CHAPTER VI

The Kremlin Offices—Moscow University—The Chemist—The Cholera—Philaret—Passek.

IN spite of the ominous prognostications of the one-legged general, my father entered my name for service at the Government offices in the Kremlin, under Prince Yusúpov. I signed some document, and there the matter ended. I never heard anything more about my office, except once, three years later, when a man was sent to our house by Yusúpov, to inform me that I had gained the first step of official promotion; this messenger was the court architect, and he always shouted as if he were standing on the roof of a five-storeyed house and giving orders from there to workmen in the cellar. I may remark in passing, that all this hocus-pocus was useless: when I passed my final examination at the University, this gave me at once the promotion earned by service; and the loss of a year or two of seniority was not serious. On the other hand, this pretence of office-work nearly prevented me from matriculating; for, when the University authorities found that I was reckoned as a Government clerk, they refused me permission to take the examination.

For the clerks in public offices there were special afternoon lectures, of an elementary kind, which gave the right of admission to a special examination. Rich idlers, young gentlemen whose education had been neglected, men who wished to avoid military service and to get the rank ofassessoras soon as possible—such were the candidates for this examination; and it served as a kind of gold-mine to the senior professors, who gave private instruction at twentyroublesa lesson.

To pass through these Caudine Forks to knowledge was entirely inconsistent with my views, and I told my father decidedly that unless he found some other method I should retire from the Civil Service.

He was angry: he said that my wilfulness prevented him from settling my future, and blamed my teachers for filling my head with this nonsense; but when he saw that all this had little effect upon me, he determined to wait on Prince Yusúpov.

The Prince settled the matter in no time; there was no shillyshallying about his methods. He sent for his secretary and told him to make out leave of absence for me—for three years. The secretary hummed and hawed and respectfully submitted to his chief that four months was the longest period for which leave could be granted without the imperial sanction.

“Rubbish, my friend!” said the Prince; “the thing is perfectly simple: if he can’t have leave of absence, then say that I order him to go through the University course and complete his studies.”

The secretary obeyed orders, and next day found me sitting in the lecture-theatre of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics.

The University of Moscow and the High School of Tsárskoë Seló[41]play an important part in the history of Russian education and in the life of the last two generations.

41.Tsárskoë Seló = The Tsar’s Village, near Petersburg. Púshkin was at this school.

After the year 1812, Moscow University and Moscow itself rose in importance. Degraded from her position as an imperial capital by Peter the Great, the city was promoted by Napoleon, partly by his wish but mainly against it, to be the capital of the Russian nation. The people discovered the ties of blood that bound them to Moscow by the pain they felt on hearing of her capture by the enemy. For her it was the beginning of a new epoch; and her University became more and more the centre of Russian education, uniting as it did everything to favour its development—historical importance and geographical position.

There was a vigorous outburst of intellectual activity in Petersburg after the death of the Emperor Paul; but this died away in the darkness that followed the fourteenth of December, 1825.

All was reversed, the blood flowed back to the heart, and all activity was forced to ferment and burrow underground. But Moscow University stood firm and was the first visible object to emerge from the universal fog.

The University soon grew in influence. All the youth and strength of Russia came together there in one common meeting-place, from all parts of the country and all sections of society; there they cast off the prejudicesthey had acquired at home, reached a common level, formed ties of brotherhood with one another, and then went back to every part of Russia and penetrated every class.

Down to 1848 the constitution of our universities was purely democratic. Their doors were open to everyone who could pass the examination, provided he was not a serf, or a peasant detained by the village community. The Emperor Nicholas limited the number of freshmen and increased the charges to pensioners, permitting poor nobles only to escape from this burden. But all this belongs to the class of measures that will disappear together with the passport system, religious intolerance, and so on.

A motley assemblage of young men, from high to low, from North and South, soon blended into a compact body united by ties of friendship. Among us social distinctions had none of that offensive influence which one sees in English schools and regiments—to say nothing of English universities which exist solely for the rich and well-born. If any student among us had begun to boast of his family or his money, he would have been tormented and sent to Coventry by the rest.

The external distinctions among us were not deep and proceeded from other sources. For instance, the Medical School was across the park and somewhat removed from the other faculties; besides, most of the medical students were Germans or came from theological seminaries. The Germans kept somewhat apart, and the bourgeois spirit of Western Europe was strong in them. The whole education of the divinity students and all their ideas were different from ours; we spoke different languages; they had grown up under the yoke of monastic control and beencrammed with rhetoric and theology; they envied our freedom, and we resented their Christian humility.

Though I joined the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, I never had any great turn or much liking for mathematics. Niko and I were taught the subject by the same teacher, whom we liked because he told us stories; he was very entertaining, but I doubt if he could have developed a special passion in any pupil for his branch of science. He knew as far as Conic Sections,i.e., just what was required from schoolboys entering the University; a true philosopher, he had never had the curiosity to glance at the “University branches” of mathematics. It was specially remarkable that he taught for ten years continuously out of a single book—Francœur’s treatise—and always stopped at the same page, having no ambition to go beyond the required minimum.

I chose that Faculty, because it included the subject of natural science, in which I then took a specially strong interest; and this interest was due to a rather odd meeting.

I have described already the remarkable division of the family property in 1822. When it was over, my oldest uncle went to live in Petersburg, and nothing was heard of him for a long time. At last a report got abroad that he intended to marry. He was then over sixty, and it was well known that he had other children as well as a grown-up son. He did, in fact, marry the mother of his eldest son and so made the son legitimate. He might as well have legitimised the other children; but the chief object of these proceedings was well known—he wished to disinherit his brothers; and he fully attained that object bythe acknowledgement of his son. In the famous inundation of 1824, the water flooded the carriage in which he was driving. The old man caught cold, took to his bed, and died in the beginning of 1825.

About the son there were strange reports: it was said that he was unsociable and had no friends; he was interested in chemistry and spent his life over the microscope; he read even at meals and disliked women’s society.

His uncles transferred to him the grievance they had felt against his father. They always called him “The Chemist,” using this as a term of contempt, and giving it to be understood that chemistry was a quite impossible occupation for a gentleman.

He had suffered horrible treatment from his father, who kept a harem in the house and not only insulted him by the spectacle of shameless senile profligacy but was actually jealous of his son’s rivalry. From this dishonourable existence The Chemist tried to escape by means of laudanum; but a friend who worked at chemistry with him saved his life by a mere chance. This frightened the father, and he treated his son better afterwards.

When his father died, The Chemist set free the fair captives of the harem, reduced by half the heavy dues levied by his father on the peasants, forgave all arrears, and gave away for nothing the exemptions which his father used to sell, excusing household servants from service in the Army.

When he came to Moscow eighteen months later, I was anxious to see him; for I was inclined to like him for his treatment of his peasants, and also for the dislike which his uncles unjustly felt for him.

He called on my father one morning—a shortish man, with a large nose and half his hair gone; he wore gold spectacles, and his fingers were stained with chemicals. My father’s reception was cold and cutting, but the nephew gave just as good as he got; when they had taken each other’s measure, they talked on casual topics with a show of indifference and parted politely, but a strong feeling of dislike was concealed on both sides. My father saw that his antagonist would never give way.

They never came closer afterwards. The Chemist very rarely visited his uncles; the last time he and my father met was after the Senator’s death—he came to ask a loan of 30,000roubles, in order to buy land. My father refused to lend it; The Chemist was angry, but he rubbed his nose and said with a smile: “What possible risk is there? My estate is entailed, and I want the money for improvements. I have no children, so that you are the heir to my land as I am to yours.”[42]My father, who was then seventy-five, never forgave his nephew this sally.

42.Herzen himself was excluded from succession by his birth.

I began to visit him from time to time. His was a singular existence. He had a large house on the Tver Boulevard, where he lived in one very small room and used another as a laboratory. His old mother occupied another small room at the end of the passage; and the rest of the house was unused, and left exactly as it was when his father migrated to Petersburg. Tarnished chandeliers, valuable furniture, rarities of all kinds, grandfather’s clocks supposed to have been bought by Peter the Great in Amsterdam,armchairs supposed to have belonged to Stanislas Leshchinski,[43]empty frames, and pictures turned to the wall—all these, in complete disorder, filled three large drawing-rooms which were neither heated nor lighted. In the outer hall the servants were generally playing the banjo and smoking—in the very room where formerly they hardly dared to breathe or say their prayers. One of them lit a candle and escorted me through the long museum; and he never failed to advise me to keep on my overcoat, because it was very cold in the drawing-rooms. Thick layers of dust covered all the projections of the furniture, and the contents of the rooms were reflected in the carved mirrors and seemed to move with the candle; straw, left over from packing, lay comfortably here and there, together with scraps of paper and bits of string.

43.King of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV.

After passing through these rooms, you came at last to a curtained door which led into the study. The heat in this room was terrific; and here The Chemist was always to be found, wearing a stained dressing-gown trimmed with squirrel-fur, sitting behind a rampart of books, and surrounded by bottles, retorts, crucibles, and other apparatus. A few years earlier, this room had been the scene of shocking vice and cruelty; now it smelt of chlorine and was ruled by the microscope; and in this very room I was born! When my father returned from foreign parts, he had not yet quarrelled with his brother, and spent some months under his roof. Here too my wife was born in the year 1817. After two years The Chemist sold the house, and I spent many evenings there, arguing about Pan-Slavism and losing my temper with Homyakóv,[44]though nothing could make him lose his. The chief rooms were altered then, but the outside steps, front hall, and staircase were unchanged; and the little study was left as before.

44.Alexyéi Homyakóv (1804-1860), poet, theologian, and a leader of the Slavophile party.

The Chemist’s household arrangements, simple at all times, were even simpler when his mother went to the country in summer and took the cook with her. At four in the afternoon, his valet brought a coffee-pot, made some strong broth in it, and placed it by the fire of the chemical furnace, where all sorts of poisons were brewing; then he fetched half a chicken and a loaf from an eating-house; and that was his master’s dinner. When it was eaten, the valet washed the coffee-pot and restored it to its proper functions. The man came again in the evening: he removed from the sofa a heap of books and a tiger-skin which The Chemist had inherited from his father; and when he had spread out a sheet and fetched pillows and a coverlet, the study, which had served as kitchen and drawing-room, was converted just as easily into a bedroom.

At the very beginning of our acquaintance, The Chemist perceived that I was no mere idler; and he urged me to give up literature and politics—the former was mere trifling and the latter not only fruitless but dangerous—and take to natural science. He gave me Cuvier’sEssay on Geological ChangesandCandolle’s Botanical Geography, and, seeing that I profited by the reading, he placed at my disposal his own excellent collections andpreparations, and even offered to direct my studies himself. On his own ground he was very interesting—exceedingly learned, acute, and even amiable, within certain limits. As far as the monkeys, he was at your service: from the inorganic kingdom up to the orang-outang, nothing came amiss to him; but he did not willingly venture farther, and philosophy, in particular, he avoided as mere moonshine. He was no enemy to reform, nor Rip van Winkle: he simply disbelieved in human nature—he believed that selfishness is the one and only motive of our actions, and is limited only by stupidity in some cases and by ignorance in others.

His materialism shocked me. It was quite unlike the superficial and half-hearted scepticism of a previous generation. His views were deliberate, consistent, and definite—one thought of Lalande’s famous answer to Napoleon. “Kant accepts the hypothesis of a deity,” said Napoleon. “Sir,” answered the astronomer, “in the course of my studies I have never found it necessary to make use of that hypothesis.”

The Chemist’s scepticism did not refer merely to theology. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire he called a mystic, and Oken a mere lunatic. He felt for the works of natural philosophers the contempt my father had expressed for Karamzín—“They first invent spiritual forces and First Causes, and then they are surprised that they cannot prove them or understand them.” In fact, it was my father over again, but differently educated and belonging to a different generation.

His views on social questions were even more disquieting. He believed that men are no more responsible for their actions, good or bad, than beasts: it was all a matterof constitution and circumstances and depended mainly on the state of the nervous system, from which, as he said, people expect more than it is able to give. He disliked family life, spoke with horror of marriage, and confessed frankly that, at thirty years of age, he had never once been in love. This hard temperament had, however, one tender side which showed itself in his conduct towards his mother. Both had suffered much from his father, and common suffering had united them closely. It was touching to see how he did what he could to surround her solitary and sickly old age with security and attention.

He never tried to make converts to his views, except on chemistry: they came out casually or were elicited by my questions. He was even unwilling to answer the objections I urged from an idealistic point of view; his answers were brief, and he smiled as he spoke, showing the kind of considerateness that an old mastiff will show to a lapdog whom he allows to snap at him and only pushes gently from him with his paw. But I resented this more than anything else and returned unwearied to the attack, though I never gained a single inch of ground. In later years I often called to mind what The Chemist had said, just as I recalled my father’s utterances; and, of course, he was right in three-fourths of the points in dispute. But, all the same, I was right too. There are truths which, like political rights, cannot be conveyed from one man to another before a certain age.

It was The Chemist’s influence that made me choose the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Perhaps I shouldhave done better to take up medicine; but it did me no great harm to acquire a partial knowledge of differential and integral equations, and then to lose it absolutely.

Without a knowledge of natural science, there is no salvation for the modern man. This wholesome food, this strict training of the mind by facts, this proximity to the life that surrounds ours, and this acknowledgement of its independence—without these there lurks somewhere in the soul a monastic cell, and this contains a germ of mysticism which may cover like a dark cloud the whole intellect.

Before I had gone through College, The Chemist had moved to Petersburg, and I did not meet him again till my return from exile. A few months after my marriage I paid a half-secret visit of a few days to my father, who was living near Moscow. He was still displeased at my marriage, and the purpose of my journey was to make peace between us once for all. I broke my journey at the village of Perkhushkov, the place where we had so often stayed in my youth. The Chemist was expecting me there; he even had dinner ready for me, and two bottles of champagne. Four or five years had made no change in him, except that he looked a little older. Before dinner he said to me quite seriously: “Please tell me frankly how marriage and domestic life strike you. Do you find it to your taste, or only passable?” I laughed, and he went on: “I am astonished at your boldness; no man in a normal condition could ever decide on so awful a step. More than one good match has been suggested to me; but when I think that a woman would do as she liked in my room, arranging everything in what she thinks order, forbidding me to smoke possibly, making a noise and talking nonsense,I feel such terror of the prospect that I prefer to die in solitude.”

“Shall I stop the night here or go on to my father’s?” I asked him after dinner.

“There is room enough in the house,” he answered, “but for your own sake I advise you to go on; you will get there by ten o’clock. Of course you know he’s still angry with you. Well, old people’s nerves are generally less active at night, before they get to sleep, and you will probably get a much better reception to-night than to-morrow morning; by then his spurs will be sharp for the fray.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” I laughed, “there is my old instructor in physiology and materialism! You remind me of those blissful days, when I used to come to you, like Wagner inFaust, to bore you with my idealism and to suffer, with some impatience, the cold water you threw on it.”

He laughed too and replied, “You have lived long enough, since then, to find out that all human actions depend merely on the nerves and chemical combination.”

Later, we somehow drifted apart; probably we were both to blame. Nevertheless, he wrote me a letter in 1846. I had published the first part ofWhose Fault Is It?[45]and was beginning to be the fashion. He wrote that he was sorry to see me wasting my powers on trivial objects. “I made it up with you because of your letters on the study of Nature, in which you made me understand (as far as it is intelligible to the mind of man) the German philosophy. But why, instead of going on with serious work, do you write fairy tales?” I sent a few friendly words in reply, and there our relations ended.

45.A novel.

If these lines happen to fall under The Chemist’s eyes, I beg that he will read them before going to bed, when the nerves are less active; and I am convinced that he will be able then to pardon this friendly gossip, and all the more because I cherish a real regard for him.

And so, at last, the doors of my prison were opened, and I was free. The solitude of my smallish room and the quiet half-secret interviews with my one friend, Ogaryóv, were now exchanged for a noisy family of six hundred members. In a fortnight, I was more at home there than I had ever been, from the day I was born, in my father’s house.

But even here my father’s house pursued me, in the shape of a footman whom my father sent with me to the University, especially when I walked there. I spent a whole term in trying to dodge this escort, and was formally excused from it at last. I say “formally,” because my valet Peter, who was entrusted with this duty, very soon realised, first, that I disliked being escorted, and secondly, that he himself would be much better off in various places of amusement than in the entrance-hall of my lecture-room, where he had no occupation except to exchange gossip and pinches of snuff with the two porters. What was the motive of this precaution? Was it possible that Peter, who had been liable all his life to drinking-bouts that lasted for days, could keep me straight? I don’t suppose my father believed that; but, for his own peace of mind, he took measures—ineffective, indeed, but still measures—much in the way that freethinkers keep Lent. This is a characteristic feature of the old system of educationin Russia. Till I was seven, I was not allowed to come downstairs alone—the flight was rather steep; and Vyéra Artamónovna went on bathing me till I was eleven. It was of a piece with this system that I should have a servant walking behind me to College, and should not be allowed, before I was twenty-one, to be out later than half-past ten. I was never really free and independent till I was banished; but for that incident, the system would probably have gone on till I was twenty-five or thirty-five.

Like most energetic boys who have been brought up alone, I rushed into the arms of my companions with such frank eagerness, made proselytes with such sublime confidence, and was myself so fond of everyone, that I could not but kindle a corresponding warmth in my hearers, who were mostly of the same age as myself. I was then seventeen.

The process of making friends was hastened partly by the advice which worldly wisdom gave me—to be polite to all and intimate with none, to confide in nobody; and there was also the belief which we all took with us to College, the belief that here our dreams would be realised, that here we should sow the seed of a future harvest and lay the foundations of a permanent alliance.

The young men of my time were admirable. It was just the time when ideals were stirring more and more in Russia. The formalism of theological training and Polish indolence had alike disappeared, and had not yet given place to German utilitarianism, which applies culture to the mind, like manure to a field, in the hope of a heavier crop. The best students had ceased to consider learningas a tiresome but indispensable byway to official promotion; and the questions which we discussed had nothing to do with advancement in the Civil Service.

On the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge had not yet become divorced from realities, and did not distract our attention from the suffering humanity around us; and this sympathy heightened thesocialmorality of the students. My friends and I said openly in the lecture-room whatever came into our heads; copies of forbidden poems were freely circulated, and forbidden books were read aloud and commented on; and yet I cannot recall a single instance of information given by a traitor to the authorities. There were timid spirits who held aloof and shut their eyes; but even they held their tongues.

One foolish boy made some disclosures to his mother, when she questioned him, under threat of the rod, about the Málov affair. The fond mother—she was a Princess and a leader in society—rushed to the Rector and communicated her son’s disclosures, in order to prove his repentance. We found this out, and tormented him so, that he left before his time was up.

But this episode, which led to my confinement within the walls of the University prison, is worth telling.

Málov, though a professor in the University, was a stupid, rude, ill-educated man, an object of contempt and derision to the students. One of them, when asked by a Visitor, how many professors there were in their department, replied that there were nine, not counting Málov.[46]And this man, who could be spoken of in this way, beganto treat his class with more and more rudeness, till they determined to turn him out of the lecture-room. When their plan was made, they sent two spokesmen to our department, and invited me to bring reinforcements. I raised the fiery cross against the foe at once, and was joined by some adherents. When we entered Málov’s lecture-room, he was there and saw us.

46.There is here an untranslatable play on words.

One fear only was depicted on the faces of all the audience—that he might refrain for once from rude remarks. But that fear soon passed off. The tightly packed lecture-room was in a fever and gave vent to a low suppressed noise. Málov made some objection, and a scraping of feet began. “You are like horses, expressing your thoughts with your feet,” said the professor, imagining, I suppose, that horses think by gallop and trot. Then the storm broke, with hisses and yells. “Turn him out! turn him out!Pereat!” Málov turned white as a sheet and made a desperate effort to control the noise, but failed; the students jumped up on the benches. Málov slowly left his chair, hunched himself up, and made his way to the door. The students followed him through the court to the street outside, and threw his goloshes out after him. The last detail was important: if once it reached the street, the proceeding became much more serious; but what lads of seventeen or eighteen would ever take that into account?

The University Council took fright and induced the Visitor to represent the affair as settled, and, with that object, to consign the guilty persons or someone, at least, to the University prison. That was rather ingenious on their part. Otherwise, it was likely enough that the Emperor would send anaide-de-camp, and that theaide-de-camp,in order to earn a cross, would have magnified the affair into conspiracy and rebellion; then he would have advised penal servitude for all the offenders, and the Emperor, in his mercy, would have sent them to the colours instead. But seeing vice punished and virtue triumphant, the Emperor merely confirmed the action of the students by dismissing the professor. Though we drove Málov as far as the University gates, it was Nicholas who drove him out of them.

So the fat was in the fire. On the following afternoon, one of the porters hobbled up to me, a white-haired old man who was normally in a state more drunk than sober, and produced from the lining of his overcoat a note from the Rector for me: I was ordered to call on him at seven in the evening. The porter was soon followed by a student, a baron from the Baltic Provinces, who was one of the unfortunate victims enticed by me, and had received an invitation similar to mine. He looked pale and frightened and began by heaping reproaches on me; then he asked me what I advised him to say.

“Lie desperately,” I answered; “deny everything, except that there was a row and you were present.”

“But if the Rector asks why I was in the wrong lecture-room?”

“That’s easy. Say of course that our lecturer did not turn up, and that you, not wishing to waste your time, went to hear someone else.”

“He won’t believe me.”

“That’s his affair.”

When we entered the University yard, I looked at my baron: his plump cheeks were very pale, and he was obviously feeling uncomfortable. “Listen to me,” I said;“you may be sure that the Rector will deal with me first. Say what I say, with variations; you really took no special part in the affair. But remember one thing: for making a row and for telling lies about it, they will, at most, put you in the prison; but, if you are not careful and involve any other student, I shall tell the rest and we shall poison your existence.” The baron promised, and kept his word like a gentleman.

The Rector at that time was Dvigubski, a survival and a typical specimen of the antediluvian professor—but, for flood I should substitute fire, the Great Fire of 1812.

They are extinct now: the patriarchal epoch of Moscow University ends with the appointment of Prince Obolenski as Visitor. In those days the Government left the University alone: the professors lectured or not, the students attended or not, just as they pleased, and the latter, instead of the kind of cavalry uniform they have now, wore mufti of varying degrees of eccentricity, and very small caps which would hardly stick on over their virgin locks. Of professors there were two classes or camps, which carried on a bloodless warfare against each other—one composed exclusively of Germans, the other of non-Germans. The Germans included some worthy and learned men, such as Loder, Fischer, Hildebrandt, and Heim; but they were distinguished as a rule for their ignorance and dislike of the Russian language, their want of sympathy with the students, their unlimited consumption of tobacco, and the large number of stars and orders which they always wore. The non-Germans, on their side, knew no modern language but Russian; they had the ill-breedingof the theological school and the servile temper of their nation; they were mostly overworked, and they made up for abstention from tobacco by an excessive indulgence in strong drinks. Most of the Germans came from Göttingen, and most of the non-Germans were sons of priests.

Dvigubski belonged to the latter class. He looked so much the ecclesiastic that one of the students—he had been brought up at a priests’ school—asked for his blessing and regularly addressed him as “Your Reverence” in the course of an examination. But he was also startlingly like an owl wearing the Order of St. Anne; and as such he was caricatured by another student who had come less under church influences. He came occasionally to our lecture-room, and brought with him the dean, Chumakov, or Kotelnitski, who had charge of a cupboard labelledMateria Medica, and kept, for some unknown reason, in the mathematical class-room; or Reiss, who had been imported from Germany because his uncle knew chemistry, and lectured in French with such a pronunciation thatpoissontook the place ofpoisonin his mouth, and some quite innocent words sounded unprintable. When these old gentlemen appeared, we stared at them: to us they were a party of “dug-outs,” the Last of the Mohicans, representatives of a different age, quite remote from ours—of the time when Knyazhnín and Cheraskov were read, the time of good-natured Professor Dilthey, who had two dogs which he namedBabilandBijou, because one never stopped barking and the other was always silent.

But Dvigubski was by no means a good-natured professor: his reception of us was exceedingly abrupt anddiscourteous; I talked terrible nonsense and was rude, and the baron played second fiddle to me. Dvigubski was provoked and ordered us to appear before the Council next morning. The Council settled our business in half an hour: they questioned, condemned, and sentenced us, and referred the sentence, for confirmation, to Prince Golitsyn.

I had hardly had time to give half a dozen performances in the lecture-room, representing the proceedings of the University Court, when the beginning of the lecture was interrupted by the appearance of a party, consisting of our inspector, an army major, a French dancing-master, and a corporal, who carried an order for my arrest and incarceration. Some students escorted me, and there were many more in the court-yard, who waved their hands or caps. Clearly I was not the first victim. The University police tried in vain to push them back.

I found two captives already immured in the dirty cellar which served as a prison, and there were two more in another room; six was the total number of those who suffered for this affair. We were sentenced to a diet of bread and water, and, though we declined some soup which the Rector sent us, we did not suffer; for when the College emptied at nightfall, our friends brought us cheese, game, cigars, wine, andliqueurs. The sentry grumbled and scolded, but he took a small bribe, and introduced the supplies. After midnight, he moved to some distance and allowed several of our friends to join us. And so we spent our time, feasting by night and sleeping by day.

A certain Panin, a brother of the Minister of Justice and employed under our Visitor, mindful of Army traditions,took it into his head one night to go the rounds and inspect our cellar-prison. We had just lit a candle, keeping it under a chair to betray no light, and were attacking our midnight meal, when a knocking was heard at the outer door, not the meek sound that begs for admittance and fears to be heard more than not to be heard, but a knock of power and authority. The sentry turned rigid, we hid the bottles and our guests in a cupboard, blew out the light, and dropped on our pallet-beds. Panin came in. “You appear to be smoking,” he said—the smoke was so thick that Panin and the inspector who were carrying a lantern were hardly visible. “Where do they get a light from? From you?” he asked the sentry. The man swore he was innocent, and we said that we had got tinder of our own. The inspector promised to take it and our cigars away; and Panin went off, without ever noticing that there were twice as many caps in the room as heads.

On Saturday evening the inspector appeared and announced that I and one other might go home; the rest were to stay till Monday. I resented this proposal and asked him whether I might stay. He fell back a step, looked at me with that expression of dignified wrath which is worn by ballet-dancers when representing angry kings or heroes, and said, “By all means, if you want to!” Then he left us; and this sally on my part brought down more paternal wrath on me than any other part of the affair.

Thus the first nights which I spent away from home were spent in prison. I was soon to experience a prison of another kind, and there I spent, not eight days, but nine months; and when these had passed, instead of going home, I went into exile. But much happened before that.

From this time I was a popular hero in the lecture-room. Till then I was considered “all right” by the rest; but, after the Málov affair, I became, like the lady in Gógol, all right in the fullest sense of that term.

But did we learn anything, meanwhile, and was study possible under such circumstances? I think we did. The instruction was more limited in quantity and scope than in the forties. But a university is not bound to complete scientific education: its business is rather to put a man in a position to walk by himself; it should raise problems and teach a man to ask questions. And this is exactly what was done by such professors as Pávlov and Kachenovsky, each in his own way. But the collision of young minds, the exchange of ideas, and the discussion of books—all this did more than professors or lectures to develop and ripen the student. Moscow University was a successful institution; and the professors who contributed by their lectures to the development of Lérmontov, Byelínski, Turgénev, Kavélin, and Pirógov, may play cards with an easy conscience, or, with a still easier conscience, rest in their graves.

And what astonishing people some of them were! There was Chumakov, who treated the formulae of Poinsot’sAlgebralike so many serfs—adding letters and subtracting them, mixing up square numbers and their roots, and treating x as the known quantity. There was Myágkov, who, in spite of his name,[47]lectured on the harshest of sciences, the science of tactics. The constant study of thisnoble subject had actually given a martial air to the professor; and as he stood there buttoned up to the throat and erect behind his stock, his lectures sounded more like words of command than mere conversation. “Gentlemen, artillery!” he would cry out. It sounded like the field of battle, but it only meant that this was the heading of his next discourse. And there was Reiss, who lectured on chemistry but never ventured further than hydrogen—Reiss, who was elected to the Chair for no knowledge of his own but because his uncle had once studied the science. The latter was invited to come to Russia towards the end of Catherine’s reign; but the old man did not want to move, and sent his nephew instead.

47.Myágkiis the Russian for “mild.”

My University course lasted four years, the additional year being due to the fact that a whole session was lost owing to the cholera. The most remarkable events of that time were the cholera itself, and the visits of Humboldt and Uvárov.

When Humboldt[48]was on his way back from the Ural Mountains, he was welcomed to Moscow at a formal meeting of the Society for the Pursuit of Natural Science, most of whose members were state functionaries of some kind, not at all interested in science, either natural or unnatural. But the glory of Humboldt—a Privy Councillor of the Prussian King, a man on whom the Tsar had graciously conferred the Order of St. Anne, with instructions that the recipient was to be put to no expense in the matter—was a fact of which even they were not ignorant; andthey were determined to show themselves to advantage before a man who had climbed Chimborazo and who lived at Sans-Souci.[49]

48.Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859), born at Berlin, a famous writer on natural science.

49.The Prussian palace, near Potsdam.

Our attitude towards Europe and Europeans is still that of provincials towards the dwellers in a capital: we are servile and apologetic, take every difference for a defect, blush for our peculiarities and try to hide them, and confess our inferiority by imitation. The fact is that we are intimidated: we have never got over the sneers of Peter the Great and his coadjutors, or the superior airs of French tutors and Germans in our Civil Service. Western nations talk of our duplicity and cunning; they believe we want to deceive them, when we are only trying to make a creditable appearance and pass muster. A Russian will express quite different political views in talking to different persons, without any ulterior object, and merely from a wish to please: the bump of complaisance is highly developed in our skulls.

“Prince Dmitri Golitsyn,” said Lord Durham on one occasion, “is a true Whig, a Whig at heart.” Prince Golitsyn was a worthy Russian gentleman, but I do not understand in what sense he was a Whig. It is clear enough that the Prince in his old age wished to be polite to Lord Durham and put on the Whig for that purpose.

Humboldt’s reception in Moscow and at the University was a tremendous affair. Everyone came to meet him—the Governor of the city, functionaries military andcivil, and the judges of the Supreme Court; and the professors were there wearing full uniform and their Orders, looking most martial with swords and three-cornered hats tucked under their arms. Unaware of all this, Humboldt arrived in a blue coat with gilt buttons and was naturally taken aback. His way was barricaded at every point between the entrance and the great hall: first the Rector stopped him, then the Dean, now a budding professor, and now a veteran who was just ending his career and therefore spoke very slowly; each of them delivered a speech of welcome in Latin or German or French, and all this went on in those terrible stone funnels miscalled passages, where you stopped for a minute at the risk of catching cold for a month. Humboldt listened bare-headed to them all and replied to them all. I feel convinced that none of the savages, either red-skinned or copper-coloured, whom he had met in his travels, made him so uncomfortable as his reception at Moscow.

When he reached the hall at last and could sit down, he had to get up again. Our Visitor, Pisarev, thought it necessary to set forth in a few powerful Russian sentences the merits of His Excellency, the famous traveller; and then a poet, Glinka, in a deep hoarse voice recited a poem of his own which began—

Back to Index Next