ill. His death and all the worries and business that followed distracted

us from theoretical questions. In the peace of our life at Sokolovo our divergencies were bound to come to the surface.

Ogaryov, who had not seen me for four years, was absolutely of the same tendency as I was. We had moved over the same ground by different paths and found ourselves together. Natalie, too, was with us. Our serious and at first sight overwhelming deductions did not alarm her; she gave a special poetical turn to them.

Arguments became more frequent and came back in a thousand variations. One day we were dining in the garden. Granovsky was reading in the _Notes of the Fatherland_ one of my letters on the study of nature (it was the one on the Encyclopaedists, I remember) and was delighted with it.

‘But what is it you like?’ I asked him. ‘Can it be only the method of exposition? You cannot possibly agree with the underlying implications of it.’

‘Your opinions,’ answered Granovsky, ‘are just as much an historical moment in the study of thought as the writings of the Encyclopaedists themselves. I like in your articles just what I like in Voltaire or Diderot; they stir vividly and sharply questions which rouse a man and urge him forward, and as for the one-sidedness of your views I don’t want to go into that. Does any one talk of Voltaire’s theories nowadays?’

‘Do you mean to say that there is no standard of truth and that we rouse men only to talk nonsense to them?’

The conversation continued for some time on these lines. At last I observed that the development of science, its contemporary condition, _obliges us_ to accept certain truths apart from whether we like them or not; that, once recognised, they cease to be historical problems and become simply irrefutable facts of knowledge like the theories of Euclid, like the laws of Kepler, like the connection of cause and effect and the indivisibility of spirit and matter.

‘All that is so far from being obligatory,’ answered Granovsky with a slight change in his face, ‘that I never shall accept your dry, cold idea of the unity of soul and body; with it the immortality of the soul disappears. You may not need it, but I have buried too much to give up that belief. Personal immortality is essential for me.’

‘Life would be a splendid affair,’ I said, ‘if anything any one wants were always true at once as in fairy tales.’

‘Only think, Granovsky,’ added Ogaryov, ‘why, it’s a sort of running away from unhappiness.’

‘Listen,’ answered Granovsky, turning pale and assuming the air of a disinterested outsider, ‘you will greatly oblige me if you will never speak to me again on these subjects; there are plenty of interesting things of which we can talk with far more profit and pleasure.’

‘Certainly, I shall be delighted,’ I said, feeling a cold chill on my face. Ogaryov said nothing, we all glanced at one another and that glance was quite enough; we all loved one another too much not to gauge to the full what had happened. Not a word more was said. The discussion was not resumed. Natalie tried to cover up the incident and set things right. We came to her help. Children, who always come to the rescue in such cases, served as a subject of conversation, and the dinner ended so peacefully that no outsider coming in would have noticed anything wrong....

After dinner Ogaryov jumped on his horse Kortik while I mounted the gendarme’s discarded nag and we rode out into the open country. We were as sad as though some one near and dear were dead; for till then Ogaryov and I had expected that we should come to an agreement, that our friendship would blow away our differences like dust, but the tone and meaning of Granovsky’s last words had revealed a distance between us such as we had never imagined. So here was the boundary line, the limit, and with it the censorship. Neither he nor I spoke all the way. As we came home, we shook our heads sadly and both said with one voice: ‘And so it seems we are alone again.’

Ogaryov took a chaise and three horses and drove to Moscow; on the way he composed a little poem from which I extract the following lines:

‘... For neither grief nor tedium can exhaust me, The truth I’ve spoken fearlessly in gatherings of my friends, And friends have fled from me in childish terror. He too has gone, whom like a brother Or like a sister, haply, I fondly loved and cherished.... ... Once more we will set out alone upon our cheerless journey, Speaking of truth, unwearied and undaunted, And let the dreams and people pass us by.’[129]

I met Granovsky the next day as though nothing had happened, a bad sign on both sides. The pain was still so keen that it could find no words; and dumb pain that has no outlet like a mouse in the stillness gnaws away thread after thread....

Two days later I was in Moscow. Ogaryov and I went to see Korsh. He was as solicitously gracious and mournfully sweet with us as though he were sorry for us, but, hang it all, had we committed some crime? I asked Korsh straight out, had he heard of our discussion. He had; he said that we had all been too hot over abstract subjects; pointed out that the perfect identity between people and between opinions of which we dreamed did not exist, that people’s sympathies, like chemical affinity, have their limit of saturation which could not be exceeded without stumbling upon aspects on which men were strangers again. He jested at our being so young when over thirty, and he said all this with friendliness and delicacy, one could see that he did not find it easy.

We parted peacefully. Blushing a little I thought of my ‘naïveté,’ and afterwards when I was left alone I felt as I lay in bed that another bit of my heart had been torn away—skilfully, painlessly, but it was gone!

Nothing further happened ... only everything seemed clouded over with something dark and colourless; the freedom from constraint, the complete _abandon_ had vanished from our circle. We became more careful, we edged round certain questions, that is, we really did retire at ‘the limit of chemical affinity’—and all this gave us the more pain and bitterness because we had great and genuine love for one another.

I may have been too intolerant, may have argued conceitedly and answered sarcastically ... perhaps so ... but in reality I am convinced even now that for really intimate relations it is essential to have the same religion, to be at one in the theoretical convictions that really matter. Of course theoretical agreement alone is not enough for intimacy between men; I was nearer in sympathy, for instance, to Ivan Kireyevsky than to many of my own set. What is more, one may be a good and faithful ally agreeing in some definite cause and differing in opinions. I was on such terms with men for whom I had the greatest respect, though I differed from them on many subjects—for instance, with Mazzini and with Worcell. I did not try to convince them nor they me, we had enough in common to go the same way together without quarrelling. But between us brothers of one family, who had been so near and had lived one life together, it was impossible to differ so deeply.

If only we had had some inevitable work which would have absorbed us completely; but as it was, all our activity lay precisely in the sphere of thought and the propaganda of our convictions ... how was compromise possible in that realm?...

The little rift in one of the walls of our temple of friendship grew wider, as is always the case, through trifles, misunderstandings, unnecessary openness where it would have been better to be silent and harmful silence where it was essential to speak; these things are decided only by the tact of the heart, there are no rules to guide one.

Soon afterwards everything was at sixes and sevens among the ladies too....

There was no help for it at the moment.

To go away, far away, for years, only to go! But it was not easy to go. The fetters of police supervision were on my legs, and without permission from Nicholas a foreign passport could not be got.