Chapter 29: Our Friends

THE MOSCOW CIRCLE—TABLE TALK—THE WESTERNERS (BOTKIN, RYEDKIN, KRYUKOV, AND YEVGENY KORSH)—ON THE GRAVE OF A FRIEND

I

With our visit to Pokrovskoe and the quiet summer we spent there begins the harmonious, mature, and active part of our Moscow life, which lasted till my father’s death and perhaps until we went abroad.

Our nerves, overstrained in Petersburg and Novgorod, had recovered, our spiritual storms had subsided. The agonising analysis of ourselves and of each other, the useless reopening of recent wounds, the incessant going back to the same painful subjects was over; and our shaken faith in our own infallibility gave a truer and more earnest character to our lives. My article _On a Drama_ was the last word of the sickness we had passed through.

On the external side, the only restriction we suffered from was police supervision; I cannot say it was very oppressive, but the unpleasant feeling of a Damocles’ cane wielded by the local police-constable was very distasteful.

Our new friends received us warmly, far more warmly than two years before. Foremost among them stood Granovsky, he took the leading place in those five years. Ogaryov was almost all the time abroad. Granovsky filled his place for us. To him we are indebted for the happiest moments of that period. There was a wonderful power of love in his nature. With many I was more in agreement in opinion, but to him I was nearer—deep down, somewhere in the soul.

Granovsky and all of us were very busy, all hard at work, one lecturing in the university, another contributing to reviews and magazines, another studying Russian history; the first beginnings of all that was done afterwards date from this period.

By now we were far from being children; in 1842 I was thirty; we knew only too well where our work was leading us, but we went on. We went along our chosen path, no longer rashly but deliberately, with the calm, even step to which experience and family life had trained us. This did not mean that we had grown old, no, we were still young, and that is how it was that some coming from the university lecture-room, others publishing articles or editing newspapers were every day in danger of being attested, dismissed, exiled.

Such a circle of talented, cultured, many-sided, and pure-hearted people I have met nowhere since, neither in the highest ranks of the political nor on the summits of the literary and aristocratic world. Yet I have travelled a great deal, I have lived everywhere and with all sorts of people. I have been brought by the revolution into contact with all that was foremost in culture, and I am honestly bound to say the same thing.

The finished, self-contained personality of the Western European, which surprises us at first by its specialisation, surprises us later by its one-sidedness. He is always satisfied with himself, his self-sufficiency offends us. He never forgets his personal views, his position is altogether cramped and his morals only appropriate to paltry surroundings.

I do not imagine that men were always like this here; the Western European is not in a normal condition, _he is moulting_. Unsuccessful revolutions have turned inwards, none of them have transformed him, but each has left its trace and confused his ideas, while the natural historical process has left in the foreground the slimy stratum of the petty-bourgeois, under which the fossilised aristocratic classes are buried and the rising masses submerged. Petty-bourgeoisdom is incompatible with the Russian character—and thank God for it!

Whether it is due to our carelessness, or our lack of moral stability and of definite work, or our youth in the matter of culture, or the aristocratic character of our bringing-up, any way we are on the one hand far more artists in life, and on the other far simpler than Western Europeans; we have not their specialised knowledge, but on the other hand we are far more many-sided than they. Persons of culture are not common amongst us, but their culture is richer, wider in its scope, free from hedges and barriers. It is quite different in Western Europe.

Talking to the nicest people here[57] you immediately reach contradictions where there is nothing in common, and it is quite impossible to convince. In this stubborn obstinacy and instinctive lack of comprehension you seem to be knocking your head against the limits of a completed world.

Our theoretical differences, on the contrary, brought more living interest into our lives, more craving for active exchange of opinions, kept our minds more vigorous and helped us to progress; we grew in this friction against each other, and in reality were the stronger for this co-operation which Proudhon has so superbly described in the sphere of mechanical labour.

I love to dwell on that time of work in unison, of a full, throbbing pulse, of harmonious order and manly struggle, on those years in which we were young for the last time!...

Our little circle met frequently, sometimes at the house of one, sometimes of another, most often at mine. Together with chat, jests, supper, and wine, there was the most active, the most rapid exchange of ideas, of news, and of knowledge; every one handed on what he had read or learned. Views came out in argument and what had been worked out by each became the property of all. There was nothing of significance in any sphere of knowledge, in any literature, or in any art, which did not come under the notice of some one of us, and was not at once communicated to all.

It was just this character in our gatherings that dull pedants and tedious scholars failed to understand. They saw the meat and the bottles, but they saw nothing else. Feasting goes with fullness of life, ascetic people are usually dry, egoistic people, we were not monks, we lived on all sides, and, sitting round the table, gained more in culture and did no less than those fasting toilers who grub in the backyards of science.

I will not have anything said against you, my friends, nor against that bright, splendid time; I think of it with more than love, almost with envy. We were not like the emaciated monks of Zurbaran,[58] we did not weep over the sins of the world, we only sympathised with its sufferings, and were ready with a smile for anything, and not depressed with forebodings of our sacrifices in the future. Ascetics who are for ever austere have always excited my suspicion; if they are not pretending, either their mind or their stomach is out of order.

‘You’re right, my friend, you’re right....’

Yes, you were right, Botkin—and far more so than Plato—when you sometimes taught us, not in gardens and porticos (it is too cold in Russia without a roof on) but round the friendly dinner-table, that a man may find ‘pantheistic enjoyment’ alike in contemplating the dance of the sea-waves and of Spanish maidens, in listening to the songs of Schubert and in sniffing the fragrance of turkey stuffed with truffles.

Listening to your sage words, I appreciated for the first time the democratic spirit of our language which talks of ‘hearing an odour,’ putting smell on a level with sound.

It was not for nothing that you left your lodging in Moroseika and learned in Paris to respect the culinary art, and from the banks of the Guadalquivir the religion not only of feet, but of calves, supreme and sovereign, _soberana pantorrilla_!

Yet Ryedkin was in Spain—but what good did he get from it? He went to that land of historical lawlessness for the sake of making juridical commentaries on Puchta[59] and Savigny.[60] Instead of looking at the fandango and the bolero, he looked at the rising in Barcelona (which ended exactly in the same way as every _cachucha_—that is in nothing) and talked so much about it afterwards that the curator Strogonov shook his head and began looking at Ryedkin’s lame leg and muttering something about barricades, as though doubtful whether the radical jurist had really hurt his leg falling out of the diligence on to the pavement in loyal Dresden.

‘What disrespect for learning! You know I don’t like such jokes,’ says Ryedkin severely, not in the least vexed.

‘That m—m—m—ay be so,’ observes Korsh, stammering, ‘but why is it you so identify yourself with learning that one can’t make fun of you without insulting it?’

‘Come now, there will be no end to it,’ says Ryedkin, and with the determination of a man who has read the whole of Roteck[61] attacks the soup, pelted lightly with Kryukov’s jests—elegantly modelled on an antique pattern.

But the attention of all has already abandoned them; it is bent upon the sturgeon, which is expounded by Schtchepkin himself, who has studied the flesh of contemporary fish more thoroughly than Agassiz did the bones of antediluvian ones. Botkin glances at the sturgeon, screws up his eyes and gently shakes his head, not from side to side but backwards and forwards; only Ketscher, indifferent on principle to the splendours of this world, lights his pipe and speaks of something else. Do not be angry with these lines of nonsense; I will not go on with them, they dropped almost unconsciously from my pen when I thought of our Moscow dinners; for a minute I forgot both the impossibility of repeating jokes and the fact that these sketches are living only for me, and for few, very few, survivors. I feel terrified when I think how short a time ago the path seemed so long, so very long before us all!...

And now those who have gone rise up before my eyes, not with the cloud of death about them, but young, full of strength. One of them, like Stankevitch, died far away from home—I mean E. P. Galahov.

How we used to laugh at his stories! It was not merry laughter, though, but more like that which Gogol sometimes excites. Jests and witticisms flashed from Kryukov and from Yevgeny Korsh like sparkling wine, from their exuberance. There was nothing bright in Galahov’s humour, it was the humour of a man out of harmony with himself and with his surroundings, thirsting for peace and serenity, but with no great hope of finding them.

Having been brought up in the aristocratic fashion, Galahov very early got into the Izmailovsky Regiment and also left it very early, and then set to work to educate himself in earnest. With a vigorous, but more impulsive and passionate than dialectic mind, he tried with petulant impatience to wring out the truth, and the practical truth too, immediately applicable to life. He did not notice, as the greater number of Frenchmen do not, that truth can only be reached by method and remains inseparable from it; truth as a result is but a truism, a commonplace. Galahov sought not with modest self-abasement what was to be found, but sought for a truth that was to be comforting, and it is no wonder that it eluded his capricious pursuit. He was vexed and angry. People of that type cannot live in negation, in analysis; dissection is hateful to them, they seek for something ready-made, complete, creative. What could our age, and in the reign of Nicholas too, give Galahov?

He rushed hither and thither, knocking at every door, even at the Catholic Church, but his living soul was revolted by the gloomy twilight, the damp, grave-like, prison atmosphere of her comfortless crypts. Leaving the old Catholicism of the Jesuits and the new of Buchez,[62] he was beginning to approach philosophy, but her cold, inhospitable portals repelled him, and for several years he found rest in Fourierism.

The ready-made organisation, the obligatory regulations and almost barrack-like discipline of the phalanstery, though the critical may find little to like in it, has undoubtedly great attractions for those tired people who beg almost with tears for Truth to take them in her arms and lull them to sleep. Fourierism offers a definite aim—work, and work in common. Men are very often ready to give up their own will for the sake of being rid of hesitation and uncertainty. This occurs over and over again in the most ordinary daily affairs. ‘Would you like to go to the theatre to-day, or drive out of town?’ ‘As you like,’ answers the other; they don’t know what to do and wait with impatience for some circumstance to decide for them. This was the groundwork upon which Cabet’s[63] settlement, the communistic convent, the Stauropigalian and Icarian communities were formed in America. The restless French workmen, educated by two revolutions and two reactions, began at last to be exhausted and to be assailed by doubts, frightened by them; they were glad of something new, renounced their aimless freedom, and submitted in Icaria to a strict discipline and subordination which was certainly no less severe than the monastic rule of the Benedictines.

Galahov was too cultured and independent to be completely lost in Fourierism, but for some years it attracted him. When I met him in Paris in 1847 the feeling he cherished for the phalanstery was more like the tenderness we feel for the school at which we have studied, for the house in which we have spent some peaceful years, than that which believers have for their church.

In Paris Galahov was even more charming and original than in Moscow. His aristocratic character, his generous, chivalrous ideas were wounded at every step; he looked at the petty-bourgeois world surrounding him there with the disgust with which fastidious people look at something dirty. Neither the French nor the Germans impressed him, and he rather looked down on many of the heroes of the day—with extreme simplicity pointing out their petty triviality, mercenary views, and insolent conceit. In his disdain for these people he even displayed a national haughtiness, really quite foreign to him. Speaking, for instance, of a man whom he greatly disliked, he would by his expression, by his smile and the screwing up of his eyes, compress into the one word ‘German’ a whole biography, a whole physiology, a regular series of the petty, coarse, clumsy failings especially characteristic of the German race.

Like all nervous people Galahov was very variable; he was sometimes silent and dreamy, but _par saccades_ would talk freely and with heat, would carry his listeners away by serious subjects on which he had felt deeply, and sometimes made them roar with laughter at the unexpected freakishness of phrase or startling aptness of the pictures he sketched in two or three strokes.

To repeat the things he said is almost impossible. I will recall as best I can one of his stories, and that in a brief extract. In Paris conversation somehow turned on the unpleasant feeling with which we cross our frontier. Galahov began describing how he had travelled for the last time to his estate; it was a _chef-d’œuvre_.

‘I drive up to the frontier; rain, sleet, a log painted black and white lying across the road; we wait, they won’t let us through. I look out: a Cossack with a pike on horseback comes riding down upon us. “Your passport, please.” I give it to him and say, “I’ll come to the guard-house with you, brother, it is very wet here.” “You can’t go there, sir.” “Why so?” “Kindly wait.” I turned towards the Austrian guard-house, but that was no good either: another Cossack with the face of a Chinaman seemed to spring out of the earth. “You can’t go there, sir!” What had happened? “Kindly wait!” And the rain was pouring and pouring.... All at once a sergeant shouts from the guard-house: “Lift it up!” There is a clanking of chains and the striped guillotine begins rising; we drive under it, the chains clank again and the beam descends. There, I thought, I am caught. In the guard-house a military clerk is copying out my passport: “Is this yourself?” he asks. I promptly give him a _zwanziger_. Then the sergeant comes in; he says nothing, but I make haste and give him a _zwanziger_. “Everything is correct, you can go on to the Customs.” I get in, drive off ... only I still fancy they are pursuing me. I look round—a Cossack with a pike—trot, trot, after me.... “What is it, brother?” “I am escorting your honour to the Customs.” At the Customs a clerk in spectacles looks through my books. I give him a _thaler_ and say, “You needn’t trouble, the books are all scientific, medical!” “To be sure they are: hey! porter, lock up the box again!” Again a _zwanziger_.

‘They let me go at last. I take a _troika_, we drive past endless fields; suddenly there is a glow in the distance, it grows redder and redder ... a fire. “Look,” I say to the driver, “how dreadful!” “It is no matter,” he answers, “it must be a cottage or a barn burning. Come, come, look alive, get on!” Two hours later the sky is red on the other side; this time I do not even ask, comforted by the reflection that it is a hut or a barn on fire.

‘I came to Moscow from the country in Lent. The snow had almost melted, the sledge-runners grated on the cobbles, the street lamps were dimly reflected in the dark pools, and the trace-horse flung up the frozen mud in large clods straight into one’s face. And what is very queer, as soon as the spring comes and there are four or five fine days, clouds of dust appear instead of the mud; the police-master coughs, and standing anxiously on his droshky points with dissatisfaction at it, while the policemen bustle about and scatter powdered brick by way of laying the dust!’

Galahov was extremely absent-minded, and in him absent-mindedness was as charming a defect as stuttering was in Yevgeny Korsh; sometimes he was a little vexed, but as a rule he laughed himself at the extraordinary mistakes into which he was continually falling.

Madame H—— once invited him to an evening party. Galahov went with us to hear ‘Linda di Chamonix’; after the opera he went to Chevalier’s, and after spending an hour and a half there drove home, changed his clothes, and went off to Madame H——’s. There was a candle burning in the vestibule and some baggage was lying about. He went into the dining-room—there was no one there; he went into the drawing-room, there he found Madame H——’s husband, who had just come from Penza and was still in his travelling clothes. He looked with surprise at Galahov, who inquired what sort of a journey he had had and quietly sat down in an armchair. He said that the roads were very bad and that he was very tired. ‘And where is Marya Dimitryevna?’ asked Galahov. ‘She has been asleep for hours.’ ‘Asleep? Why, is it so late?’ he asked, beginning to suspect the truth. ‘Four o’clock,’ answered H——. ‘Four o’clock!’ repeated Galahov. ‘Excuse me, I only wanted to congratulate you on your safe arrival.’

Another time he came to an evening party at the same house; all the men were in swallow-tails and the ladies in evening dress. Galahov either had not received an invitation or had forgotten it, anyway he entered the drawing-room in his overcoat; he sat down, took a candle, lighted a cigar, and began talking without observing the visitors or their costumes. Two hours later he asked me: ‘Are you going anywhere?’ ‘No.’ ‘But you are in evening dress?’ I burst out laughing. ‘Ough, how absurd!’ muttered Galahov, snatched up his hat and went away.

When my son was five years old, Galahov brought him for the Christmas tree a wax doll as tall as the child himself. Galahov sat the doll at the table and awaited the effect of the surprise. When the Christmas tree was ready and the doors were opened, Sasha, breathless with joy, moved slowly about, casting fascinated eyes on the tinsel and candles, but suddenly he stopped—stood stock still, flushed crimson, and with a roar rushed back. ‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ we all asked; bathed in bitter tears he only repeated: ‘There is a strange boy there, I don’t want him, I don’t want him.’ He saw in Galahov’s doll a rival, an _alter ego_, and was deeply mortified at it, but Galahov was even more deeply mortified; he caught up the unlucky doll, went home, and for a long time disliked speaking about it.

The last time I met him was in the autumn of 1847 in Nice. The Italian movement was working up just then: he was carried away by it. In spite of his ironical attitude he kept romantic hopes and still eagerly ran after convictions. Our long conversations, our arguments led me to think of recording them. _From the Other Shore_ begins with one of our conversations. I read the beginning of it to Galahov; he was then very ill, visibly wasting away and on the brink of the grave. Not long before his death he sent me in Paris a long letter full of interest. It is a pity that I have not got it, I would have published extracts from it.

From his grave I pass to another, fresher and even more dear.

II

ON THE GRAVE OF A FRIEND

‘_Generous and pure in spirit with a heart_
_Tender as a caress.... And friendship with him_
_Lives in my memory like a fairy tale._’

... In 1840 when I was passing through Moscow I met Granovsky[64] for the first time. He had only just come back from foreign parts and been appointed to the Chair of History in the university. He attracted me by his noble, thoughtful appearance, his melancholy eyes under overhanging brows, and mournfully good-natured smile; in those days his hair was long, and he was wearing a dark blue Berlin overcoat of a peculiar cut, with velvet revers and cloth fastenings. His features, dress, dark hair—all gave so much grace and elegance to his figure as he stood at the dividing line between youth and a richly developing manhood, that even a man not easily enthusiastic could not have remained indifferent to him. I have always respected beauty, and looked upon it as a talent and a strength.

I had but a passing glimpse of him then, and carried away with me to Vladimir a noble image, and a conviction, perhaps founded on it, that he would one day be my friend. My presentiment did not deceive me. Two years later, after I had been in Petersburg and, at the end of my second exile, returned to live in Moscow, a close and deep friendship was formed between us.

Granovsky was gifted with an amazing tact of the heart. His whole nature was so remote from the irritability of diffidence, from pretentiousness, so clear, so candid, that he was extraordinarily easy to get on with. He did not oppress me with his friendship, and his love was deep and equally free from jealous exactingness and unconcerned indifference. I do not remember that Granovsky ever touched roughly or awkwardly upon those delicate ‘capillary tissues’ that shrink from light and noise and exist in every man who has really lived. That was why one was not afraid to speak to him of the things of which it is hard to speak even with those most near and dear, whom one trusts completely though some scarcely audible chords in them are not tuned to the same pitch.

In contact with his loving, serene, and indulgent spirit all the angular discords vanished, the voice of over-sensitive vanity was almost mute. He was a uniting link for many things and many people among us, and often brought together in their sympathy with him whole circles mutually hostile, and friends on the brink of separation. Granovsky and Byelinsky, completely unlike each other, were among the noblest and most remarkable figures of our circle.

Towards the end of the oppressive period from which Russia is now emerging, when everything was crushed to the earth, when only the voice of official infamy dared make itself heard, when literature had been brought to a standstill, and instead of humane learning a theory of slavery was taught, when the censorship shook its head over the parables of Christ and blotted out Krylov’s _Fables_—in those days, if one saw Granovsky on the lecture platform one’s spirit was comforted. ‘All is not lost yet if he still goes on speaking,’ every one thought, and breathed more freely.

And yet Granovsky was not a fighter like Byelinsky, nor a dialectician like Bakunin. His strength lay not in keen polemic nor in bold denunciation, but just in positive moral influence, in the absolute confidence which he inspired, in the artistic completeness of his nature, the calm serenity of his spirit, the purity of his character, and in his constant and profound protest against the existing order in Russia. Not only his words were effective but also his silence; his thought, denied free utterance, came out to plainly in his face that it was hard not to read it, especially in a land in which a narrow despotism has trained us all to guess and to divine the hidden word. In the gloomy years of persecution from 1848 down to the death of Nicholas, Granovsky succeeded, not only in keeping his chair in the university, but also his independent views—and that because a feminine delicacy, a softness of expression, and the reconciling power of which we have spoken were harmoniously combined with chivalrous courage and the complete devotion of passionate conviction.

Granovsky reminds me of a number of the reflectively calm preachers and revolutionaries of the reformation—not those fierce, turbulent spirits who ‘feel their life fully in their wroth’ like Luther, but the serene, mild reformers who put the crown of glory on their heads as simply as the crown of thorns. Their gentleness nothing can ruffle, they go forward with firm step but with no loud tramping of feet; judges fear these men, they are ill at ease with them; their smile of reconciliation leaves a sting in their torturer’s conscience.

Such was Coligny himself, such were the best of the Girondists; and certainly Granovsky in all the harmonious moulding of his soul, in his romantic bent, in his dislike of extremes, might more readily have been a Huguenot or a Girondist than an Anabaptist or a follower of the Montagnards.

Granovsky’s influence on the university, and on the whole of the younger generation, was immense, and outlived him; he left a long streak of light behind him. I look with peculiar tenderness at the books dedicated to his memory by his former students, at the warm, enthusiastic lines about him in their prefaces and in magazine articles, at the good, youthful desire to connect their new work with the spirit of that friend, to touch gently on his grave as they begin, to claim their intellectual pedigree from him.

Granovsky’s development had been different from ours. Educated in Oryol, he went to the Petersburg University. As he received but little money from his father he was obliged from a very early age to write ‘to order’ for the papers. He and his friend Yevgeny Korsh, whom he met in his university days and with whom he maintained the closest friendship up to his death, used to work for Senkovsky, who needed fresh energies and inexperienced lads in order to transform their conscientious work into the effervescing wine of ‘The Library of Good Reading.’

There was no tempestuous period of passion and dissipation in his life. When he had taken his degree the Institute of Pedagogy sent him to Germany.

In Berlin Granovsky met Stankevitch, and that was the most important event of his youth.

Any one who knew them both would understand how immediately Granovsky and Stankevitch must have rushed at each other. There was in them so much that was similar, in character, in tendency, in age ... and each bore within him the fatal seed of premature death. But mere resemblance is not enough to give men this close intimacy, this enduring sense of kinship. Only that love is deep and lasting in which each completes the other: for active love difference is as necessary as resemblance; without it the feeling is lifeless and passive and passes into a mere habit.

There was a vast difference in the abilities of the two young men and in the direction of their energies. Stankevitch, from early years trained by the Hegelian dialectic, had a conspicuous talent for speculative thought, and if he brought the aesthetic element into his thinking, he certainly brought philosophy as much into aesthetics. Granovsky, who had deep sympathy with the intellectual tendencies of the day, had neither love nor talent for abstract thought. His choice of history as his chief pursuit showed a clear understanding of his own vocation. He would never have made either a metaphysician or a remarkable naturalist. He could never have endured the passionless impartiality of logic, nor the passionless objectivity of nature; he could not have renounced everything for the sake of thought, nor have renounced himself for the sake of observation; the doings of men, on the contrary, interested him keenly. And, indeed, is not history the same thought and the same nature expressed in a different form? Granovsky thought in history, learned from history, and later on made propaganda through history, while Stankevitch in a natural and poetic way communicated to him, not only the theory of contemporary learning but also its method.

Pedants who estimate the value of thought by the sweat and labour it has cost will doubt this.... But, we would ask them, what about Proudhon and Byelinsky? Had not they a better grasp even of Hegel’s method than all the scholastics who studied it until they went bald and wrinkled? And yet neither of them knew German, neither of them had read one of Hegel’s works, nor one of the dissertations of his followers of the left or right wing, but had only talked sometimes about his method with his disciples.... Granovsky’s life in Berlin with Stankevitch was, to judge from the stories of the one and the letters of the other, one of the most radiant periods of his existence, in which the exuberance of youth, of energy, of the first passionate impulses, of fun and irony without malice, went hand in hand with earnest intellectual work, all warmed and fostered by a deep, ardent friendship such as is only found in youth.

Two years later they were separated. Granovsky went to Moscow to take the Chair of History at the university; Stankevitch went to Italy for his health and died of consumption. The death of Stankevitch was a great shock to Granovsky. Long afterwards in my presence he received a medallion of his dead friend; I have rarely seen such quiet, speechless, overwhelming sorrow.

It happened soon after his marriage. The harmony that surrounded his new life with peace and calm was overcast with mourning. It was long before the traces of it passed away—indeed, I do not know whether they ever passed entirely.

His wife was very young and hardly yet formed; she retained that peculiar element of youthful awkwardness, even of the apathy which is not infrequently met with in young girls with flaxen hair, especially if they are of German descent. These natures, often gifted and strong, cannot readily come to full consciousness when they awaken. The shock that had awakened the young girl had been so tender and so free from pain and conflict, had come so early that she had scarcely noticed it. Her blood still flowed slowly and serenely.

Granovsky’s love for her was a quiet, gentle affection, rather deep and tender than passionate. There was something serene and touchingly calm in the atmosphere of their youthful household. It did the heart good to see at times beside Granovsky engrossed in his work the tall, willowy figure of his silent companion, deeply in love and happy. Looking at them, I used to think of the serene chaste families of the early Protestants who fearlessly sang forbidden psalms, ready to go hand in hand, calmly and firmly, to face the inquisitor.

They seemed to me like brother and sister, the more so as they had no children.

We quickly became friends and saw each other almost every day; we sat through the nights until dawn talking of one thing and another.... It is in those wasted hours and through them that people grow together inseparably and irrevocably.

It is dreadful and painful to me to think that later on Granovsky and I were for a long time at variance over theoretical convictions. To us they were not something extraneous but the real foundation of our lives. But I hasten to add that if time proved that we could think differently, could fail to understand and could wound each other, time has also proved with redoubled force later on that we could neither part nor cease to be friends, that even death could not divide us.

It is true that, much later, a streak of bitterness was added to a theoretical difference between Granovsky and Ogaryov, who loved each other ardently and deeply, but we shall see that it too was, though late, completely effaced.

As for our disputes Granovsky himself put an end to them; he concluded a letter from Moscow to me in Geneva on August 25th, 1849, with the following words. With pride and reverence I repeat them: ‘What was best and strongest in my soul has gone into my affection for you two (that is Ogaryov and me). There is in it something of passion which set me weeping in 1846 and blaming myself for being unable to break a tie which apparently could not last. Almost with despair I discovered that you were bound fast to my soul with threads which I could not cut without tearing away the living flesh. This interval has not been profitless to me. I have come out of it victorious over the _worse side_ of myself. _Of the romanticism for which you blamed me not a trace is left._ On the other hand, all that was romantic in my very nature has gone into my personal attachments. Do you remember my letter about your _Krupov_? It was written on a night that I well remember. A black shroud dropped off my soul, your image rose up before me in all its brightness, and I stretched out my hand to you in Paris as lightly and lovingly as I held it out in the happy holy minutes of our life in Moscow. It is not your talent only that had so great an effect on me. That play brought all of you back to me with a rush. Once you wounded me by saying: “Don’t build anything on the personal, believe only in the universal,” while I always laid so much stress on the personal. But for me personal and universal are blended in you, that is why I love you so warmly and completely.’

Let these lines be remembered when my account of our difference is read....

At the end of 1843 I published my articles on ‘Dilettantism in Learning.’ Their success was a source of childlike pleasure to Granovsky. He used to go from house to house with _Notes of the Fatherland_, used to read them aloud himself with comments, and was seriously vexed if anybody did not like them. After that it was my lot to see Granovsky’s success, and a success of a very different order. I am speaking of his first public lectures on the ‘Mediaeval History of France and England.’

‘Granovsky’s lectures,’ Tchaadayev said to me as we came away from the third or fourth, out of a lecture-hall packed to overflowing with ladies and all the aristocratic society of Moscow, ‘are of historical significance.’ I entirely agreed with him. Granovsky turned the lecture-hall into a drawing-room, a place for meeting, for social intercourse of the _beau monde_. To do this he did not deck out history in lace and gauze, quite the contrary; his language was severe, extremely grave, full of force, daring, and poetry, which roused his hearers and had a powerful effect on them. His boldness passed without provoking interference, not from any compromises he made but from the mildness of expression which was natural to him, from the absence of sentences _à la française_, putting big dots on tiny i’s like the moral after a fable. As he laid the events of history before his audience, grouping them artistically, he spoke _in them_ so that the thought unuttered, but perfectly clear, was the more readily assimilated by his hearers that it seemed to be their own thought.

The end of the first lecture was the scene of a regular ovation, a thing unheard of in Moscow University. When at the end, deeply moved, he thanked the audience, every one leapt up in a sort of delirium, ladies waved their handkerchiefs, others rushed to the platform, pressed his hands, asked for his portrait. I myself saw young men with flushed cheeks shouting through their tears: ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ There was no possibility of getting out. Granovsky, pale as a sheet, stood with his arms folded and his head a little bent; he wanted to say a few words more but could not. The applause, the shouting, the fury of approbation was redoubled, the students ranged themselves on each side of the stairs and left the general public to make a noise in the lecture-room. Granovsky made his way, exhausted, to the council-room; a few minutes later he was seen leaving it, and again there was endless applause; he turned with a deprecating gesture, and, ready to drop with emotion, went into the office. There I flung myself on his neck and we wept in silence....

Tears as happy flowed down my cheeks when the hero Ciceruacchio,[65] in the Coliseum, glorified by the last rays of the setting sun, dedicated his youthful son to the Roman people, who had risen in armed insurrection, a few months before they both fell shot without trial by the armed assassins of the graceless youth[66] who wore the crown!

Yes, those were precious tears; the first, born of my faith in Russia, the second, of my faith in the Revolution!

Where is that Revolution? Where is Granovsky? Gone together with the boy with the black curls, and the broad-shouldered _popolano_, and the others who were so near and dear. Faith in Russia is still left. Surely it will not be my lot to lose that also?

And why did a blind chance carry off Granovsky, that noble worker, that deeply suffering spirit, on the very threshold of a new age for Russia, as yet obscure but different, anyway? Why did not fate let him breathe that fresh air of which we have a breath and which does not smell so strongly of the torture-chamber and the barracks?

The news of his death was a terrible blow to me. I was on my way to the railway station at Richmond when the letter was given me. I read it as I walked along and literally did not at first understand it. I got into the railway carriage. I did not want to read the letter again, I was afraid of it. Strangers with stupid, ugly faces kept coming in and going out, the engine whistled, I looked at it all and thought: ‘But it is absurd! What? That man in all the flower of his age, he whose smile, whose glance is before my eyes now—he no more?...’ I was overcome by a heavy torpor and I felt horribly cold. In London I met A. Talandier; after greeting him I said I had a letter with bad news, and as though I had only just heard it, I could not restrain my tears.

We had had little intercourse in later days, but I needed to know that there, far away in our native land, that man was living!

Without him Moscow was empty, another tie was snapped!... Shall I alone, far away from all, ever be able to visit his grave—it has hidden as much strength, as much of the future, as many thoughts, as much love and life, as another, not quite unknown to him, which I have visited!

Here I add some lines of mournful reconciliation which are so precious to me that I have begged them as a gift for our memoirs.

TO A DEAD FRIEND

‘Amid the burial urns and stones
Upon that gloomy Autumn day,
Uneven, damp, and freshly strewn
The new-made grave before me lay.
The gifts of love, the gifts of grief,
Placed by thy pupils’ hands were seen:
Fresh wreaths bestowed with tender care
Of fragrant flowers and foliage green,
Above it, stretching, dark and grim,
Reflecting the Autumnal mood,
The ancient guardians of the graves,
The pine-trees, cold, indifferent, stood.
The river, lapping at the banks
With trackless waves went, flowing, by,
Without a pause, without an end,
On, on,—into eternity.
...
Thy tenderness was lost to me:
For years our lives were spent apart,
And the last greeting from thy lips
I did not hear, to rend my heart.
Our angry silence kept so long
Perchance was bitter grief to thee,
And I was powerless to forget
Thy deep, unmeant offence to me.
My error I could not confess,
We each were sure that we were wronged,
And when I hastened to thy side,
To bare my heart before thee, longed,
That my repentance thou should’st learn
And grant me pardon in return,
It was too late....
Upon that day
In gloomy Autumn did I grieve
Beside thy new-made grave alone,
And could not make myself believe....
And shall I see my friend no more?
And shall thine eyes be closed for aye?
Thy voice be hushed in sorrow’s hour?
Shall no word speed me on my way,
No fond embrace, when I depart?
And will thy loving heart not learn
The true devotion of my heart?
’Tis over now, for ever gone—
The fearful truth I cannot flee,
Some words distracted, vague and wild
Fall from my lips, unmeaningly,
My body trembles like a leaf,
Some words of sad reproach I hear,
With bitter sobs my breast is rent,
My heart is numb with grief and fear,
The blood is freezing in my veins,
Oh, let me breathe! Oh, give me light!
What fearful dream oppresses me?
What frenzied vision haunts my sight?
...
But I survived. Mid work and leisure
From day to day my life I spend,
But in my heart the grief still lingers,
And tears with laughter closely blend.
One souvenir alone is left me:
His picture as he lay at rest,
I gaze upon it: Oh, my brother,
Thine image lives within my breast!
And suddenly the thought arrests me:
’Tis but a passing dream, this pain,
He does but sleep, serenely smiling,
To-morrow he will wake again.
His noble voice, upraised, will newly
The sacred gifts to youth impart,
The spirit free, the faith undaunted,
To stir the mind and fire the heart.
But once again, that sad remembrance ...
The funeral urns, thy new-made bed,
The flowers and foliage strewn upon it,
The grim custodians at its head ...
The river lapping at the banks
With trackless waves, that passes by,
Without a pause, without an end,
On, on—into eternity....’[67]

Granovsky was not persecuted; the lawless cruelty of Nicholas’s agents halted before his glance of mournful reproach. He died surrounded by the love of the younger generation, the sympathy of all cultivated Russia, recognised even by his enemies. Nevertheless I adhere to my expression, yes, he knew great suffering. Not chains of iron alone wear life away; in the one letter Tchaadayev wrote to me abroad (July 1851), he speaks of the way he is perishing, growing feeble and with rapid steps approaching the end—‘not from the oppression against which men revolt, but from that which they endure with a touching resignation, and which for that very reason is even more fatal.’

Before me lie three or four letters which I received from Granovsky in later years; what a consuming deadly sadness there is in every line!

‘Our position,’ he writes in 1850, ‘grows more insufferable every day. Every progressive movement in Western Europe is followed by some repressive measure here. People are being denounced by thousands. They have twice been getting up a case against me during the last three months. But what does personal danger matter in comparison with the universal oppression and suffering? It has been proposed to shut the universities, but for the present they have confined themselves to the following measures: they have raised the students’ fees, and diminished their number by a law according to which no more than three hundred must be attending a university. In Moscow there are fourteen hundred university students, so we must expel twelve hundred to have the right to admit a hundred new ones. The Institute of Nobility is closed; many institutions are threatened with the same fate, the Lyceum for instance. Despotism is crying aloud that it cannot make terms with enlightenment. New programmes have been drawn up for the Cadet Schools. The Jesuits might envy the military pedagogue who drew up the programme. The priest is instructed to instil into the cadets that the greatness of Christ lies pre-eminently in submission to authority. He is depicted as a model of submission and discipline. The teacher of history is to unmask the trumpery virtues of the ancient republics and to bring out the grandeur—not yet grasped by historians—of the Roman Empire, which lacked but one thing, the hereditary character!...

‘It is enough to drive one mad. It is a blessing for Byelinsky that he died in time. Many decent people have sunk into despair and look with blank apathy at what is being done—when will this world fall to pieces?

‘I have made up my mind not to resign, but to wait at my post what the fates bring me. I can do a little; let them turn me out themselves.

‘... Yesterday the news came of Galahov’s death, and the other day there was a rumour that you were dead too. When they told me that I almost burst out laughing. Though after all why shouldn’t you die? It would be no more stupid than the rest.’

In the autumn of 1853 he writes:

‘My heart aches at the thought of what we were in old days’ (_i.e._, when I was there) ‘and what we have become now. We drink our wine from old habit, but there is no gladness in our hearts; only at the thought of you my spirit renews its youth. My best, most comforting dream now is to see you once again—and even that is not likely to come true.’

He ends one of his last letters like this: ‘On all sides a low vague murmur can be heard, but where is there strength? where is there resistance? It is bitter, brother,—and there is no escape in this life.’

In our North the savage autocracy wears men out quickly. With a pang of dread I look back—it is like a battlefield, there lie the dead and the maimed....

Granovsky was not alone, he was one of a group of young professors who came back from Germany while we were in exile. They did a great deal for the advancement of the Moscow University. History will not forget them. Men of conscientious erudition, they were pupils of Hegel, Gantz, Ritter, and others, just at the period when the dry bones of dialectic began to be clothed with flesh, when learning ceased to consider itself antagonistic to life, when Gantz used to come to his lectures not with an ancient folio in his hand, but with the latest number of a review from Paris or London. They were trying at that time to solve historical questions of the day by the dialectic method; it was an impossible task, but it put the facts in a clearer light.

Our professors brought with them their cherished dreams, their ardent faith in learning, and in men; they preserved all the fire of youth, and the lecturer’s chair was for them a sacred lectern from which they were called to preach the truth. They took their stand in the lecture-room not as mere professional savants, but as missionaries of the religion of humanity.

And what has become of that Pleiades of young professors, including the best of them, Granovsky? Dear Kryukov, brilliant, intelligent, learned, died at thirty-five. Petcherin, the Hellenistic scholar, struggled and struggled in the terrible conditions of Russian life, till, unable to endure it, he went away without aim, without means, ill and shattered, to foreign lands, wandered homeless and forlorn, became a Jesuit priest and is burning Protestant Bibles in Ireland. Ryedkin became a secular monk, serves in the Ministry of Home Affairs, and writes divinely inspired articles, interspersed with texts. Krylov—but enough. _La toile! La toile!_