Part 6
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For the quiet life of the landlords of those times Nikólskoye was admirably suited. There was nothing in it of the luxury which is seen in richer estates; but an artistic hand was visible in the planning of the buildings and gardens, and in the general arrangement of things. Besides the main house, which father had recently built, there were, round a spacious and well-kept yard, several smaller houses, which gave a greater degree of independence to their inhabitants, without destroying the close intercourse of the family life. An immense ‘upper garden’ was devoted to fruit-trees, and through it the church was reached. The southern slope of the land, which led to the river, was entirely given up to a pleasure garden, where flower-beds were intermingled with alleys of lime-trees, lilacs, and acacias. From the balcony of the main house there was a beautiful view of the Siréna, with the ruins of an old earthen fortress where the Russians had offered a stubborn resistance during the Mongol invasion, and farther on, the boundless yellow grain-fields, with copses of woods on the horizon.
In the early years of my childhood we occupied with M. Poulain one of the separate houses entirely by ourselves; and after his method of education was softened by the intervention of our sister Hélène, we were on the best possible terms with him. Father was invariably absent from home in the summer, which he spent in military inspections, and our stepmother did not pay much attention to us, especially after her own child, Pauline, was born. We were thus always with M. Poulain, who thoroughly enjoyed the stay in the country, and let us enjoy it. The woods; the walks along the river; the climbing over the hills to the old fortress, which M. Poulain made alive for us as he told how it was defended by the Russians, and how it was captured by the Tartars; the little adventures, in one of which he became our hero by saving Alexander from drowning; an occasional encounter with wolves--there was no end of new and delightful impressions. Large parties were also organized in which all the family took part, sometimes picking mushrooms in the woods, and afterward having tea in the midst of the forest, where a man a hundred years old lived alone with his little grandson, taking care of the bees. At other times we went to one of father’s villages where a big pond had been dug, in which golden carp were caught by the thousand--part of them being taken for the landlord and the remainder being distributed among all the peasants. My former nurse, Vasilísa, lived in that village. Her family was one of the poorest; besides her husband, she had only a small boy to help her, and a girl, my foster-sister, who became later on a preacher and a ‘Virgin’ in the Nonconformist sect to which they belonged. There was no bound to her joy when I came to see her. Cream, eggs, apples, and honey were all that she could offer; but the way in which she offered them, in bright wooden plates, after having covered the table with a fine snow-white linen tablecloth of her own making (with the Russian Nonconformists absolute cleanliness is a matter of religion), and the fond words with which she addressed me, treating me as her own son, left the warmest feelings in my heart. I must say the same of the nurses of my elder brothers, Nicholas and Alexander, who belonged to prominent families of two other Nonconformist sects in Nikólskoye. Few know what treasuries of goodness can be found in the hearts of Russian peasants, even after centuries of the most cruel oppression, which might well have embittered them.
On stormy days M. Poulain had an abundance of tales to tell us, especially about the campaign in Spain. Over and over again we induced him to tell us how he was wounded in a battle, and every time he came to the point when he felt warm blood streaming into his boot, we jumped to kiss him and gave him all sorts of pet names.
Everything seemed to prepare us for the military career: the predilection of our father (the only toys that I remember his having bought for us were a rifle and a real sentry-box); the war tales of M. Poulain; nay, even the library which we had at our disposal. This library, which had once belonged to General Repnínsky, our mother’s grandfather, a learned military man of the eighteenth century, consisted exclusively of books on military warfare, adorned with rich plates and beautifully bound in leather. It was our chief recreation, on wet days, to look over the plates of these books, representing the weapons of warfare since the times of the Hebrews, and giving plans of all the battles that had been fought since Alexander of Macedonia. These heavy books also offered excellent materials for building out of them strong fortresses which would stand for some time the blows of a battering-ram and the projectiles of an Archimedean catapult (which, however, persisted in sending stones into the windows, and was soon prohibited). Yet neither Alexander nor I became military men. The literature of the sixties wiped out the teachings of our childhood.
M. Poulain’s opinions about revolutions were those of the Orleanist ‘Illustration Française,’ of which he received back numbers, and of which we knew all the woodcuts. For a long time I could not imagine a revolution otherwise than in the shape of Death riding on a horse, the red flag on one hand and a scythe in the other, mowing down men right and left. So it was pictured in the ‘Illustration.’ But I now think that M. Poulain’s dislike was limited to the uprising of 1848, for one of his tales about the Revolution of 1789 deeply impressed my mind.
The title of prince was used in our house with and without occasion. M. Poulain must have been shocked by it, for he began once to tell us what he knew of the great Revolution, I cannot now recall what he said, but one thing I remember, namely, that ‘Count Mirabeau’ and other nobles one day renounced their titles, and that Count Mirabeau, to show his contempt for aristocratic pretensions, opened a shop decorated with a signboard which bore the inscription, ‘Mirabeau, tailor.’ (I tell the story as I had it from M. Poulain.) For a long time after that I worried myself thinking what trade I should take up, so as to write, ‘Kropótkin, such and such a handicraft man.’ Later on, my Russian teacher, Nikolái Pávlovich Smirnóff, and the general Republican tone of Russian literature influenced me in the same way; and when I began to write novels--that is, in my twelfth year--I adopted the signature P. Kropótkin, which I never have departed from, notwithstanding the remonstrances of my chiefs when I was in the military service.
VIII
In the autumn of 1852 my brother Alexander was sent to the corps of cadets, and from that time we saw each other only during the holidays and occasionally on Sundays. The corps of cadets was six miles from our house, and although we had a dozen horses, it always happened that when the time came to send the sledge to the corps there was no horse free for that purpose. My eldest brother, Nicholas, came home very seldom. The relative freedom which Alexander found at school, and especially the influence of two of his teachers in literature, developed his intellect rapidly, and later on I shall have ample occasion to speak of the beneficial influence that he exercised upon my own development. It is a great privilege to have had a loving, intelligent elder brother.
In the meantime I remained at home. I had to wait till my turn to enter the corps of pages should come, and that did not happen until I was nearly fifteen years of age. M. Poulain was dismissed, and a German tutor was engaged instead. He was one of those idealistic men who are not uncommon among Germans, but I remember him chiefly on account of the enthusiastic way in which he used to recite Schiller’s poetry, accompanying it by a most naïve kind of acting that delighted me. He stayed with us only one winter.
The next winter I was sent to attend the classes at a Moscow gymnasium; and finally I remained with our Russian teacher, Smirnóff. We soon became friends, especially after my father took both of us for a journey to his Ryazán estate. During this journey we indulged in all sorts of fun, and we used to invent humorous stories in connection with the men and the things that we saw; while the impression produced upon me by the hilly tracts we crossed added some new and fine touches to my growing love of nature. Under the impulse given me by Smirnóff, my literary tastes also began to grow, and during the years from 1854 to 1857 I had full opportunity to develop them. My teacher, who had by this time finished his studies at the university, obtained a small clerkship in a law court, and spent his mornings there. I was thus left to myself till dinner-time, and after having prepared my lessons and taken a walk, I had plenty of leisure for reading and writing. In the autumn, when my teacher returned to his office at Moscow, while we remained in the country, I was left again to myself, and though in continual intercourse with the family, and spending part of the day in playing with my little sister Pauline, I could in fact dispose of my time as I liked.
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Serfdom was then in the last years of its existence. It is recent history--it seems to be only of yesterday; and yet, even in Russia, few realize what serfdom was in reality. There is a dim conception that the conditions which it created were very bad; but how these conditions affected human beings bodily and mentally is only vaguely understood. It is amazing, indeed, to see how quickly an institution and its social consequences are forgotten when the institution has ceased to exist, and with what rapidity men and things change after that. I will try to recall the conditions of serfdom by telling, not what I heard, but what I saw.
Uliána, the housekeeper, stands in the passage leading to father’s room, and crosses herself; she dares neither to advance nor to retreat. At last, after having recited a prayer, she enters the room, and reports, in a hardly audible voice, that the store of tea is nearly at an end, that there are only twenty pounds of sugar left, and that the other provisions will soon be exhausted.
‘Thieves, robbers!’ shouts my father. ‘And you, you are in league with them!’ His voice thunders throughout the house. Our stepmother leaves Uliána to face the storm. But father cries, ‘Frol, call the princess! Where is she?’ And when she enters, he receives her with the same reproaches.
‘You also are in league with this progeny of Ham; you are standing up for them;’ and so on, for half an hour or more.
Then he commences to verify the accounts. At the same time, he thinks about the hay. Frol is sent to weigh what is left of that, and our stepmother is sent to be present during the weighing, while father calculates how much of it ought to be in the barn. A considerable quantity of hay appears to be missing, and Uliána cannot account for several pounds of such and such provisions. Father’s voice becomes more and more menacing; Uliána is trembling; but it is the coachman who now enters the room, and is stormed at by his master. Father springs at him, strikes him, but he keeps repeating, ‘Your highness must have made a mistake.’
Father repeats his calculations, and this time it appears that there is more hay in the barn than there ought to be. The shouting continues; he now reproaches the coachman with not having given the horses their daily rations in full; but the coachman calls on all the saints to witness that he gave the animals their due, and Frol invokes the Virgin to confirm the coachman’s appeal.
But father will not be appeased. He calls in Makár, the piano-tuner and sub-butler, and reminds him of all his recent sins. He was drunk last week, and must have been drunk yesterday, for he broke half a dozen plates. In fact, the breaking of these plates was the real cause of all the disturbance: our stepmother had reported the fact to father in the morning, and that was why Uliána was received with more scolding than was usually the case, why the verification of the hay was undertaken, and why father now continues to shout that ‘this progeny of Ham’ deserve all the punishments on earth.
Of a sudden there is a lull in the storm. My father takes his seat at the table and writes a note. ‘Take Makár with this note to the police station, and let a hundred lashes with the birch rod be given to him.’
Terror and absolute muteness reign in the house.
The clock strikes four, and we all go down to dinner; but no one has any appetite, and the soup remains in the plates untouched. We are ten at table, and behind each of us a violinist or a trombone-player stands, with a clean plate in his left hand; but Makár is not among them.
‘Where is Makár?’ our stepmother asks. ‘Call him in.’
Makár does not appear, and the order is repeated. He enters at last, pale, with a distorted face, ashamed, his eyes cast down. Father looks into his plate, while our stepmother, seeing that no one has touched the soup, tries to encourage us.
‘Don’t you find, children,’ she says, ‘that the soup is delicious?’
Tears suffocate me, and immediately after dinner is over I run out, catch Makár in a dark passage and try to kiss his hand; but he tears it away, and says, either as a reproach or as a question, ‘Let me alone; you, too, when you are grown up, will you not be just the same?’
‘No, no, never!’
Yet father was not among the worst of landowners. On the contrary, the servants and the peasants considered him one of the best. What we saw in our house was going on everywhere, often in much more cruel forms. The flogging of the serfs was a regular part of the duties of the police and of the fire brigade.
A landowner once made the remark to another, ‘Why is it, general, that the number of the souls on your estate increases so slowly? You probably do not look after their marriages.’
A few days later the general ordered that a list of all the inhabitants of his village should be brought him. He picked out from it the names of the boys who had attained the age of eighteen, and of the girls just past sixteen--these are the legal ages for marriage in Russia. Then he wrote, ‘John to marry Anna, Paul to marry Paráshka,’ and so on with five couples. The five weddings, he added, must take place in ten days, the next Sunday but one.
A general cry of despair rose from the village. Women, young and old, wept in every house. Anna had hoped to marry Gregory; Paul’s parents had already had a talk with the Fedótoffs about their girl, who would soon be of age. Moreover, it was the season for ploughing, not for weddings; and what wedding can be prepared in ten days? Dozens of peasants came to see the landowner; peasant women stood in groups at the back entrance of the mansion, with pieces of fine linen for the landowner’s spouse, to secure her intervention. All in vain. The master had said that the wedding should take place at such a date, and so it must be.
At the appointed time, the nuptial processions, in this case more like burial processions, went to the church. The women cried with loud voices, as they are wont to cry during burials. One of the house valets was sent to the church, to report to the master as soon as the wedding ceremonies were over; but soon he came running back, cap in hand, pale and distressed.
‘Paráshka,’ he said, ‘makes a stand; she refuses to be married to Paul. Father’ (that is, the priest) ‘asked her, “Do you agree?” but she replied in a loud voice, “No, I don’t.”’
The landowner grew furious. ‘Go and tell that long-maned drunkard’ (meaning the priest; the Russian clergy wear their hair long) ‘that if Paráshka is not married at once, I will report him as a drunkard to the archbishop. How dares he, clerical dirt, disobey me? Tell him he shall be sent to rot in a monastery, and I shall exile Paráshka’s family to the steppes.’
The valet transmitted the message. Paráshka’s relatives and the priest surrounded the girl; her mother weeping, fell on her knees before her, entreating her not to ruin the whole family. The girl continued to say ‘I won’t,’ but in a weaker and weaker voice, then in a whisper, until at last she stood silent. The nuptial crown was put on her head; she made no resistance, and the valet ran full speed to the mansion to announce, ‘They are married.’
Half an hour later, the small bells of the nuptial processions resounded at the gate of the mansion. The five couples alighted from the cars, crossed the yard and entered the hall. The landlord received them, offering them glasses of wine, while the parents, standing behind the crying daughters, ordered them to bow to the earth before their lord.
Marriages by order were so common that amongst our servants, each time a young couple foresaw that they might be ordered to marry, although they had no mutual inclination for each other, they took the precaution of standing together as godfather and godmother at the christening of a child in one of the peasant families. This rendered marriage impossible, according to Russian Church law. The stratagem was usually successful, but once it ended in a tragedy. Andréi, the tailor, fell in love with a girl belonging to one of our neighbours. He hoped that my father would permit him to go free, as a tailor, in exchange for a certain yearly payment, and that by working hard at his trade he could manage to lay aside some money and to buy freedom for the girl. Otherwise, in marrying one of my father’s serfs she would have become the serf of her husband’s master. However, as Andréi and one of the maids of our household foresaw that they might be ordered to marry, they agreed to unite as god-parents in the christening of a child. What they had feared happened: one day they were called to the master, and the dreaded order was given.
‘We are always obedient to your will,’ they replied, ‘but a few weeks ago we acted as godfather and godmother at a christening.’ Andréi also explained his wishes and intentions. The result was that he was sent to the recruiting board to become a soldier.
Under Nicholas I. there was no obligatory military service for all, such as now exists. Nobles and merchants were exempt, and when a new levy of recruits was ordered, the landowners had to supply a certain number of men from their serfs. As a rule, the peasants, within their village communities, kept a roll amongst themselves; but the house servants were entirely at the mercy of their lord, and if he was dissatisfied with one of them, he sent him to the recruiting board and took recruit acquittance, which had a considerable money value, as it could be sold to any one whose turn it was to become a soldier.
Military service in those times was terrible. A man was required to serve twenty-five years under the colours, and the life of a soldier was hard in the extreme. To become a soldier meant to be torn away for ever from one’s native village and surroundings, and to be at the mercy of officers like Timoféeff, whom I have already mentioned. Blows from the officers, flogging with birch rods and with sticks, for the slightest fault, were normal affairs. The cruelty that was displayed surpasses all imagination. Even in the corps of cadets, where only noblemen’s sons were educated, a thousand blows with birch rods were sometimes administered, in the presence of all the corps, for a cigarette--the doctor standing by the tortured boy, and ordering the punishment to end only when he ascertained that the pulse was about to stop beating. The bleeding victim was carried away unconscious to the hospital. The Grand Duke Mikhael, commander of the military schools, would quickly have removed the director of a corps in which one or two such cases did not occur every year. ‘No discipline,’ he would have said.
With common soldiers it was far worse. When one of them appeared before a court-martial, the sentence was that a thousand men should be placed in two ranks facing each other, every soldier armed with a stick of the thickness of the little finger (these sticks were known under their German name of _Spitzruthen_), and that the condemned man should be dragged three, four, five, and seven times between these two rows, each soldier administering a blow. Sergeants followed to see that full force was used. After one or two thousand blows had been given, the victim, spitting blood, was taken to the hospital and attended to, in order that the punishment might be finished as soon as he had more or less recovered from the effects of the first part of it. If he died under the torture, the execution of the sentence was completed upon the corpse. Nicholas I. and his brother Mikhael were pitiless; no remittance of the punishment was ever possible. ‘I will send you through the ranks; you shall be skinned under the sticks,’ were threats which made part of the current language.
A gloomy terror used to spread through our house when it became known that one of the servants was to be sent to the recruiting board. The man was chained and placed under guard in the office to prevent suicide. A peasant cart was brought to the office door, and the doomed man was taken out between two watchmen. All the servants surrounded him. He made a deep bow asking everyone to pardon him his willing or unwilling offences. If his father and mother lived in our village, they came to see him off. He bowed to the ground before them, and his mother and his other female relatives began loudly to sing out their lamentations--a sort of half-song and half-recitative: ‘To whom do you abandon us? Who will take care of you in the strange lands? Who will protect me from cruel men?’--exactly in the same way in which they sang their lamentations at a burial, and with the same words.
Thus Andréi had now to face for twenty-five years the terrible fate of a soldier: all his schemes of happiness had come to a violent end.
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The fate of one of the maids, Pauline, or Pólya, as she used to be called, was even more tragical. She had been apprenticed to make fine embroidery, and was an artist at the work. At Nikólskoye her embroidery frame stood in sister Hélène’s room, and she often took part in the conversations that went on between our sister and a sister of our stepmother who stayed with Hélène. Altogether, by her behaviour and talk Pólya was more like an educated young person than a housemaid.
A misfortune befell her: she realized that she would soon be a mother. She told all to our stepmother, who burst into reproaches: ‘I will not have that creature in my house any longer! I will not permit such a shame in my house! oh, the shameless creature!’ and so on. The tears of Hélène made no difference. Pólya had her hair cut short, and was exiled to the dairy; but as she was just embroidering an extraordinary skirt, she had to finish it at the dairy, in a dirty cottage, at a microscopical window. She finished it, and made many more fine embroideries, all in the hope of obtaining her pardon. But pardon did not come.
The father of her child, a servant of one of our neighbours, implored permission to marry her; but as he had no money to offer, his request was refused. Pólya’s ‘too gentlewoman-like manners’ were taken as an offence, and a most bitter fate was kept in reserve for her. There was in our household a man employed as a postillion, on account of his small size; he went under the name of ‘bandy-legged Fílka.’ In his boyhood a horse had kicked him terribly, and he did not grow. His legs were crooked, his feet were turned inward, his nose was broken and turned to one side, his jaw was deformed. To this monster it was decided to marry Pólya--and she was married by force. The couple were sent to become peasants at my father’s estate in Ryazán.