Chapter XIV: Appendix (6)

The people were broken. Without murmur, without revolt, without hope, they passed with clenched teeth _through the next thousand blows_,[102] sank exhausted, died; their children were driven the same way, and so one generation followed another. Tranquillity prevailed, the masters’ tribute was paid, the forced labour was performed, the horn sounded for the hunt with hounds, the serfs’ band played, the motherly heart of the Empress rejoiced.

The Petersburg throne was made secure. It was supported on the graduated table of ranks, made fast to the earth with bayonets and butt-ends of guns; it was supported by the provincial nobility, who battened upon the peasants. The light from the West shed its pale, cold beams on the top of the pyramid, lighting up one side of it only; on the other, behind its shadow, nothing could be discerned—and, indeed, there was no need to look: there lay a scourged body covered with sacking, waiting for _some one_ to come and decide whether it was dead or not. It seemed as though the conquest was complete.

But the revolution made by Peter the Great introduced a double-edged element into the life of the Russian nobility. Peter liked the material side of civilisation, practical science. The rich resources it provided increased the power of government tenfold. But he did not know what thorns lie hid in these West European roses, and, maybe, had too much contempt for his own people to dream that they could assimilate something else as well as constructing fortifications, building ships and establishing official routine. Science is as bad as any wood-worm which gnaws day and night until somewhere it comes forth into the light, struggles into consciousness. And some thought, like the gnawing of conscience, begins to ferment, until the whole dough rises.

In 1789 the following incident took place. A young man[103] of no importance, after supping with his friends in Petersburg, drove in a postchaise to Moscow. He slept through the first station. At the second, Sofya, he was detained a long time before he could get horses, and consequently, it may be supposed, was so thoroughly awakened that when the fresh team carried him off with the bells ringing, instead of sleeping he listened to the driver’s song in the fresh morning air. Strange ideas came into the mind of the young man of no importance. Here are his words:—

‘My driver sang a song, as usual a mournful one. Any one who knows the airs of the Russian peasants’ songs will recognise that there is something suggestive of spiritual sadness. Almost every tune of these songs is in a minor key. The Government should be based on this peculiarity of the peasants’ musical taste. In it you will find the character of our people’s soul. _Look at the Russian and you will find him melancholy._ If he wants to shake off his dreariness, or, as he himself says, if he wants to enjoy himself, he goes to the pot-house.... The barge-hauler going with hanging head to the pot-house and coming back red with blood from blows in the face may provide the solution of much that has hitherto been enigmatic in the history of Russia.’

The driver went on wailing his song: the traveller went on thinking his thoughts, and before he had reached Tchudovo suddenly recalled how he had once in Petersburg struck his Petrushka for being drunk. And he burst out crying like a child, and, without blushing for his honour as a nobleman, had the shamelessness to write: ‘Oh, if only, drunk as he was, he had plucked up spirit enough to answer me in the same way!’

This song, these tears, these words, cast at hazard on the posting-road between two stations, must be regarded as one of the first signs of the turning tide. The seed always germinates in silence, and at the beginning there is no trace of it.

The Empress Catherine saw the point of it, and was graciously pleased ‘with warmth and feeling’ to say to Hrapovitsky: ‘Radishtchev is a rebel worse than Pugatchov!’

To wonder that she sent him in chains to Ilimsky Prison is absurd. It is much more wonderful that Paul brought him back, but he did that to spite his dead mother, he had no other object in it.

Thenceforward, from time to time, stray gleams of light flash on the horizon with no clap of thunder. Men appear on the stage who embody in themselves the historical gnawings of conscience, helpless and guiltless victims expiating the sins of their fathers. Many of them are ready to give up everything, sacrifice everything, but there is no altar, no one to accept their sacrifice. Some knocked at the palace doors, and on their knees besought their rulers to take heed to their ways; their words seemed to trouble the rulers, but nothing came of it. Others knocked at the hut but could say nothing to the peasant, since they spoke a different language. The peasant looked with sullen distrust at these ‘Greeks bearing gifts,’ and the conscience-stricken turned away bitterly, feeling that they had no fatherland.

Bereaved of all through thought, bereaved of all through love, foreigners at home, cut off from communication with each other, the five or six best men in Russia perished in idleness, surrounded by hatred, indifference, misunderstanding. Novikov[104] was in the fortress, Radishtchev in Ilimsk. A fine place Russia must have seemed to them when Paul released them!

There is no wonder that all men looked with ecstatic hope to Alexander.

Young, handsome, with a mild and pensive expression, shy and extremely gracious, he might well fascinate them. Was he not suffering for the ills of Russia as they were? Was he not trying to heal them as they were? And, moreover, he _could_ do it—so at least they fancied.

And Radishtchev, who had paid so dearly for his pity of the dark masses of Russia, went with the same faith as Karazin to offer his services to the young Emperor, and he too was accepted. Zealously Radishtchev plunged into work and drew up a series of legislative projects for the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment. But all at once, after a short discussion, not with the sledge-driver but with Count Zavadovsky, he stopped short, hesitated, was overcome by doubt and dread, pondered, poured himself out a glass of sulphuric acid and drank it. Alexander sent his own doctor, Villiers, but it was too late. Villiers only said, looking at his features as he lay in agony: ‘This man must have been very unhappy!’

He must have been!

This was in the autumn of 1802. Karazin was then in power. He knew Radishtchev very well, and indeed on one occasion lost the manuscript of his proposed reforms—but his alarming example had no effect on him. Dismissed from the palace, Karazin came back five years later, ten years later, twenty years later, thirty years later, with his plan for the emancipation of the serfs and a representative assembly of the nobles, his programme for a revolution from above. Not even observing that Nicholas was reigning, he knocked at his door too, and urged upon that dull-witted martinet that ‘storms were rising, there would be trouble; that to save the throne concessions must be made,’ and could not imagine why, in 1820, Alexander had ordered him to be put in the fortress, and the head gendarme Benckendorf ordered the gendarmes to turn him out of Nicholas’ anteroom. He should have asked Speransky how the ‘steep hills break the spirited steed’ even in flat Petersburg, and make of him a respectable harnessed nag, gravely jogging along in blinkers.

But how was it these people could be so deceived, or was it Alexander who deceived them? But that was not the case at all. We have not, at any rate before 1806 or 1807, the slightest right to doubt his genuine desire to alleviate the lot of his subjects: to protect his peasants from maltreatment by their owners, from maltreatment by officials, from the veniality of the law-courts and the injustice of the mighty. Alexander did not set before himself as the exclusive aim of his reign the futile preservation and increase of his power, as Nicholas did. It was not his desire that his word should have the effect of strychnine; he strove not only to be feared but to be loved. In his most passionate moments he could not only listen to another man’s opinion, but even accept it. When he had decided to shoot Speransky in 1812, he commuted the senseless sentence after talking to the academician, Parrot. All that is so, but he _could not_ do anything real for the Russian people. That was just the tragedy of his position.

And who can tell whether he did not rush into foreign wars because he had begun to discern the magic circle which grew wider every time that he ordered a levy or increased the taxes on the peasants, and at once contracted when he undertook anything for the peasants? He became irresolute, he was oppressed by mistrust of others, lack of confidence in himself; his hesitation grew with defeat and grew with victory. From Paris he returned a gloomy mystic: he no longer wanted to transform or to improve; he brought back Speransky, but his projects of reform were pigeonholed in the archives. To Engelhart, who said something to him about bringing order into the civilian side of the Government, he answered gloomily: ‘There is no one to undertake it!’

He was accustomed to power, he had glory enough, all he wanted now was peace, and among all his ministers and grandees, among the generals covered with glory and courtiers about his person, he chose the heartless torturer, Araktcheyev, and handed Russia over to him, and, what is more, arranged that even after his death it should pass into the hands of another Araktcheyev.

He did not trust the nobles, the peasants he did not know—and that is no matter for wonder, since about him stood men like Speransky and his rival Karamzin; like Shishkov, the forerunner of Slavophilism, who might have known the peasants but did not know them; since the most intelligent statesmen, like Mordvinov, talked of the nobility as the one prop of the throne; since honest senators, like Lopuhin, were indignant at the idea of the emancipation of the serfs.

It is a pity that Alexander was rather deaf and did not drive about in a chaise alone on the high-roads. He too might have been awakened at dawn by the song of the sledge-driver and might have sought the key to the mysteries of the people in that instead of in Eckhartshausen.

To understand the Russian people it was not enough for Alexander to kill his father. He would have had to renounce his wise grandmother, to renounce Peter the Great, to renounce his whole family and kindred. He would have had—horrible to say—to renounce even Laharpe, who had made a man of him, but who could never have grasped that one could learn more of Russian history from the barge-hauler who goes gloomily into the pot-house and comes out of it covered with blood than from the records of Governments.

5

FAREMO DA SE

When the doors of the Tsar’s study had been shut upon Karazin he still made an effort to write to the Tsar, taking advantage of the privilege that had been accorded him. But the Marquis von Posa had no further interest for the crowned Don Carlos; moreover, Alexander was now engrossed and absorbed by questions of far different importance, European questions; he was measuring himself against Napoleon, and blundering into the war which was to end in our defeat at Austerlitz.

Karazin, too, began to be engrossed with other tasks; like a rejected lover, he flung himself _par dépit amoureux_ into amazingly many-sided activities. His ardent, restless brain was filled with ideas floating by in rapid succession—political plans, agricultural projects, learned theories, machines, observation, apparatuses, new and improved methods of distillery and of leather tanning, horticultural experiments with foreign seeds, easy ways of drying and preserving fruit, and so on. War broke out: Karazin wrote on the methods of increasing the output of saltpetre, he preserved meat, and at the same time was engaged in founding stations for meteorological observations in Russia. He absolutely clearly formulated in 1808 the scientific needs of that department, which have not been satisfied to this day, investigated the possibility of utilising the electricity in the atmosphere, founded a technological society in Ukraine, looked after his Harkov university, and so on.

But his chief thought, his chief anxiety, the leading note of his life, lay not in these things. While he was improving distilleries and trying to utilise the electricity of the atmosphere, Karazin was passionately watching other events and seeking other means of averting the storm. And meanwhile time was passing and passing.

Alexander had been reigning now for twenty years; all sorts of things had happened since, with tears in his eyes, he had read Karazin’s letter ... Tilsit and 1812 ... Moscow and Paris, the Congress of Vienna and St. Helena. Public opinion, stirred by so many shots and shocks, had moved forward while the Government had fallen back. Alexander had not carried out his promises. Dissatisfaction was growing. The people, who had given so much blood and received in return a manifesto written in Shishkov’s prose, murmured against the new levy of recruits, the more as there was talk of a senseless war in support of the Austrian yoke in Italy, of a repetition of the futile campaign of Suvorov.

The younger men of energy and education looked on sullenly. Karazin saw it all, but still believed that Alexander could and would prevent the gathering storm.

At the beginning of 1820 the Tsar forgave Karazin’s father-in-law some government debt. Karazin asked permission to offer his thanks in person, but was refused. He wrote a letter to the Tsar, in which among other things he said:—

‘I am not going to write anything special, but I only beg you, gracious Sovereign, ask Count Viktor Pavlovitch[105] for the note of some pages I wrote for him on the 31st of March, apropos of a conversation with him, and also Prince Vyazemsky for the letter written to him from his Masalsky estate by the merchant Rogov on the 1st of April, which he read to me the other day. One cannot without horror see the striking similarity of the thoughts of a man (so far removed from me in every respect) with my thoughts and with all that has been filling my soul continually since the year 1817, when I had the audacity to reveal the same in my letter from Ukraine to Your Majesty. One cannot help remembering that just in the same way warnings from the well-disposed resounded from various parts of France before the coming of the fatal revolution, and that in just the same way they were neglected! “_Il est singulier que dans ce siècle de lumières, les souverains ne voient venir l’orage que quand il éclate_,” Napoleon said to Las Cases[106] on the Island of St. Helena. Such striking agreement in the views of different minds that have nothing in common between them deserves attention. There _must_ be something true in them; and the more so as similar feelings have been for some time past apparent in private conversations in both Petersburg and Moscow! It is quite enough if there are grounds for one half, for a fraction of what is thought!’

‘... Time,’ he says in a note given at the Tsar’s command to V. P. Kotchubey—‘time will strengthen the weakened framework of our State; time will replace the _religious_ reverence for the Throne by another founded on the laws....

‘Of course it may linger on a year or two, perhaps more, but it is just for that reason I am writing now, it is for that reason that I am disregarding myself entirely. My fate is bound to be either exile beyond Lake Baikal, while there is still power to exile, or death with a weapon in my hand defending to the last the entrance to the Tsar’s apartments. Only then I shall write no more.’

Karazin beseeches the Tsar not to believe the sayings with which the governors meet him that ‘All is well, all is as before....’

‘A great change,’ he says, ‘has taken place and is daily taking place in men’s minds....’

In the Semyonovsky mutiny, in which he justifies the soldiers and admires them, he sees distinctly ‘the first step of the ladder which the spirit of the age is raising for us.’

But what were his means of averting the storm? Here they are:—

‘The gradual emancipation of the peasants and the summoning of elected persons from the whole of the nobility as representatives of public opinion to the private councils of the Government.’ By this Duma Karazin supposes ‘all will be saved and without detriment to the power of the Monarch, if only the time has not passed. O my Country, unique in Thy character, Thou mayest even on the threshold of Thy greatest catastrophe be saved by a sincere, warm union of Thy Tsar with His nobility! But God’s Will be done in this as in all!

‘... And, indeed, what can the Autocracy lose from trusting the class whose fate is so closely bound up with it?... All the measures of the police and ecclesiastical censorship are insufficient to check the growth of opinion. Excessive severity only revolts men’s hearts. All at once the strained cord will snap. Among the many freed serfs and men of no definite class I foresee the miscreants who will surpass Robespierre. There are noblemen, too, who have squandered their estates and been reared in debauchery and evil principles, who are dissatisfied with their lot and are consequently ready to join the ignorant mob. The times of Pugatchov, of the Moscow mutiny in the time of Yeropkin,[107] and the outbreaks of lawlessness at the invasion in 1812 in various parts of the Moscow and Kaluga provinces have shown us already what our mob can be when it has had too much to drink! Alas for us! the Throne will drown in the blood of the nobility!’

In answer to this cry of horror and warning, the Emperor Alexander bade V. P. Kotchubey demand from Karazin ‘details, proofs, names’—in other words a denunciation. The ‘Trajan and Marcus Aurelius’ had developed in the twenty years of his reign!

Karazin refused to give them. The Tsar ordered him to be thrown into the fortress and afterwards to be banished to his estate in Little Russia.

What for?

For having meddled in what was not his business, but that Karazin was quite unable to understand.

‘How long has the welfare of the country in which I live,’ he says, ‘in which my children and grandchildren will live, ceased to be my own business?[108] From what Asiatic system is this idea borrowed? _Teaching_ the _Government_ is an expression purposely invented to mortify the vanity of the persons who make up the Government. But must not the authors of books on the best systems of legislation, of finance and so on, be called even more guilty? We all teach and are taught up to the day of our death. The Government is a centre, to which every thought concerning the commonweal must flow. Woe to us if we begin passing judgment in the market-place as other nations do!... And are there so many of us now in Russia desirous and capable of saying something to the Government and daring enough to do so? There is no need to be uneasy on that score: there will not be enough to become wearisome!’

However that may be, Karazin was in the fortress and was able at his leisure to ponder on the question whether there was more danger in saving the mighty of this world, or in thrusting them into the abyss.

While Karazin in those sleepless nights was writing his political rhapsodies to Kotchubey, there were other men, too, who could not sleep: in the barracks of the Guards, in the staff of the Second army, in old-fashioned signorial Moscow houses, there were men who did not sleep. They grasped the fact that Alexander would not go beyond two or three Liberal phrases, that there was no place in the Winter Palace for a Marquis von Posa nor Struensee[109]; they knew that no salvation for the people could come from the same source from which the military settlements had come. They expected nothing from the Government and tried to act independently of it; they brought all that was enlightened lower down in the social pyramid; its summit had grown dim in the mist. Culture, intelligence, the thirst for freedom, all now was to be found in a different region, in different surroundings, away from the Palace! In these were to be found youth, daring, breadth, poetry, Pushkin, the scars of 1812, fresh laurels, and white crosses. Between 1812 and 1825 there appeared a perfect galaxy of brilliant talent, independent character and chivalrous valour (a combination quite new in Russia). These men had absorbed everything of Western culture, the introduction of which had been forbidden. The period of Petersburg Government produced nothing better. They were its latest blossoms, and in spite of the fatal scythe that mowed them down at once, their influence can be traced flowing far into the gloomy Russia of Nicholas, like the Volga into the sea.

The story of the Decembrists becomes a more and more solemn prologue, from which we all date our lives, our heroic genealogy. What Titans, what giants, and what poetical, what sympathetic characters! Their glory nothing could diminish or distort, neither the gibbet nor the prison, nor the treachery of Bludov, nor the memorial words of Korf....

Yes, they were men!

When, thirty years afterwards, a few of the old ones who survived Nicholas came back, bent and leaning on crutches, from their long, weary exile—the generation of broken-spirited, splenetic, disillusioned men who had lived under Nicholas looked at these _youthful_ figures, who, at the fortresses, at the mines, in Siberia, had kept the old warmth of heart, young enthusiasm, unconquerable will, unflinching convictions, at these young figures with their silver hair that still bore traces of the crown of thorns which had lain for more than a quarter of a century on their heads. It was not they who sought support and comfort at the hearth that had grown chill—no—they consoled the weak, they gave a hand to the sick children, cheering them on, supporting their strength and their hopes!

As Faust, wearied, turned for peace and rest to the eternally beautiful types of motherhood, so our younger generation turn for new energy and strengthening example to these Fathers.

The Petersburg period was purified by the holy company of Decembrists; the nobles could go no further without going out to the people, without tearing up their patent of nobility.

It was their Isaac sacrificed for reconciliation with the people. The crowned Abraham did not hear the voice of God and drew the noose....

The people did not weep for them.

The tragic element of the Petersburg period attained its furthest, most heart-rending expression—further it could not go.

The sacrifice was complete, and the last touch to its completeness was given by the indifference of the people.

Only now a way of escape and reconciliation became possible. The separation from the people was truly expiated by so much love and strength, purity and penitence, so much self-denial and devotion to others. The readiness of this group of aristocrats and noblemen not only to give up their unjust heritage, _se faire roturiers de gentilshommes_, as Count Rostoptchin expressed it, but to face death, to go to penal servitude, wipes out the sins of the fathers!

6

ON THE FURTHER SIDE

When in 1826 Yakubovitch saw Prince Obolensky with a beard and wearing the greatcoat of a soldier, he could not help exclaiming: ‘Well, Obolensky, if I am like Stenka Razin, you certainly must be like Vanka Kain!...[110]’ Then the officer came up, the convicts were put in fetters and sent to Siberia to penal servitude.

The common people did not recognise the likeness, and dense crowds of them looked on indifferently in Nizhni-Novgorod as the fettered prisoners were driven by at the time of the fair. Perhaps they were thinking: ‘Our poor dears go there _on foot_, but here the gentry are driven by the gendarmes!’

But on the other side of the Ural Mountains lies a mournful equality in face of penal servitude and in face of hopeless misery. Everything is changed. The petty official whom we knew here as a heartless, dirty bribe-taker, at Irkutsk, in a voice trembling with tears, begs the exiles to accept a gift of money from him; the rude Cossacks who escort them leave them in peace and freedom so far as they can; the merchants entertain them on their way. On the further side of Lake Baikal some of them stopped at the ford at Verhno-Udinsk; the inhabitants learnt who they were, and an old man at once sent them by his grandson a basket of white rolls, while he hobbled out himself to talk to them of the region beyond the Baikal and to question them about the wide world.

While Prince Obolensky was still at the Usolsky Works, he went out early in the morning to the place where he had been told to chop down trees. While he was at work, a man appeared out of the forest, looked at him intently with a friendly air, and then went on his way. In the evening, as he was going home, Obolensky met him again; he made signs to him and pointed to the forest. Next morning he came out from the bushes again and signed to Obolensky to follow him. Obolensky went. Leading him away into the forest, he stopped and said to him solemnly: ‘We have long known of your coming. We have been told of you in the prophecy of Ezekiel. We have been expecting you, there are many of us here, rely upon us, we will not betray you!’ It was an exiled Duhobor.

Obolensky had for a long time been fretted by the desire for news of his own people through Princess Trubetskoy who had come to Irkutsk. He had no means of forwarding a letter to her. Obolensky asked the help of the Duhobor. The latter did not waste time in deliberation. ‘At dusk to-morrow,’ he said, ‘I will be at a certain spot. Bring me the letter, it shall be taken....’ Obolensky gave him the letter, and the same night the man set off for Irkutsk; two days later the answer was in Obolensky’s hands.

What would have happened if he had been caught?

Among comrades one does not count the risk.

The Duhobor paid the people’s debt for Radishtchev.

And so in the forests and mines of Siberia the Russia of Petersburg, of the landowners, of the officials, of the officers, and the Russia of the ignorant peasants of the village, both exiled and fettered, both with an axe in the belt, both leaning on the spade, both wiping away the sweat, looked each other for the first time in the face, and recognised the long-forgotten traits of kinship.

It is time that this should take place in the light of day, aloud, openly, everywhere.

It is time that the nobility, artificially raised into a different channel by the German engineers, should mingle with the surrounding sea. Fountains are no marvel now, and Samson’s spout of water from the lion’s mouth is no wonder beside the infinity of the rippling sea.

The Peterhof fête is over, the court masque in fancy dress is played out, the lamps are smoking and going out, the fountains have almost run dry—let us go home.

‘All that is so, but ... but ... would it not be better to raise the people?’ Perhaps; only it is as well to grasp that the one sure method of doing so is the method of torture, the method of Peter the Great, of Biron, of Araktcheyev. That is why the Emperor Alexander accomplished nothing with the Karazins and the Speranskys—but when he got to Araktcheyey, he did not give him up again.

There are too many of the common people for it to be really possible to raise them all to the fourteenth grade,[111] and indeed every people has a strongly defined physiological character which even foreign conquest rarely changes. So long as we take the common people as clay and ourselves as sculptors, and from our sublime height mould it into a statue _à l’antique_, in the French style, in the English manner, or on the German model, we shall find nothing in the people except stubborn indifference or mortifyingly passive obedience.

The pedagogic method of our civilising reformers is a bad one. It starts from the fundamental principle that we know everything and the peasantry knows nothing: as though we had taught the peasant his right to the land, communal ownership, organisation, the artel and the mir.

It goes without saying that we can teach the peasantry a great deal, but there is a great deal that we have to learn from it and to study in it. We have theories, absorbed by us and representing the worked-out results of European culture. To determine which to apply, and how to fit them to our national existence, it is not enough to translate word for word; the lexicon is not enough. One must try in the first place to do with it what social thinkers are trying to do in Western Europe—to make their institutions comprehensible to them.

The common people cling obstinately to their habits—they believe in them; but we cling as obstinately to our theories and we believe in them, and, what is more, imagine that we know them to be true, that the reality is so. Passing on after a fashion what we have learnt out of books in conventional language, we see with despair that the common people do not understand us, and we bewail the stupidity of the people, just as the schoolboy will blush for poor relations, because they do not know when to put ‘i’ and when ‘y,’ but never troubles to wonder why two different letters should be used for the same sound.

Genuinely desirous of the good of the people, we look for remedies for their ailments in foreign pharmacopœias; there the herbs are foreign, but it is easier to find them in a book than in the fields. We easily and consistently become liberals, constitutionalists, democrats, Jacobins, but not Russians, believers in the common people. All these political shades one can acquire from books: all that is understood, explained and written, printed, bound.... But here one must go without a track.... The life of Russia is like the forest in which Dante lost his way, and the wild beasts that are in it are worse than the Florentine ones, but there is no Virgil to show the way; there were some Moscow Susanins,[112] but even those led one to the graveyard instead of to the peasants’ cottage....

Without knowing the people we may oppress the people, we may enslave them, we may conquer them, but we cannot set them free.

Without the help of the people they will be freed neither by the Tsar with his clerks, nor the nobility with the Tsar, nor the nobility without the Tsar.

What is happening now in Russia ought to open the eyes of the blind. The peasantry have borne the terrible burden of serfdom without ever acknowledging its lawfulness; seeing the force opposed to them they have remained dumb. But as soon as others attempted in their own way to set them free, they passed from murmuring, from passive resistance, almost to open mutiny, and yet they are obviously better off now. What new signs do the reformers wait for?

Only the man who when called to action understands the life of the people while keeping what science has given him; only one who voices its strivings and founds on the realisation of them his work for the common cause, will be the bridegroom that is to come.

This lesson is repeated to us alike by the mournful figure of Alexander with his crown; by Radishtchev with his glass of poison; by Karazin flying through the Winter Palace like a burning meteor; by Speransky who shone for years together with a glimmer like moonshine, with no warmth, no colour; and by our holy martyrs of the Fourteenth of December.

Who will be the predestined saviour?

Will it be an emperor who, renouncing all the traditions of the Petersburg Government, combines in himself Tsar and Stenka Razin? Will it be another Pestel? Or another Emelyan Pugatchov, Cossack, Tsar and heretic? Or will it be a prophet and a peasant, like Antony Bezdninsky?

It is hard to tell: these are details, _des détails_ as the French say. Who ever it may be, it is our task to meet him with warm welcome!

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Die Schwefelbande._—(_Author’s Note._)

[2] Don Carlos, born 1818, usually called Count of Montemolin to distinguish him from the better known Don Carlos, his father. Both were unsuccessful pretenders to the throne of Queen Isabella of Spain. Don Juan was the brother of the Count of Montemolin, and at the latter’s death succeeded to his claims.

[3] _Honveds_ (‘Land-defenders’), the name given to the old national heroes of Hungary, was in 1848 adopted by the revolutionary armies.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[4] Sir George Grove in his _Dictionary of Music and Musicians_ says of Jullien (originally Julien): ‘No one at all in the same category has occupied anything like the same position in public favour. His name was a household word and his face and figure household shapes during a period of nearly twenty years.’ ‘To Jullien is attributed the immense improvements made in our orchestras during these twenty years.’ Among other works he composed The Allied Armies Quadrille (Crimean War, 1854), The Indian Quadrille and Havelock’s March (Indian Mutiny, 1857), The English Quadrille, and The French Quadrille.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[5] The Austrian Field-Marshal Urban defeated Garibaldi’s volunteers and took Varese, but was obliged to abandon it (June 1859).—(_Translator’s Note._)

[6] This lady was the wife of the Count F. A. Pulszky, who was a friend of Kossuth and associated with him in the efforts to throw off the yoke of the Austrian Government. He wrote several books describing his adventures, and his wife wrote her memoirs, known in English as _Memoirs of an Hungarian Lady_ (published in London, 1850), and other books, such as _Tales and Traditions of Hungary_ (1851).

[7] The famous Lord Raglan, who distinguished himself in the campaigns against Napoleon and still more so in the Crimean War, lost his right arm at Waterloo and is said to have practised writing with his left hand the very next day. The ‘Raglan sleeve’ is doubtless so named in his honour.

[8] St.-Arnaud, Jacques Leroy de (1801-1854), one of the leading organisers of the Coup d’État of December 2, defeated the Russians at Alma.

[9] Omer Pasha, Turkish General in the Crimean War.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[10] Delahodde (or De Lahode), Lucien, wrote _Histoire des Sociétés Secrètes de 1830 à 1848_, and _La Naissance de la République_.

[11] Chenu, J. A., wrote _Les Conspirateurs_, which called forth a reply, _Réponse aux deux libelles de Chenu et Delahodde_, by J. Miot.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[12] Delescluze, Charles (1809-1871), a French journalist and politician, was a member of the Commune in 1871 and killed at the barricades.

[13] Boichot, Jean Baptiste (born 1820), elected a Representative of the People, appeared in uniform at the demonstration of June 13, 1849, escaped to Switzerland and afterwards to London, where he wrote books in conjunction with Félix Pyat and was head of the society called ‘La Commune Révolutionnaire.’ He returned to Paris in 1854, was captured and imprisoned.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[14] Latour was Austrian War Minister, murdered by an infuriated crowd on October 6, 1848.

[15] An unconscious pun which occurs in an old Russian poem on the Crusades.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[16] Probably James Buchanan, then President of the United States, is meant.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[17] Stansfeld, The Rt. Hon. James, born 1820, was, 1859, returned to Parliament for Halifax as an advanced Liberal. He was a Lord of the Admiralty from 1863 to 1864, when he resigned. In 1886 he was President of the Local Government Board, with a seat in the Cabinet. He was a close friend of Mazzini.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[18] A village in the province of Milan where the French defeated the Austrians in 1859.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[19] The _Alabama_ was a vessel built by a British firm in a British port for the Southern States in the American Civil War. It did great damage to the shipping of the Northern States, capturing sixty-five ships. Feeling on the subject ran so high that at one time there seemed a danger of England’s taking part in the war on the side of the South.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[20] I remember one case of a stolen watch and two or three of fights with Irishmen.—(_Author’s Note._)

[21] Is it not strange that Garibaldi was at one with Karl Vogt in his estimate of the Schleswig-Holstein question?—(_Author’s Note._)

[22] The region including the four towns of Verona, Legnago, Peschiera and Mantua is meant.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[23] Chief agent of the French police before 1827 and author of famous Memoirs. The name has been wrongly transliterated as ‘Vidok’ in Volume II.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[24] This refers to the following passage, which appeared in the _Bell_, Number 184, May 1, 1864:—

_April 17, 1864._

‘To _young_ Russia suffering and struggling for the _new_ Russia which, when once it has vanquished the Russian Tsardom, will undoubtedly in its development have immense significance for the destinies of the world!’

_From the health proposed by Garibaldi._

‘Your words will reach our friends, they will reach into the fortresses and mines....’

_From the reply to it._

We promised an article describing Garibaldi’s visit to England; now that it has so _unexpectedly_ come to an end we are convinced of its historical significance, but that article is to come. For the moment we would only give our friends some details concerning Garibaldi’s visit to us, and those details, indeed, will consist of the brief speeches of Mazzini and Garibaldi. The English newspapers have been so overloaded with descriptions of receptions, welcomes, dishes, garlands, and so on, that we are as little anxious to enter into competition with them as we are capable of equalling the aristocratic Balthazar feasts in honour of the revolutionary leader.

Our banquet was a modest one, there were not twenty invited guests to it (among them, not counting Garibaldi and Mazzini, there were several of their nearest friends: Saffi, who was one of the Triumvirate in Rome, Mordini, the Dictator of Sicily, Guerzoni, et cetera. Mrs. Stansfeld was among the ladies). In the _Daily News_, in the _Morning Star_, in Prince Dolgoruky’s _Listok_, there have been descriptions of the crowds of people before the garden railings, the shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ (as Garibaldi walked in he was almost carried off his feet, the ladies kissed his hands and the hem of his cloak) and so on—as it has been at every house which the uncrowned king has visited.

At lunch Mazzini stood up, and raising his glass spoke as follows:—

‘In the toast proposed by me I unite all that we love, all for which we are struggling—

To the freedom of the Peoples;

To the union of the Peoples;

To the man who in our day stands as the living incarnation of
these great ideas,

To Giuseppe Garibaldi;

To unhappy, holy, heroic Poland, whose sons for more than a
year have been fighting in silence and dying for freedom;

To young Russia, which under the standard of Zemlya i Volya
(Land and Freedom) will soon hold out the hand of brotherhood
to Poland, will recognise her equality, her independence, and
efface the memory of imperial Russia;

To those Russians who following our friend Herzen are working
their utmost for the development of that Russia;

To the religion of duty which gives us the strength to struggle
and die for these ideas!’

Then Garibaldi got up, and with a glass of Marsala in his hand said:—

‘I want to-day to do a duty which I ought to have done long ago. Among us here is a man who has performed the greatest services both to my native land and to freedom in general. When I was a lad and was full of vague longings I sought a man to be my guide, the counsellor of my youth, I sought him as a thirsty man seeks water.... I found him. He alone was awake when all around were slumbering, he became my friend and has remained my friend for ever; in him the holy fire of love for fatherland and freedom has never dimmed; that man is Giuseppe Mazzini—I drink to him, to my friend, to my teacher!’

In the voice, in the expression of face with which these words were uttered, there was so much that gripped and thrilled the heart that they were received not with applause but with tears.

After a momentary silence Garibaldi continued with the words:—

‘Mazzini has said a few words of unhappy Poland with which I am in complete sympathy.

‘To Poland the home of martyrs, to Poland facing death for independence and setting a grand example to the peoples!

‘Now let us drink to young Russia, who is suffering and struggling as we are, and like us will be victorious; to the new people which, vanquishing the Russian Tsardom and winning its freedom, is evidently destined to play a great part in the future of Europe.

‘And finally to England, the land of freedom and independence, the land which for its hospitality and sympathy with the persecuted deserves our fullest gratitude; to England, which gives us the possibility of a friendly gathering like this....’

After Garibaldi’s departure I wrote him the following letter:—

‘I was so excited yesterday that I did not say all I wanted, but confined myself to a mere expression of gratitude in the name of _coming_ Russia, no less persecuted than Poland; in the name of the Russia that is dying in the fortresses and mines and living in the consciousness of the awakening people with their ideal of the indissoluble connection of Land and Freedom, and in the minority that is persecuted for having given expression to this instinct of the people.

‘Our far-away friends will hear with joy your words of sympathy; they need them; rarely are garlands flung upon their agonies; the shadow of the crimes that are being committed in Poland falls upon us all.

‘In reality I do not regret that I added nothing to my words of gratitude. What could I add? A toast to Italy? But was not our whole gathering in honour of Italy? What I was feeling could hardly have been put into such a speech. I looked at you both, listened to you with a youthful feeling of devotion no longer appropriate to my age, and seeing how you, the two great leaders of the peoples, greeted the rise of dawning Russia, I blessed you under our modest roof.

‘I owe to you the best day of my winter, a day of untroubled serenity, and for that I embrace you once more with ardent gratitude, with deep love, and boundless respect.

‘_April 18, 1864_, ELMFIELD HOUSE, TEDDINGTON.’

[25] As though Garibaldi had asked for money for himself! I need hardly say he refused the dowry given by the English aristocracy on such absurd conditions, to the extreme mortification of the police newspapers which had been reckoning up the shillings and pence he would be carrying away to Caprera.—(_Author’s Note._)

[26] French Minister for foreign affairs under Napoleon the Third.

[27] In Pushkin’s poem ‘The Fountain of Bahtchisaray’ the lines occur:—

‘I know how to use a dagger,
I was born near the Caucasus.’—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[28] An Italian village where in 1859 the Austrians were defeated by the French and Piedmontese.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[29] That is, of the Secret Police.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[30] A Russian town on the Roumanian frontier.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[31] Extremely hard-working young men often end by becoming followers of Petrashev; they might be described as the top class of our historical development in education.—(_Author’s Note._)

[32] A district in Bukovina settled by Russian raskolniks.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[33] And this was the awful Tulcea agency with connections with the revolution all over the world, inciting the villages with money from Mazzini’s funds, a menacing danger two years after it had ceased to exist, and even now flourishing in the literature of the detectives and of Katkov’s Police News!—(_Author’s Note._)

[34] Their vanity was not so great as it was touchy and irritable, and above all, unrestrained in words. They could conceal neither their envy nor a special kind of irritable insistence on respectful recognition of the position they ascribed to themselves, at the same time that they looked down on everything and were perpetually jeering at one another—which was why their friendships never lasted more than a month.—(_Author’s Note._)

[35] At that very time in Petersburg and Moscow, and even in Kazan and Harkov, there were circles being formed among the university youth who devoted themselves in earnest to the study of science, especially among the medical students. They worked honestly and conscientiously, but, cut off from active participation in the questions of the day, they were not forced to leave Russia and we scarcely knew anything of them.—(_Author’s Note._)

[36] A character in Gogol’s _Dead Souls_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[37] Under this pseudonym Bakunin published articles on the Reaction in Germany in the _Jahrbücher_ of 1842, which were brought out under the editorship of Ruge.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[38] ‘Tell Caussidière,’ I said in jest to his friends, ‘that the difference between Bakunin and him is that Caussidière, too, is a splendid fellow, but it would be better to shoot him the day before the revolution.’ Later on in London, in the year 1854, I reminded him of this. The prefect in exile merely smote with his huge fist upon his mighty chest with the force with which piles are driven into the earth, and said: ‘I carry Bakunin’s image here, here.’—(_Author’s Note._)

[39] The word means ‘thimble’ in Russian.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[40] Herzen’s daughter by Madame Tutchkov-Ogaryov, born 1858.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[41] Bakunin received no dowry with his wife.—(_Author’s Note._)

[42] The country between the lower Niemen and the Windau, the inhabitants of which are closely related to the Lithuanians, and from the fourteenth century were included in Lithuania.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[43] ‘Slava’ is the Russian for ‘glory.’—(_Translator’s Note._)

[44] ‘I have come to ask your advice,’ a youthful Georgian, who looked like a young tiger, said to me one day, ‘I want to give Skaryatin a thrashing.’

‘No doubt you know that when Charles V. was in Rome, et cetera....’ ‘I know, I know; for God’s sake don’t tell me!’

And the tiger with milk in his veins departed.—(_Author’s Note._)

[45] Characters in Gogol’s _Dead Souls_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[46] Demontowicz, after prolonged arguments with Bakunin, said: ‘I tell you what, gentlemen, hard as it may be for us with the Russian Government, anyway our position under it is better than what these Socialist fanatics are preparing for us.’—(_Author’s Note._)

[47] The ‘Dance of Death’ on the cloister walls of a convent in Basle, attributed to Holbein.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[48] One of the members of the great German publishing firm of Cotta, which brought out the works of Schiller, Goethe, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, the Humboldts, etc., is meant. One of them was responsible for the _Allgemeine Zeitung_, which first appeared in 1798, and he was also the first Würtemberg landowner to abolish serfdom on his estates.

[49] Hoffmann, A. H. (commonly called Hoffmann von Fallersleben), the poet and author of many philological and antiquarian works, is no doubt referred to here, not the better-known musical composer and story-writer of that name.

[50] Campe, J. H., was the author of works on education, a German dictionary, and numerous stories for children, of which _Robinson der Jüngere_ was the most popular.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[51] Did not the _kept_ genius of the Prussian King do the same? His double personality drew down a biting sarcasm. After 1848 the Hanoverian King, an ultra-conservative and feudalist, arrived in Potsdam. On the palace staircase he met various courtiers, and among them Humboldt in a livery dress-coat. The malicious king stopped and said to him, smiling: ‘_Immer derselbe, immer Republikaner und immer im Vorzimmer des Palastes._’—(_Author’s Note._)

[52] Pozzo di Borgo, C. A. (1764-1842), a Corsican, was a diplomat in the Russian service and a privy councillor of Alexander I.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[53] Suhozanet, a Russian general under Alexander I. and Nicholas. He took a prominent part in the suppression of the Fourteenth of December 1825.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[54] ‘Fion’ is a colloquial word about equivalent to ‘esprit.’—(_Translator’s Note._)

[55] A year ago I saw the carnival in Nice. There is a fearful difference; to say nothing of the soldiers fully armed and the gendarmes and the commissaires of police with their scarves ... the conduct of the people themselves, not of the tourists, amazed me. Drunken masqueraders were swearing and fighting with people standing at their gates, white pierrots were violently knocked down into the mud.—(_Author’s Note._)

[56] La Marmora, Alfonso Ferrero, Marquis of, was Italian Minister of War in 1849, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in 1861, and Prime Minister in 1864.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[57] Ricasoli, Baron Bettino, an Italian authority on agriculture, wrote on the cultivation of the olive, the vine and the mulberry, and took a leading part in the work of draining the Tuscan Maremma. In 1859 he was dictator of Tuscany. He worked for the unity of Italy, and on the accession of Victor Emmanuel was appointed governor-general of Tuscany.

[58] Cialdini, Enrico, took part in the insurrection of 1831, and escaped to France; fought in Spain, first against the Miguelists and then against the Carlists; fought in Italy in 1848, and fell wounded into the hands of the Austrians. In the Crimean War he commanded a Sardinian division. In the war of 1859 he gained the victory of Palestro. He was for a few months governor of Naples, and it was there in 1862 that he acted against Garibaldi in the second Sicilian expedition.

[59] Depretis, Agostino (1813-1887), an Italian politician, took a leading part in promoting the adhesion of Italy to the Triple Alliance.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[60] Capo d’Istrias, Ioannos Antonios, Count of, was president of the Greek Republic from 1828 to 1831, when he was assassinated.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[61] Svyatoslav, prince of Kiev, is meant.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[62] John Zimisces became Emperor in 969 by marriage with Theophania, widow of Romanus II., and reigned till 976. He was, as a fact, victorious over the Russians.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[63] A very charming Hungarian, Count Sandor Téléki, who afterwards served as a colonel of cavalry in Italy, said to me once, laughing at the tawdry luxury of the Florentine dandies: ‘Do you remember a race or a festival in Moscow?... It is silly, but it has character. The coachman is primed with liquor, his cap is on one side, the horses are worth some thousands of roubles, and the master lolls in bliss and in sables. Here our gaunt Count So-and-so hires lean nags with rheumatic legs and nodding heads, and the same thin, clumsy-looking Giacopo who is his cook and gardener sits on the box, dressed in a livery not made for him, and tugs at the reins, while the Count entreats him: “Giacopo, Giacopo, _fate una grande e bella figura_.”’ I asked leave of Count Téléki to borrow this expression.—(_Author’s Note._)

[64] The Dukes of Savoy were also Princes of Carignano, a little town of Piedmont. Charles Albert of Savoy came to the throne of Piedmont in 1831, and his son, Victor Emmanuel II., became in 1860 the first king of united Italy.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[65] Leopold II., uncle of the present King of the Belgians, is meant.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[66] Nulin is the hero of a poem by Pushkin.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[67] The second time was in 1853 on the occasion of the illness of Marya Kasparovna Reihel. I received this permit at the request of Rothschild. Marya Kasparovna recovered, and I did not make use of it. Two years later I was informed at the French Consulate that since I had not made use of it at the time, the permit was no longer valid.

[68] I have noted the word _Monsieur_ because when I was banished the Prefecture invariably wrote _Sieur_, while Napoleon wrote _Monsieur_ with his own hand in full.—(_Author’s Notes._)

[69] A phrase used by Gogol to describe the hero of _Dead Souls_—(_Translator’s Note._)

[70] Laboulaye, E. R. de (1811-1883), was a French lawyer and journalist.

[71] Prévost-Paradol, L. A. (1829-1870), was a French critic and journalist, author of _Études sur les Moralistes Français_.

[72] Mirès was a leading figure in the financial world, whose ruin through speculation led to a famous trial.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[73] Espinasse, Charles, a French general, supported Louis Napoleon at the Coup d’État of the 2nd of December, was Minister of the Interior in 1858, and killed at Magenta in 1859.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[74] Tyutchev, Fyodor (1803-1873), a minor poet, described as belonging to the ‘Art for Art’s sake’ school, though of somewhat patriotic and Slavophil tendency, wrote lyrics marked by a deep feeling for nature and fine taste.—(_Translator’s Note._)