My past and thoughts, vol. 1 (of 6)

A few words about Herzen’s parentage will make his narrative more intelligible to the English reader. Herzen’s father, Ivan Yakovlyev, was a very wealthy nobleman belonging to o...

‘_When memories of the past return And the old road again we tread, Slowly the passions of old days Come back to life within the soul; Old griefs and joys are here unchanged, Ag...

MY NURSE AND THE _GRANDE ARMÉE_—THE FIRE OF MOSCOW—MY FATHER WITH NAPOLEON—GENERAL ILOVAISKY—TRAVELLING WITH THE FRENCH PRISONERS—THE PATRIOTISM OF C. CALOT—THE COMMON MANAGEMEN...

Until I was ten years old I noticed nothing strange or special in my position; it seemed to me simple and natural that I should be living in my father’s house; that in his part...

One winter morning the Senator arrived not at the time he usually visited us; looking anxious, he went with hurried footsteps into my father’s study and closed the door, motioni...

Three years before the time of my cousin’s visit we were walking on the banks of the Moskva at Luzhniki, _i.e._ on the other side of the Sparrow Hills. At the river’s edge we me...

The insufferable dreariness of our house grew greater every year. If my University time had not been approaching, if it had not been for my new friendship, my political enthusia...

ever and he even had a different valet; but he himself was just the same, only his physical powers were changed, there was the same spiteful intelligence, the same tenacious mem...

In spite of the lame general’s sinister predictions my father put my name down with N. B. Yussupov for a berth in the Kremlin department. I signed a paper and there the matter e...

Before the storm had broken over our heads my time at the university was coming to an end. The ordinary anxieties, the nights without sleep spent in trying to learn useless thin...

One day in the spring of 1834, I arrived at Vadim’s in the morning and found neither him nor any of his brothers and sisters at home. I went upstairs to his little room and sat...

In the doorway of the drawing-room, a figure was standing wrapped in a military greatcoat; by the window I saw a white plume, behind there were other persons,—I distinguished th...

A man soon becomes used to prison, if he only has some inner resources. One quickly becomes used to the peace and complete freedom in one’s cage—no anxieties, no distractions.

Three days after the Tsar’s arrival, late in the evening—all these things are done in darkness to avoid disturbing the public—a police officer came to me with instructions to co...

They were no more successful in the new committee than in the old. The police had been on our track for a long time, but in their zeal and impatience could not wait to find anyt...

On the morning of the 10th of April an officer of gendarmes took me to the house of the governor-general. There, in the private part of the building, my relatives were allowed t...

I found in the room next morning the district police-captain, the police-master, and two officials: they were all standing talking in whispers and looking uneasily at the door....

One of the most melancholy results of the revolutionising of Russia by Peter the Great was the development of the official class. An artificial, hungry, and uncultivated class,...

Among the grotesque and dirty, petty and loathsome scenes and figures, affairs and cases, in this setting of official routine and red-tape, I recall the noble and melancholy fea...

The Tsarevitch will visit Vyatka! The Tsarevitch is travelling about Russia to show himself and look at the country! This news interested all, but the governor, of course, more...

When I went to get into my sledge at Kosmodemiansk it was harnessed in the Russian style, three horses abreast, and the shaft horse with the yoke over its head was gaily jinglin...

The members of the Petrashevsky group, of whom Dostoevsky was one, were condemned to death, and led out to the scaffold. At the last moment their sentence was transmuted to pena...