CHAPTER IX

Alexander Vitberg.

IN the midst of all this ugliness and squalor, these petty and repulsive persons and scenes, in this world of chicanery and red tape, I recall the sad and noble figure of a great artist.

I lived at his side for two years and a half and saw this strong man breaking up under the pressure of persecution and misfortune.

Nor can it be said that he succumbed without a protest; for ten long years he struggled desperately. When he went into exile, he still hoped to conquer his enemies and right himself; in fact, he was still eager for the conflict, still full of projects and expedients. But at Vyatka he saw that all was over.

He might have accepted this discovery but for the wife and children at his side, and the prospect of long years of exile, poverty, and privation; he grew greyer and older, not day by day, but hour by hour. I was two years at Vyatka, and when I left, he was ten years older than when I came.

Let me tell the story of this long martyrdom.

§2

The Emperor Alexander could not believe in his victory over Napoleon. Glory was a burden to him, and he quite sincerely gave it to God’s name instead. Always inclined to mysticism and despondency, he was more than ever haunted by these feelings after his repeated victories over Napoleon.

When the last soldier of the French army had retreated over the frontier, Alexander published a manifesto, in which he took a vow to erect a great cathedral at Moscow, dedicated to the Saviour.

Plans for this church were invited from all quarters, and there was a great competition of artists.

Alexander Vitberg was then a young man; he had been trained in the art schools at Petersburg and had gained the gold medal for painting. Of Swedish descent, he was born in Russia and received his early education in the School of Mines. He was a passionate lover of art, with a tendency to eccentricity and mysticism. He read the Emperor’s manifesto and the invitation for designs, and at once gave up all his former occupations. Day and night he wandered about the streets of Petersburg, tormented by a fixed idea which he was powerless to banish. He shut himself up in his room, took his pencil, and began to work.

The artist took no one into his confidence. After working for several months, he travelled to Moscow, where he studied the city and its surroundings. Then he set to work again, hiding himself from all eyes for months at a time, and hiding his drawings also.

The time came for the competition. Many plans were sent in, plans from Italy and from Germany, and our ownacademicians sent in theirs. The design of this unknown youth took its place among the rest. Some weeks passed before the Emperor examined the plans, and these weeks were the Forty Days in the Wilderness, days of temptation and doubt and painful anxiety.

The Emperor was struck by Vitberg’s design, which was on a colossal scale and remarkable for religious and artistic feeling. He stopped first in front of it and asked who had sent it in. The envelope was opened; the name inside was that of an unknown student of the Academy.

Alexander sent for Vitberg and had a long conversation with him. He was impressed by the artist’s confident and animated speech, the real inspiration which filled him, and the mystical turn of his convictions. “You speak in stone,” the Emperor said, as he looked through the plans again.

The plans were approved that very day; Vitberg was appointed architect of the cathedral and president of the building committee. Alexander was not aware that there were thorns beneath the crown of laurels which he placed on the artist’s head.

There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture. Abstract, geometrical, musical and yet dumb, passionless, it depends entirely upon symbolism, form, suggestion. Simple lines, and the harmonious combination and numerical relations between these, present something mysterious and at the same time incomplete. A building, a temple, does not comprise its object within itself; it differs in this respect from a statue or a picture, a poem or a symphony. The building needs an inhabitant; in itself itis a prepared space, a setting, like the shell of a tortoise or marine creature; and the essential thing is just this, that the outer case should fit the spirit and the inhabitant, as closely as the shell fits the tortoise. The walls of the temple, its vaults and pillars, its main entrance, its foundations and cupola, should all reflect the deity that dwells within, just as the bones of the skull correspond exactly to the convolutions of the brain.

To the Egyptians their temples were sacred books, their obelisks were sermons by the high road.

Solomon’s temple is the Bible in stone; and so St. Peter’s at Rome is the transition, in stone, from Catholicism to a kingdom of this world, the first stage of our liberation from monastic fetters.

The mere construction of temples was at all times accompanied by so many mystical rites, allegoric ceremonies, and solemn consecrations, that the medieval builders ranked themselves as a kind of religious order, as successors to the builders of Solomon’s temple; and they formed themselves into secret companies, of which freemasonry was a later development.

The Renaissance robbed architecture of this essentially mystical note. The Christian faith began to contend with scepticism, the Gothic spire with the Greek façade, religious sanctity with worldly beauty. This is why St. Peter’s at Rome is so significant; in that colossal erection Christianity is struggling to come alive, the Church turns pagan, and Michael Angelo uses the walls of the Sistine Chapel to depict Jesus Christ as a brawny athlete, a Hercules in the flower of youth and strength.

After this date church architecture fell into utter decadence, till it became a mere reproduction, in varying proportions,either of St. Peter’s or of ancient Greek temples. There is one Parthenon at Paris which is called the Church of the Madeleine, and another at New York, which is used as the Exchange.

Without faith and without special circumstances, it was hard to build anything with life about it. All modern churches are misfits and pretentious anachronisms, like those angular Gothic churches with which the English ornament their towns and offend every artistic eye.

But the circumstances in which Vitberg drew his plans, his own personality, and the Emperor’s temperament, all these were quite exceptional.

The war of 1812 had a profound effect upon men’s minds in Russia, and it was long after the liberation of Moscow before the general emotion and excitement subsided. Then foreign events, the taking of Paris, the history of the Hundred Days, expectations and rumours, Waterloo, Napoleon on board theBellerophon, mourning for the dead and anxiety for the living, the returning armies, the warriors restored to their homes,—all this had a strong effect upon the least susceptible natures. Now imagine a young man, an artist and a mystic, endowed with creative power, and also an enthusiast spurred on by current events, by the Tsar’s challenge, and by his own genius.

Near Moscow, between the Mozhaisk and Kaluga roads, a modest eminence dominates the whole city. Those are the Sparrow Hills of which I spoke in my early recollections. They command one of the finest views of all Moscow. Here it was that Ivan the Terrible, still young and unhardened, shed tears at the sight of his capital onfire; and here that the priest Silvester met him and by his stern rebuke changed for twenty years to come the nature of that monster and man of genius.

Napoleon and his army marched round these hills. There his strength was broken, and there his retreat began. What better site for a temple in memory of 1812 than the farthest point reached by the enemy?

But this was not enough. It was Vitberg’s intention to convert the hill itself into the lowest part of the cathedral, to build a colonnade to the river, and then, on a foundation laid on three sides by nature herself, to erect a second and a third church. But all the three churches made one; for Vitberg’s cathedral, like the chief dogma of Christianity, was both triple and indivisible.

The lowest of the three churches, hewn in the rock, was a parallelogram in the shape of a coffin or dead body. All that was visible was a massive entrance supported on columns of almost Egyptian size; the church itself was hidden in the primitive unworked rock. It was lighted by lamps in high Etruscan candelabra; a feeble ray of daylight from the second church passed into it through a transparent picture of the Nativity. All the heroes who fell in 1812 were to rest in this crypt; a perpetual mass was to be said there for those who had fallen on the field of battle; and the names of them all, from the chief commanders to the private soldiers, were to be engraved on the walls.

On the top of this coffin or cemetery rose the second church, in the form of a Greek cross with limbs of equal length spreading to the four quarters, a temple of life, of suffering, of labour. The colonnade which led up to it was adorned with statues of the Patriarchs and Judges.At the entrance were the Prophets; they stood outside the church, pointing out the way which they could not tread themselves. Inside this temple the Gospel story and the Acts of the Apostles were represented on the walls.

Above this building, crowning it, completing it, and including it, the third church was to be built in the shape of the Pantheon. It was brightly lighted, as the home of the Spirit, of unbroken peace, of eternity; and eternity was represented by its shape. Here there were no pictures or sculpture; but there was an exterior frieze representing the archangels, and the whole was surmounted by a colossal dome.

Sad is my present recollection of Vitberg’s main idea; he had worked it out in every detail, in complete accordance at every point with Christian theology and architectural beauty.

This astonishing man spent a whole lifetime over his conception. It was his sole occupation during the ten years that his trial lasted; in poverty and exile, he devoted several hours of each day to his cathedral. He lived in it; he could not believe that it would never be built; his whole life—his memories, his consolations, his fame—was wrapped up in that portfolio.

It may be that in the future, when the martyr is dead, some later artist may shake the dust from those leaves and piously give to the world that record of suffering, those plans over which the strong man, after his brief hour of glory had gone out, spent a life of darkness and pain.

His plan was full of genius, and startling in its extravagance; for this reason Alexander chose it, and for this reason it should have been carried out. It is said that thehill could never have supported such a building; but I do not believe it, especially in view of all the modern triumphs of engineering in America and England, those suspension-bridges and tunnels which a train takes eight minutes to pass through.

Milorádovitch advised Vitberg to have granite monoliths for the great pillars of the lowest church. Someone pointed out that the process of bringing these from Finland would be very costly. “That is the very reason why we should get them,” answered Milorádovitch; “if there were granite quarries on the Moscow River, where would be the wonder in erecting the pillars?”

Milorádovitch was a soldier, but he understood the element of romance in war and in other things. Magnificent ends are gained by magnificent means. Nature alone attains to greatness without effort.

The chief accusation brought against Vitberg, even by those who never doubted his honesty, was this, that he had accepted the post of director of the works. As an artist without experience, and a young man ignorant of finance, he should have been content with his position as architect. This is true.

It is easy to sit in one’s chair and condemn Vitberg for this. But he accepted the post just because he was young and inexperienced, because nothing seemed hard when once his plans had been accepted, because the Tsar himself offered him the post, encouraged him, and supported him. Whose head would not have been turned? Where are these sober, sensible, self-controlled people? If they exist, they are not capable of constructing colossal plans, they cannot make stones speak.

§5

As a matter of course, Vitberg was soon surrounded by a swarm of rascals, men who look on state employment merely as a lucky chance to line their own pockets. It is easy to understand that such men would undermine Vitberg and set traps for him; yet he might have climbed out of these but for something else—had not envy in some quarters, and injured dignity in others, been added to general dishonesty.

There were three other members of the commission as well as Vitberg—the Archbishop Philaret, the Governor of Moscow, and Kushnikov, a Judge of the Supreme Court; and all three resented from the first the presence of this “whipper-snapper,” who actually ventured to state his objections and insist on his own opinions.

They helped others to entangle and defame him, and then they destroyed him without a qualm.

Two events contributed to this catastrophe, the fall of the Minister, Prince A. N. Golitsyn, and then the death of Alexander.

The Minister’s fall dragged Vitberg down with it. He felt the full weight of that disaster: the Commission complained, the Archbishop was offended, the Governor was dissatisfied. His replies were called insolent—insolence was one of the main charges brought against him on his trial—and it was said that his subordinates stole—as if there was a single person in the public service in Russia who refrains from stealing! It is possible, indeed, that his agents stole more than usual; for he was quite inexperienced in the management of reformatories or the detection of highly placed thieves.

Alexander ordered Arakchéyev to investigate the affair.He himself was sorry for Vitberg and sent a message to say that he was convinced of the architect’s honesty.

But Alexander died and Arakchéyev fell. Under Nicholas, Vitberg’s affair at once assumed a more threatening aspect. It dragged on for ten years, and the absurdity of the proceedings is incredible. The Supreme Court dismissed charges taken as proved by the Criminal Court, and charged him with guilt of which he had been acquitted; the committee of ministers found him guilty on all the charges; and the Emperor Nicholas added to the original sentence banishment to Vyatka.

So Vitberg was banished, having been discharged from the public service “for abusing the confidence of the Emperor Alexander and for squandering the revenues of the Crown.” A claim was brought against him for a millionroubles—I think that was the sum; all his property was seized and sold by auction, and a report was spread that he had transferred an immense sum of money to America.

I lived for two years in the same house with Vitberg and kept up constant relations with him till I left Vyatka. He had not saved even enough for his daily bread, and his family lived in the direst poverty.

In order to throw light on this trial and all similar trials in Russia, I shall add two trifling details.

Vitberg bought a forest for building material from a merchant named Lobanov, but, before the trees were felled, offered to take another forest instead which was nearer the river and belonged to the same owner. Lobanov agreed; the trees were felled and the timber floated down the river. More timber was needed at a later date, andVitberg bought the first forest over again. Hence arose the famous charge that he had paid twice over for the same timber. The unfortunate Lobanov was put in prison on this charge and died there.

Of the second affair I was myself an eye-witness.

Vitberg bought up land with a view to his cathedral. His idea was that the serfs, when transferred with the land he had bought, should bind themselves to supply a fixed number of workmen to be employed on the cathedral; in this way they acquired complete freedom from all other burdens for themselves and their community. It is amusing to note that our judges, being also landowners, objected to this measure as a form of slavery!

One estate which Vitberg wished to buy belonged to my father. It lay on the bank of the Moscow River; stone had been found there, and Vitberg got leave from my father to make a geological inspection, in order to determine how much stone there was. After obtaining leave, Vitberg had to go off to Petersburg.

Three months later my father learned that the quarrying operations were being carried out on a great scale, and that the peasants’ cornfields were buried under blocks of stone. His protests were not listened to, and he went to law. There was a stubborn contest. The defendants tried at first to throw all the blame on Vitberg, but, unfortunately for them, it turned out that he had given no orders whatever, and that the Commission had done the whole thing during his absence.

The case was referred to the Supreme Court, which surprised everyone by coming to a fairly reasonable decision.The stone which had been quarried was to belong to the landowner, as compensation for the injury to his fields; the Crown funds spent on the work were to be repaid, to the amount of 100,000roubles, by those who had signed the contract for the work. The signatories were Prince Golitsyn, the Archbishop, and Kushnikov. Of course there was a great outcry, and the matter was referred to the Tsar.

The Tsar ordered that the payment should not be exacted, because—as he wrote with his own hand—“the members of the Commission did not know what they were signing”! This is actually printed in the journals of the Supreme Court. Even if the Archbishop was bound by his cloth to display humility, what are we to think of the other two magnates who accepted the Tsar’s generosity under such conditions?

But where was the money to be found? Crown property, we are told, can neither be burnt by fire nor drowned in water—it can only be stolen, we might add. Without hesitation a general of the Staff was sent in haste to Moscow to clear matters up.

He did so, restored order, and settled everything in the course of a few days. The stone was to be taken from the landowner, to defray the expenses of the quarry, though, if the landowner wished to keep the stone, he might do so on payment of 100,000roubles. The landowner was not to receive special compensation, because the value of his property had been increased by the discovery of a new source of wealth (that is really a noble touch!)—but a certain law of Peter the Great’s sanctioned the payment of so manykopecksan acre for the damage done to the peasants’ fields.

The real sufferer was my father. It is hardly necessary to add that this business of the stone quarry figured after all among the charges brought against Vitberg at his trial.

Vitberg had been living in exile at Vyatka for two years when the merchants of the town determined to build a new church.

Their plans surprised the Tsar Nicholas when they were submitted to him. He confirmed them and gave orders to the local authorities that the builders were not to mar the architect’s design.

“Who made these plans?” he asked of the minister.

“Vitberg, Your Majesty.”

“Do you mean the same Vitberg?”

“The same man, Your Majesty.”

And so it happened that Vitberg, most unexpectedly, got permission to return to Moscow or Petersburg. When he asked leave to clear his character, it was refused; but when he made skilful plans for a church, the Tsar ordered his restoration—as if there had ever been a doubt of his artistic capacity!

In Petersburg, where he was starving for bread, he made a last attempt to defend his honour. It was a complete failure. He applied to Prince A. N. Golitsyn; but the Prince thought it impossible to open the question again, and advised Vitberg to address a humble petition for pecuniary assistance to the Crown Prince. He said that Zhukovski and himself would interest themselves in the matter, and held out hopes of a gift of 1,000roubles.

Vitberg refused.

I visited Petersburg for the last time at the beginningof winter in 1846, and there I saw Vitberg. He was quite a wreck; even his wrath against his enemies, which I had admired so much in former days, had begun to cool down; he had ceased to hope and was making no endeavour to escape from his position; a calm despair was making an end of him; he was breaking up altogether and only waiting for death.

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

“But for my children,” he said to me at parting, “I would tear myself away from Russia and beg my bread over the world; wearing my Cross of Vladímir, I would hold out calmly to the passer-by that hand which the Tsar Alexander grasped, and tell him of my great design and the fate of an artist in Russia.”

“Poor martyr,” thought I, “Europe shall learn your fate—I promise you that.”

My intimacy with Vitberg was a great relief to me at Vyatka. His serious simplicity and a certain solemnity of manner suggested the churchman to some extent. Strict in his principles, he tended in general to austerity rather than enjoyment; but this strictness took nothing from the luxuriance and richness of his artistic fancy. He could invest his mystical views with such lively forms and such beautiful colouring that objections died on your lips, and you felt reluctant to examine and pull to pieces the glimmering forms and shadowy pictures of his imagination.

His mysticism was partly due to his Scandinavian blood. It was the same play of fancy combined with cool reflectionwhich we see in Swedenborg;[106]and that in its turn resembles the fiery reflection of the sun’s rays when they fall on the ice-covered mountains and snows of Norway.

106.Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish mystic and founder of a sect.

Though I was shaken for a time by Vitberg’s influence, my positive turn of mind held its own nevertheless. It was not my destiny to be carried up to the third heaven; I was born to inhabit earth alone. Tables never turn at my touch, rings never quiver when I look at them. The daylight of thought is my element, not the moonlight of imagination.

But I was more inclined to the mystical standpoint when I lived with Vitberg than at any other period of my life.

There was much to support Vitberg’s influence—the loneliness of exile, the strained and pietistic tone of the letters I received from home, the love which was mastering my whole being with ever increasing power, and an oppressive feeling of remorse for my own misconduct.[107]

107.He refers to an intrigue he was carrying on at Vyatka.

Two years later I was again influenced by ideas partly religious and partly socialistic, which I took from the Gospel and from Rousseau; my position was that of some French thinkers, such as Pierre Leroux.[108]

108.A French publicist and disciple of Saint Simon, 1797-1871.

My friend Ogaryóv plunged even before I did into the waves of mysticism. In 1833 he began to write a libretto for Gebel’s oratorio ofParadise Lost; and he wrote to me that the whole history of humanity was included in that poem! It appears therefore that he then considered the paradise of his aspirations to have existed already and disappeared from view.

In 1838 I wrote from this point of view some historical scenes which I supposed at the time to be dramatic. They were in verse. In one I represented the strife between Christianity and the ancient world, and told how St. Paul, when entering Rome, raised a young man from the dead to enter on a new life. Another described the contest of the Quakers against the Church of England, and the departure of William Penn for America.

The mysticism of the Gospel soon gave way in my mind to the mysticism of science; but I was fortunate enough to escape from the latter as well in course of time.

But now I must go back to the modest little town which was called Chlynov until Catherine II changed its name to Vyatka; what her motive was, I do not know, unless it was her Finnish patriotism.

In that dreary distant backwater of exile, separated from all I loved, surrounded by the unclean horde of officials, and exposed without defence to the tyranny of the Governor, I met nevertheless with many warm hearts and friendly hands, and there I spent many happy hours which are sacred in recollection.

Where are you now, and how are you, my snowbound friends? It is twenty years since we met. I suppose you have grown old, as I have; you are thinking about marrying your daughters, and have given up drinking champagne by the bottle and tossing off bumpers of vodka. Which of you has made a fortune, and which has lost it? Which has risen high in the official world, and which is laid low by the palsy? Above all, do you still keep alive the memory of our free discussions? Do those chordsstill resound that were struck so vigorously by our common friendship and our common resentment?

I am unchanged, as you know, for I suspect that rumour flies from the banks of the Thames as far as you. I think of you sometimes, and always with affection. I have kept some letters of those former days, and some of them I regard as treasures and love to read over again.

“I am not ashamed to confess to you,” writes one young friend on January 26, 1838, “that my heart is full of bitterness. Help me for the sake of that life to which you summoned me; help me with your advice. I want to learn; make me a list of books, lay down any programme you like; I will work my hardest, if you will point the way. It would be sinful of you to discourage me.”

“I bless you,” another wrote to me just after I had left Vyatka, “as the husbandman blesses the rain which gives life to his unfertilized field.”

I copy out these lines, not from vanity, but because they are very precious to me. This appeal to young hearts and their generous reply, and the unrest I was able to awaken in them—this is my compensation for nine months spent in prison and three years at Vyatka.

There is one thing more. Twice a week the post from Moscow came to Vyatka. With what excitement I waited near the post-office while the letters were sorted! How my heart beat as I broke the seal of my letter from home and searched inside for a little enclosure, written on thin paper in a wonderfully small and beautiful hand!

I did not read that in the post-office. I walked slowlyhome, putting off the happy moment and feasting on the thought that the letter was there.

These letters have all been preserved. I left them at Moscow when I quitted Russia. Though I longed to read them over, I was afraid to touch them.

Letters are more than recollections, the very life blood of the past is stored up in them; theyarethe past, exactly as it was, preserved from destruction and decay.

Is it really necessary once again to know, to see, to touch with hands which age has covered with wrinkles, what once you wore on your wedding-day?[109]

109.These letters were from Herzen’s cousin, Natálya Zakhárin, who became his wife in 1838.

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