CHAPTER IV

My Friend Niko and the Sparrow Hills.

SOME time in the year 1824 I was walking one day with my father along the Moscow River, on the far side of the Sparrow Hills; and there we met a French tutor whom we knew. He had nothing on but his shirt, was obviously in great alarm, and was calling out, “Help! Help!” Before our friend had time to pull off his shirt or pull on his trousers, a Cossack ran down from the Sparrow Hills, hurled himself into the water, and disappeared. In another moment he reappeared, grasping a miserable little object, whose head and hands shook like clothes hung out to dry; he placed this burden on the bank and said, “A shaking will soon bring him round.”

The bystanders collected fiftyroublesfor the rescuer. The Cossack made no pretences but said very honestly, “It’s a sin to take money for a thing like that; for he gave me no trouble, no more than a cat, to pull him out. But,” he added, “though I don’t ask for money, if I’m offered it, I may as well take it. I’m a poor man. So thankyou kindly.” Then he tied up the money in his handkerchief and went back to his horses grazing on the hill.

My father asked the man’s name and wrote next day to tell his commanding officer of his gallantry; and the Cossack was promoted to be a corporal. A few months later the Cossack appeared at our house and brought a companion, a German with a fair curling wig, pock-marked, and scented. This was the drowning man, who had come to return thanks on behalf of the Cossack; and he visited us afterwards from time to time.

Karl Sonnenberg had taught boys German in several families, and was now employed by a distant relation of my father’s, who had confided to him the bodily health and German pronunciation of his son. This boy, Nikolai Ogaryóv, whom Sonnenberg always called Niko, attracted me. There was something kind, gentle, and thoughtful about him; he was quite unlike the other boys whom I was in the way of seeing. Yet our intimacy ripened slowly: he was silent and thoughtful, I was lively and feared to trouble him by my liveliness.

Niko had lost his mother in infancy, and his grandmother died about the time when my cousin Tatyana left us and went home. Their household was in confusion, and Sonnenberg, who had really nothing to do, made out that he was terribly busy; so he brought the boy to our house in the morning and asked if we would keep him for the whole day. Niko was frightened and sad; I suppose he loved his grandmother.

After sitting together for some time, I proposed that we should read Schiller. I was soon astonished by the similarity of our tastes: he knew by heart much more than I did, and my favourite passages were those he knewbest; we soon shut the book, and each began to explore the other’s mind for common interests.

He too was familiar with the unprinted poems of Púshkin and Ryléev;[33]the difference from the empty-headed boys whom I sometimes met was surprising. His heart beat to the same tune as mine; he too had cut the painter that bound him to the sullen old shore of conservatism; our business was to push off with a will; and we decided, perhaps on that very first day, to act in support of the Crown Prince Constantine!

33.One of the five Decembrists who were hanged when the revolt was suppressed.

This was our first long conversation. Sonnenberg was always in our way, persistent as a fly in autumn and spoiling all our talk by his presence. He was constantly interfering, criticising without understanding, putting the collar of Niko’s shirt to rights, or in a hurry to go home; in short, he was thoroughly objectionable. But, before a month was over, it was impossible for my friend and me to pass two days without meeting or writing; I, who was naturally impulsive, became more and more attached to Niko, and he had a less demonstrative but deep love for me.

From the very first, our friendship was bound to take a serious turn. I cannot remember that we thought much of amusement, especially when we were alone. I don’t mean that we sat still always; after all, we were boys, and we laughed and played the fool and teased Sonnenberg and shot with a bow in our court-yard. But our friendship was not founded on mere idle companionship: we were united, not only by equality of age and “chemical” affinity, but by a common religion. Nothing in the worldhas more power to purify and elevate that time of life, nothing preserves it better, than a strong interest in humanity at large. We respected, in ourselves, our own future; we regarded one another as chosen vessels, with a fixed task before us.

We often took walks into the country; our favourite haunts were the Sparrow Hills, and the fields outside the Dragomirovsky Gate. Accompanied by Sonnenberg, he used to come for me at six or seven in the morning; and if I was still asleep, he used to throw sand or pebbles at my window. I woke up joyfully and hastened to join him.

These morning walks had been started by the activity of Sonnenberg. My friend had been brought up under adyádka,[34]in the manner traditional in noble Russian families, till Sonnenberg came. The influence of thedyádkawaned at once, and the oligarchy of the servants’ hall had to grin and bear it: they realised that they were no match for the “accursed German” who was permitted to dine with the family. Sonnenberg’s reforms were radical: thedyádkaeven wept when the German took his young master in person to a shop to buy ready-made boots. Just like the reforms of Peter the Great, Sonnenberg’s reforms bore a military character even in matters of the least warlike nature. It does not follow from this that Sonnenberg’s narrow shoulders were ever covered by epaulettes, plain or laced—nature has constructed the German on such a plan, that, unless he is a philologer or theologian and therefore utterly indifferent to personal neatness, he is invariably military, whatever civilian sphere he may adorn. Hence Sonnenberg liked tight clothes, closely buttoned and belted in at the waist; andhence he was a strict observer of rules approved by himself. He had made it a rule to get up at six in the morning; therefore he made his pupil get up one minute before six or, at latest, one minute after it, and took him out into the fresh air every morning.

34.See note to p. 55.

The Sparrow Hills, at the foot of which Sonnenberg had been so nearly drowned, soon became to us a Holy Place.

One day after dinner, my father proposed to take a drive into the country, and, as Niko was in the house, invited him and Sonnenberg to join us. These drives were no joke. Though the carriage was made by Iochim, most famous of coachmakers, it had been used, if not severely, for fifteen years till it had become old and ugly, and it weighed more than a siege mortar, so that we took an hour or more to get outside the city-gates. Our four horses, ill-matched both in size and colour, underworked and overfed, were covered with sweat and lather in a quarter of an hour; and the coachman, knowing that this was forbidden, had to keep them at a walk. However hot it was, the windows were generally kept shut. To all this you must add the steady pressure of my father’s eye and Sonnenberg’s perpetual fussy interference; and yet we boys were glad to endure it all, in order that we might be together.

We crossed the Moscow River by a ferry at the very place where the Cossack pulled Sonnenberg out of the water. My father walked along with gloomy aspect and stooping figure, as always, while Sonnenberg trotted at his side and tried to amuse him with scandal and gossip. We two walked on in front till we had got a good lead;then we ran off to the site of Vitberg’s cathedral[35]on the Sparrow Hills.

35.See part II, chap. IX.

Panting and flushed, we stood there and wiped our brows. The sun was setting, the cupolas of Moscow glittered in his rays, the city at the foot of the hill spread beyond our vision, a fresh breeze fanned our cheeks. We stood there leaning against each other; then suddenly we embraced and, as we looked down upon the great city, swore to devote our lives to the struggle we had undertaken.

Such an action may seem very affected and theatrical on our part; but when I recall it, twenty-six years after, it affects me to tears. That it was absolutely sincere has been proved by the whole course of our lives. But all vows taken on that spot are evidently doomed to the same fate: the Emperor Alexander also acted sincerely when he laid the first stone of the cathedral there, but the first stone was also the last.

We did not know the full power of our adversary, but still we threw down the glove. Power dealt us many a shrewd blow, but we never surrendered to it, and it was not power that crushed us. The scars inflicted by power are honourable; the strained thigh of Jacob was a sign that he had wrestled with God in the night.

From that day the Sparrow Hills became a place of pilgrimage for us: once or twice a year we walked there, and always by ourselves. There, five years later, Ogaryóv asked me with a modest diffidence whether I believed in his poetic gift. And in 1833 he wrote to me from the country:

“Since I left Moscow, I have felt sad, sadder than Iever was in my life. I am always thinking of the Sparrow Hills. I long kept my transports hidden in my heart; shyness or some other feeling prevented me from speaking of them. But on the Sparrow Hills these transports were not lessened by solitude: you shared them with me, and those moments are unforgettable; like recollections of bygone happiness, they pursued me on my journey, though I passed no hills but only forests.”

“Tell the world,” he ended, “how our lives (yours and mine) took shape on the Sparrow Hills.”

Five more years passed, and I was far from those Hills, but their Prometheus, Alexander Vitberg, was near me, a sorrowful and gloomy figure. After my return to Moscow, I visited the place again in 1842; again I stood by the foundation-stone and surveyed the same scene; and a companion was with me—but it was not my friend.

After 1827 we two were inseparable. In every recollection of that time, whether detailed or general,heis always prominent, with the face of opening manhood, with his love for me. He was early marked with that sign of consecration which is given to few, and which, for weal or for woe, separates a man from the crowd. A large oil-painting of Ogaryóv was made about that time and long remained in his father’s house. I often stopped in front of it and looked long at it. He was painted with a loose open collar: the artist has caught successfully the luxuriant chestnut hair, the fleeting beauty of youth on the irregular features, and the somewhat swarthy complexion. The canvas preserves the serious aspect which precedes hard intellectual work. The vague sorrow and extreme gentleness whichshine from the large grey eyes, give promise of great power of sympathy; and that promise was fulfilled. The portrait was given to me. A lady, not related to Ogaryóv, afterwards got hold of it; perhaps she will see these lines and restore it to me.

I do not know why people dwell exclusively on recollections of first love and say nothing about memories of youthful friendship. First love is so fragrant, just because it forgets difference of sex, because it is passionate friendship. Friendship between young men has all the fervour of love and all its characteristics—the same shy reluctance to profane its feeling by speech, the same diffidence and absolute devotion, the same pangs at parting, and the same exclusive desire to stand alone without a rival.

I had loved Niko long and passionately before I dared to call him “friend”; and, when we were apart in summer, I wrote in a postscript, “whether I am your friend or not, I don’t know yet.” He was the first to use “thou” in writing to me; and he called me Damon before I called him Pythias.

Smile, if you please, but let it be a kindly smile, such as men smile when recalling their own fifteenth year. Perhaps it would be better to ask, “Was I like that in my prime?” and to thank your stars, if you everhada prime, and to thank them doubly, if you had a friend to share it.

The language of that time seems to us affected and bookish. We have travelled far from its passing enthusiasms and one-sided partisanships, which suddenly give place to feeble sentimentality or childish laughter. In a man of thirty it would be absurd, like the famousBettina will schlafen;[36]but, in its own season, this language ofadolescence, thisjargon de la puberté, this breaking of the soul’s voice—all this is quite sincere, and even its bookish flavour is natural to the age which knows theory and is ignorant of practice.

36.This must refer to Bettina von Arnim’s first interview with Goethe at Weimar in April, 1807. She writes that she sprang into Goethe’s arms and slept there. The poet was then 58, and Bettina had ceased to be a child.

Schiller remained our favourite; the characters in his plays were real for us; we discussed them and loved or hated them as living beings and not as people in a book. And more than that—we identified ourselves with them. I was rather distressed that Niko was too fond of Fiesco, and wrote to say that behind every Fiesco stands a Verina. My own ideal was Karl Moor, but I soon deserted him and adopted the Marquis Posa instead.

Thus it was that Ogaryóv and I entered upon life hand in hand. We walked in confidence and pride; without counting the cost, we answered every summons and surrendered ourselves sincerely to each generous impulse. The path we chose was not easy; but we never once left it; wounded and broken, we still went on, and no one out-stripped us on the way. I have reached, not our goal but the place where the road turns downhill, and I seek instinctively for your arm, my friend, that I may press it and say with a sad smile as we go down together, “So this is all!”

Meanwhile, in the wearisome leisure to which I am condemned by circumstances, as I find in myself neither strength nor vigour for fresh toil, I am recordingourrecollections.[37]Much of what bound us so closely hasfound a place in these pages, and I give them to you. For you they have a double meaning, the meaning of epitaphs, on which we meet with familiar names.

37.This was written in 1853.

But it is surely an odd reflection, that, if Sonnenberg had learned to swim or been drowned when he fell into the river, or if he had been pulled out by some ordinary private and not by that Cossack, we should never have met; or, if we had, it would have been at a later time and in a different way—not in the little room of our old house where we smoked our first cigars, and where we drew strength from one another for our first long step on the path of life.

Back to Index Next