Chapter 6 (4)

The ‘regent’ hesitated and hesitated, and suddenly, as though nothing had happened between them, turned to Golitsyn with the words: ‘Your Excellency, as the steamer does not go from Hull for five days, be so gracious—allow me to remain with you for the while.’ My Lablache will give it him, I thought, devotedly preparing myself for the shock of the sound.

‘Of course you can stay. Where the devil would you go?’

The ‘regent’ thanked the prince and went away.

Golitsyn by way of explanation said to me: ‘You see he is a very good fellow; it is that b-b-blackguard, that thief, that unclean Yuss leads him astray.’

Let Savigny and Mittermeyer do their best to formulate and classify the ideas of justice developed in our orthodox fatherland between the stable where they flog the house-serfs and the master’s study where they fleece the peasants.

The second _cause célèbre_, that is, the one with the aforesaid Yuss, was not so successful. Golitsyn came in, and he suddenly shouted so loud, and the secretary shouted so loud that there was nothing left but to come to blows with each other, and then the prince of course would have smashed the mangy sharper. But as everything in that household followed the laws of a peculiar logic, it was not the prince who fought with the secretary, but the secretary who fought with the door. Brimming over with spite and invigorated by an extra glass of gin, he aimed a blow with his fist at the big glass window in the door, and broke it to bits.

‘Police!’ roared Golitsyn. ‘Burglary! Police!’ and going into the drawing-room he fell exhausted on the sofa. When he had recovered a little, he explained to me among other things how great was the ingratitude of the secretary. The man had been his brother’s trusted agent and had swindled him—I do not remember how—and was on the point of being brought to trial. Golitsyn was sorry for him; he entered so thoroughly into his position that he pawned his only watch to buy him off. And so having the fullest proof that he was a rogue, he took him into his service as a steward!

There could be no doubt whatever that he had cheated Golitsyn at every turn.

I went away. A man who could smash a glass door with his fist could find justice and protection for himself. Moreover, he told me afterwards himself when he asked me to get him a passport to return to Russia, that he had proudly offered Golitsyn a pistol and suggested casting lots which should fire.

If this was so, the pistol was certainly not loaded.

The prince spent his last penny in pacifying the Servile Revolt, and none the less ended, as might have been expected, by being imprisoned for debt. Any one else would have been clapped in prison, and that would have been the end of it; but even that could not happen to Golitsyn simply in the common way.

A policeman used to conduct him between seven and eight o’clock every evening to Cremona Gardens; there he used to conduct a concert for the edification of the _lorettes_ of all London, and with the last wave of his ivory sceptre a policeman, till then unobserved, would spring up as though out of the earth and escort the prince to the cab which took the captive in the black swallow-tail and white gloves to prison. There were tears in his eyes as he said ‘Good-bye’ to me in the Gardens. Poor prince! Another man might have laughed at it, but he took his captivity to heart. His relations redeemed him at last; then the Government permitted him to return to Russia, and banished him at first to Yaroslavl, where he could conduct religious concerts together with Felinski, the Bishop of Warsaw. The Government was kinder to him than his father; as free a liver as his son, he advised the latter to go into a monastery. The father knew the son well; and yet he was himself so good a musician that Beethoven dedicated a symphony to him.

Following the exuberant figure of the Assyrian god, of the fleshy ox-Apollo, a series of other Russian curiosities must not be forgotten.

I am not speaking of flitting shades like the ‘colonel russe,’ but of those who, stranded by fate and various adventures, have remained a long time in London; such as the clerk in the War Office who, having got into a mess with his accounts and debts, threw himself into the Neva, was drowned ... and popped up in London, an _exile_, in a fur cap and a fur-lined coat, which he never abandoned, regardless of the muggy warmth of a London winter.

Or such as my friend Ivan Ivanovitch S., who, with antecedents and future and all, with raw skin on his head where there should have been hair, clamours for a place in my gallery of curiosities. A retired officer of the bodyguard of the Pavlov regiment, he lived in comfort in foreign parts, and so continued up to the revolution of February. Then he took fright, and began to look on himself as a criminal. Not that his conscience troubled him; what troubled him was the thought of the gendarmes who would meet him at the frontier, the thought of dungeons, of a troika, of the snow, and he resolved to postpone his return. All at once the news reached him that his brother had been arrested in connection with Shevtchenko’s case. There really was some risk for him, and he at once resolved to return. It was at that time that I made his acquaintance at Nice. S. was setting off, having bought a minute phial of poison for the journey, which he intended as he crossed the frontier to insert in a hollow tooth and to swallow if he were arrested.

As he approached his native land his panic grew greater and greater, and by the time he arrived at Berlin it had become a suffocating anguish. However, S. mastered himself and took his seat in the train. He remained there for the first five stations; further than that he could not bear it. The engine stopped to take in water; on a different pretext he left the train. The engine whistled, the train moved off without S.; and that was just what he wanted. Leaving his trunk to the caprice of destiny, by the first train going in the opposite direction he returned to Berlin. Thence he sent a telegram concerning his luggage, and went to get a _visa_ for his passport to Hamburg. ‘Yesterday you were going to Russia, and to-day you are going to Hamburg,’ remarked the policeman, without refusing the _visa_. The panic-stricken S. said: ‘Letters—I have had letters,’ and probably his expression as he said it was such that the Prussian official ought to be dismissed the service for not arresting him. Thereupon S., like Louis-Philippe, escaping though pursued by no one, arrived in London. In London a hard life began for him, as for thousands of others; for years he maintained an honest and resolute struggle with poverty. But for him, too, destiny provided a comic trimming to all his tragic adventures. He made up his mind to give lessons in mathematics, drawing and even French (for English people). After consulting various advisers, he saw that it could not be done without an advertisement or cards. ‘But the trouble is this: how will the Russian Government look at it? I thought and thought about it, and I have had anonymous cards printed.’

It was a long time before I could get over my delight at this grand invention: it had never occurred to me that it was possible to have a visiting-card without a name on it. With the help of his anonymous cards, and with great perseverance (he used to live for days together on nothing but bread and potatoes), he succeeded in getting afloat, was employed in selling things on commission, and his fortunes began to mend.

And this was precisely at the date when the fortunes of another officer of the Pavlov bodyguard failed completely; defeated, robbed, deceived, cheated, and deluded, the commander-in-chief of the Pavlov regiment departed into eternity. Pardons, amnesties, followed; S. too wished to take advantage of the Imperial mercies, and so he writes a letter to Brunov and asks whether he comes under the amnesty.

A month later S. was summoned to the Embassy. ‘My case is not so simple,’ he thought; ‘they have been thinking it over for a month.’

‘We have received an answer,’ the senior secretary said to him; ‘you have inadvertently put the Ministry in a difficult position; they have nothing against you. They have applied to the Ministry of Home Affairs, and they can find nothing relating to you either. Tell us plainly what it was; it could not have been anything of great consequence?’

‘Why, in 1849 my brother was arrested and afterwards exiled.’

‘Well?’

‘That was all.’

‘No,’ thought the official, ‘he is joking’; and he told S. if that was the case the Ministry would make further inquiries.

Two months passed. I can imagine what went on during these two months in Petersburg: references, reports, confidential inquiries, secret questions passed from the Ministry to the Third Section, from the Third Section to the Ministry, the report of X. ... of the Governor-General ... reprimands, observations ... but S.’s case could not be found.

The Ministry reported to that effect to London.

Brunov himself sent for S. ‘Here,’ he said—‘look—is the answer: there is nothing anywhere concerning you.—Tell me, what case was it you were mixed up in?’

‘My brother....’

‘I have heard all that, but with what case were you yourself connected?’

‘There was nothing else.’

Brunov, who had never been surprised at anything from his birth up, was surprised.

‘Then why do you ask for a pardon since you have done nothing?’

‘I thought that it was better, anyway.’

‘So the fact is you don’t need a pardon, but a passport,’ and Brunov ordered a passport to be given him.

In high delight S. dashed off to us.

After describing in detail the whole story of how he had obtained a pardon, he took Ogaryov by the arm and led him away into the garden. ‘For God’s sake, give me advice,’ he said to him, ‘Alexandr Ivanovitch always laughs at me—that is his way; but you have a kind heart. Tell me candidly: do you think I can safely go through Vienna?’ Ogaryov did not justify this good opinion; he burst out laughing. But not only Ogaryov—I can imagine how the faces of Brunov and his secretary for two minutes lost the wrinkles traced by weighty affairs of State and grinned when S., amnestied, walked out of their office.

But with all his eccentricities, S. was an honest man.

The other Russians who rose to the surface, God knows whence, strayed for a month or two about London, called on us with their own letters of introduction and vanished God knows whither, were by no means so harmless.

The melancholy case which I am going to describe took place in the summer of 1862. The reaction was at that time in its incubation stage, and the internal hidden rottenness had not yet shown itself externally. No one was afraid to come and see us; no one was afraid to take copies of the _Kolokol_ and our other publications away with him; many people boasted of the clever way they conveyed them over the frontier. When we advised them to be careful they laughed at us. We hardly ever wrote letters to Russia: we had nothing to say to our old friends, we were drifting further and further away from them; with our new unknown friends we corresponded through the _Kolokol_.

In the spring Kelsiev returned from Moscow and Petersburg. His journey is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable episodes of that period. The man who had slipped under the noses of the police, scarcely concealing himself, who had been present at conversations of raskolniks and drinking parties of comrades, with an absurd Turkish passport in his pocket, and had returned safe and sound to London, had grown reckless.

He took it into his head to get up a subscription-supper in our honour on the fifth anniversary of the _Kolokol_ at a restaurant. I begged him to put off the celebration to another happier time. He would not. The supper was not a success, there was no _entrain_ about it, and there could not be. There were too many outsiders taking part in it.

Talking of one thing and the other between toasts and anecdotes, it was mentioned as the simplest thing in the world that Vyetoshnikov, Kelsiev’s friend, was going to Petersburg and was ready to take anything with him. The party broke up late. Many people said that they would be with us on Sunday. There was indeed a regular crowd among whom were people whom we knew very little, and unfortunately Vyetoshnikov himself; he came up to me and said that he was going next morning, and asked me whether I had any letters or commissions. Bakunin had already given him two or three letters. Ogaryov went downstairs to his own room and wrote a few words of friendly greeting to Nikolay Serno-Solovyevitch; to them I added a word of greeting and asked the latter to call the attention of Tchernyshevsky (to whom I had never written) to our proposal in the _Kolokol_ to print the _Sovremennik_ in London at our expense.

The party began to break up about twelve o’clock. Two or three guests remained. Vyetoshnikov came into my study and took the letter. It is very possible that even that might have remained unnoticed. But this is what happened. By way of thanking those who had taken part in the supper, I asked them to choose any one of our publications or a big photograph of myself as a souvenir from me. Lyev Vyetoshnikov took the photograph; I advised him to cut off the margin and roll it up; he would not, but said he should put it at the bottom of his trunk, and so wrapped it in a sheet of _The Times_ and went off. That could not escape notice.

Saying good-bye to him, the last of the party, I quietly went off to bed—so great is one’s blindness at times—and of course never dreamed how dearly that minute would cost me and what sleepless nights it would bring me. It was all stupid and careless in the extreme. We might have delayed Vyetoshnikov until Tuesday, he might have been sent off on Saturday; why had he not come in the morning? ... and indeed why had he come himself at all? ... and, indeed, why did we write the letters?

We were told that one of our guests telegraphed at once to Petersburg.

Vyetoshnikov was arrested on the steamer; the rest is well known.

To conclude this gloomy narrative, I will speak of a man whom I have casually mentioned and whom I must not pass over. I mean Kelsiev.

BEHIND THE SCENES (1863 TO 1864)

We were left alone without faith listening to the far-away thunder of cannon, the far-away moan of the wounded. Early in April the news came that Potyebnya had been killed in battle at the Pyeskov Rock. In May Padlewski was shot at Plotsk, and so it went on and on.

It was a hard, unbearably hard, time! And, to add to all the gloom, one was the involuntary spectator of the stupidity, the senselessness of men, the cursed recklessness destroying every force about one.

V. I. KELSIEV

The name of V. Kelsiev has gained a mournful notoriety of late: the rapidity of his inward and the haste of his outward transformation, the success of his penitence, the urgent craving for a public confession and its strange scantiness, the tactlessness of his story, its inappropriate jocosity together with the easy levity so unseemly in the penitent and forgiven—all this, among people so unaccustomed as we are to abrupt and public conversions, set the better part of our journalists in arms against him. Kelsiev wanted at all costs to occupy the public attention; he made himself a target at which every one flings a stone without sparing. I am far from condemning the intolerance displayed in that case by our slumbering journalism. This indignation proves that there is still much that is uncorrupted and vigorous left among us, in spite of the black period of moral sloppiness and immoral talk. The indignation poured upon Kelsiev was the same as that which was unsparing of Pushkin for one or two poems and turned against Gogol for his ‘Correspondence with Friends.’

To cast a stone at Kelsiev is superfluous; a whole pavement has been thrown at him already. I want to tell others and to remind him what he was like when he came to us in London, and what he was like when for the second time he went away to Turkey.

Let him compare the bitterest moments of his life then with the sweetest of his present career.

These pages were written before his penitence and conversion, before his metempsychosis and metamorphosis. I have changed nothing and added nothing but extracts from letters. In my hasty sketch Kelsiev is presented as he remained in my memory until his arrival on a boat at the Skulyany[30] Customs in the character of prohibited goods asking to be confiscated and to be treated according to the law.

In 1859 I received the first letter from him.

The letter came from Plymouth. Kelsiev had arrived there on the steamer of a North American company, and was going on to a job in the Aleutian Islands. After spending a little time in Plymouth he gave up the idea of going to the Aleutian Islands, and wrote to me asking whether he could gain a livelihood in London. He had already succeeded in making the acquaintance of some theological gentlemen in Plymouth, and told me that they had called his attention to remarkable interpretations of prophecy. I warned him off the English clergymen, and invited him to London ‘if he really wanted to work.’ A fortnight later he made his appearance.

A rather tall, thin, sickly-looking young man with a rectangular skull and a thick crop of hair on his head, he reminded me—not by his hair (for the other was bald) but by his whole character—of Engelson, and he really was like him in very many ways. From the first glance one could discern in him much that was inharmonious and unstable, but nothing that was vulgar. It was evident that he had escaped from every form of bondage and authority but had not yet enrolled himself in the service of any cause or party: he had no definite object. He was much younger than Engelson, but yet he did belong to the latest section of the Petrashev group, and had some of their virtues and all of their defects, had studied everything in the world and learnt nothing thoroughly, read everything of every sort, and worried his brains rather uselessly over it all. Through continual criticism of every accepted idea, Kelsiev had shaken all his moral conceptions without discovering any guiding principle of conduct.

What was particularly original about Kelsiev was that in all his sceptical questioning there remained an element of fantastic mysticism: he was a Nihilist with the ways and manners of the religious, a Nihilist in the robes of a deacon. The flavour of the Church, its manner of speech and imagery, were retained in his deportment, his language, his style,[31] and gave his whole life a peculiar character, a peculiar unity, made by the welding together of opposing metals.

Kelsiev was passing through that stage of revaluation so familiar to us which almost every truly awakened Russian accomplishes within himself, and of which the Western European through practical preoccupations and lack of leisure never dreams at all, drawn as he is by his specialised knowledge into other tasks. Our elder brothers never verify their elementary assumptions, and that is how it is that their generations succeed each other, building and destroying, rewarding and punishing, bestowing crowns and fetters, always firmly convinced that it is the right thing and that they are doing their job. Kelsiev, on the contrary, doubted everything and refused to accept on hearsay that good was good or that evil was evil. This haughty spirit that denies all previous morality and accepted truths was particularly strong in the _mi-carême_ of our Lent under Nicholas, and found striking expression as soon as the yoke that weighed on our brains was lifted one inch. This analysis, so full of life and vigour, was fiercely attacked by the conservative literary movement—conserving God knows what—and after it by the Government.

At the time of our awakening in the din of the Sevastopol cannon, many of our clever fellows kept repeating the words they had heard from others, that Western European conservatism was the right thing for us, that we had been hurriedly thrust into European culture, not that we might share their hereditary diseases and out-of-date prejudices, but that we might compare ourselves with our elder brothers, so that it might be possible to advance in step with them. But as soon as in actual fact we see that in awakening thought, that in mature speech there is no firm principle, ‘nothing sacred,’ nothing but questions and problems, that thought is seeking, that speech is denying, that the most certain good is tottering together with what is bad, and that the spirit of doubt and experiment is dragging everything indiscriminately into an abyss, from which all safeguards have been removed—then a cry of consternation and horror bursts from the lips, and the first-class passengers close their eyes that they may not see the train leaving the rails while the drivers try to put on the brakes and stop the engine.

In reality there was no cause to be afraid: the rising force was too weak to change the course of sixty millions materially. But it had a programme, perhaps a prophecy.

Kelsiev had developed under the first influence of the period of which we are speaking. He was far from having attained clarity or reached any equilibrium; his moral property was in complete liquidation. All that was old he denied, all that was solid he had dissolved, he had shoved off from the shore and was drifting recklessly into the open sea; with equal suspicion and mistrustfulness he regarded belief and disbelief, Russian methods and the methods of Western Europe. The one thing that had sent deep roots into his heart was a passionate and profound recognition of the economic injustice of the present political order, a hatred for it and an intense but vague passion for the social theories in which he saw a solution.

Apart from all understanding of it, he had an undeniable right to this sense of injustice and this hatred of it.

In London he settled in one of the remotest parts of the town, in a blind alley of Fulham, inhabited by pale, smutty Irish and emaciated workmen of all sorts. In these damp, stony, unroofed corridors, it is fearfully still, there is almost no sound nor light nor colour: people, flower-pots and houses, all are faded and shrunk. Smoke and soot have wrapped all outlines in a shroud of mourning. No tradesmen’s carts rattle down them with provisions, no cabmen drive that way, no hawkers cry their wares, no dogs bark (there is absolutely nothing to feed the latter on); only from time to time a thin, dishevelled-looking, smutty cat emerges, clambers on to the roof and goes up to the chimney to get warm, arching her spine and betraying unmistakably how chilled she has been indoors.

The first time I visited Kelsiev I did not find him at home. A very young, very plain woman—thin, lymphatic, with tear-stained eyes—was sitting on the floor by a mattress, on which a baby of a year or a year and a half was tossing in a high fever, suffering and dying.

I looked at its face, and thought of the face of another baby on the point of death: it was the same expression. A few days later it died, and another was born.

No poverty could have been more complete. The young frail woman, or rather married child, endured it heroically and with extraordinary simplicity.

No one looking at her sickly, scrofulous, feeble appearance could have imagined what energy, what force of devotion, resided in that frail body. She might have served as a bitter lesson for our popular novelists. She was, or rather wanted to be, what was afterwards called a _Nihilist_: did her hair queerly, was careless in her dress, smoked a great deal, and was not afraid either of bold thoughts or bold words; she was not enthusiastic over the domestic virtues, did not talk of the sacredness of duty and the sweetness of the sacrifice she made daily, or of the lightness of the burden that weighed on her young shoulders. There was no pose or affectation about her struggle with poverty; and she did everything—sewed, washed, suckled her baby, cooked the meat and scrubbed the room. She was a resolute comrade to her husband, and like a great martyr laid down her life in the distant East, following her husband’s restless, wandering flight and losing her two last children in succession.

At first I struggled with Kelsiev, trying to persuade him not to cut himself off from the path of return before he knew what the life of an exile was like.

I had told him that he ought first to learn what poverty in a strange land meant, poverty in England, particularly in London; I told him that every vigorous man was precious now in Russia.

‘What are you going to do here?’ I asked him. Kelsiev proposed to study everything and to write about everything; most of all, he wanted to write about the Woman Question and the reorganisation of the family.

‘Write first,’ I told him, ‘about the necessity that the peasants should have the land when they are emancipated. That is the first question that confronts us.’

But Kelsiev was not attracted in that direction. He did, as a fact, bring me an article on the Woman Question. It was incredibly poor. Kelsiev was angry with me for not publishing it, though he thanked me for it two years later.

He did not want to go back. Work had to be found for him at all costs. We did our best to find it. His theological eccentricities assisted us in doing so. We obtained for him the job of correcting the proofs of the Russian edition of the Scriptures published by the London Bible Society, and then handed over to him a heap of papers we had received at various times relating to the Old Believers. Kelsiev undertook the task of arranging and editing them with enthusiasm. What he had been groping for and dreaming of lay revealed before him: he discovered in the dissenters a coarsely naïve socialism in a gospel setting. This was the best period in Kelsiev’s life. He worked passionately, and used to run in to see me in the evening to tell me of some socialistic idea of the Duhobors or the Molokans, or some communistic doctrine of the Fedoseyevtsy. He was delighted with their wanderings in the forests, and found an ideal for his life in wandering among them and becoming the founder of a socialist Christian sect in Belaya-Krinitsa,[32] or Russia.

And indeed Kelsiev was a ‘vagrant’ soul, a vagrant morally and in practice: he was tormented by unstable thoughts, by depression. He could not remain in one spot. He had found work, occupation, a livelihood free from want, but he did not find work which would completely absorb his restless temperament; he was ready to go anywhere to seek it, even to become a monk, to accept the holy calling without faith in it.

A typical Russian, Kelsiev made a new programme of work every month, thought of new schemes and took up a new task without finishing the old one. He worked by bouts, and by bouts did nothing. He grasped things easily, but was at once satisfied and cloyed; he plucked at once all the essence out of a thing, to the last deduction, sometimes even more than was in it.

The book about the raskolniks came off successfully; he published six parts, which were quickly distributed. The Government, seeing this, allowed the publication of the facts concerning the Old Believers. The same thing happened with the translation of the Bible. The translation from the Hebrew was not successful. Kelsiev tried to perform a _tour de force_ and to translate it word for word, regardless of the fact that the grammatical forms of the Semitic tongues do not correspond with those of the Slavonic. Nevertheless, the books that were issued were instantly sold, and the Holy Synod, alarmed at the success of the foreign edition, gave its blessing to the publication of the Old Testament in Russian. These back-handed victories were never put down to the credit of our press by any one.

At the end of 1862 Kelsiev went to Moscow with the object of establishing permanent relations with the raskolniks. This expedition he ought one day to describe himself. It was incredible, impossible, but it actually took place. The daring of this trip borders on insanity; its recklessness was almost criminal; but of course it is not for me to blame him for that. Incautious chatter at the frontier might have done a great deal of harm, but that is not the point, and has nothing to do with the estimate of the expedition itself.

On his return to London he undertook the suggestion of Trübner to compile a Russian grammar for Englishmen, and to translate some financial book. He did not complete either of these tasks: his travels had ruined his _Sitzfleisch_. He was bored by work, sank into hypochondria and depression, while work was necessary, for again they had not a penny. Moreover, a new craze began to fret him. The success of this expedition, the daring he had incontestably displayed, the mysterious negotiations, the triumph over dangers—all this fanned the flame of vanity that was already strong in his heart; unlike Caesar, Don Carlos, and Vadim Passek, Kelsiev, passing his hands through his thick hair, would say, shaking his head mournfully: ‘Not yet thirty, and such immense responsibilities undertaken!’ From all this it might readily be deduced that he would not finish the grammar but would go away. And he did go. He went to Turkey with the firm intention of there getting into closer touch with the raskolniks, forming new ties and if possible remaining there, and beginning to preach the free church and communistic life. I wrote him a long letter, trying to persuade him not to go, but to stick to his work. The passion for wandering, the desire to do great deeds and to have a grand destiny, which haunted him, were too strong, and he went. He and Martyanov disappeared almost at the same time—one, after passing through a series of trials and misfortunes, to bury his dear ones and be lost between Jassy and Galatz, the other to bury himself in penal servitude, to which he was sent by the incredible stupidity of the Tsar and the incredible spite of the revengeful land-owning senators.

After them men of a different stamp appear upon the scene. Our social metamorphosis, having no great depth and affecting only a thin layer, rapidly wears out and changes its forms and colours.

A whole stratum lay between Engelson and Kelsiev, just as between us and Engelson. Engelson was a man injured and broken by his whole environment; the foul atmosphere which he had breathed from childhood had distorted him. A ray of light gleamed upon him and warmed him for three years before his death, but by then the sickness that was consuming him could not be arrested. Kelsiev, who was also damaged and injured by his environment, was yet free from despair and fatigue; he was not merely seeking peace abroad, but had simply run away from oppression; without looking behind him, he was going _somewhere_. Where? That he did not know (and therein lay the most prominent characteristic of his group), he had no definite aim; he was seeking it, and meanwhile looking about him and setting in order, and maybe in disorder, a whole mass of ideas caught up at school from books and from life. Within him that destructive process of which we have spoken was going on, and it was for him the essential question in which he lived, while waiting either for a cause which should absorb him or a thought to which he could devote himself.

After making his way to Turkey, Kelsiev decided to settle in Tulcea; there he meant to form a centre for his propaganda among the raskolniks, to found a school for Cossack children and to make the experiment of a communal life, in which profit and loss was to fall equally upon all, and the work, skilled or unskilled, light or heavy, should be divided among all. The cheapness of dwelling and of food made the experiment possible. He made the acquaintance of Gonchar, the old ataman of the Nekrassovtsys, and at first praised him up to the skies.

In the summer of 1863 his younger brother Ivan, a fine and gifted youth, joined him. He had been exiled from Moscow to Perm in connection with the students’ rising; there he came into collision with a wretch of a governor, who oppressed him. Then he was sent again to Moscow on account of some investigation; he was in danger of being exiled to some place more remote than Perm. He escaped from custody and made his way through Constantinople to Tulcea. His elder brother was extremely glad to see him. He was looking for comrades, and in the end sent for his wife, who was eager to go to him, and had been living under our protection in Teddington. While we were fitting her out, Gonchar himself arrived in London.

The crafty old man, who scented the approach of war and disturbance, had come out of his hole to sniff what was in the air and to see what he had to expect, and from which quarter; that is, with whom and against whom to ally himself. Knowing no single word of any language but Turkish and Russian, he set off for Marseilles, and from there reached Paris. In Paris he saw Czartorysczki and Zamoisky; I was even told that he had been taken to Napoleon, but I did not hear that from himself. His negotiations led to nothing, and the old Cossack, shaking his grizzled head and screwing up his cunning eyes, wrote in the scrawl of the seventeenth century, and, addressing me as Count, asked if he could come and see us and how he could reach us. We were then living in Teddington; it was not easy to find us without a word of English, and I went to London to meet him at the station. An old Russian peasant of the more prosperous sort, rather thin, but sturdy, muscular, fairly tall and sunburnt, with a big Russian beard, stepped out of the carriage, wearing a grey kaftan and carrying a bundle tied up in a coloured handkerchief.

‘You are Osip Semyonovitch?’ I asked him.

‘I am, my good sir, I am’; he gave me his hand. His kaftan flew open and I saw on his jerkin a big star—of course a Turkish one; Russian stars are not given to peasants. The jerkin was dark blue and was bordered with a wide coloured braid; I had not seen one like it in Russia.

‘I am Alexandr Ivanovitch Herzen. I have come to meet you and to take you to us.’

‘What did you put yourself out for, Your Excellency?... Why ... you might have sent some one or something....’

‘Evidently because I am not an Excellency. What put it into your head, Osip Semyonovitch, to call me Count?’

‘Well, Christ only knows how to address you; surely you are the head-man in your line. Well, I am an ignorant man, you see, so, says I, he is a Count, that is an Excellency, that is the chief.’ Not only Gonchar’s turn of speech, but even his accent was that of a Great Russian peasant. How have these men preserved their language so splendidly in the wilds, surrounded by natives of another race? It would be hard to explain it apart from the compact solidarity of the Old Believers. Their sect has divided them off so strictly that no foreign influence has crossed its barrier.

Gonchar spent three days with us. For the first two days he ate nothing but dry bread which he had brought with him and he drank nothing but water. The third day was Sunday, and he allowed himself a glass of milk, some boiled fish and, if I am not mistaken, a glass of sherry. Russian circumspection, Oriental cunning, the caution of a hunter, the reserve of a man accustomed from childhood to being entirely without rights and in close contact with powerful enemies, a long life spent in struggle, in unceasing toil among dangers—all this was apparent behind the seemingly simple features and simple words of the grey-headed Cossack. He was continually qualifying what he said, using evasive phrases, quoting texts from Scripture; he assumed a modest air while he very consciously described his successes, and if he was sometimes carried away in his stories of the past and said a good deal, he certainly never let drop a word concerning anything of which he meant to be silent.

This stamp of man scarcely exists in Western Europe. It is not needed there, as Damascus steel is not needed for the blade of a penknife.

In Europe everything is done wholesale, in the mass; the individual man does not need so much strength and caution.

He had no faith now in the success of the Polish rebellion, and spoke of his interviews in Paris, shaking his head. ‘It is not for us, of course, to judge: we are little, ignorant people, while they, look you, are grand gentlemen as is only right; but there, they are a bit light in their ways. “Don’t you doubt, Gonchar,” they say. “This is how we’ll manage, we will do this and that for you.... Do you understand?... It will all be satisfactory.” ... To be sure, they are good-natured gentlemen, but look you here, when will they manage it ... with politics like that...?’ He wanted to find out what connections we had with the raskolniks and what support in his country; he wanted to make certain whether there could be any practical benefit for the Old Believers in connection with us. In reality, it was all one to him; he would as readily have allied himself with Poland or with Austria, with us or with the Greeks, with Russia or with Turkey, if only it had been profitable for his Nekrassovtsy. He shook his head as he left us, too. He wrote two or three letters afterwards, in which, among other things, he complained of Kelsiev and, contrary to our advice, sent an appeal to the Tsar.

At the beginning of 1864 two Russian officers, both exiles, Krasnopyevtsev and V., went to Tulcea. At first the little colony set to work zealously. They taught the children and salted cucumbers, patched their clothes and dug in the kitchen-garden. Kelsiev’s wife cooked the dinner and made their clothes. Kelsiev was pleased with the beginning, pleased with the Cossacks and with the raskolniks, pleased with his comrades and with the Turks.[33]

Kelsiev was still writing us his humorous descriptions of their installation, but the dark hand of destiny was already menacing the little band of Tulcea Communists. In June 1864, just a year after his arrival, Ivan Kelsiev died of malignant typhus in his brother’s arms. He was only three-and-twenty. His death was a fearful blow for his brother; the latter fell ill himself, but somehow survived. His letters of that period are terrible reading. The spirit which had sustained the recluses drooped, they were overcome by gloomy depression; crimes and quarrels followed. Gonchar wrote that Kelsiev was drinking heavily. Krasnopyevtsev shot himself. V. went away. Kelsiev, too, could stand it no longer; he took his wife and his children (he had another by then), and without means or aim set off first for Constantinople, then for the Balkan States. Completely cut off from every one, for the time even cut off from us, it was then that he broke off all relations with the Polish exiles in Turkey. In vain he tried to earn a crust of bread, with despair he looked at the wan faces of his poor wife and children. The money we sent him now and then could not be sufficient. ‘It happened at times that we had no bread at all,’ his wife wrote not long before her death. At last, after long efforts, Kelsiev obtained in Galatz a job as ‘overseer of work on the high-roads.’ He was consumed, devoured by boredom. He could not but blame himself for the position of his family. The ignorance of the barbarous Eastern world oppressed him. He pined in it and longed to get away. He had lost his faith in the raskolniks; he had lost his faith in Poland; his faith in men, in science, in revolution, was growing more and more unsteady, and it was easy to predict when it too would collapse. He dreamt of nothing but at all costs struggling back again into the world and coming to us, and saw with horror that he could not leave his family. ‘If I were alone,’ he wrote several times, ‘I would set off at hazard with a daguerrotype machine, or a barrel-organ, and, wandering over the world, would reach Geneva on foot.’

Help was at hand.

Malusha (so they called the elder girl) went to bed quite well, but woke up in the night ill. Towards morning she died of cholera. A few days later the younger child died; the mother was taken to the hospital, she was found to be suffering from galloping consumption.

‘Do you remember,’ she said to him, ‘you promised once to tell me when I was going to die, that it was death? Is this death?’

‘It is death, my dear, it is.’

And she smiled once more, sank into forgetfulness and died.

_Extract from a Letter_

They write to us in Petersburg that the other day the official
in charge of the Skulyany Customs House received a letter
signed V. Kelsiev informing him that the passenger who would
have to present himself at that Customs House with a regular
Turkish passport bearing the name of Ivan Zheludkov was no
other than himself, Kelsiev, and that, wishing to give himself
up to the Russian Government, he begged the said official to
arrest him and send him to Petersburg.

THE COMMON FUND

Kelsiev had hardly passed out of our door when fresh people, driven out by the chill blasts of 1863, were knocking at it. These came not from the training-schools of the coming upheaval but from the devastated stage on which they had already played their parts. They were taking refuge from the storm without and seeking nothing within; all they needed was a temporary haven until the weather improved, until a chance presented itself to return to the fray. These men, while still very young, had done with ideas, with culture; theoretical questions did not interest them, partly because they had not yet arisen among them, partly because they were concerned with putting them into practice. Though they had been defeated, they had given proofs of their reckless daring. They had furled their flag, and their task was to preserve its honour. Hence their dry, _cassant_, _raide_, abrupt and rather elevated tone. Hence their martial, impatient aversion for prolonged deliberation, for criticism, their somewhat elaborate contempt for all intellectual superfluities, among which they put Art in the foreground. What need of music? What need of poetry? ‘The fatherland is in danger, _aux armes, citoyens_!’ In certain cases they were theoretically right, but they did not take into account the complex, intricate process of balancing the ideal with the actual, and, I need hardly say, assumed that their views and theories were the views and theories of all Russia. To blame our young pilots of the coming storm for this would be unjust. It is the common characteristic of youth; a year ago a Frenchman, a follower of Comte, assured me that Catholicism no longer existed in France, that it had _complètement perdu le terrain_, and pointed to the medical profession, to the professors and students who were not merely not Catholics but not even Deists. ‘Well, but that part of France,’ I observed, ‘which neither gives nor hears medical lectures?’

‘It, of course, keeps to religion and its rites—but more from habit and ignorance.’

‘Very true, but what will you do with it?’

‘What did they do in 1792?’

‘A little: at first the Revolution closed the churches, but afterwards opened them again. Do you remember Augereau’s answer to Napoleon when they were celebrating the Concordat? “Do you like the ceremony?” the consul asked as they came out of Notre-Dame. The Jacobin general answered: “Very much. I am only sorry that the two hundred thousand men who have gone to their graves to abolish such ceremonies are not present!”’

‘_Ah bah_, we have grown wiser, and we shall not open the church doors—or rather we shall not close them at all, but shall turn the temples of idolatry into schools.’

‘_L’infâme sera écrasée_,’ I wound up, laughing.

‘Yes, no doubt of it; that is certain!’

‘But that you and I will not see it—that is even more certain.’

It is to this looking at the surrounding world through a prism coloured by personal sympathies that half the revolutionary failures are due. The life of young people, spent as a rule in a noisy and limited seclusion of a sort, remote from the everyday and wholesale struggle for personal interests, though it grasps universal truths clearly, is almost always doomed to a false understanding of their application to the needs of the day.

At first our new visitors cheered us with accounts of the movement in Petersburg, of the wild pranks of the full-fledged reaction, of the trials and persecutions, of university and literary parties. Then, when all this had been told with the rapidity with which in such cases men hasten to tell all they know, a pause, a hiatus would follow; our conversations became dull and monotonous.

‘Can this really be,’ I thought, ‘old age divorcing two generations? Is it the chill induced by years, by weariness, by experience?’

Whatever it might be due to, I felt that our horizon was not widened, but narrowed, by the arrival of these new men. The scope of our conversations was more limited. Sometimes we had nothing to say to one another. They were occupied with the details of their circles, beyond which nothing interested them. Having once related everything of interest about them, there was nothing to do but to repeat it, and they did repeat it. They took little interest in learning or in public affairs; they even read little, and did not follow the newspapers regularly. Absorbed in memories and anticipations, they did not care to step forth into other spheres; while we had not air to breathe in that exhausted atmosphere. We, spoiled by wider horizons, were stifled.

Moreover, even if they did know a certain section of Petersburg, they did not know Russia at all, and, though sincerely desirous of coming into contact with the people, they only approached them bookishly and theoretically.

What we had in common was too general. Advance together, _serve_, as the French say, take action together we might, but it was hard to stand still with hands folded and live together. It was useless to dream of a serious influence on them. A morbid and very unceremonious vanity had long ago got the upper hand.[34] Sometimes, it is true, they did ask for a programme, for guidance, but for all their sincerity there was no reality about that. They expected us to formulate their own opinions, and only assented when what we said did not contradict them in the least. They looked upon us as respectable veterans, as something past and over, and were naïvely surprised that we were not yet so very much behind themselves.

I have always and in everything dreaded ‘above all sorrows’ _mésalliances_; I have always endured them, partly through humanity, partly through carelessness, and have always suffered from them.

It was not hard to foresee that our new connections would not last long, that sooner or later they would be broken, and that, considering the churlish character of our new friends, this rupture would not come off without disagreeable consequences.

The subject upon which our unstable relations came to grief was that old subject upon which acquaintances tacked together with rotten threads usually come to grief. I mean money. Knowing absolutely nothing of my resources nor of my sacrifices, they made demands upon me which I did not think it right to satisfy. That I had been able through bad times without the slightest assistance to maintain the Russian propaganda for fifteen years was only because I had put a careful limit to my other expenses. My new acquaintances considered that all I was doing was not enough, and looked with indignation at a man who pretended to be a Socialist and did not distribute his property in equal shares among people who wanted money without working. Obviously they had not advanced beyond the impractical point of view of Christian charity and voluntary poverty, and mistook that for practical Socialism.

The efforts to collect a ‘Common Fund’ yielded no results of importance. Russians are not fond of giving money to any common cause, unless it includes the building of a church, and a banquet, a drinking-party, and the approval of the higher authorities.

When the impecuniosity of the exiles was at its height, a rumour circulated among them that I had a sum of money entrusted to me for purposes of propaganda.

It seemed perfectly right to the young people to relieve me of it.

To make the position clear, I must describe a strange incident that occurred in the year 1858. One morning I received a very brief note from an unknown Russian; he wrote to me that he ‘urgently desired to see me,’ and asked me to fix an hour.

I happened to be going to London at the time, and so instead of answering I went myself to the Sablonnière Hotel and inquired for him. He was at home. He was a young man who looked like a cadet, shy, very depressed, and with the peculiar rather rough-hewn appearance of the seventh or eighth son of a Steppe landowner. Very uncommunicative, he was almost completely silent; it was evident that he had something on his mind, but he could not come to the point of putting it into words.

I went away, inviting him to dinner two or three days later. Before that date I met him in the street. ‘May I walk with you?’ he asked.

‘Of course; there is no risk for me in being seen with you, though there is for you in being seen with me. But London is a big place.’

‘I am not afraid’—and then all at once, taking the bit between his teeth, he hurriedly burst out: ‘I shall never go back to Russia—no, no, I shall certainly never go back to Russia....’

‘Upon my word, and you so young?’

‘I love Russia—I love her dearly; but there the people ... I cannot live there. I want to found a colony on completely socialistic principles; I have thought it all over, and now I am going straight there.’

‘Straight where?’

‘To the Marquesas Islands.’

I looked at him in dumb amazement.

‘Yes, yes; it is all settled. I am sailing by the next steamer, and so I am very glad that I have met you to-day—may I put an indiscreet question to you?’

‘As many as you like.’

‘Do you make any profit out of your publications?’

‘Profit! I am glad to say that now the press pays its way.’

‘Well, but what if it should not?’

‘I shall make it up.’

‘So that no sort of commercial aim enters into your propaganda?’ said the young man.

I laughed heartily.

‘Well, but how are you going to pay all the expenses alone? And your propaganda is essential. You must forgive me, I am not asking out of curiosity: when I left Russia for ever, I had the thought in my mind of doing something useful for her, and I made up my mind to leave a small sum of money with you. Should your printing-press need it, or the Russian propaganda generally, then you must make use of it.’

Again I could do nothing but look at him with amazement.