Chapter 6 (1)

THE KREMLIN DEPARTMENT—MOSCOW UNIVERSITY—OUR SET—THE CHEMIST—THE MALOV
AFFAIR—THE CHOLERA—FILARET—V. PASSEK—GENERAL LISSOVSKY—THE SUNGUROV
AFFAIR

‘_Oh, years of boundless ecstasies,
Of visions bright and free!
Where now your mirth untouched by spite,
Your hopeful toil and noisy glee?_’
OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.

In spite of the lame general’s sinister predictions my father put my name down with N. B. Yussupov for a berth in the Kremlin department. I signed a paper and there the matter ended; I heard nothing more of the service, except that three years later Yussupov sent the Palace architect, who always shouted as though he were standing on the scaffolding of the fifth storey and there giving orders to workmen in the basement, to announce that I had received the first grade in the service. These amazing incidents were, I may remark in passing, useless, for I rose above the grades received in the service by taking my degree—it was not worth while taking so much trouble for the sake of two or three years’ seniority. And meanwhile this supposed post in the service almost prevented me from entering the university. The Council, seeing that I was reckoned as in the office of the Kremlin department, refused me the right to go in for the examination.

For those in the government service, there were special after-dinner courses of study, extremely limited in scope and only qualifying for entrance into the so-called ‘committee examinations.’ All the wealthy idlers, the young snobs who had learnt nothing, all those who did not want to serve in the army and were in a hurry to get the grade of assessor went in for the ‘committee examinations’; they were gold mines for the old professors, who coached them privately for twenty roubles the lesson.

To begin my life in these Caudine Forks of learning was far from suiting my ideas. I told my father resolutely that if he could not find some way out of it, I should resign my post in the service.

My father was angry, said that with my caprices I was preventing him from making a career for me, and abused the teachers who had put this nonsense into my head, but, seeing that all this had very little effect upon me, he made up his mind to go to Yussupov.

The latter settled the matter in a trice, after the fashion of a great nobleman and a Tatar. He called his secretary and told him to write me a leave of absence for three years. The secretary hesitated and hesitated, and at last, half in terror, submitted that leave of absence for longer than four months could not be given without the sanction of the Most High.

‘What nonsense, my man,’ the prince said to him. ‘Where is the difficulty? Well, if leave of absence is impossible, write that I commission him to attend the university courses for three years to perfect himself in the sciences.’

His secretary wrote this and next day I was sitting in the amphitheatre of the Physico-Mathematical auditorium.

The University of Moscow and the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Syelo play a significant part in the history of Russian education and in the life of the last two generations.

The Moscow University grew in importance together with the city itself after 1812. Degraded by Peter the Great from being the royal capital, Moscow was promoted by Napoleon (partly intentionally, but still more unintentionally) to being the capital of the Russian people. The people realised their ties of blood with Moscow from the pain felt at the news of its being taken by the enemy. From that time a new epoch began for the city. Its university became more and more the centre of Russian culture. All the conditions necessary for its development were combined—historical significance, geographical position, and the absence of the Tsar.

The intensified mental activity of Petersburg after the death of Paul came to a gloomy close on the Fourteenth of December. Nicholas appeared with five gibbets, with penal servitude, with the white strap and the light-blue uniform of Benckendorf.[69]

The tide turned, the blood rushed to the heart, the activity that was outwardly concealed was surging inwardly. Moscow University remained firm and was the foremost to stand out in sharp relief against the general darkness. The Tsar began to hate it from the time of the Polezhaev affair.[70] He sent A. Pissarev, the major-general of the ‘Kaluga Evenings,’ as director, commanded the students to be dressed in uniform, commanded them to wear a sword, then forbade them to wear a sword, condemned Polezhaev to be a common soldier for his verses and punished Kostenetsky and his comrades for their prose, destroyed the Kritskys[71] for a bust, sentenced us to exile for Saint-Simonism, then made Prince Sergey Mihailovitch Golitsyn director, and then took no further notice of that ‘hot-bed of vice,’ piously advising young men who had finished their studies at the Lyceum or at the School of Jurisprudence not to enter it.

Golitsyn was a surprising person, it was long before he could accustom himself to the irregularity of there being no lecture when a professor was ill; he thought the next on the list ought to take his place, so that it sometimes happened to Father Ternovsky to lecture in the clinic on women’s diseases and the gynæcologist Richter to discourse on the Immaculate Conception.

But in spite of that the university that had fallen into disgrace grew in influence; the youthful strength of Russia streamed to it from all sides, from all classes of society, as into a common reservoir; in its halls they were purified from the superstitions they had picked up at the domestic hearth, reached a common level, became like brothers and dispersed again to all parts of Russia and among all classes of its people.

Until 1848 the organisation of our universities was purely democratic. Its doors were open to every one who could pass the examination, who was neither a serf, a peasant, nor a man excluded from his commune. Nicholas spoilt all this; he put restrictions on the admission of students, increased the fees of those who paid their own expenses, and permitted none to be relieved of payment but poor _noblemen_. All these belonged to the series of senseless measures which will disappear with the last breath of that drag on the Russian wheel, together with passports, religious intolerance and so on.[72]

The young men of all sorts and conditions coming from above and from below, from the south and from the north, were quickly fused into a compact mass of comrades. Social distinctions had not among us the distressing influence which we find in English schools and barracks; I am not speaking of the English universities. They exist exclusively for the aristocracy and for the rich. A student who thought fit to boast among us of his blue blood or his wealth would have been sent to Coventry and made the butt of his comrades.

The external distinctions—and they did not go very deep—that divided the students arose from other causes. Thus, for instance, the medical section which was on the other side of the garden was not so closely united with us as the other faculties; moreover, the majority of the medical students consisted of seminarists and Germans. The Germans kept a little apart and were deeply imbued with the Western bourgeois spirit. All the education of the luckless seminarists, all their ideas were utterly different from ours, we spoke different languages; brought up under the yoke of monastic despotism, weighed down by rhetoric and theology, they envied us our ease and freedom; we were vexed at their Christian meekness.[73]

I entered in the section of physics and mathematics in spite of the fact that I had never had a marked ability, nor much liking for mathematics. Nick and I had been taught mathematics together by a teacher whom we loved for his anecdotes and stories; interesting as he was, he could hardly have developed a passion for his subject. His knowledge of mathematics extended only to conic sections, _i.e._ exactly as far as was necessary for preparing High School boys for the university; a real philosopher, he never had the curiosity to glance at the ‘university grades’ of mathematics.

What was particularly remarkable was that he had never read more than one book on the subject, and that book, Francoeur’s Course, he studied over and over again for ten years; but being continent by temperament and disliking superfluous luxury, he never went beyond a certain page.

I chose the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics because the natural sciences were taught in that Faculty, and just at that time I developed a great passion for natural science.

A rather strange meeting had led me to those studies.

After the famous division of the family property in 1822, which I have described, my father’s ‘elder brother’ went to live in Petersburg. For a long time nothing was heard of him, then suddenly a rumour came that he was getting married. He was at that time over sixty, and every one knew that he had a grown-up son besides other children. He married the mother of his eldest son; the bride, too, was over fifty. With this marriage he legitimised his son. Why not all the children? It would be hard to say why, if we had not known the chief object of it all; his one desire was to deprive his brothers of the inheritance, and this he completely attained by legitimising the son.

In the famous inundation of Petersburg in 1824 the old man was drenched with water in his carriage. He caught cold, took to his bed, and in the beginning of 1825 he died.

Of the son there were strange rumours. It was said that he was unsociable, refused to make acquaintances, sat alone for ever absorbed in chemistry, spent his life at his microscope, read even at dinner and hated feminine society. Of him it is said in _Woe from Wit_,[74]

‘He is a chemist, he is a botanist,
Our nephew, Prince Fyodor,
He flies from women and even from me.’

His uncles, who transferred to him the grudge they had against his father, never spoke of him except as ‘the Chemist,’ using this word as a term of disparagement, and assuming that chemistry was a subject that could not be studied by a gentleman.

His father used to oppress him dreadfully, not merely insulting him with the spectacle of grey-headed cynical vice, but actually being jealous of him as a possible rival in his seraglio. The Chemist on one occasion tried to escape from this ignoble existence by taking laudanum. The comrade with whom he used to work at chemistry by chance saved him. His father was thoroughly frightened, and before his death had begun to treat his son better.

After his father’s death the Chemist released the luckless odalisques, halved the heavy _obrok_ laid by his father on the peasants, forgave all arrears and presented them gratis with the army receipt for the full quota of recruits, which the old man used to sell them after sending his serfs as soldiers.

A year and a half later he came to Moscow. I longed to see him, for I liked him both for the way he treated his peasants and on account of the undeserved dislike his uncles felt for him.

One morning a small man in gold spectacles, with a big nose, with hair somewhat thin on the top, and with hands burnt by chemical reagents, called upon my father. My father met him coldly, sarcastically; his nephew responded in the same coin and gave him quite as good as he got: after taking each other’s measure, they began speaking of extraneous matters with external indifference, and parted politely but with concealed dislike. My father saw that he was an opponent who would not give in to him.

They did not become more intimate later. The Chemist very rarely visited his uncles; the last time he saw my father was after the Senator’s death, when he came to ask him for a loan of thirty thousand roubles for the purchase of land. My father would not lend it. The Chemist was moved to anger and, rubbing his nose, observed with a smile, ‘There is no risk whatever in it; my estate is entailed; I am borrowing money for its improvement. I have no children and we are each other’s heirs.’ The old man of seventy-five never forgave his nephew for this sally.

I took to visiting the Chemist from time to time. He lived in an extremely original way. In his big house on the Tverskoy Boulevard he used one tiny room for himself and one as a laboratory. His old mother occupied another little room on the other side of the corridor, the rest of the house was abandoned and remained exactly as it had been when his father left it to go to Petersburg. The blackened candelabra, the wonderful furniture among which were rarities of all sorts, a grandfather clock said to have been bought by Peter the Great in Amsterdam, an armchair said to have come from the house of Stanislav Leszcynski,[75] frames without pictures in them, pictures turned to the wall, were all left anyhow, filling up three big, unheated and unlighted drawing-rooms. Servants were usually playing some musical instrument and smoking in the hall, where in old days they had scarcely dared to breathe nor say their prayers. A man-servant would light a candle and escort one through this museum of antiquities, observing every time that there was no need to take my cloak off as it was very cold in the drawing-rooms. Thick layers of dust covered the horns and various curios, the reflections of which moved together with the candle in the elaborately carved mirrors, straw left from the packing lay undisturbed here and there together with scraps of paper and bits of string.

At last we reached the door hung with a rug which led to the terribly overheated study. In it the Chemist, in a soiled dressing-gown lined with squirrel fur, was invariably sitting, surrounded by books, phials, retorts, crucibles, and other apparatus. In that study where Chevalier’s microscope now reigned supreme and there was always a smell of chlorine, and where a few years before terrible infamous deeds were perpetrated—in that study I was born. My father on his return from foreign parts before his quarrel with his brother stayed for some months in his house, and in the same house, too, my wife was born in 1817. The Chemist sold the house two years later, and it chanced that I was in the house again at evening parties, at Sverbeyev’s, arguing there about Pan-Slavism and getting angry with Homyakov, who never lost his temper about anything. The rooms had been done up, but the front entrance, the vestibule, the stairs, the hall were all untouched, and so was the little study.

The Chemist’s housekeeping was even less complicated, especially when his mother had gone away for the summer to their estate near Moscow and with her the cook. His valet used to appear at four o’clock with a coffee-pot, pour into it a little strong broth and, taking advantage of the chemical furnace, would set it there to warm, together with various poisons. Then he would bring bread and half a woodcock from the restaurant, and that made up the whole dinner. When it was over the valet would wash the coffee-pot and it would return to its natural duties. In the evening, the valet would appear again, take from the sofa a heap of books, and a tiger-skin that had come down to the Chemist from his father, bring sheets, pillows and bedclothes, and the study was as easily transformed into a bedroom as it had been into a kitchen and a dining-room.

From the very beginning of our acquaintance the Chemist saw that I was interested in earnest, and began to persuade me to give up the ‘empty’ study of literature and the ‘dangerous and quite useless pursuit of politics,’ and take to natural science. He gave me Cuvier’s speech on _Geological Cataclysms_ and De Candolle’s _Plant Morphology_. Seeing that these were not thrown away upon me he offered me the use of his excellent collection, apparatus, herbariums, and even his guidance. He was very interesting on his own ground, extremely learned, witty and even polite; but one could not go beyond the monkeys with him; from stones to ourangoutangs, everything interested him, but he did not care to be drawn beyond them, particularly into philosophy, which he regarded as twaddle. He was neither a conservative nor a reactionary, he simply did not believe in people, that is, believed that egoism is the sole source of all action, and thought that it was restrained merely by the senselessness of some and the ignorance of others.

I was revolted by his materialism. The superficial, timid, half-Voltairianism of our fathers was not in the least like the Chemist’s materialism. His outlook was calm, consistent, complete. He reminded me of the celebrated answer made by Lalande[76] to Napoleon: ‘Kant accepts the hypothesis of God,’ Bonaparte said to him. ‘Sire,’ replied the astronomer, ‘in my studies I have never had occasion to make use of that hypothesis.’

The Chemist’s atheism went far beyond the sphere of theology. He considered Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire[77] a mystic and Oken[78] simply a degenerate. He closed the works of the natural philosophers with the same contempt with which my father had closed Karamzin’s _History_. ‘They have invented first causes, spiritual powers, and then are surprised that they can neither find them nor understand them,’ he said. This was a second edition of my father, in a different age and differently educated.

His views on all the problems of life were still more comfortless. He thought that there was as little responsibility for good and evil in man as in the beasts; that it was all a matter of organisation, circumstances, and the general condition of the nervous system, of which he said _more was expected than it was capable of giving_. He did not like family life, spoke with horror of marriage, and naïvely acknowledged that in the thirty years of his life he had never loved one woman. However, one warm spot in this frozen man still remained; it could be seen in his attitude to his old mother; they had suffered a great deal together at the hands of his father, and their troubles had united them; he touchingly surrounded her solitary and infirm old age with tranquillity and attention, as far as he knew how.

He never advocated his theories, except those that concerned chemistry; they came out casually or were called for by me. He even showed reluctance in answering my romantic and philosophic objections; his answers were brief, and he made them with a smile and with that delicacy with which a big old mastiff plays with a puppy, allowing him to tease and only pushing him off with a light pat of his paw. But it was just that which provoked me most and I would return to the charge without weariness, never gaining an inch of ground, however. Later on, namely twelve years afterwards, just as I recalled my father’s observations I frequently recalled the Chemist’s. Of course, he had been right in three-quarters of everything against which I argued, but of course I was right too. There are truths (we have spoken of this already) which like political rights are not given to those under a certain age.

The Chemist’s influence made me choose the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics; perhaps I should have done better to enter in the Medical Faculty, but there was no great harm in my first acquiring some degree of knowledge of the differential and integral calculus and then completely forgetting it.

Without the natural sciences there is no salvation for the modern man. Without that wholesome food, without that strict training of the mind by facts, without that closeness to the life surrounding us, without humility before its independence, the monastic cell remains hidden in the soul, and in it the drop of mysticism which may flood the whole understanding with its dark waters.

Before I completed my studies the Chemist had gone away to Petersburg, and I did not see him again until I came back from Vyatka. Some months after my marriage I went half secretly for a few days to the estate near Moscow where my father was then living. The object of my going was to effect a complete reconciliation with him, for he was still angry with me for my marriage.

On the way I halted at Perhushkovo where we had so many times broken our journey in old days. The Chemist was expecting me there and had actually got a dinner and two bottles of champagne ready for me. In those four or five years he had not changed at all except for being a little older. Before dinner he asked me quite seriously: ‘Tell me, please, openly, how do you find married life, is there anything good in it, or not much?’ I laughed. ‘What boldness it is on your part,’ he went on. ‘I wonder at you; in a normal condition a man can never venture on such a terrible step. Two or three very good matches have been proposed to me, but when I imagine a woman taking up her abode in my room, setting everything in order according to her ideas, perhaps forbidding me to smoke my tobacco, making a fuss and an upset, I am so panic-stricken that I prefer to die in solitude.’

‘Shall I stay the night with you or go on to Perhushkovo?’ I asked him after dinner.

‘I have plenty of room here,’ he answered, ‘but for you I think it would be better to go on, you will reach your father at ten o’clock. You know, of course, that he is still angry with you; well—in the evening before going to bed old people’s nerves are usually exhausted and feeble—he will probably receive you much better this evening than to-morrow; in the morning you will find him quite ready for battle.’

‘Ha, ha, ha! I recognise my teacher in physiology and materialism,’ said I, laughing heartily, ‘how your remark recalls those blissful days when I used to go to you like Goethe’s _Wagner_ to weary you with my idealism and listen with some indignation to your chilling opinions.’

‘Since then,’ he answered, laughing too, ‘you have lived enough to know that all men’s doings depend simply on their nerves and their chemical composition.’

Later on we had some sort of disagreement, probably we were both to blame.... Nevertheless in 1846 he wrote me a letter. I was then beginning to be the fashion after the publication of the first part of _Who is to Blame?_ The Chemist wrote to me that he saw with grief that I was wasting my talent on ‘idle pursuits!... I forgive you everything for the sake of your letters on the study of nature. In them I understood the German philosophy (so far as it is possible for the mind of man to do so)—why then instead of going on with serious work are you writing tales?’ I sent him a few friendly lines in reply, and with that our relations ended.

If the Chemist’s own eyes ever rest upon these lines, I would beg him to read them just before going to sleep at night when his nerves are exhausted, and then I am sure he will forgive me this affectionate gossip, especially as I keep a very warm and good memory of him.

And so at last the seclusion of the parental home was over. I was _au large_. Instead of solitude in our little room, instead of quiet and half-concealed interviews with Ogaryov alone, I was surrounded by a noisy family, seven hundred in number. I was more at home in it in a fortnight than I had been in my father’s house from the day of my birth.

But the parental roof pursued me even to the university in the shape of a footman whom my father ordered to accompany me, particularly when I went on foot. For a whole session I was trying to get rid of my escort and only with difficulty succeeded in doing so officially. I say ‘officially,’ because Pyotr Fyodorovitch, upon whom the duty was laid, very quickly grasped, first, that I disliked being accompanied, and, secondly, that it was a great deal more pleasant for him in various places of entertainment than in the hall of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, where the only pleasures open to him were conversation with the two porters and regaling them and himself with snuff.

With what object was an escort sent with me? Could Pyotr, who from his youth had been given to getting drunk for several days at a time, have prevented me from doing anything? I imagine that my father did not even suppose so, but for his own peace of mind took steps, which were insufficient but were still steps, like people who do not believe but take the sacrament. It was part of the old-fashioned education of landowners. Up to seven years old, it was the rule that I should be led by the hand up the staircase, which was rather steep; up to eleven, I was washed in my bath by Vera Artamonovna; therefore, very consistently, a servant was sent with me when I was a student; until I was twenty-one, I was not allowed to be out after half-past ten. I was inevitably in freedom and on my own feet when in exile; had I not been exiled, probably the same regime would have continued up to twenty-five or even thirty-five.

Like the majority of lively boys brought up in solitude, I flung myself on every one’s neck with such sincerity and impulsiveness, made propaganda with such senseless imprudence, and was so candidly fond of every one, that I could not fail to call forth a warm response from lads almost of the same age. (I was then in my seventeenth year.)

The sage rule—to be courteous to all, intimate with no one and to trust no one—did as much to promote this readiness to make friends as the persistent thought with which we entered the university, the thought that here our dreams would be accomplished, that here we should sow the seeds and lay the foundation of a league. We were persuaded that out of this lecture-room would come the company which would follow in the footsteps of Pestel and Ryleyev, and that we should be in it.

They were a splendid set of young men in our year. It was just at that time that theoretical tendencies were becoming more and more marked among us. The scholastic method of learning and aristocratic indolence were alike disappearing, and not yet replaced by that German utilitarianism which enriches men’s minds with science, as the fields with manure, for the sake of an increased crop. A considerable group of students no longer regarded science as a necessary but wearisome short-cut by which they would come to be collegiate assessors. The problems that were arising amongst us had no reference whatever to grades in the service.

On the other hand, the interest in science had not yet had time to degenerate into doctrinarianism; science did not draw us away from the life and suffering around us. Our sympathy with it raised the social morality of the students, too, in an extraordinary way. We said openly in the lecture-room everything that came into our heads; manuscript copies of prohibited poems passed from hand to hand, prohibited books were read with commentaries, but for all that I do not remember a single case of tale-bearing or treachery. There were timid young men who turned away and held aloof, but they too were silent.[79]

One silly boy, questioned by his mother on the Malov affair, under threat of the birch told her something. The fond mother—an aristocrat and a princess—flew to the rector and told him her son’s tale as proof of his penitence. We heard of this and tormented him so that he could not remain until the end of his session.

This affair, for which I too was imprisoned, deserves to be described.

Malov was a stupid, coarse, and uncultured professor in the political section. The students despised him and laughed at him. ‘How many professors have you in your section?’ asked the director of a student in the political lecture-room. ‘Nine, not counting Malov,’ answered the student.[80] Well, this professor, who had to be left out of the reckoning when the others were counted, began to be more and more insolent in his treatment of the students; the latter made up their minds to turn him out of the lecture-room. After deliberating together they sent two delegates to our section to invite me to come with an auxiliary force. I at once gave the word to go out to battle with Malov, and several students went with me; when we went into the lecture-room Malov was on the spot and saw us come in.

On the faces of all the students could be seen the same fear: that on that day he might say nothing rude to them. This anxiety was soon over.

The overflowing lecture-room was restless and a vague subdued hum rose from it. Malov made some observations; there began a scraping of feet. ‘You express your thoughts like horses, with your legs,’ observed Malov, probably imagining that horses think with a trot and a gallop, and a storm arose, whistling, hisses, shouts; ‘Out with him, _pereat_!’ Malov, pale as a sheet, made a desperate effort to control the uproar but could not; the students jumped on to the benches, Malov quietly left his chair and, shrinking together, began to make his way to the door; the students went after him, saw him through the university court into the street and flung his goloshes after him. The last circumstance was important, for the case at once assumed a very different character in the street; but where in the world are there lads of seventeen or eighteen who would consider that?

The University Council was alarmed and persuaded the director to present the affair as completely closed, and for that reason to put the ringleaders, or at least some of them, in prison. This was prudent; it might otherwise easily have happened that the Tsar would have sent an aide-de-camp who, with a view to gaining a cross, would have turned the affair into a plot, a conspiracy, a mutiny, and would have suggested sending all the culprits to penal servitude, which the Tsar would graciously have commuted to service as common soldiers. Seeing that vice was punished and virtue triumphant, the Tsar confined himself to graciously confirming the students’ wishes by authority of the Most High and dismissed the professor. We had driven Malov out as far as the university gates and he put him outside them. It was _vae victis_ with Nicholas, but on this occasion it was not for us to complain.

And so the affair went on merrily; after dinner next day the porter from the head office, a grey-headed old man, who conscientiously assumed _à la lettre_ that the students’ tips were for vodka and therefore kept himself continually in a condition approximating to drunkenness rather than sobriety, came to me bringing in the cuff of his coat a note from the rector; I was instructed to present myself before him at seven o’clock. After he had gone, a pale and frightened student appeared, a baron from the Baltic provinces, who had received a similar invitation and was one of the luckless victims led on by me. He began showering reproaches upon me and then asked advice as to what he was to say.

‘Lie desperately, deny everything, except that there was an uproar and that you were in the lecture-room.’

‘But the rector will ask why I was in the political lecture-room and not in my own.’

‘What of it? Why, don’t you know that Rodion Heiman did not come to give his lecture, so you, not wishing to waste your time, went to hear another.’

‘He won’t believe it.’

‘Well, that’s his affair.’

As we were going into the university courtyard I looked at my baron, his plump little cheeks were very pale and altogether he was in a bad way.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you may be sure that the rector will begin with me and not with you, so you say exactly the same with variations. You did not do anything in particular, as a matter of fact. Don’t forget one thing, for making an uproar and for telling lies ever so many of you will be put in prison, but if you go and tell tales and mix anybody else up in it before me, I’ll tell the others and we’ll poison your existence.’

The baron promised and kept his word honestly.

The rector at that time was Dvigubsky, one of the surviving specimens of the professors before the flood, or to be more accurate, before the fire, that is, before 1812. They are extinct now; with the directorship of Prince Obolensky the patriarchal period of Moscow University ended. In those days the government did not trouble itself about the university; the professors lectured or did not lecture, the students attended or did not attend, and went about, not in uniform jackets _ad instar_ of light-cavalry officers, but in all sorts of outrageous and eccentric garments, in tiny little caps that would scarcely keep on their virginal locks. The professors consisted of two groups or classes who placidly hated each other. One group was composed exclusively of Germans, the other of non-Germans. The Germans, among whom were good-natured and learned men such as Loder, Fischer, Hildebrand, and Heym himself, were as a rule distinguished by their ignorance of the Russian language and disinclination to learn it, their indifference to the students, their spirit of Western exclusiveness, their immoderate smoking of cigars and the immense quantity of decorations which they invariably wore. The non-Germans for their part knew not a single living language except Russian, were servile in their patriotism, as uncouth as seminarists, and, with the exception of Merzlyakov,[81] were treated as of little account, and instead of an immoderate consumption of cigars indulged in an immoderate consumption of liquor. The Germans for the most part hailed from Göttingen and the non-Germans were sons of priests.

Dvigubsky was one of the non-Germans: his appearance was so venerable that a student from a seminary, who came in for a list of classes, went up to kiss his hand and ask for his blessing, and always called him ‘The Father Rector.’ At the same time he was wonderfully like an owl with an Anna ribbon on its neck, in which form another student, who had received a more worldly education, drew his portrait. When he came into our lecture-room either with the dean Tchumakov, or with Kotelnitsky, who had charge of a cupboard inscribed _Materia Medica_, kept for some unknown reason in the mathematical lecture-room, or with Reiss, who was bespoken from Germany because his uncle was a very good chemist, and who, when he read French, used to call a lamp-wick a _bâton de coton_, and poison, _poisson_, and so cruelly distorted the word ‘lightning’ that many people supposed he was swearing—we looked at them with round eyes as at a collection of antiquities, as at the last of the Abencerrages,[82] representatives of a different age not so near to us as to Tredyakovsky[83] and Kostrov[84]; the times in which Heraskov[85] and Knyazhnin[86] were still read, the times of the good-natured Professor Diltey, who had two little dogs, one which always barked and the other which never barked, for which reason he very justly called one Bavardka and the other Prudentka.

But Dvigubsky was not at all a good-natured professor; he received us extremely curtly and was rude. I reeled off a fearful rigmarole and was disrespectful; the baron served up the same story. The rector, irritated, told us to present ourselves next morning before the Council, where in the course of half an hour they questioned, condemned and sentenced us and sent the sentence to Prince Golitsyn for ratification.

I had scarcely had time to rehearse the trial and the sentence of the University Senate to the students five or six times in the lecture-room when all at once the inspector, who was a major in the Russian army and a French dancing-master, made his appearance with a non-commissioned officer, bringing an order to seize me and conduct me to prison. Some of the students went to see me on my way, and in the courtyard there was already a crowd of young men, so evidently I was not the first taken; as we passed, they all waved their caps and their hands; the university soldiers moved them back but the students would not go.

In the dirty cellar which served as a prison I found two of the arrested men, Arapetov and Olov; Prince Andrey Obolensky and Rozenheim had been put in another room; in all, there were six of us punished for the Malov affair. Orders were given that we should be kept on bread and water; the rector sent some sort of soup, which we refused, and it was well we did so. As soon as it got dark and the lecture-rooms emptied, our comrades brought us cheese, game, cigars, wine, and liqueurs. The soldier in charge was angry and grumbled, but accepted twenty kopecks and carried in the provisions. After midnight he went further and let several visitors come in to us; so we spent our time feasting by night and sleeping by day.

On one occasion it somehow happened that the assistant-director Panin, the brother of the Minister of Justice, faithful to his Horse-Guard habits, took it into his head to go the round of the Imperial prison in the university cellars by night. We had only just lighted a candle and put it under a chair so that the light could not be seen from outside, and were beginning on our midnight repast, when we heard a knock at the outer door; not the sort of knock which weakly begs a soldier to open, which is more afraid of being heard than of not being heard; no, this was a peremptory knock, a knock of authority. The soldier was petrified; we hid the bottles and the students in a little cupboard, blew out the candle and threw ourselves on our trestle-beds. Panin entered. ‘I believe you are smoking?’ he said, so lost in thick clouds of smoke that we could hardly distinguish him and the inspector who was carrying a lantern. ‘Where do they get a light, do you give it them?’ The soldier swore that he did not. We answered that we had tinder with us. The inspector undertook to remove it and to take away the cigars, and Panin withdrew without observing that the number of caps in the room was double the number of heads.

On Saturday evening the inspector made his appearance and announced that I and another one might go home, but that the rest would remain until Monday. This distinction seemed to me insulting and I asked the inspector whether I might remain; he drew back a step, looked at me with the threateningly majestic air with which tsars and heroes in a ballet depict anger in a dance, and saying, ‘Stay by all means,’ walked away. I got more into trouble at home for this last sally than for the whole business.

And so the first nights I slept away from home were spent in prison. Not long afterwards it was my lot to have experience of a very different prison, and there I stayed not eight days but nine months, after which I went not home but into exile. All that comes later, however.

From that time forward I enjoyed the greatest popularity in the lecture-room. From the first I had been accepted as a good comrade. After the Malov affair, I became, like Gogol’s famous lady, a comrade ‘agreeable in all respects.’

Did we learn anything with all this going on, could we study? I imagine that we did. The teaching was more meagre and its scope narrower than in the ’forties. It is not the function of a university, however, to give a complete training in any branch of knowledge; its work is to put a man in a position to continue study on his own account; its work is to provoke inquiry, to teach men to ask questions. And this was certainly done by such professors as M. G. Pavlov, and on the other side, by such as Katchenovsky.

But contact with other young men in the lecture-rooms and the exchange of ideas and opinions did more to develop the students than lectures and professors.... The Moscow University did its work; the professors whose lectures contributed to the development of Lermontov, Byelinsky,[87] Turgenev, Kavelin,[88] and Pirogov[89] may play their game of boston in tranquillity and still more tranquilly lie under the earth.

And what original figures, what marvels there were among them—from Fyodor Ivanovitch Tchumakov, who made formulas to fit in with those in the text-book with the reckless freedom of the privileged landowner, adding and removing letters, taking powers for roots and _x_ for the known quantity, to Gavril Myagkov, who lectured on military tactics. From perpetually dealing with heroic subjects, Myagkov’s very appearance had acquired an air of drill and discipline; buttoned up to the throat and wearing a cravat entirely free from curves, he delivered his lectures as though giving words of command. ‘Gentlemen!’ he would shout; ‘in the field—of artillery!’ This did not mean that cannons were advancing into the field of battle, but simply that such was the heading in the margin. What a pity Nicholas avoided visiting the University! If he had seen Myagkov, he would certainly have made him Director.

And Fyodor Fyodorovitch Reiss, who in his chemistry lectures never went beyond the second person of the chemical divinity, _i.e._ hydrogen! Reiss, who had actually been made Professor of Chemistry because not he, but his uncle, had at one time studied that science! Towards the end of the reign of Catherine, the old uncle had been invited to Russia; he did not want to come, so sent his nephew instead....

Among the exceptional incidents of my course, which lasted four years (for the University was closed for a whole session during the cholera), were the cholera itself, the arrival of Humboldt and the visit of Uvarov.

Humboldt was welcomed on his return to Moscow from the Urals in a solemn assembly, held in the precincts of the University by the Society of Scientific Research, the members of which were various senators and governors—people, in fact, who took no interest in science, either natural or unnatural. The fame of Humboldt, a privy councillor of his Prussian Majesty, on whom the Tsar had graciously bestowed the Anna, and to whom he had also commanded that equipment and diploma should be presented free of charge, had reached even them. They were determined not to disgrace themselves before a man who had been to Mount Chimborazo and had lived at Sans-Souci.

To this day we look upon Europeans and upon Europe in the same way as provincials look upon those who live in the capital, with deference and a feeling of our own inferiority, flattering them and imitating them, taking everything in which we are different for a defect, blushing for our peculiarities and concealing them. The fact is that we were intimidated by the jeers of Peter the Great, by the insults of Biron, by the haughty superiority of German officers and French tutors, and we have not recovered from it. They talk in Western Europe of our duplicity and wily cunning; they mistake the desire to show off and swagger a bit for the desire to deceive. Among us the same man is ready to be naïvely Liberal with a Liberal or to play the Legitimist with a reactionary, and this with no ulterior motive, simply from politeness and a desire to please; the bump _de l’approbativité_ is strongly developed in our skulls.

‘Prince Dmitri Golitsyn,’ observed Lord Durham, ‘is a true Whig, a Whig in soul!’

Prince D. V. Golitsyn is a respectable Russian gentleman, but why he was a Whig and in what way he was a Whig I don’t understand. You may be certain that in his old age the prince wanted to please Durham and so played the Whig.

The reception of Humboldt in Moscow and in the University was no jesting matter. The Governor-General, various military and civic chiefs, and the members of the Senate, all turned up with ribbons across their shoulders, in full uniform, and the professors wore swords like warriors and carried three-cornered hats under their arms. Humboldt, suspecting nothing, came in a dark-blue coat with gold buttons, and, of course, was overwhelmed with confusion. From the vestibule to the hall of the Society of Scientific Research, ambushes were prepared for him on all sides: here stood the rector, there a dean, here a budding professor, there a veteran whose career was over and who for that reason spoke very slowly; every one welcomed him in Latin, in German, in French, and all this took place in those awful stone tubes, called corridors, in which one cannot stay for a minute without being laid up with a cold for a month. Humboldt, hat in hand, listened to everybody and answered everybody—I feel certain that all the savages among whom he had been, red-skinned and copper-coloured, caused him less trouble than his Moscow reception.

As soon as he reached the hall and sat down, he had to get up again. The Director, Pissarev, thought it necessary, in brief but vigorous language, to lay down the law in Russian concerning the services of his Excellency, the celebrated traveller; after which Sergey Glinka,[90] ‘the officer,’ with a voice of the year 1812, deep and hoarse, recited his poem which began:

‘_Humboldt—Prométhée de nos jours!_’

Whilst Humboldt wanted to talk about his observations on the magnetic needle and to compare his meteorological records on the Urals with those of Moscow, the rector came up to show him instead something plaited of the imperial hair of Peter the Great ... and Ehrenberg and Rosa had difficulty in finding a chance to tell him something about their discoveries.[91]

Things are not much better among us in the nonofficial world: ten years ago Liszt was received in Moscow society in much the same way. Silly enough things were done in his honour in Germany, but here it took quite a different character. In Germany, it was all old-maidish exaltation, sentimentality, all _Blumenstreuen_, while with us it was all servility, homage paid to power, rigid standing at attention, with us it was all ‘I have the honour to present myself to your Excellency.’ And in that case, unfortunately, there was Liszt’s fame as a celebrated Lovelace to add to it all. The ladies flocked round him, as peasant-boys at the cross-roads flock round a traveller while his horses are being harnessed, inquisitively examining himself, his carriage, his cap.... No one listened to anybody but Liszt, no one spoke to anybody else, nor answered anybody else. I remember that at one evening party, Homyakov,[92] blushing for the honourable company, said to me, ‘Please let us argue about something, that Liszt may see that there are people in the room not exclusively occupied with him.’ For the consolation of our ladies I can only say one thing, that in just the same way Englishwomen dashed about, crowded round, pestered and obstructed other celebrities such as Kossuth and afterwards Garibaldi. But alas for those who want to learn good manners from Englishwomen and their husbands!

Our second ‘famous’ visitor was also in a certain sense ‘the Prometheus of our day,’ only he stole the light not from Jupiter but from men. This Prometheus, sung not by Glinka but by Pushkin himself, in his ‘Epistle to Lucullus,’ was the Minister of Public Instruction, S. S. Uvarov. He amazed us by the multitude of languages and the variety of subjects with which he was acquainted; a veritable shopman in the stores of enlightenment, he had committed to memory patterns of all the sciences, samples or rather snippets of them. In the reign of Alexander, he wrote Liberal brochures in French; later on, corresponded on Greek subjects with Goethe in German. When he became Minister, he discoursed upon Slavonic poetry of the fourth century, upon which Katchenovsky observed to him that in those days our forefathers had enough to do to fight the bears, let alone singing ballads about the gods of Samothrace and the mercy of tyrants. He used to carry in his pocket, by way of a testimonial, a letter from Goethe, in which the latter paid him an extremely odd compliment, saying: ‘There is no need for you to apologise for your style; you have succeeded in what I never can succeed in doing—forgetting the German grammar.’

So this actual civil Pic-de-la-Mirandole[93] introduced a new kind of torture. He ordered that the best students should be selected to deliver a lecture, each on his own subject, instead of the professor. The deans, of course, selected the liveliest.

These lectures went on for a whole week. The students had to prepare in all the subjects of their course, and the deans picked out the student’s name and the subject by lot. Uvarov invited all the distinguished people of Moscow. Archimandrites and senators, the Governor-General and Ivan Ivanovitch Dmitriev—all were present.

I had to lecture on mineralogy in Lovetsky’s place—and already he is dead!

‘Where’s our old comrade Langeron!
Where’s our old comrade Benigsen!
You, too, are nowhere to be seen,
And you, too, might have never been!’

Alexey Leontyevitch Lovetsky was a tall, roughly-hewn, heavily-moving man with a big mouth and a large face, entirely devoid of expression. Removing in the corridor his pea-green overcoat adorned with a number of collars of varying size, such as were worn during the First Consulate, he would begin, before entering the lecture-room, in an even, passionless voice (which was in perfect keeping with his stony subject): ‘We concluded in the last lecture all that is necessary concerning the Siliceous Rocks.’ Then he would sit down and go on: ‘The Argillaceous Rocks....’ He had created an invariable system for formulating the qualities of each mineral, from which he never departed; so that it sometimes happened that the characteristics were entered in the negative:

‘Crystallisation—does not crystallise.

‘Employment—is not employed for any purpose.

‘Use—injurious to the organism....’

He did not, however, avoid poetry, nor moral reflections, and every time he showed us artificial stones and told us how they were made, he added: ‘Gentlemen, it’s a fraud!’ In dealing with husbandry, he found moral qualities in a good cock if he ‘crowed well and was attentive to the hens,’ and a distinct virtue in an aristocratic ram if he had ‘bald knees.’ He would also tell us touching tales in which flies describe how on a fine summer evening they walked about a tree and were covered with resin which turned into amber, and he always added: ‘That, gentlemen, is prosopopeia!’

When the dean summoned me, the audience was rather exhausted; two mathematical lectures had reduced the listeners, who did not understand a single word, to apathy and depression. Uvarov asked for something a little livelier and for a student with a ‘well-balanced tongue.’ Shtchepkin pointed to me.

I mounted the platform. Lovetsky was sitting near, motionless, with his arms on his knees like a Memnon or Osiris, and was looking uneasy. I whispered to him, ‘What luck that I have to lecture in your room. I won’t give you away.’

‘Don’t boast when you are going into action,’ the worthy professor responded, scarcely moving his lips and not looking at me. I almost burst out laughing; but when I looked before me, there was a mist before my eyes, I felt that I was turning pale and there was a sort of dryness on my tongue. I had never spoken in public before, the lecture-room was full of students—they relied upon me; at the table below were the ‘mighty of this world’ and all the professors of our section. I picked up the question and read in an unnatural voice, ‘Crystallisation, its conditions, laws and forms.’

While I was thinking how to begin, the happy thought occurred to me that if I made a mistake, the professors might notice it, but they would not say a word, while the rest of the audience knew nothing about the subject themselves, and the students would be satisfied so long as I did not break down in the middle, because I was a favourite. And so in the name of Haüy, Werner, and Mitscherlich, I delivered my first lecture, concluding it with philosophic reflections, and all the time addressing myself to the students and not to the Minister. The students and the professors shook hands with me and thanked me. Uvarov led me off to be introduced to Prince Golitsyn and the latter said something, of which I could catch nothing but the vowel sounds. Uvarov promised me a book in honour of the occasion, but never sent it.