and next because the old lady, who had brought with her for a three days’ journey a colossal hamper full of provisions, treated me to all sorts of home-made delicacies. All the surroundings during that journey were delightful. One evening especially is still vivid in my memory. We came at night to one of the great villages and stopped at some inn. The old lady ordered a samovár for herself, while I went out in the street, walking about anywhere. A small ‘white inn’ at which only food is served, but no drinks, attracted my attention and I went in. Numbers of peasants sat round the small tables, covered with white napkins, and enjoyed their tea. I did the same.
All was so new for me in these surroundings. It was a village of ‘Crown peasants’—that is, peasants who had not been serfs and enjoyed a relative well-being, probablyowing to the weaving of linen which they carried on as a home industry. Slow, serious conversations, with occasional laughter, were going on at those tables, and after the usual introductory questions, I soon found myself engaged in a conversation with a dozen peasants about the crops in our neighbourhood, and answering all sorts of questions. They wanted to know all about St. Petersburg, and most of all about the rumours concerning the coming abolition of serfdom. And a feeling of simplicity and of the natural relations of equality, as well as of hearty good-will, which I always felt afterwards when among peasants or in their houses, took possession of me at that inn. Nothing extraordinary happened that night, so that I even ask myself if the incident is worth mentioning at all; and yet that warm, dark night in the village, that small inn, that talk with the peasants, and the keen interest they took in hundreds of things lying far beyond their habitual surroundings, have made ever since a poor ‘white inn’ more attractive to me than the best restaurant in the world.
Stormy times came now in the life of our corps. When Girardot was dismissed, his place was taken by one of our officers, Captain B——. He was rather good-natured than otherwise, but he had got into his head that he was not treated by us with due reverence, corresponding to the high position which he now occupied, and he tried to enforce upon us more respect and awe toward himself. He began by quarrelling about all sorts of petty things with the upper form, and—what was still worse—he attempted to destroy our ‘liberties,’ the origin of which was lost in the darkness of time, and which, insignificant in themselves, were perhaps on that same account only the dearer to us.
The result of it was that the school broke for several days into an open revolt, which ended in wholesale punishment, and the exclusion from the corps of two of our favourite pages de chambre.
Then, the same captain began to intrude in the class-rooms, where we used to spend one hour in the morning in preparing our lessons before the classes began. We were considered to be there under our teaching staff, and were happy to have nothing to do with our military chiefs. We resented that intrusion very much, and one day I loudly expressed our discontent, saying to the captain that this was the place of the inspector of the classes, not his. I spent weeks under arrest for that frankness, and perhaps should have been excluded from the school, were it not that the inspector of the classes, his assistant, and even our old director, judged that after all I had only expressed aloud what they all used to say to themselves.
No sooner all these troubles were over, than the death of the Dowager-Empress—the widow of Nicholas I.—brought a new interruption in our work.
The burial of crowned heads is always so arranged as to produce a deep impression on the crowds, and it must be owned that this object is attained. The body of the empress was brought from Tsárkoye Seló, where she died, to St. Petersburg, and here, followed by the imperial family, all the high dignitaries of the state, and scores of thousands of functionaries and corporations, and preceded by hundreds of clergy and choirs, it was taken from the railway station through the main thoroughfares to the fortress, where it had to lie in state for several weeks. A hundred thousand men of the Guard were placed along the streets, and thousands of people, dressed in the most gorgeous uniforms, preceded, accompanied, and followed the hearse in a solemn procession. Litanies were sung at every important crossing of the streets, and here the ringing of the bells on the church towers,the voices of vast choirs, and the sounds of the military bands united in the most impressive way, so as to make people believe that the immense crowds really mourned the loss of the empress.
As long as the body lay in state in the cathedral of the fortress, the pages, among others, had to keep the watch round it, night and day. Three pages de chambre and three maids of honour always stood close by the coffin, placed on a high pedestal, while some twenty pages were stationed on the platform upon which litanies were sung twice every day, in the presence of the emperor and all his family. Consequently, every week nearly one-half of the corps was taken in turns to the fortress, to lodge there. We were relieved every two hours, and in the daytime our service was not difficult; but when we had to rise in the night, to dress in our court uniforms, and then to walk through the dark and gloomy inner courts of the fortress to the cathedral, to the sound of the gloomy chime of the fortress bells, a cold shiver seized me at the thought of the prisoners who were immured somewhere in this Russian Bastille. ‘Who knows,’ thought I, ‘whether in my turn I shall not also have to join them one day or other?’
The burial did not pass without an accident which might have had serious consequences. An immense canopy had been erected under the dome of the cathedral over the coffin. A huge gilded crown rose above it, and from this crown an immense purple mantle lined with ermine hung towards the four thick pilasters which support the dome of the cathedral. It was impressive, but we boys soon made out that the crown was made of gilded cardboard and wood, the mantle was of velvet only in its lower part, while higher up it was red cotton, and that the ermine lining was simply cotton flannelette or swansdown to which black tails of squirrels had been sewn, while the escutcheons which represented the arms of Russia, veiled with black crêpe, were simple cardboard.But the crowds which were allowed at certain hours of the night to pass by the coffin, and to kiss in a hurry the gold brocade which covered it, surely had no time to closely examine the flannelette ermine or the cardboard escutcheons, and the desired theatrical effect was obtained even by such cheap means.
When a litany is sung in Russia all the people present hold lighted wax candles, which have to be put out after certain prayers have been read. The Imperial family also held such candles, and one day the young son of the grand duke Constantine, seeing that the others put out their candles by turning them upside down, did the same. The black gauze which hung behind him from an escutcheon took fire, and in a second the escutcheon and the cotton stuff were ablaze. An immense tongue of fire ran up the heavy folds of the supposed ermine mantle.
The service was stopped. All looks were directed with terror towards the tongue of fire, which went higher and higher towards the cardboard crown and the woodwork which supported the whole structure. Bits of burning stuff began to fall down, threatening to set fire to the black gauze veils of the ladies present.
Alexander II. lost his presence of mind for a couple of seconds only, but he recovered immediately and said in a composed voice: ‘The coffin must be taken!’ The pages de chambre at once covered it with the thick gold brocade, and we all advanced to lift the heavy coffin; but in the meantime the big tongue of flame had broken into a number of smaller ones, which now slowly devoured only the fluffy outside of the cotton stuff and, meeting more and more dust and soot in the upper part of the structure, gradually died out in the folds.
I cannot say what I looked most at: the creeping fire or the stately slender figures of the three ladies who stood by the coffin, the long trains of their black dresses spreading over the steps which led to the upper platform, and their black lace veils hanging down their shoulders.None of them had made the slightest movement: they stood like three beautiful carved images. Only in the dark eyes of one of them, Mdlle. Gamaléya, tears glittered like pearls. She was a daughter of South Russia, and was the only really handsome lady amongst the maids of honour at the Court.
At the corps, in the meantime, everything was upside down. The classes were interrupted; those of us who returned from the fortress were lodged in temporary quarters, and, having nothing to do, spent the whole day in all sorts of frolics. In one of them we managed to open a cupboard which stood in the room and contained a splendid collection of models of all kinds of animals for the teaching of natural history. That was its official purpose; but it was never even so much as shown to us, and now that we got hold of it we utilized it in our own way. With the human skull which made part of the collection we made a ghostly figure wherewith to frighten at night other comrades and the officers. As to the animals, we placed them in the most unappropriate positions and groups: monkeys were seen riding on lions, sheep were playing with leopards, the giraffe danced with the elephant, and so on. The worst was that a few days later one of the Prussian princes who had come to assist at the burial ceremony (it was the one, I think, who became later on the Emperor Frederick) visited our school, and was shown all that concerned our education. Our director did not fail to boast of the excellent educational appliances which we had at the school, and brought him to that same unfortunate cupboard.... When the German prince caught a glimpse of our zoological classification, he drew a long face and quickly turned away. Our old director looked horrified; he had lost the power of speech, and only pointed repeatedly with his hand at some star-fishes which were placed in glass boxes on the walls by the sides of the cupboard. The suite of the prince tried to look as if they had noticed nothing, andonly threw rapid glimpses at the cause of so much disturbance, while we wicked boys made all sorts of faces in order not to burst with laughter.
The school years of a Russian youth are so very different from what they are in West European schools that I must dwell upon my school life. Russian youths, as a rule, while they are yet at a lyceum or in a military school, already take an interest in a wide circle of social, political, and philosophical matters. It is true that the corps of pages was, of all schools, the least congenial medium for such a development; but in those years of general revival, broader ideas penetrated even into our midst and carried some of us away, without, however, preventing us from taking a very lively part in ‘benefit nights’ and all sorts of frolics.
While I was in the fourth form I took an interest in history, and with the aid of notes made during the lessons—I knew that university students do it that way—and helping myself with reading, I wrote quite a course of early mediæval history for my own use. Next year the struggle between Pope Boniface VIII. and the Imperial power attracted my special attention, and now it became my ambition to gain admission to the Imperial library as a reader, in order thoroughly to study that great struggle. This was contrary to the rules of the library, pupils of secondary schools not being admitted; our good Herr Becker, however, smoothed the way out of the difficulty, and I was allowed one day to enter the sanctuary and to take a seat at one of the readers’ small tables, on one of the red velvet sofas with which the reading-room was then furnished.
From various text-books and some books from our own library, I soon got to the sources. Knowing noLatin, I discovered nevertheless a rich supply of original sources in Old Teutonic and Old French, and found an immense æsthetic enjoyment in the quaint structure and expressiveness of the latter in the Chronicles. Quite a new structure of society and quite a world of complicated relations opened before me; and from that time I learned to value far more the original sources of history than works in which it is generalized in accordance with modern views—the prejudices of modern politics, or even mere current formulæ being substituted for the real life of the period. Nothing gives more impetus to one’s intellectual development than some sort of independent research, and these studies of mine immensely helped me afterwards.
Unhappily, I had to abandon them when we reached the second form (the last but one). The pages had to study during the last two years nearly all that was taught in other military schools in three ‘special’ forms, and we had an immense amount of work to do for the school. Natural sciences, mathematics, and military sciences necessarily relegated history to the background.
In the second form we began seriously to study physics. We had an excellent teacher—a very intelligent man with a sarcastic turn of mind, who hated learning from memory, and managed to make usthinkinstead of merely learning facts. He was a good mathematician, and taught us physics on a mathematical basis, admirably explaining at the same time the leading ideas of physical research and physical apparatus. Some of his questions were so original and his explanations so good that they have engraved themselves for ever on my memory.
Our text-book of physics was pretty good (most text-books for the military schools had been written by the best men at the time), but it was rather old, and ourteacher, who followed his own system in teaching, began to prepare a short summary of his lessons—a sort ofaide-mémoire—for the use of our form. However, after a few weeks it so happened that the task of writing this summary fell upon me, and our teacher, acting as a true pedagogist, trusted it entirely to me, only reading the proofs. When we came to the chapters of heat, electricity, and magnetism, they had to be written entirely anew, and this I did, thus preparing a nearly complete text-book of physics, which was printed for the use of the school.
In the second form we also began to study chemistry, and we also had a first-rate teacher—a passionate lover of the subject who had himself made valuable original researches. The years 1859-61 were years of a universal revival of taste in the exact sciences: Grove, Clausius, Joule, and Séguin showed that heat and all physical forces are but divers modes of motion; Helmholtz began about that time his epoch-making researches in sound; and Tyndall, in his popular lectures, made one touch, so to say, the very atoms and molecules. Gerhardt and Avogadro introduced the theory of substitutions, and Mendeléoff, Lothar Meyer, and Newlands discovered the periodical law of elements; Darwin, with his ‘Origin of Species,’ revolutionized all biological sciences; while Karl Vogt and Moleschott, following Claude Bernard, laid the foundations of true psychology in physiology. It was a great time of scientific revival, and the current which directed men’s minds towards natural science was irresistible. Numbers of excellent books were published at that time in Russian translations, and I soon understood that whatever one’s subsequent studies might be, a thorough knowledge of the natural sciences and familiarity with their methods must lie at the foundation.
Five or six of us joined together to get some sort of laboratory for ourselves. With the elementary apparatus recommended for beginners in Stöckhardt’s excellenttext-book we started our laboratory in a small bedroom of two of our comrades, the brothers Zasétsky. Their father, an old retired admiral, was delighted to see his sons engaged in so useful a pursuit, and did not object to our coming together on Sundays and during the holidays in that room by the side of his own study. With Stöckhardt’s book as a guide, we systematically made all experiments. I must say that once we nearly set the house on fire, and that more than once we poisoned all the rooms with chlorine and similar stuffs. But the old admiral, when we related the adventure at dinner time, took it very nicely, and told us how he and his comrades also nearly set a house on fire in the far less useful pursuit of punch making; while the mother only said, amidst her paroxysms of coughing: ‘Of course, if itisnecessary for your learning to handle such nasty smelling things, then there’s nothing to be done!’
After dinner she usually took her seat at the piano, and till late at night we would go on singing duos, trios, and choruses from the operas. Or else we would take the score of some Italian or Russian opera and go through it from the beginning to the end, recitatives and all—the mother and her daughter taking the parts of theprime donne, while we managed more or rather less successfully to maintain all other parts. Chemistry and music thus went hand in hand.
Higher mathematics also absorbed a great deal of my time. Four or five of us had already decided that we should not enter a regiment of the Guards, where all our time would be given to military drill and parades, and we intended to enter, after promotion, one of the military academies—artillery or engineering. In order to do so we had to prepare in higher geometry, the differential and the beginnings of the integral calculus, and we took private lessons for that purpose. At the same time, elementary astronomy being taught to usunder the name of mathematical geography, I plunged into astronomical reading, especially during the last year of my stay at school. The never-ceasing life of the universe, which I conceived aslifeand evolution, became for me an inexhaustible source of higher poetical thought, and gradually the sense of man’s oneness with Nature, both animate and inanimate—the poetry of Nature—became the philosophy of my life.
If the teaching in our school were only limited to the subjects I have mentioned, our time would already be pretty well occupied. But we also had to study in the domain of humanitarian science, history, law (that is, the main outlines of the Russian Code), and political economy in its essential leading principles, including a course of comparative statistics; and we had to master formidable courses of military sciences: tactics, military history (the campaigns of 1812 and 1815 in all their details), artillery, and field fortification. Looking now back upon this education I think that apart from the subjects relative to military warfare, which might have been advantageously substituted by more detailed studies in the exact sciences, the variety of subjects which we were taught was not beyond the capacities of the average youth. Owing to a pretty good knowledge of elementary mathematics and physics, which we gained in the lower forms, nearly all of us managed to master all these subjects. Some subjects were neglected by most of us, especially law, as also modern history, for which we had unfortunately an old wreck of a master who was only kept at his post in order to give him his full old age pension. Moreover, some latitude was given to us in the choice of the subjects we liked best, and, while we underwent severe examinations in these chosen subjects, we were treated rather leniently in the remainder. But the chief cause of the relative success which was obtained in the school was that the teaching was rendered as concrete as possible. As soon as we had learned elementarygeometry on paper, we re-learned it in the field with poles and the surveyor’s chain, and next with the astrolabe, the compass, and the surveyor’s table. After such a concrete training, elementary astronomy offered no difficulties, while the surveys themselves were an endless source of enjoyment.
The same system of concrete teaching was applied to fortification. In the winter we solved such problems as, for instance, the following: ‘Having a thousand men and a fortnight at your disposal, build the strongest fortification you can build to protect that bridge for a retreating army;’ and we hotly discussed our schemes with the teacher when he criticized them. In the summer we applied that knowledge in the field. To these practical and concrete exercises I entirely attribute the easiness with which most of us mastered such a variety of subjects at the age of seventeen and eighteen.
With all that, we had plenty of time for amusement. Our best time was when the examinations were over, and we had three or four weeks quite free before going to camp; or when we returned from the camp, and had another three weeks free before the beginning of the lessons. The few of us who remained then in the school were allowed, during the vacations, to go out just as we liked, always finding bed and food at the school. I worked then in the library, or visited the picture galleries of the Hermitage, studying one by one all the best pictures of each school separately; or I went to the different Crown factories and works of playing cards, cottons, iron, china and glass, which are open to the public. Or we went out rowing on the Nevá, spending the whole night on the river, sometimes in the Gulf of Finland with fishermen—a melancholy northern night, during which the morning dawn meets the afterglow of the setting sun, and a book can be read in the open air at midnight. For all this we found plenty of time.
Since those visits to the factories I took a liking tostrong and perfect machinery. Seeing how a gigantic paw, coming out of a shanty, grasps a log floating in the Nevá, pulls it inside, and puts it under the saws which cut it into boards; or how a huge red-hot iron bar is transformed into a rail after it has passed between two cylinders, I understood the poetry of machinery. In our present factories, machinery work is killing for the worker, because he becomes a lifelong servant to a given machine and never is anything else. But this is a matter of bad organization, and has nothing to do with the machine itself. Over-work and lifelong monotony are equally bad whether the work is done with the hand, with plain tools, or with a machine. But, apart from these, I fully understand the pleasure that man can derive from the consciousness of the might of his machine, the intelligent character of its work, the gracefulness of its movements, and the correctness of what it is doing, and I think that William Morris’s hatred of machines only proved that the conception of the machine’s power and gracefulness was missing in his great poetical genius.
Music also played a very great part in my development. From it I borrowed even greater joys and enthusiasm than from poetry. The Russian opera hardly existed in those times; but the Italian opera, which had a number of first-rate stars in it, was the most popular institution at St. Petersburg. When theprima donnaBósio fell ill, thousands of people, chiefly of the youth, stood till late at night at the door of her hotel to get news of her. She was not beautiful, but was so much so when she sang that young men madly in love with her could be counted by the hundred; and when she died she had a burial which no one before had ever had at St. Petersburg. ‘All Petersburg’ was then divided into two camps: the admirers of the Italian opera and those of the French stage, which already then was showing in germ the putrid Offenbachian current which a few years later infected all Europe. Our form was alsodivided, half and half, between these two currents, and I belonged to the former. We were not permitted to go to the pit or to the balcony, while all the boxes in the Italian opera were always taken months in advance by subscription, and even transmitted in certain families as an hereditary possession. But we gained admission, on Saturday nights, to the passages in the uppermost gallery, and had to stand there on our legs in a Turkish bath atmosphere; while to conceal our showy uniforms we used to wear, in that Turkish bath, our black overcoats, lined with wadding and with a fur collar, tightly buttoned. It is a wonder that none of us got pneumonia in this way, especially as we came out overheated with the ovations which we used to make to our favourite singers, and stood afterwards at the stage door to catch once more a glimpse of our favourites, and to cheer them. The Italian opera in those years was in some strange way intimately connected with the Radical movement, and the revolutionary recitatives in ‘Wilhelm Tell’ and ‘The Puritans’ were always met with stormy applause and vociferations which went straight to the heart of Alexander II.; while in the sixth story galleries, in the smoking-room of the opera, and at the stage door the best part of the St. Petersburg youth came together in a common idealist worship of a noble art. All this may seem childish; but many higher ideas and pure inspirations were kindled in us by this worship of our favourite artists.
Every summer we went out camping at Peterhóf, with the other military schools of the St. Petersburg district. All things considered, our life there was very pleasant, and certainly was excellent for our health: we slept in spacious tents, we bathed in the sea, and spent all the six weeks in open-air exercise.
In military schools the main purpose of camp life was evidently military drill, which we all disliked very much, but the dulness of which was occasionally relieved by making us take part in manœuvres. One night, as we were already going to bed, Alexander II. aroused the camp by having the alert sounded. In a few minutes all the camp was alive—several thousand boys gathering round their colours, and the guns of the artillery school booming in the stillness of the night. All military Peterhóf was galloping to our camp, but, owing to some misunderstanding, the emperor remained on foot. Orderlies were sent in all directions to get a horse for him, but there was none, and he, not being a good rider, would not ride any horse but one of his own. Alexander II. was very angry, and freely ventilated his anger. ‘Imbecile (durák), have I only one horse?’ I heard him shout to an orderly who reported that his horse was in another camp.
What with the increasing darkness, the booming of the guns, and the rattling of the cavalry, we boys grew very much excited, and when Alexander ordered charging, our column charged straight upon him. Tightly packed in the ranks, with lowered bayonets, we must have had a menacing aspect, for I saw Alexander II. who was still on foot, clearing the way for the column in three formidable jumps. I understood then the meaning of a column which is marching in serried ranks under the excitement of the music and the march itself. There stood before us the emperor—our commander, whom we all venerated very much; but I felt that in this moving mass not one page or cadet would have moved an inch aside, or stopped awhile, to make room for him. We were the marching column—he was but an obstacle—and the column would have marched over him. ‘Why should he be in our way?’ the pages said afterwards. Boys, rifle in hand, are even more terrible in such cases than old soldiers.
Next year, when we took part in the great manœuvresof the St. Petersburg garrison, I got an insight into the sidelights of warfare. For two days in succession we did nothing but march up and down on a space of some twenty miles, without having the slightest idea of what was going on round us or for what purpose we were marched. Cannon boomed now in our neighbourhood and now far away: sharp musketry fire was heard somewhere in the hills and the woods; orderlies galloped up and down bringing the order to advance and next the order to retreat—and we marched, marched, and marched, seeing no sense in all these movements and counter-movements. Masses of cavalry had passed along the same road, making out of it a deep mass of movable sand; and we had to advance and retreat several times along the same road, till at last our column broke all discipline and represented an incoherent mass of pilgrims rather than a military unit. The colours alone remained in the road; the remainder slowly paced along the sides of the road, in the wood. The orders and supplications of the officers were of no avail.
Suddenly a shout came from behind: ‘The emperor is coming! The emperor!’ The officers ran about supplicating us to gather in the ranks: no one listened to them.
The emperor came and ordered to retreat once more—‘Turn round!’ the words of command resounded. ‘The emperor is behind us, please turn round,’ the officers whispered; but the battalion hardly took any notice of the command, and none whatever of the presence of the emperor. Happily, Alexander II. was no fanatic of militarism, and, after having said a few words to cheer us with a promise of rest, he galloped off.
I understood then how much depends in warfare upon the state of mind of the troops, and how little can be done by mere discipline when more than an average effort is required from the soldiers. What can discipline do when tired troops have to make a supreme effort to reachthe field of battle at a given hour? It is absolutely powerless. Only enthusiasm and confidence can at such moments induce the soldiers to do ‘the impossible’—and it is the impossible that continually must be accomplished to secure success. How often, later on in Siberia, I recalled to memory that object lesson when we also had to do the impossible during our scientific expeditions!
Comparatively little of our time was, however, given during our stay in the camp to military drill and manœuvres. A good deal of it was given to practical exercises in surveys and fortification. After a few preliminary exercises we were given a reflecting compass and told: ‘Go and make a plan of, say, this lake or those roads, or that park, measuring the angles with the compass and the distances with your pace.’ And early in the morning, after a hurriedly swallowed breakfast, the boy would fill his spacious military pockets with slices of rye bread, and would go out for four or five hours every day in the parks, miles away, mapping with his compass and paces the beautiful shady roads, the rivulets, and the lakes. His work was later on compared with accurate maps, and prizes in optical and drawing instruments at the boy’s choice were awarded. For me these surveys were a deep source of enjoyment. That independent work, that isolation under the centuries-old trees, that life of the forest which I could enjoy undisturbed, while there was at the same time the interest in the work—all these left deep traces in my mind; and if I later on became an explorer of Siberia and several of my comrades became explorers in Central Asia, the ground for it was prepared in these surveys.
And finally, in the last form, parties of four boys were taken every second day to some villages at a considerable distance from the camp, and there they had to make a detailed survey of several square miles with the aid of the surveyor’s table and a telescopic ruler. Officers of the General Staff came from time to time to verify their work and to advise them. This life amidst the peasants inthe villages had the best effect upon the intellectual and moral development of many boys.
At the same time, exercises were made in the construction of natural-sized cross-sections of fortifications. We were taken out by an officer in the open field, and there we had to make the cross-sections of a bastion, or of a bridge head, nailing poles and battens together in exactly the same way as railway engineers do in tracing a railway. When it came to embrasures and barbettes, we had to calculate a great deal to obtain the inclinations of the different planes, and after that geometry in the space ceased to be difficult to understand.
We delighted in such work, and once, in town, finding in our garden a heap of clay and gravel, we at once began to build a real fortification on a reduced scale, with well-calculated straight and oblique embrasures and barbettes. All was done very neatly, and our ambition now was to obtain some planks for making the platforms for the guns, and to place upon them the model guns which we had in our class-rooms.
But, alas, our trousers wore an alarming aspect. ‘What are you doing there?’ our captain exclaimed. ‘Look at yourselves! You look like navvies’ (that was exactly what we were proud of). ‘What if the Grand Duke comes and finds you in such a state!’
‘We will show him our fortifications and ask him to get us tools and boards for the platforms.’
All protests were vain. A dozen workers were sent next day to cart away our beautiful work, as if it were a mere heap of mud!
I mention this to show how children and youths long for real applications of what they learn at school in abstract, and how stupid are the educators who are unable to see what a powerful aid they could find in concrete applications for helping their pupils to grasp the real sense of the things they learn.
In our school all was directed towards training usfor warfare. But we should have worked with the same enthusiasm at tracing a railway, at building a log-house, or at cultivating a garden or a field. But all this longing of the children and youths forrealwork is wasted simply because our idea of the school is still the mediæval scholasticism, the mediæval monastery!
The years 1857-61 were years of rich growth in the intellectual forces of Russia. All that had been whispered for the last decade, in the secrecy of friendly meetings, by the generation represented in Russian literature by Turguéneff, Tolstóy, Hérzen, Bakúnin, Ogaryóff, Kavélin, Dostoévsky, Grigoróvich, Ostróvsky, and Nekrásoff, began now to leak out in the press. Censorship was still very rigorous; but what could not be said openly in political articles was smuggled in under the form of novels, humorous sketches, or veiled comments on West European events, and everyone read between the lines and understood.
Having no acquaintances at St. Petersburg apart from the school and a narrow circle of relatives, I stood outside the radical movement of those years—miles, in fact, away from it. And yet this was, perhaps, the main feature of the movement—that it had the power to penetrate into so ‘well meaning’ a school as our corps was, and to find an echo in such a circle as that of my Moscow relatives.
I used at that time to spend my Sundays and holidays at the house of my aunt, mentioned in a previous chapter under the name of Princess Mírski. Prince Mírski thought only of extraordinary lunches and dinners, while his wife and their young daughter led a very gay life. My cousin was a beautiful girl of nineteen, of a most amiable disposition, and nearly all her male cousins weremadly in love with her. She, in turn, fell in love with one of them, and wanted to marry him. But to marry a cousin is considered a great sin by the Russian Church, and the old princess tried in vain to obtain a special permission from the high ecclesiastical dignitaries. Now she brought her daughter to St. Petersburg, hoping that she might choose among her many admirers a more suitable husband than her own cousin. It was labour lost, I must add; but their fashionable apartment was full of brilliant young men from the Guards and from the diplomatic service.
Such a house would be the last to be thought of in connection with revolutionary ideas; and yet it was in that house that I made my first acquaintance with the revolutionary literature of the times. The great refugee, Hérzen, had just begun to issue at London his review, ‘The Polar Star, which made a commotion in Russia, even in the palace circles, and was widely circulated secretly at St. Petersburg. My cousin got it in some way, and we used to read it together. Her heart revolted against the obstacles which were put in the way of her happiness, and her mind was the more open to the powerful criticisms which the great writer launched against the Russian autocracy and all the rotten system of misgovernment. With a feeling near to worship I used to look on the medallion which was printed on the paper cover of ‘The Polar Star,’ and which represented the noble heads of the five ‘Decembrists’ whom Nicholas I. had hanged after the rebellion of December 14, 1825—Bestúzheff, Kahóvskiy, Péstel, Ryléeff, and Muravióv-Apóstol.
The beauty of the style of Hérzen—of whom Turguéneff has truly said that he wrote in tears and blood, and that no other Russian had ever so written—the breadth of his ideas, and his deep love of Russia took possession of me, and I used to read and re-read those pages, even more full of heart than of brain.
In 1859, or early in 1860, I began to edit my firstrevolutionary paper. At that age, what could I be but a constitutionalist?—and my paper advocated the necessity of a constitution for Russia. I wrote about the foolish expenses of the Court, the sums of money which were spent at Nice to keep quite a squadron of the navy in attendance on the dowager Empress, who died in 1860; I mentioned the misdeeds of the functionaries which I continually heard spoken of, and I urged the necessity of constitutional rule. I wrote three copies of my paper, and slipped them into the desks of three comrades of the higher forms, who, I thought, might be interested in public affairs. I asked my readers to put their remarks behind the Scotch grandfather clock in our library.
With a throbbing heart, I went next day to see if there was something for me behind the clock. Two notes were there, indeed. Two comrades wrote that they fully sympathized with my paper, and only advised me not to risk too much. I wrote my second number, still more vigorously insisting upon the necessity of uniting all forces in the name of liberty. But this time there was no reply behind the clock. Instead the two comrades came to me.
‘We are sure,’ they said, ‘that it is you who edit the paper, and we want to talk about it. We are quite agreed with you, and we are here to say, “Let us be friends.” Your paper has done its work—it has brought us together; but there is no need to continue it. In all the school there are only two more who would take any interest in such matters, while if it becomes known that there is a paper of this kind the consequences will be terrible for all of us. Let us constitute a circle and talk about everything; perhaps we shall put something into the heads of a few others.’
This was so sensible that I could only agree, and we sealed our union by a hearty shaking of hands. From that time we three became firm friends, and used to read a great deal together and discuss all sorts of things.
The abolition of serfdom was the question which then engrossed the attention of all thinking men.
The Revolution of 1848 had had its distinct echo in the hearts of the Russian peasant folk, and from the year 1850 the insurrections of revolted serfs began to take serious proportions. When the Crimean war broke out, and militia was levied all over Russia, these revolts spread with a violence never before heard of. Several serf-owners were killed by their serfs, and the peasant uprisings became so serious that whole regiments, with artillery, were sent to quell them, whereas in former times small detachments of soldiers would have been sufficient to terrorize the peasants into obedience.
These outbreaks on the one side, and the profound aversion to serfdom which had grown up in the generation which came to the front with the advent of Alexander II. to the throne, rendered the emancipation of the peasants more and more imperative. The emperor, himself averse to serfdom, and supported, or rather influenced, in his own family by his wife, his brother Constantine, and the grand duchess Hélène Pávlovna, took the first steps in that direction. His intention was that the initiative of the reform should come from the nobility, the serf-owners themselves. But in no province of Russia could the nobility be induced to send a petition to the Tsar to that effect. In March 1856 he himself addressed the Moscow nobility on the necessity of such a step; but a stubborn silence was all their reply to his speech, so that Alexander II., growing quite angry, concluded with those memorable words of Hérzen: ‘It is better, gentlemen, that it should come from above than to wait till it comes from beneath.’ Even these words had no effect, and it was to the provinces of Old Poland—Gródno, Wílno, and Kóvno—where Napoleon I. had abolished serfdom (on paper) in 1812, that recourse was had. The Governor-General of those provinces, Nazímoff, managed to obtain the desired address from the Polish nobility. In November 1857 thefamous ‘rescript’ to the Governor-General of the Lithuanian provinces, announcing the intention of the emperor to abolish serfdom, was launched, and we read, with tears in our eyes, the beautiful article of Hérzen, ‘Thou hast conquered, Galilean,’ in which the refugees in London declared that they would no more look upon Alexander II. as an enemy, but would support him in the great work of emancipation.
The attitude of the peasants was very remarkable. No sooner had the news spread that the liberation long sighed for was coming than the insurrections nearly stopped. The peasants waited now, and during a journey which Alexander made in Middle Russia they flocked around him as he passed, beseeching him to grant them liberty—a petition, however, which Alexander received with great repugnance. It is most remarkable—so strong is the force of tradition—that the rumour went among the peasants that it was Napoleon III. who had required of the Tsar, in the treaty of peace, that the peasants should be freed. I frequently heard this rumour; and on the very eve of the emancipation they seemed to doubt that it would be done without pressure from abroad. ‘Nothing will be done unless Garibaldi comes,’ was the reply which a peasant made at St. Petersburg to a comrade of mine who talked to him about ‘freedom coming.’
But after these moments of general rejoicing years of incertitude and disquiet followed. Specially appointed committees in the provinces and at St. Petersburg discussed the proposed liberation of the serfs, but the intentions of Alexander II. seemed unsettled. A check was continually put upon the press, in order to prevent it from discussing details. Sinister rumours circulated at St. Petersburg and reached our corps.
There was no lack of young men amongst the nobility who earnestly worked for a frank abolition of the old servitude; but the serfdom party drew closer and closer round the emperor, and got power over his mind. Theywhispered into his ears that the day serfdom was abolished the peasants would begin to kill the landlords wholesale, and Russia would witness a new Pugachóff uprising, far more terrible than that of 1773. Alexander, who was a man of weak character, only too readily lent his ear to such predictions. But the huge machine for working out the emancipation law had been set to work. The committees had their sittings; scores of schemes of emancipation, addressed to the emperor, circulated in manuscript or were printed in London. Hérzen, seconded by Turguéneff, who kept him well informed about all that was going on in government circles, discussed in his ‘Bell’ and his ‘Polar Star’ the details of the various schemes, and Chernyshévsky in the ‘Contemporary’ (Sovreménnik). The Slavophiles, especially Aksákoff and Bélyáeff, had taken advantage of the first moments of relative freedom allowed the press, to give the matter a wide publicity in Russia, and to discuss the features of the emancipation with a thorough understanding of its technical aspects. All intellectual St. Petersburg was with Hérzen, and particularly with Chernyshévsky, and I remember how the officers of the Horse Guards, whom I saw on Sundays, after the church parade, at the home of my cousin (Dmítri Nikoláevich Kropótkin, who was aide-de-camp of that regiment and aide-de-camp of the emperor), used to side with Chernyshévsky, the leader of the advanced party in the emancipation struggle. The whole disposition of St. Petersburg, in the drawing-rooms and in the street, was such that it was impossible to go back. The liberation of the serfs had to be accomplished; and another important point was won—the liberated serfs would receive, besides their homesteads, the land that they had hitherto cultivated for themselves.
However, the party of the old nobility were not discouraged. They centred their efforts on obtaining a postponement of the reform, on reducing the size of the allotments, and on imposing upon the emancipated serfsso high a redemption tax for the land that it would render their economical freedom illusory; and in this they fully succeeded. Alexander II. dismissed the real soul of the whole business, Nikolái Milútin (brother of the minister of war), saying to him, ‘I am so sorry to part with you, but I must: the nobility describe you as one of the Reds.’ The first committees, which had worked out the scheme of emancipation, were dismissed too, and new committees revised the whole work in the interest of the serf-owners; the press was muzzled once more.
Things assumed a very gloomy aspect. The question whether the liberation would take place at all was now asked. I feverishly followed the struggle, and every Sunday, when my comrades returned from their homes, I asked them what their parents said. By the end of 1860 the news became worse and worse. ‘The Valúeff party has got the upper hand.’ ‘They intend to revise the whole work.’ ‘The relatives of the Princess X. [a friend of the Tsar] work hard upon him,’ ‘The liberation will be postponed: they fear a revolution.’
In January 1861 slightly better rumours began to circulate, and it was generally hoped that something would be heard of the emancipation on the day of the emperor’s accession to the throne, February 19.
The 19th came, but it brought nothing with it. I was on that day at the palace. There was no grandlevée, only a small one; and pages of the second form were sent to suchlevéesin order to get accustomed to the palace ways. It was my turn that day; and as I was seeing off one of the grand duchesses who came to the palace to assist at the Mass, her husband did not appear and I went to fetch him. He was called out of the emperor’s study, and I told him, in a half jocose way, of the perplexity of his wife, without having the slightestsuspicion of the important matters that may have been talked of in the study at that time. Apart from a few of the initiated, no one in the palace suspected that the manifesto had been signed on February 19, and was kept back for a fortnight only because the next Sunday, the 26th, was the beginning of the carnival week, and it was feared that, owing to the drinking which goes on in the villages during the carnival, peasant insurrections might break out. Even the carnival fair, which used to be held at St. Petersburg on the square near the winter palace, was removed that year to another square, from fear of a popular insurrection in the capital. Most sanguinary instructions had been issued to the army as to the ways of repressing peasant uprisings.
A fortnight later, on the last Sunday of the carnival (March 5, or rather March 17, new style), I was at the corps, having to take part in the military parade at the riding-school. I was still in bed, when my soldier servant, Ivánoff, dashed in with the tea-tray, exclaiming, ‘Prince, freedom! The manifesto is posted on the Gostínoi Dvor’ (the shops opposite the corps).
‘Did you see it yourself?’
‘Yes. People stand round; one reads, the others listen. Itisfreedom!’
In a couple of minutes I was dressed and out. A comrade was coming in.
‘Kropótkin, freedom!’ he shouted. ‘Here is the manifesto. My uncle learned last night that it would be read at the early Mass at the Isaac Cathedral; so we went. There were not many people there; peasants only. The manifesto was read and distributed after the Mass. They well understood what it meant: when I came out of the church, two peasants, who stood in the gateway, said to me in such a droll way, “Well, sir? now—all gone?”’ And he mimicked how they had shown him the way out. Years of expectation were in that gesture of sending away the master.
I read and re-read the manifesto. It was written in an elevated style by the old metropolitan of Moscow, Philarète, but with a useless mixture of Russian and old Slavonian which obscured the sense. It was liberty; but it was not liberty yet, the peasants having to remain serfs for two years more, till February 19, 1863. Notwithstanding all this, one thing was evident: serfdom was abolished, and the liberated serfs would get the land and their homesteads. They would have to pay for it, but the old stain of slavery was removed. They would be slaves no more; the reaction hadnotgot the upper hand.
We went to the parade; and when all the military performances were over, Alexander II., remaining on horseback, loudly called out, ‘The officers to me!’ They gathered round him, and he began, in a loud voice, a speech about the great event of the day.
‘The officers ... the representatives of the nobility in the army’—these scraps of sentences reached our ears—‘an end has been put to centuries of injustice.... I expect sacrifices from the nobility ... the loyal nobility will gather round the throne’ ... and so on. Enthusiastic hurrahs resounded amongst the officers as he ended.
We ran rather than marched back on our way to the corps—hurrying to be in time for the Italian opera, of which the last performance in the season was to be given that afternoon; some manifestation was sure to take place then. Our military attire was flung off with great haste, and several of us dashed, lightfooted, to the sixth-story gallery. The house was crowded.
During the first entr’acte the smoking-room of the opera filled with excited young men, who all talked to one another, whether acquainted or not. We planned at once to return to the hall, and to sing, with the whole public in a mass choir, the hymn ‘God save the Tsar.’
However, sounds of music reached our ears, and weall hurried back to the hall. The band of the opera was already playing the hymn, which was drowned immediately in enthusiastic hurrahs coming from the galleries, the boxes, the pit. I saw Bavéri, the conductor, waving his stick, but not a sound could be heard from the powerful band. Then Bavéri stopped, but the hurrahs continued. I saw the stick waved again in the air; I saw the fiddle bows moving and musicians blowing the brass instruments, but again the sound of voices overwhelmed the band. Bavéri began conducting the hymn once more, and it was only by the end of that third repetition that isolated sounds of the brass instruments pierced through the clamour of human voices.
The same enthusiasm was in the streets. Crowds of peasants and educated men stood in front of the palace, shouting hurrahs, and the Tsar could not appear without being followed by demonstrative crowds running after his carriage. Hérzen was right when, two years later, as Alexander was drowning the Polish insurrection in blood, and ‘Muravióff the Hanger’ was strangling it on the scaffold, he wrote, ‘Alexander Nikoláevich, why did you not die on that day? Your name would have been transmitted in history as that of a hero.’
Where were the uprisings which had been predicted by the champions of slavery? Conditions more indefinite than those which had been created by the Polozhénie (the emancipation law) could not have been invented. If anything could have provoked revolts, it was precisely the perplexing vagueness of the conditions created by the new law. And yet—except in two places where there were insurrections, and a very few other spots where small disturbances, entirely due to misunderstandings and immediately appeased, took place—Russia remained quiet, more quiet than ever. With their usual good sense, the peasants had understood that serfdom was done away with, that ‘freedom had come,’ and they accepted theconditions imposed upon them, although these conditions were very heavy.
I was in Nikólskoye in August 1861, and again in the summer of 1862, and I was struck with the quiet intelligent way in which the peasants had accepted the new conditions. They knew perfectly well how difficult it would be to pay the redemption tax for the land, which was in reality an indemnity to the nobles in lieu of the obligations of serfdom. But they so much valued the abolition of their personal enslavement that they accepted the ruinous charges—not without murmuring, but as a hard necessity—the moment that personal freedom was obtained. For the first months they kept two holidays a week, saying that it was a sin to work on Friday; but when the summer came they resumed work with even more energy than before.
When I saw our Nikólskoye peasants, fifteen months after the liberation, I could not but admire them. Their inborn good nature and softness remained with them, but all traces of servility had disappeared. They talked to their masters as equals talk to equals, as if they never had stood in different relations. Besides, such men came out from among them as could make a stand for their rights. The Polozhénie was a large and difficult book, which it took me a good deal of time to understand; but when Vasíli Ivánoff, the elder of Nikólskoye, came one day to ask me to explain to him some obscurity in it, I saw that he, who was not even a fluent reader, had admirably found his way amongst the intricacies of the chapters and paragraphs of the law.