Part 29
I made a minute inspection of the room where I had now to spend no one could say how many years. From the position of the high chimney of the Mint I guessed that I was in the south-western corner of the fortress, in a bastion overlooking the Nevá. The building in which I was incarcerated, however, was not the bastion itself, but what is called in a fortification a _reduit_; that is, an inner two-storied pentagonal piece of masonry which rises a little higher than the walls of the bastion, and is meant to contain two tiers of guns. This room of mine was a casemate destined for a big gun, and the window was an embrasure. The rays of the sun could never penetrate it; even in summer they are lost in the thickness of the wall. The room held an iron bed, a small oak table, and an oak stool. The floor was covered with painted felt, and the walls with yellow paper. However, in order to deaden sounds, the paper was not put on the wall itself; it was pasted upon canvas, and behind the canvas I discovered a wire grating, back of which was a layer of felt; only beyond the felt could I reach the stone wall. At the inner side of the room there was a washstand, and a thick oak door in which I made out a locked opening, for passing food through, and a little slit protected by glass and by a shutter from the outside: this was the ‘Judas,’ through which the prisoner could be spied upon at every moment. The sentry who stood in the passage frequently lifted the shutter and looked inside--his boots squeaking as he crept toward the door. I tried to speak to him; then the eye which I could see through the slit assumed an expression of terror, and the shutter was immediately let down, only to be furtively opened a minute or two later; but I could not get a word of response from the sentry.
Absolute silence reigned all round. I dragged my stool to the window and looked upon the little bit of sky that I could see; I tried to catch some sound from the Nevá, or from the town on the opposite side of the river; but I could not. This dead silence began to oppress me, and I tried to sing, slowly at first, and louder and louder afterwards.
‘Have I then to say farewell to love for ever’--I caught myself singing from my favourite opera of Glinka, ‘Ruslán and Ludmíla.’
‘Sir, do not sing, please,’ a bass voice resounded through the food-window in my door.
‘I _will_ sing, and I shall.’
‘You may not.’
‘I will sing nevertheless.’
Then came the governor, who tried to persuade me that I must not sing, as it would have to be reported to the commander of the fortress, and so on.
‘But my throat will become blocked and my lungs become useless if I do not speak and cannot sing,’ I tried to argue.
‘You had better try to sing in a lower tone, more or less to yourself,’ said the old governor in a supplicatory manner.
But all this was useless. A few days later I had lost all desire to sing. I tried to do it on principle, but it was of no avail.
‘The main thing,’ I said to myself, ‘is to preserve my physical vigour. I _will_ not fall ill. Let me imagine myself compelled to spend a couple of years in a hut in the far north, during an arctic expedition. I will take plenty of exercise, practise gymnastics, and not let myself be broken down by my surroundings. Ten steps from one corner to the other is already something. If I repeat them one hundred and fifty times, I shall have walked one verst’ (two-thirds of a mile). I determined to walk every day seven versts--about five miles: two versts in the morning, two before dinner, two after dinner, and one before going to sleep. ‘If I put on the table ten cigarettes, and move one of them each time that I pass the table, I shall easily count the three hundred times that I must walk up and down. I must walk rapidly, but turn slowly in the corner to avoid becoming giddy, and turn each time a different way. Then twice a day I shall practise gymnastics with my heavy stool.’ I lifted it by one leg, holding it at arm’s length. I turned it like a wheel, and soon learned to throw it from one hand to the other, over my head, behind my back, and across my legs.
A few hours after I had been brought into the prison the governor came to offer me some books, and among them was an old acquaintance and friend of mine, the first volume of George Lewes’s ‘Physiology,’ in a Russian translation; but the second volume, which I especially wanted to read again, was missing. I asked, of course, to have paper, pen, and ink, but was absolutely refused. Pen and ink are never allowed in the fortress, unless special permission is obtained from the Emperor himself. I suffered very much from this forced inactivity, and began to compose in my imagination a series of novels for popular reading, taken from Russian history--something like Eugène Sue’s ‘Mystères du Peuple.’ I made up the plot, the descriptions, the dialogues, and tried to commit the whole to memory from the beginning to the end. One can easily imagine how exhausting such a work would have been if I had had to continue it for more than two or three months.
But my brother Alexander obtained pen and ink for me. One day I was asked to enter a four-wheeled cab, in company with the same speechless Georgian gendarme officer of whom I have spoken before. I was taken to the Third Section, where I was allowed an interview with my brother, in the presence of two gendarme officers.
Alexander was at Zürich when I was arrested. From early youth he had longed to go abroad, where men think as they like, read what they like, and openly express their thoughts. Russian life was hateful to him. Veracity--absolute veracity--and the most open-hearted frankness were the dominating features of his character; he could not bear deceit or even conceit in any form. The absence of free speech in Russia, the Russian readiness to submit to oppression, the veiled words to which our writers resort, were utterly repulsive to his frank and open nature. Soon after my return from Western Europe he removed to Switzerland, and decided to settle there. After he had lost his two children--one from cholera in a few hours, and another from consumption--St. Petersburg became doubly repugnant to him.
My brother did not take part in our work of agitation. He did not believe in the possibility of a popular uprising, and he conceived a revolution only as the action of a representative body, like the National Assembly of France in 1789. As for the socialist agitation, he understood it when it is conducted by means of public meetings--not as the secret, minute work of personal propaganda which we were carrying on. In England he would have sided with John Bright or with the Chartists. If he had been in Paris during the uprising of June 1848, he would surely have fought with the last handful of workers behind the last barricade; but in the preparatory period he would have followed Louis Blanc or Ledru Rollin.
In Switzerland he settled at Zürich, and his sympathies went with the moderate wing of the International. Socialist on principle, he carried out his principles in his most frugal and laborious mode of living, toiling on passionately at his great scientific work--the main purpose of his life--a work which was to be a nineteenth-century counter-part to the famous _Tableau de la Nature_ of the Encyclopædists. He soon became a close personal friend of the old refugee, Colonel P. L. Lavróff, with whom he had very much in common in his Kantian philosophical views.
When he learned about my arrest, Alexander immediately left everything--the work of his life, the life itself of freedom which was as necessary for him as free air is necessary for a bird--and returned to St. Petersburg, which he disliked, only to help me through my imprisonment.
We were both very much affected at this interview. My brother was extremely excited. He hated the very sight of the blue uniforms of the gendarmes--those executioners of all independent thought in Russia--and expressed his feeling frankly in their presence. As for me, the sight of him at St. Petersburg filled me with the most dismal apprehensions. I was happy to see his honest face, his eyes full of love, and to hear that I should see them once a month; and yet I wished him hundreds of miles away from that place to which he came free that day, but to which he would inevitably be brought some night under an escort of gendarmes. ‘Why did you come into the lion’s den? Go back at once!’ my whole inner self cried; and yet I knew that he would remain as long as I was in prison.
He understood better than any one else that inactivity would kill me, and had already made application to obtain for me the permission of resuming work. The Geographical Society wanted me to finish my book on the glacial period, and my brother turned the whole scientific world in St. Petersburg upside down to move it to support his application. The Academy of Sciences was interested in the matter; and finally, two or three months after my imprisonment, the governor entered my cell and announced to me that I was permitted by the Emperor to complete my report to the Geographical Society, and that I should be allowed pen and ink for that purpose. ‘Till sunset only,’ he added. Sunset, at St. Petersburg, is at three in the afternoon, in winter time; but that could not be helped. ‘Till sunset’ were the words used by Alexander II. when he granted the permission.
II
So I could work!
I could hardly express now the immensity of relief I then felt at being enabled to resume writing. I would have consented to live on nothing but bread and water, in the dampest of cellars, if only permitted to work.
I was, however, the sole prisoner to whom writing materials were allowed. Several of my comrades spent three years and more in confinement before the famous trial of ‘the hundred and ninety-three’ took place, and all they had was a slate. Of course, even the slate was welcome in that dreary loneliness, and they used it to write exercises in the languages they were learning, or to work out mathematical problems; but what was jotted down on the slate could last only a few hours.
My prison life now took a more regular character. There was something immediate to live for. At nine in the morning I had already made the first three hundred pacings across my cell, and was waiting for my pencils and pens to be delivered to me. The work which I had prepared for the Geographical Society contained, beside a report of my explorations in Finland, a discussion of the bases upon which the glacial hypothesis ought to rest. Now, knowing that I had plenty of time before me, I decided to rewrite and enlarge that part of my work. The Academy of Sciences put its admirable library at my service, and a corner of my cell soon filled up with books and maps, including the whole of the excellent Swedish Geological Survey publications, a nearly full collection of reports of all Arctic travels, and whole sets of the _Quarterly Journal of the London Geological Society_. My book grew in the fortress to the size of two large volumes. The first of them was printed by my brother and Polakóff (in the Geographical Society’s Memoirs); while the second, not quite finished, remained in the hands of the Third Section when I ran away. The manuscript was only found in 1895, and given to the Russian Geographical Society, by whom it was forwarded to me in London.
At five in the afternoon--at three in the winter--as soon as the tiny lamp was brought in, my pencils and pens were taken away, and I had to stop work. Then I used to read, mostly books of history. Quite a library had been formed in the fortress by the generations of political prisoners who had been confined there. I was allowed to add to the library a number of staple works on Russian history, and with the books which were brought to me by my relatives I was enabled to read almost every work and collection of acts and documents bearing on the Moscow period of the history of Russia. I relished in reading, not only the Russian annals, especially the admirable annals of the democratic mediæval republic of Pskov--the best, perhaps, in Europe for the history of that type of mediæval cities--but all sorts of dry documents, and even the Lives of the Saints, which occasionally contain facts of the real life of the masses which cannot be found elsewhere. I also read during this time a great number of novels, and even arranged for myself a treat on Christmas Eve. My relatives managed to send me then the Christmas stories of Dickens, and I spent the festival laughing and crying over those beautiful creations of the great novelist.
III
The worst was the silence, as of the grave, which reigned about me. In vain I knocked on the walls and struck the floor with my foot, listening for the faintest sound in reply. None was to be heard. One month passed, then two, three, fifteen months, but there was no reply to my knocks. We were only six, scattered among thirty-six casemates--all my arrested comrades being kept in the Litóvskiy Zámok prison. When the non-commissioned officer entered my cell to take me out for a walk, and I asked him, ‘What kind of weather have we? Does it rain?’ he cast a furtive side glance at me, and without saying a word promptly retired behind the door, where a sentry and another non-commissioned officer kept watch upon him. The only living being from whom I could hear even a few words was the governor, who came to my cell every morning to say ‘good-morning’ and ask whether I wanted to buy tobacco or paper. I tried to engage him in conversation; but he also cast furtive glances at the non-commissioned officers who stood in the half-opened door, as if to say, ‘You see, I am watched, too.’ Pigeons only were not afraid to keep intercourse with me. Every morning and every afternoon they came to my window to receive through the gratings their food.
There were no sounds whatever except the squeak of the sentry’s boots, the hardly perceptible noise of the shutter of the Judas, and the ringing of the bells on the fortress cathedral. They rang a ‘Lord save me’ (‘Góspodi pomílui’) every quarter of an hour--one, two, three, four times. Then, each hour, the big bell struck slowly, with long intervals between successive strokes. A lugubrious canticle followed, chimed by the bells, which at every sudden change of temperature went out of tune, making at such times a horrible cacophony which sounded like the ringing of bells at a burial. At the gloomy hour of midnight, the canticle, moreover, was followed by the discordant notes of a ‘God save the Tsar.’ The ringing lasted a full quarter of an hour; and no sooner had it come to an end than a new ‘Lord save me’ announced to the sleepless prisoner that a quarter of an hour of his uselessly spent life had gone in the meantime, and that many quarters of an hour, and hours, and days, and months of the same vegetative life would pass, before his keepers, or, maybe, death, would release him.
Every morning I was taken out for a half-hour’s walk in the prison yard. This yard was a small pentagon with a narrow pavement round it, and a little building--the bath house--in the middle. But I liked those walks.
The need of new impressions is so great in prison that, when I walked in our narrow yard, I always kept my eyes fixed upon the high gilt spire of the fortress cathedral. This was the only thing in my surroundings which changed its aspect, and I liked to see it glittering like pure gold when the sun shone from a clear blue sky, or assuming a fairy aspect when a light bluish haze lay upon the town, or becoming steel gray when dark clouds began to gather.
During these walks, I saw occasionally the daughter of our governor, a girl of eighteen, as she came out from her father’s apartment and had to walk a few steps in our yard in order to reach the entrance gate--the only issue from the building. She always hurried to pass away, with her eyes cast down, as if she felt ashamed of being the daughter of a jailor. Her younger brother, on the contrary, a cadet whom I also saw once or twice in the yard, always looked straight in my face with such a frank expression of sympathy that I was struck by it, and even mentioned it to some one after my release. Four or five years later, when he was already an officer, he was exiled to Siberia. He had joined the revolutionary party, and must have helped, I suppose, to carry on correspondence with prisoners in the fortress.
Winter is gloomy at St. Petersburg for those who cannot be out in the brightly lighted streets. It was still gloomier, of course, in a casemate. But dampness was even worse than darkness. In order to drive away moisture the casemate was overheated, and I could not breathe; but when, at last, I obtained by request, that the temperature should be kept lower than before, the outer wall became dripping with moisture, and the paper was as if a pail of water had been poured upon it every day--the consequence being that I suffered a great deal from rheumatism.
* * * * *
With all that I was cheerful, continuing to write and to draw maps in the darkness, sharpening my lead pencils with a broken piece of glass which I had managed to get hold of in the yard; I faithfully walked my five miles a day in the cell, and performed gymnastic feats with my oak stool. Time went on. But then sorrow crept into my cell and nearly broke me down. My brother Alexander was arrested.
Toward the end of December 1874, I was allowed an interview with him and our sister Hélène, in the fortress, in the presence of a gendarme officer. Interviews, granted at long intervals, always bring both the prisoner and his relatives into a state of excitement. One sees beloved faces and hears beloved voices, knowing that the vision will last but a few moments; one feels so near to the other, and yet so far off, as there can be no intimate conversation before a stranger, an enemy and a spy. Besides, my brother and sister felt anxious for my health, upon which the dark, gloomy winter days and the dampness had already marked their first effects. We parted with heavy hearts.
A week after that interview, I received, instead of an expected letter from my brother concerning the printing of my book, a short note from Polakóff. He informed me that henceforward he would read the proofs, and that I should have to address to him everything relative to the printing. From the very tone of the note I understood at once that something must be wrong with my brother. If it were only illness, Polakóff would have mentioned it. Days of fearful anxiety came upon me. Alexander must have been arrested, and I must have been the cause of it! Life suddenly ceased to have any meaning for me. My walks, my gymnastics, my work, lost interest. All the day long I went ceaselessly up and down my cell, thinking of nothing but Alexander’s arrest. For me, an unmarried man, imprisonment was only personal inconvenience; but he was married, he passionately loved his wife, and they now had a boy, upon whom they had concentrated all the love that they had felt for their first two children.
Worst of all was the incertitude. What could he have done? For what reason had he been arrested? What were they going to do with him? Weeks passed; my anxiety became deeper and deeper; but there was no news, till at last I heard in a roundabout way that he had been arrested for a letter written to P. L. Lavróff.
I learned the details much later. After his last interview with me he wrote to his old friend, who at that time was editing a Russian socialist review, _Forward_, in London. He mentioned in this letter his fears about my health; he spoke of the many arrests which were made then in Russia; and he freely expressed his hatred of the despotic rule. The letter was intercepted at the post office by the Third Section, and they came on Christmas Eve to search his apartments. They carried out their search in an even more brutal manner than usual. After midnight half a dozen men made an irruption into his flat, and turned everything upside down. The very walls were examined; the sick child was taken out of its bed, that the bedding and the mattresses might be inspected. They found nothing--there was nothing to find.
My brother very much resented this search. With his customary frankness, he said to the gendarme officer who conducted it: ‘Against you, captain, I have no grievance. You have received little education, and you hardly understand what you are doing. But you, sir,’ he continued, turning toward the procureur, ‘you know what part you are playing in these proceedings. You have received a university education. You know the law, and you know that you are trampling all law, such as it is, under your feet, and covering the lawlessness of these men by your presence; you are simply--a scoundrel!’
They swore hatred against him. They kept him imprisoned in the Third Section till May. My brother’s child--a charming boy, whom illness had rendered still more affectionate and intelligent--was dying from consumption. The doctors said he had only a few days more to live. Alexander, who had never asked any favour of his enemies, asked them this time to permit him to see his child for the last time. He begged to be allowed to go home for one hour, upon his word of honour to return, or to be taken there under escort. They refused. They could not deny themselves that vengeance.
The child died, and its mother was thrown once more into a state bordering on insanity when my brother was told that he was to be transported to East Siberia, to a small town, Minusínsk. He would travel in a cart between two gendarmes, and his wife might follow later, but could not travel with him.
‘Tell me, at least, what is my crime,’ he demanded; but there was no accusation of any sort against him beyond the letter. This transportation appeared so arbitrary, so much an act of mere revenge on the part of the Third Section, that none of our relatives could believe that the exile would last more than a few months. My brother lodged a complaint with the Minister of the Interior. The reply was that the minister could not interfere with the will of the chief of the gendarmes. Another complaint was lodged with the Senate. It was of no avail.
A couple of years later, our sister Hélène, acting on her own initiative, wrote a petition to the Tsar. Our cousin Dmítri, Governor-general of Khárkoff, aide-de-camp of the Emperor and a favourite at the court, also deeply incensed at this treatment by the Third Section, handed the petition personally to the Tsar, and in so doing added a few words in support of it. But the vindictiveness of the Románoffs was a family trait strongly developed in Alexander II. He wrote upon the petition, ‘Pust posidít’ (Let him remain some time more). My brother stayed in Siberia twelve years, and never returned to Russia.
IV
The countless arrests which were made in the summer of 1874, and the serious turn which was given by the police to the prosecution of our circle, produced a deep change in the opinions of Russian youth. Up to that time the prevailing idea had been to pick out among the workers, and eventually the peasants, a number of men who should be prepared to become socialistic agitators. But the factories were now flooded with spies, and it was evident that, do what they might, both propagandists and workers would very soon be arrested and hidden for ever in Siberia. Then began a great movement ‘to the people’ in a new form, when several hundred young men and women, disregarding all precautions hitherto taken, rushed to the country, and, travelling through the towns and villages, incited the masses to revolution, almost openly distributing pamphlets, songs, and proclamations. In our circles this summer received the name of ‘the mad summer.’