Their plans surprised the Tsar Nicholas when they were submitted to him. He confirmed them and gave orders to the local authorities that the builders were not to mar the architect's design.
'Who made these plans ? ' he asked of the minister.
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'Vitberg, Your Majesty.'
'Do you mean the same Vitberg ?'
'The same man, Your Majesty.'
And so it happened that Vitberg, most unexpectedly, got permission to return to Moscow or Petersburg. When he asked leave to clear his character, it was refused ; but when he made skilful plans for a church, the Tsar ordered his restoration - as if there had ever been a doubt of his artistic capacity !
In Petersburg, where he was starving for bread, he made a last attempt to defend his honour. It was a complete failure. He applied to Prince A. N. Golitsyn ; but the Prince thought it impossible to open the question again, and advised Vitberg to address a humble petition for pecuniary assistance to the Crown Prince. He said that Zhukovsky and himself would interest themselves in the matter, and held out hopes of a gift of 1 ,ooo roubles.
Vitberg refused.
I visited Petersburg for the last time at the beginning of winter in 1846, and there I saw Vitberg. He was quite a wreck ; even his wrath against his enemies, which I had admired so much in former days, had begun to cool down ; he had ceased to hope and was making no endeavour to escape from his position ; a calm despair was making an end of him ; he was breaking up altogether and only waiting for death.
Whether the sufferer is still living, I do not know, but I doubt it.
'But for my children,' he said to me at parting, 'I would tear myself away from Russia and beg my bread over the world ; wearing my Cross of Vladimir, I would hold out calmly to the passer-by that hand which the Tsar Alexander grasped, and tell him of my great design and the fate of an artist in Russia.'
'Poor martyr,' thought I, 'Europe shall learn your fate - I promise you that.'
9
My intimacy with Vitberg was a great relief to me at Vyatka.
His serious simplicity and a certain solemnity of manner suggested the churchman to some extent. Strict in his principles, he tended in general to austerity rather than enjoyment ; but this strictness took nothing from the luxuriance and richness of his artistic fancy. He could invest his mystical views with such lively C.Y.E,-I4
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forms and such beautiful colouring that objections died o n your lips, and you felt reluctant to examine and pull to pieces the glimmering forms and shadowy pictures of his imagination.
His mysticism was partly due to his Scandinavian blood. It was the same play of fancy combined with cool reflection which we see in Swedenborg ;1 and that in its tum resembles the fiery reflection of the sun's rays when they fall on tlte ice-covered mountains and snows of Norway.
Though I was shaken for a time by Vitberg's influence, my positive tum of mind held its own nevertheless. It was not my destiny to be carried up to the third heaven ; I was born to inhabit earth alone. Tables never tum at my touch, rings never quiver when I look at them. The daylight of thought is my element, not the moonlight of imagination.
But I was more inclined to the mystical standpoint when I lived with Vitberg than at any other period of my life.
There was much to support Vitberg's influence - the loneliness of exile, the strained and pietistic tone of the letters I received from home, the love which was mastering my whole being with ever increasing power, and an oppressive feeling of remorse for my own misconduct.2
•
Two years later I was again influenced by ideas partly religious and partly socialistic, which I took from the Gospel and from Rousseau ; my position was tltat of some French tltinkers, such as Pierre Leroux.3
My friend Ogarev plunged even before I did into the waves of mysticism. In 183 3 he began to write a libretto for Gebel's oratorio of Paradise Lost ; and he wrote to me that the whole history of humanity was included in that poem ! It appears therefore that he then considered the paradise of his aspirations to have existed already and disappeared from view.
In 1838 I wrote from this point of view some historical scenes which I supposed at the time to be dramatic. They were in verse.
In one I represented the strife between Christianity and the ancient world, and told how St Paul, when entering Rome, raised a young man from the dead to enter on a new life. Another de-l. Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-I772}, a Swedish mystic and founder of a sect.
2. He refers to an intrigue he was carrying on at Vyatka.
3· A French publicist and disciple of Saint-Simon, 1797-1871.
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scribed the contest of the Quakers against the Church of England, and the departure of William Penn for America.
The mysticism of the Gospel soon gave way in my mind to the mysticism of science ; but I was fortunate enough to escape from the latter as well in course of time.
10
But now I must go back to the modest little town whi�h was called Khlynov until Catherine II changed its name to Vyatka ; what her motive was, I do not know, unless it was her Finnish patriotism.
In that dreary distant backwater of exile, separated from all I loved, surrounded by the unclean horde of officials, and exposed without defence to the tyranny of the Governor, I met nevertheless with many warm hearts and friendly hands, and there I spent many happy hours which are sacred in recollection.
Where are you now, and how are you, my snowbound friends ?
It is twenty years since we met. I suppose you have grown old, as I have ; you are thinking about marrying your daughters, and have given up drinking champagne by the bottle and tossing off bumpers of vodka. Which of you has made a fortune, and which has lost it ? Which has risen high in the official world, and which is laid low by the palsy ? Above all, do you still keep alive the memory of our free discussions ? Do those chords still resound that were struck so vigorously by our common friendship and our common resentment ?
I am unchanged, as you know, for I suspect that rumour flies from the banks of the Thames as far as you. I think of you sometimes, and always with affection. I have kept some letters of those former days, and some of them I regard as treasures and love to read over again.
'I am not ashamed to confess to you,' writes one young friend on 26 January 1838, 'that my heart is full of bitterness. Help me for the sake of that life to which you summoned me ; help me with your advice. I want to learn ; make me a list of books, lay down any programme you like ; I will work my hardest, if you will point the way. It would be sinful of you to discourage me.'
'I bless you,' another wrote to me just after I had left Vyatka,
'as the husbandman blesses the rain which gives life to his unfertilised field.'
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I copy out these lines, not from vanity, but because they are very precious to me. This appeal to young hearts and their generous reply, and the unrest I was able to awaken in them -
this is my compensation for nine months spent in prison and three years at Vyatka.