Chapter XVIII: Letter 2 (2)

The landowner cannot legally demand a breach of conjugal fidelity. If the law were carried out in Russia, the violation of a serf-woman would be punished exactly as though she were free, namely by penal servitude or exile to Siberia, with deprivation of all civil rights. Such is the law, let us turn to the facts.

I do not pretend to deny that with the power given by the Government to the landowners, it is very easy for them to violate the wives and daughters of their serfs. By privation and punishment the landowner can always bring his serfs to a pass in which some will offer him their wives and daughters, just like that worthy French nobleman who, in the eighteenth century, asked as a special favour that his daughter should be installed in the Parc-aux-Cerfs.

It is no matter for wonder that honourable fathers and husbands find no redress against the landowners, thanks to the excellent judicial system of Russia. For the most part, they find themselves in the position of Monsieur Tiercelin, whose daughter of eleven was stolen by Berruyer, at the instigation of Louis XV. All these filthy abuses are possible; one has but to think of the coarse and depraved manners of a section of the Russian nobility to be certain of it. But as far as the peasants are concerned they are far indeed from enduring their masters’ viciousness with indifference.

Allow me to bring forward a proof of it.

Half of the landowners murdered by their serfs (the statistics give their number as sixty to seventy a year) perish in consequence of their misdeeds in this line. Legal proceedings on such grounds are rare; the peasant knows that the judges show little respect for his complaints; but he has an axe; he is a master of the use of it, and knows that he is.

I will say no more about the peasants, but beg you to listen to a few more words about educated Russia.

Your view of the intellectual movement in Russia is no more indulgent than your opinion of the popular character; with one stroke of the pen you strike off all the work hitherto done by our fettered hands!

One of Shakespeare’s characters, not knowing how to show his contempt for a despised opponent, says to him: ‘I even doubt of your existence!’ You have gone further, for it is not a matter of doubt to you that Russian literature does not exist. I quote from your own words:

‘We are not going to attach importance to the attempts of those few clever people who have thought fit to exercise themselves in the Russian language and cheat Europe with a pale phantom of Russian literature. If it were not for my deep respect for Mickiewicz and his saintly aberrations, I should really censure him for the indulgence, one might even say charity, with which he speaks of this trifling.’[88]

I search in vain, sir, for the grounds for the contempt with which you greet the first frail cry of a people that has awakened in its prison-house, the groan suppressed by its gaoler.

Why are you unwilling to listen to the shuddering notes of our mournful poetry, to our chants through which a sob can be heard? What has concealed from your eyes our hysterical laughter, the perpetual irony behind which the deeply tortured heart seeks refuge, in which our fatal helplessness is confessed? Oh, how I long to make you a worthy translation of some poems of Pushkin and Lermontov, some songs of Koltsov! Then you would hold out to us a friendly hand at once, you would be the first to beg us to forget what you have said!

Next to the communism of the peasants, nothing is so deeply characteristic of Russia, nothing is such an earnest of her great future, as her literary movement.

Between the peasantry and literature there looms the monster of official Russia. ‘Russia the deception, Russia the pestilence,’ as you call her. This Russia extends from the Emperor, passing from gendarme to gendarme, from official to official, down to the lowest policeman in the remotest corner of the Empire. Every step of the ladder, as in Dante, gains a new power for evil, a new degree of corruption and cruelty. This living pyramid of crimes, abuses, and bribery, built up of policemen, scoundrels, heartless German officials everlastingly greedy, ignorant judges everlastingly drunk, aristocrats everlastingly base: all this is held together by a community of interest in plunder and gain, and supported on six hundred thousand animated machines with bayonets. The peasant is never defiled by contact with this governing world of aggression; he endures its existence—only in that is he to blame.

The body hostile to official Russia consists of a handful of men who are ready to face anything, who protest against it, fight with it, denounce and undermine it. These isolated champions are from time to time thrown into dungeons, tortured, sent to Siberia, but their place does not long remain empty, fresh champions come forward; it is our tradition, our inalienable task. The terrible consequences of speech in Russia inevitably give it a peculiar force. A free utterance is listened to with love and reverence, because among us it is only uttered by those who have something to say. One does not so easily put one’s thoughts into print when at the end of every page one has a vision of a gendarme, a troika, and, on the far horizon, Tobolsk or Irkutsk.

In my last pamphlet[89] I have said enough about Russian literature. Here I will confine myself to a few general observations.

Melancholy, scepticism, irony, those are the three chief strings of the Russian lyre.

When Pushkin begins one of his finest poems with these terrible words:

‘All say—there is no justice upon earth....
But there is no justice—up above us either!
To me that is as clear as A B C,’

does it not grip your heart, do you not through the show of composure divine the broken life of a man grown used to suffering? Lermontov, in his profound repulsion for the society surrounding him, turns in 1830 to his contemporaries with his terrible

‘With mournful heart I watch our generation,
Tragic or trivial must its future be.’

I only know one contemporary poet who touches the gloomy strings of man’s soul with the same power. He, too, was a poet born in slavery and dying before the rebirth of his Fatherland; that is the singer of death, Leopardi, to whom the world seems a vast league of criminals ruthlessly persecuting a handful of righteous madmen.

Russia has only one painter who has won general recognition, Bryullov. What is the subject of his finest work which won him fame in Italy?

Glance at this strange painting.[90] On an immense canvas groups of terrified figures are crowded in confusion, seeking in vain for safety. They are perishing from an earthquake, a volcanic eruption in the midst of a perfect tempest of cataclysms. They are overwhelmed by savage, senseless, ruthless force, to which any resistance is impossible. Such are the conceptions inspired by the Petersburg atmosphere. The Russian novel is occupied exclusively in the sphere of pathological anatomy. In it there is a perpetual reference to the evil consuming us, perpetual, pitiless, peculiar to us. Here you do not hear voices from heaven, promising Faust forgiveness for sinful Gretchen—here the only voices raised are those of doubt and damnation. Yet if there is salvation for Russia, she will be saved only by this profound recognition of our position, by the truthfulness with which she lays bare before all her plight. He who boldly recognises his failings feels that there is in him something that has been kept safe in the midst of downfalls and backslidings; he knows that he can expiate his past, and not only lift up his head, but turn from ‘Sardanapalus the profligate to Sardanapalus the hero.’

The Russian peasantry do not read. You know that Voltaire and Dante, too, were not read by villagers, but by the nobility and a section of the middle class. In Russia the educated section of the middle class forms part of the nobility, which consists of all that has ceased to be the peasantry. There is even a proletariat of the nobility which merges into the peasantry, and a proletariat of the peasantry which rises up into the nobility. This fluctuation, this continual renewal, gives the Russian nobility a character which you do not find in the privileged classes of the backward countries of Europe. In brief, the whole history of Russia, from the time of Peter the Great, is only the history of the nobility and of the influence of enlightenment upon it. I will add that the Russian nobility equals in numbers the electorate of France established by the laws of the 31st of May.

In the course of the eighteenth century, the new Russian literature fashioned that rich, sonorous language which we possess now: a supple and powerful language capable of expressing both the most abstract ideas of German metaphysics and the light sparkling play of French wit. This literature, called into being by the genius of Peter the Great, bore, it is true, the impress of the Government—but in those days the banner of the Government was progress, almost revolution.

Till 1789 the Imperial throne complacently draped itself in the majestic vestments of enlightenment and philosophy. Catherine II. deserved to be deceived with cardboard villages and palaces of painted boards.... No one could dazzle spectators by a gorgeous stage effect as she could. In the Hermitage there was continual talk about Voltaire, Montesquieu, Beccaria. You, sir, know the reverse of the medal.

Yet in the midst of the triumphal chorus of the courtiers’ songs of praise, a strange unexpected note was already sounding. That was the sceptical, fiercely satirical strain, before which all the other artificial chants were soon to be reduced to silence.

The true character of Russian thought, poetical and speculative, develops in its full force on the accession of Nicholas to the throne. Its distinguishing feature is a tragic emancipation of conscience, a pitiless negation, a bitter irony, an agonising self-analysis. Sometimes this all breaks into insane laughter, but there is no gaiety in that laughter.

Cast into oppressive surroundings, and armed with a clear eye and incorruptible logic, the Russian quickly frees himself from the faith and morals of his fathers. The thinking Russian is the most independent man in the world. What is there to curb him? Respect for the past?... But what serves as a starting-point of the modern history of Russia, if not the denial of nationalism and tradition?

Or can it be the tradition of the Petersburg period? That tradition lays no obligation on us; on the contrary, that ‘fifth act of the bloody drama staged in a brothel’[91] sets us completely free from every obligation.

On the other hand, the past of the Western European peoples serves us as a lesson and nothing more; we do not regard ourselves as the executors of their historic testaments.

We share your doubts, but your faith does not cheer us. We share your hatred, but we do not understand your devotion to what your forefathers have bequeathed you; we are too down-trodden, too unhappy, to be satisfied with half-freedom. You are restrained by scruples, you are held back by second thoughts. We have neither second thoughts nor scruples; all we lack is strength. This is where we get the irony, the anguish which gnaws us, which brings us to frenzy, which drives us on till we reach Siberia, torture, exile, premature death. We sacrifice ourselves with no hope, from spite, from boredom.... There is, indeed, something irrational in our lives, but there is nothing vulgar, nothing stagnant, nothing bourgeois.

Do not accuse us of immorality because we do not respect what you respect. Can you reproach a foundling for not respecting his parents? We are independent because we are starting life from the beginning. We have no law but our nature, our national character; it is our being, our flesh and blood, but by no means a binding authority. We are independent because we possess nothing. We have hardly anything to love. All our memories are filled with bitterness and resentment. Education, learning, were given us with the whip.

What have we to do with your sacred duties, we younger brothers robbed of our heritage? And can we be honestly contented with your threadbare morality, unchristian and inhuman, existing only in rhetorical exercises and speeches for the prosecution? What respect can be inspired in us by your Roman-barbaric system of law, that hollow clumsy edifice, without light or air, repaired in the Middle Ages, whitewashed by the newly enfranchised petty bourgeois? I admit that the daily brigandage in the Russian law-courts is even worse, but it does not follow from that that you have justice in your laws or your courts.

The distinction between your laws and our Imperial decrees is confined to the formula with which they begin. Our Imperial decrees begin with a crushing truth: ‘The Tsar has been pleased to command’; your laws begin with a revolting falsehood, the ironical abuse of the name of the French people, and the words Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The code of Nicholas is drawn up for the benefit of the Autocracy to the detriment of its subjects. The Napoleonic code has absolutely the same character. We are held in too many chains already to fasten fresh ones about us of our own free will. In this respect we stand precisely on a level with our peasants. We submit to brute force. We are slaves because we have no possibility of being free; but we accept nothing from our foes.

Russia will never be Protestant, Russia will never be _juste-milieu_.

Russia will never make a revolution with the object of getting rid of the Tsar Nicholas, and replacing him by other Tsars—parliamentary representatives, judges, and police officials. We perhaps ask for too much and shall get nothing. That may be so, but yet we do not despair; before the year 1848 Russia could not, and should not, have entered on a career of revolution, she had to learn her lesson—now she has learnt it. The Tsar himself observes it, and is ferociously brutal in his opposition to universities, to ideas, to knowledge; he is trying to cut Russia off from Europe, to destroy culture. He is doing his job.

Will he succeed in it? As I have said before, we must not have blind faith in the future; every seed has its claim to development, but not every one develops. The future of Russia does not depend on her alone, it is bound up with the future of Europe. Who can foretell the fate of the Slav world, if reaction and absolutism finally vanquish the revolution in Europe?

Perhaps it will perish.

But in that case Europe too will perish....

And progress will pass to America.

* * * * *

After writing the above I received the last two instalments of your legend. My first impulse on reading them was to throw what I had written in the fire. Your warm and generous heart has not waited for some one else to raise a voice on behalf of the despised Russian people. Your heart was too tender for you to play the part you had undertaken of the _relentless_ judge, the avenger of the outraged Polish people. You have been drawn into inconsistency, but it is the inconsistency of a noble mind.

I thought, however, on reading over my letter that you might find in it some new views on Russia and the Slav world, and I made up my mind to send it you. I confidently hope that you will forgive the passages in which I have been carried away by my Scythian impetuosity. It is not for nothing that the blood of the barbarians flows in my veins. I so longed to change your opinion of the Russian people, it was such a grief, such a pain to me to see that you were hostile to us that I could not conceal my bitterness, my emotion, that I let my pen run away with me. But now I see that you do not despair of us, that under the coarse smock of the Russian peasant you discern the man. I see this, and in my turn confess that I fully understand the impression the very name of Russia must produce on every free man. We often ourselves curse our unhappy Fatherland. You know it, you say yourself that everything you have written of the moral worthlessness of Russia is feeble compared with what Russians say themselves.

But the time for funeral orations on Russia is past for us too, and with you we say ‘in that thought lies hid the spark of life.’ You have divined that spark by the power of your love; but we see it, we feel it. That spark will not be quenched by streams of blood, by the ices of Siberia, nor the suffocating heat of mines and prisons. May it spread under its layer of ashes! The cold, deadly breath which blows from Europe cannot put it out.

For us the hour of action has not come; France may still be justly proud of her foremost position. That painful privilege is hers until 1852. Europe will doubtless before us reach the goal of the grave or of the new life. The day of action is perhaps still far away for us; the day of recognising the idea, the day of utterance, has already come. We have lived long enough in sleep and silence; the time has come to tell what we have dreamed, what conclusions we have reached.

And indeed whose fault is it that we have had to wait until 1847 for a German (Haxthausen) to _discover_, as you express it, the Russia of the peasantry, as unknown before his time as America before Columbus?

Of course, it is we who are to blame for it, we poor dumb creatures with our cowardice, our halting words, our terrified imagination. Even abroad we are afraid to confess the hatred with which we look upon our fetters. Convicts from our birth up, doomed to the hour of death to drag the chains riveted to our legs, we are offended when we are spoken of as though we were voluntary slaves, as though we were frozen negroes, and yet we do not openly protest.

Ought we to submit meekly to these denunciations, or to resolve to check them, lifting up our voice for Russian freedom of speech? Better for us to perish suspected of human dignity than to live with the shameful brand of slavery on our brow, than to hear ourselves charged with voluntary servility.

Unhappily, free speech in Russia arouses terror and amazement. I have tried to lift only a corner of the heavy curtain that hides us from Europe, I have indicated only the theoretical tendencies, the remote hopes, the organic elements of our future development; and yet my book of which you speak in such flattering phrases has made an unpleasant impression in Russia. Friendly voices which I respect condemn it. In it they see a denunciation of Russia, denunciation!... For what? for our sufferings, our hardships, our desire to force our way out of this hateful position.... Poor precious friends, forgive me this crime, I am falling into it again.

Heavy and dreadful is the yoke of years of slavery with no struggle, no hope at hand! In the end it crushes even the noblest, the strongest heart. Where is the hero who is not overcome at last by weariness, who does not prefer peace in old age to the everlasting fret of fruitless effort?

No, I will not be silent! My words shall avenge those unhappy lives crushed by the Russian autocracy which brings men to moral annihilation, to spiritual death.

We are bound in duty to speak, else no one will know how much that is fine and lofty is locked for ever in those martyrs’ breasts and perishes with them in the snows of Siberia, where their criminal name is not even traced upon their tombstone, but is only cherished in the hearts of friends who dare not utter it aloud.

Scarcely have we opened our mouth, scarcely have we murmured two or three words of our desires and hopes, when they try to silence us, try to stifle free speech in its cradle! It is impossible. A time comes when thought reaches maturity and can no longer be kept in fetters by the censorship, nor by prudence. Then propaganda becomes a passion; can one be content with a whisper when the sleep is so deep that it can scarcely be awakened by an alarm-bell? From the mutiny of the Stryeltsy to the conspiracy of the Fourteenth of December there has been no political movement of consequence in Russia. The cause is easy to understand: there were no clearly defined cravings for independence in the people. In many things they were at one with the Government, in many things the Government was in advance of the people. Only the peasants, who had no share in the Imperial benefits and were more oppressed than ever, tried to revolt. Russia from the Urals to Penza and Kazan was, for three months, in the power of Pugatchov. The Imperial army was defeated, put to flight by the Cossacks, and General Bibikov, sent from Petersburg to take the command of the army, wrote, if I am not mistaken, from Nizhni: ‘Things are in a very bad way; what is most to be feared is not the armed hordes of the rebels, but the spirit of the peasantry, which is dangerous, very dangerous.’ After incredible efforts the insurrection was at last crushed. The people relapsed into numbness, silence, and submission....

Meanwhile the nobility had developed, education had begun to fructify their minds, and like a living proof of that political maturity, of that moral development which is inevitably expressed in action, those divine figures appeared, those heroes as you justly call them, who ‘alone in the very jaws of the dragon dared the bold stroke of the Fourteenth of December.’

Their defeat and the terror of the present reign have crushed every idea of success, every premature attempt. Other questions have arisen; no one has cared to risk his life again in the hope of a Constitution; it has been too clear that any stroke won in Petersburg would be defeated by the treachery of the Tsar; the fate of the Polish Constitution has been before our eyes.

For ten years no intellectual activity could betray itself by one word, and the oppressive misery has reached the point when men ‘would give their life for the happiness of being free for one moment’ and uttering aloud some part of their thoughts.

Some, with that frivolous recklessness which is only met with in us and in the Poles, have renounced their possessions and gone abroad to seek distraction; others, unable to endure the oppressive atmosphere of Petersburg, have buried themselves in the country. The young men gave themselves up, some to Pan-Slavism, some to German philosophy, some to history or political economy; in short, not one of those Russians whose natural vocation was intellectual activity could or would submit to the stagnation.

The case of Petrashevsky and his friends, condemned to penal servitude for life, and exiled in 1849, because they formed some political societies not two steps from the Winter Palace, proves by the insane recklessness of the attempt, and the obvious impossibility of its success, that the time for rational reflection had passed, that feeling was beyond restraint, that certain ruin had come to seem easier to endure than dumb agonising submission to the Petersburg discipline.

A fable very widely known in Russia tells how a Tsar, suspecting his wife of infidelity, shut her and her son in a barrel, then had the barrel sealed up and thrown into the sea.

For many years the barrel floated on the sea.

Meanwhile, the Tsarevitch grew not by days but by hours, and his feet and his head began to press against the ends of the barrel. Every day he became more and more cramped. At last he said to his mother: ‘Queen-mother, let me stretch in freedom.’

‘My darling Tsarevitch,’ answered the mother, ‘you must not stretch, the barrel will burst and you will drown in the salt water.’

The Tsarevitch thought in silence for a while, then he said: ‘I will stretch, mother; better stretch for once in freedom and die.’

That fable, sir, contains our whole history.

Woe to Russia if bold men, risking everything to stretch in freedom for once, are no more to be found in her. But there is no fear of that....

These words involuntarily bring to my mind Bakunin. Bakunin has given Europe the sample of a free Russian.

I was deeply touched by your fine reference to him. Unhappily, those words will not reach him.

An international crime has been committed; Saxony has handed over the victim to Austria, Austria to Nicholas. He is in the Schlüsselburg, that fortress of evil memory where once Ivan, the grandson of the Tsar Alexis, was kept caged like a wild beast, till he was killed by Catherine the Second,[92] who, still stained by her husband’s blood, first ordered the captive’s murder, then punished the luckless officer who carried out her command.

In that damp dungeon in the icy waters of Lake Ladoga there is no place for dreams or hopes! May he sleep the last sleep in peace, the martyr betrayed by two Governments, whose hands are stained with his blood.... Glory to his name! And revenge! But where is the avenger?... And we too, like him, shall perish with our work half done; but then lift up your stern and majestic voice, and tell our children once more that there is a duty before them....

I will close with the memory of Bakunin and warmly press your hand for him and for myself.

NICE, _September 22, 1851_.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Ogaryov suffered from some form of epilepsy.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[2] Herzen lived twelve years in London, and during that time took no less than seven different houses: (1) ‘a house in one of the remotest parts of the town, near Primrose Hill’; (2) Chomley Lodge, Richmond; (3) Peterborough Villa, Finchley Road; (4) Laurel House, Fulham; (5) Park House, Putney Bridge; (6) Orsett House, Wimbledon; (7) Elmfield House, Teddington.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[3] See vol. ii. p. 403.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[4] See vol. i. p. 67.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[5] Natalya Alexyevna’s version is slightly different. She gives Emma Vogt’s age as sixteen, and says that when the girl’s parents were returning to America Herzen begged them to leave her in London, ‘but they insisted on taking her with them.’ Neither Madame Passek nor Madame Ogaryov can be relied upon for perfect accuracy, but I think the latter is the more trustworthy.

[6] This is how I interpret the cryptic passage on page 113, vol. iv.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[7] See vol. v. p. 245.

[8] See vol. i. chapter iii.

[9] Yakovlyev was the surname of the two brothers, Ivan, Herzen’s father, and Pyotr, Madame Passek’s father.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[10] See vol. v. p. 82.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[11] See vol. v. pp. 105 and 106.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[12] See vol. iv. chap. iv.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[13] The two children who died in Paris were buried at Nice.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[14] The famous doctor.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[15] As a matter of fact, Natalya Alexandrovna Herzen’s illness was what would now be called a ‘nervous breakdown,’ and was followed by a complete and permanent recovery.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[16] Herzen’s elder daughter Natalie, also called Natasha.

[17] Madame Ogaryov.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[18] English in the original.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[19] English in the original.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[20] English in the original.

[21] The news that Tata had an attack of smallpox.

[22] Baby daughter who died.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[23] Natalya Alexyevna Tutchkov-Ogaryov.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[24] Tata’s nervous illness.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[25] Tata.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[26] Turgenev was the friend to whom these letters were addressed.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[27] A character in the play _Woe from Wit_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[28] A famous singer who made his début in _La Caravane_ in 1813. He is frequently mentioned in French memoirs of the period.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[29] A very intelligent man, Count Oscar Reichenbach, said to me once, speaking of the better-class houses in London: ‘Tell me the rent and the storey, and I will undertake to go on a dark night without a candle and fetch a clock, a vase, decanters ... whatever you like of the things that are invariably standing in every middle-class dwelling.’—(_Author’s Note._)

[30] Lamé, Gabriel, born 1795, was a French mathematician who for many years held an important post in the Transport Department of the Russian Government. He published _Leçons sur la Théorie Mathématique de l’Élasticité_, and many other works.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[31] A brewer who was in command of the ‘Garde Nationale’ in 1793.

[32] Members of the ‘Convention’ of 1792.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[33] A traditional hero of Russian legend.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[34] Vattel (1714-1767), a Swiss writer, author of _Traité du Droit des Gens_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[35] I was so interested by _Arminius_ that I began writing a series of similar scenes, and the chief police-master, Tsinsky, made a critical analysis of them in my presence at the committee in 1834.

[36] This was written in 1855.—(_Author’s Notes._)

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

[38] Auguste Romieu, celebrated in Paris for his wit and droll adventures, began by writing vaudevilles (1822-1834). The Government of July turned him into _un homme politique_, appointing him prefect of several places in succession, and in 1849 he wrote _De l’Administration sous le Régime républicain_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[39] The Russian word for Sunday means Resurrection.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[40]

Sie feiern die Auferstehung des Herrn,
Denn Sie sind selber auferstanden
Aus niedrigern Häuser dumpfen Gemächer.—_Faust._

—(_Author’s Note._)

[41] The intensity with which cultivated people felt their isolation at that time, and tried to devise a life, pursuits, and so on for themselves, you can see clearly in Trelawney’s _Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron_.—(_Author’s Note._)

[42] _A Family Chronicle_, by Aksakov. There is an excellent translation by Mr. Duff.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[43] Onyegin, hero of Pushkin’s poem.

[44] Petchorin, hero of Lermontov’s novel, _A Hero of Our Time_.

[45] Oblomov, hero of Goncharov’s novel of that name.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[46] Ivan Ivanovitch Pushtchin was a great friend of the poet Pushkin.

[47] One of the Decembrists.

[48] See vol. i. page 193.

[49] A young poet of the greatest promise who died in 1827 at the age of twenty-two.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[50] Of which Koshihin so picturesquely writes that the Boyars sat silent with their eyes fixed on their beards to show their profundity.—(_Author’s Note._)

[51] Polubotok was a candidate for the office of Hetman after Mazeppa’s treason. Peter the Great appointed the weak Skuropadsky, saying that Polubotok was ‘much too clever’ and might be another Mazeppa. He owned more than two thousand peasant homesteads, and was one of the richest men in Little Russia; he did his utmost to defend the interests of his country against the encroachments of the Tsar’s officials, and for some time with success, but in 1723 he was imprisoned in the Peter-Paul fortress, where he died a year later.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[52] Diderot, in his extremely interesting account of his acquaintance with Princess Dashkov, speaking of this interview, adds that Catherine said to her: ‘You are either an angel or a demon.’ ‘Neither the one nor the other,’ she answered; ‘but the Empress is dying and you must be saved.’—(_Author’s Note._)

[53] Diderot in the above-mentioned essay relates that Princess Dashkov told him of this rumour with the greatest resentment.—(_Author’s Note._)

[54] There are no grounds for supposing that Catherine knew of any plan to murder Peter; there is strong evidence, indeed, that she did not know, and that in fact there was no such plan. It is obvious that Peter was killed in a drunken scrimmage.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[55] A mistress of Paul’s, and a friend of his wife’s.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[56] This is the drift of the letter; I cannot answer for the exact words. I repeat what I heard long ago from memory.—(_Author’s Note._)

[57] Mirovitch plotted to rescue Ivan VI. from the Schlüsselburg and put him on the throne. Ivan’s jailers had been instructed by the Empress Elizabeth to kill him if any attempt were made to effect his escape—and did so. For an impartial account of Catherine’s reign see Sir Bernard Pares’ _History of Russia_.

[58] Princess Tarakanov was an adventuress who claimed to be one of the natural children of the Empress Elizabeth (there were several). Alexey Orlov captured her, by pretending to make love to her. She was imprisoned in the Peter-Paul fortress, where she died of consumption.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[59] Madame Necker, wife of the great minister of finance and mother of Mme. de Staël.

[60] Madame Geoffrin, a lady noted for her wit, whose salon was the favourite resort of the philosophers of the day.

[61] Rulhière, Claude de (1735-1791), a French historian and poet.

[62] Hamilton, Elizabeth (1758-1816), a Scotswoman, authoress of _Letters of a Hindoo Rajah_, _Letters on Education_, and also _On the Moral and Religious Principle_, and _The Cottagers of Glenburnie_.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[63] An impartial reader of the Memoirs of both ladies will probably be surprised at Catherine’s forbearance with Princess Dashkov, whose tediously reiterated insistence on her own virtue and impeccability must have been a severe tax on the quick-witted Empress’s patience and good nature. Only on one occasion she permitted herself the gentle retort: ‘Dear princess, your reputation is better established than that of the whole calendar of saints,’ the irony of which was probably not apparent to Princess Dashkov.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[64] The duc de Biron, afterwards a general in the service of the government of the Revolution, was beheaded in 1793.

[65] An Italian writer on philosophy, history, and economics (1728-1789).—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[66] The former tutor of Peter III.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[67] An Italian writer of the school of the physiocrats.

[68] See Pares’ _History of Russia_, p. 241.

[69] The pamphlet referred to is _A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow_, an impassioned protest against serfdom. (See vol. v. p. 313.)

[70] Knyazhnin translated tragedies from the French and wrote imitations of them. This last one was called _Vadim of Novgorod_.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[71] Catherine’s own Memoirs make it clear that, though crazy, Paul was not the son of Peter III.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[72] By their successful conspiracy to assassinate Paul.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[73] In 1770, Alexey Orlov, in command of the Russian fleet, defeated and burnt the Turkish fleet at Chesme Bay.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[74] The archimandrite of the Yurev Monastery, famous for his fanaticism and ascetic exploits. Alexander I. once had an interview with him, but was repelled by his crassness.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[75] Miss Wilmot meant to say something biting, but paid us a compliment. It is only a pity that she does not see how old the girl is now! It is not something to be reckoned by years.—(_Author’s Note._)

[76] Youth is fond of expressing itself in all sorts of incommensurables, and striking the imagination by images of infinite magnitude. The last sentence reminds me vividly of Karl Moor, Ferdinand, and Don Carlos.—(_Author’s Note._)

[77] The prophecy has now been fulfilled. This mutual interaction of men on books, and books on men, is a curious thing. The book takes its whole shape from the society in which it is conceived; it generalises, it makes it more vivid and striking, and afterwards is outdone by reality. The originals caricature their vividly drawn portraits, and actual persons live in their literary shades. At the end of last century all young Germans were a little after the style of Werther, while all their young ladies resembled Charlotte; at the beginning of the present century the university Werthers had begun to change into ‘Robbers,’ not real ones, but Schilleresque robbers. The young Russians who have come on the scene since 1862 are almost all derived from _What Is to be Done?_ with the addition of a few Bazarov features.—(_Author’s Note._)

[78] The hero of Herzen’s novel, _Who Is to Blame?_—(_Translator’s Note._)

[79] The hero of _Woe from Wit_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[80] The reference is to the performance of Gogol’s _The Government Inspector_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[81] Hegel’s dialectic is a terrible battering-ram, in spite of its double-facedness and its Prussian Protestant cockade; it dissolved everything existing and dissipated everything that was a check on reason. Moreover, that was the period of Feuerbach, _der kritischen Kritik_.—(_Author’s Note._)

[82] It appeared in a feuilleton of the journal _l’Événement_, 1851, and was later on included in a volume entitled _Democratic Legends_.—(_Note to Russian Edition._)

[83] A philanthropist, Baron de Montyon (1733-1820) endowed prizes for virtue and literary distinction to be distributed by the Institut in Paris.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[84] Hegel.

[85] A peasant commune belonging to Prince Kozlovsky bought their freedom. The land was divided amongst the peasants in proportion to the sum contributed by each to the purchase-money. This arrangement was apparently most natural and just. The peasants, however, thought it so inconvenient and inconsistent with their habits that they decided to regard the purchase-money as a debt incurred by the commune and to divide the lands according to their accepted custom. This fact is vouched for by Baron von Haxthausen. The author himself visited the village in question.

In a book recently published in Paris and dedicated to the Emperor Nicholas, the writer says that this system of the division of land seems to him unfavourable to the development of agriculture (as though the object of it were the success of agriculture!); he adds, however: ‘It is difficult to escape these disadvantages, because this system of land division is bound up with the organisation of our communes, which it would be _dangerous to touch_; it is established on the fundamental idea of the unity of the commune, and the right of every member of it to a share in the communal property in proportion to his strength, and so it supports the communal spirit, that trusty prop of the social order. At the same time it is the best defence against the increase of the proletariat and the diffusion of communistic ideas.’ (We may well believe that for a people in actual fact possessing their property in common, communistic ideas present no danger.) ‘The good sense with which the peasants avoid the inconveniences of their system where such are inevitable is extremely remarkable; so is the ease with which they agree over the compensation for inequalities arising from differences of soil, or the confidence with which every one accepts the decisions of the elders of the commune. It might be expected that the continual re-divisions would give rise to continual disputes, and yet the intervention of the higher authorities is only necessary in the very rarest cases. This fact, _very strange in itself_, can only be explained through the system, with all its disadvantages, having so grown into the morals and conceptions of the peasants that its drawbacks are accepted without a murmur.’

‘The idea of the commune is,’ says the same author, ‘as natural to the Russian peasant, and as fully embodied in all the aspects of his life, as the corporate municipal spirit that has taken shape in the bourgeoisie of Western Europe is distasteful to his character.’—(_Author’s Note._)

[86] _I.e._, from the revolutionary changes made by Peter the Great.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[87] To ‘let fly the Red Cock’ is the popular Russian phrase for arson.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[88] The last sentence is omitted in the version of the ‘Légende’ in Michelet’s Collected Works.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[89] _Du Développement des Idées révolutionnaires en Russie._

[90] The picture is called ‘The Last Day of Pompeii.’—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[91] Quoted from the excellent expression of one of the contributors of _Il Progresso_ in an article on Russia, August 1, 1851.—(_Author’s Note._)

[92] This is not a correct version either of the murder of Peter III. or of Ivan VI. Catherine was certainly not directly responsible for either of those crimes.—(_Translator’s Note._)