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police, scarcely concealing himself, who had been present at meetings of schismatics and drinking parties of comrades, with the stupidest Turkish passport in his pocket, and had returned safe and sound to London, had begun to champ the bit a good deal. He took it into his head to get up a subscription-dinner in our honour on the fifth anniversary of The Bell at Kuhn's restaurant. I asked him to put off the celebration to another, happier time. He would not. The supper was not a success: there was no entrain about it, and there could not be. Among the participants were people v.-hose interests were too extraneous to ours.
Talking of one thing and the other between toasts and anecdotes, it was mentioned as the simplest thing in the world that Kelsiev's friend, Vetoshnikov, was going to Petersburg and was ready to take something with him. The party broke up late.
Many people said that they would be \vith us on Sunday. In fact, a regular crowd assembled, among whom were people whom we knew very little, and unfortunately Vetoshnikov himself; he came up to me and said that he was going next morning, and asked me whether I had not any letters or commissions. Bakunin had already given him two or three letters. Ogarev went downstairs to his own room and wrote a few words of friendly greeting to Nikolay Serno-Solovyevich, to which I added a word of greeting and asked the latter to call the attention of Chernyshevsky (to whom I had never written) to our proposal in The Bell to print the Sovremennik (Contemporary) in London at our expense.
The guests began to leave about twelve o'clock. Two or three of them remained. Vetoshnikov came into my study and took the letter. It is very possible that even that might have remained unnoticed. But this is what happened. By way of thanking those who had taken part in the dinner, I asked them to choose any one of our publications or a big photograph of me by Levitsky as a souvenir. Vetoshnikov took the photograph ; I advised him to cut off the margin and roll it up into a tube; he would not, and said he should put it at the bottom of his trunk, and so wrapped it in a sheet of The Times and went off. That could not escape notice.
Saying good-bye to him, the last of the party, I went calmly off to bed-so great is one's blindness at times-and of course never dreamed how dearly that minute would cost me and what sleepless nights it would bring me.
All put together it was stupid and careless in the extreme. We might have delayed Vetoshnikov until Tuesday: we might have
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sent him off on Saturday; why had he not come in the morning? . . . and, indeed, why had he come himself at all? .
and, indeed, why did we write the letters?
It is said that one of our guests19 telegraphed at once to Petersburg.
Vetoshnikov was arrested on the steamer; the rest is well known.20
The You1zger En1igra1zts :
Tlze Co1111110n Fund
KELSIEV1 HAD HARDLY passed out of our door when fresh people, driven out by the severe cold of 1 863, were knocking at it. These came not from the training-schools of the coming revolution but from the devastated stage on which they had already acted roles.
They were seeking shelter from the storm without and seeking nothing within ; what they needed was a temporary haven until the weather improved, until a chance presented itself to return to the fray. These men, while still very young, had fmished with ideas, with culture; theoretical questions did not interest them, partly because they had not yet arisen among them, partly because what they were concerned with was their application.
Though they had been defeated physically, they had given proofs of their courage. They had furled their flag, and their task I9 One of Herzcn's guests was G. G. Peretts, an agent of the Third Division, who gave information of the return of P. A. Vetoshnikov with
'dangerous documents.' (A.S. )
20 Mass arrests in Russia, the result of the seizure of the letters that Vetoshnikov was carrying, seriously weakened H.'s and Ogarev's ties with the revolutionary movement in Russia. (A.S.)
1 V. I. Kelsiev was temporarily a member of the circle of revolutionary emigrants and became one of the first renegades of the Russian liberation movement. ( A.S.) The preceding chapter is devoted to his tragi-comic story ; I regret space didn't permit including it, for it is a Chekhovian tale that displays both Herzen's novelistic talents and his humanity.
( D.M.)
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was to preserve its honour. Hence their dry tone, cassant, raide, abrupt and rather elevated. Hence their martial, impatient aversion for prolonged deliberation, for criticism, their somewhat elaborate contempt for all intellectual luxuries, among which they put Art in the foreground. What need had they of music? \Vhat need of poetry? 'The fatherland is in danger, aux armes, citorens!' In certain cases they were theoretically right, but they did not take into account the complex, intricate process of balancing the ideal with the real, and, I need hardly say, they assumed that their views and theories were the views and theories of the whole of Russia. To blame for this our young pilots of the coming storm would be unjust. It is the common characteristic of youth ; a year ago a Frenchman,2 a follower of Comte, assured me that Catholicism did not exist in France, that it had completement perdu le terrain, and he pointed among others to the medical faculty, to the professors and students who were not merely not Catholics but not even Deists.
'\Vell, but the part of France,' I observed, 'which neither gives nor hears medical lectures?'
'It, of course, keeps to religion and its rites-but more from habit and ignorance.'
'I can very well believe it, but what will you do with it?'
'What did they do in 1 792?'
'Not much: at first the Revolution closed the churches, but aftenvards opened them again. Do you remember Augereau's answer to Napoleon when they were celebrating the Concordat?
"Do you like the ceremony?" the consul asked as they came out of Notre-Dame. The Jacobin general answered: "Very much. I am only sorry that the two hundred thousand men are not present who went to their graves to abolish such ceremonies! " '
'Ah bah! we have grown wiser, and we shall not open the church doors-or rather we shall not close them at all, but shall turn the temples of superstition into schools.'
'L'infame sera ecrasee,' I wound up, laughing.
'Yes, no doubt of it; that is certain ! '
'But that you and I will not see it-that is even more certain.'
It is to this looking at the surrounding world through a prism coloured by personal sympathies that half the revolutionary 2 G. N. Vyrubov, who had emigrated from Russia in 1 864. Herzen was critical of his views and acti,·ities, calling him 'Frenchman' and 'doctrinaire' and censuring him for his complete break with his native country. (A.S.)
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failures arc due. The life of young people, spent in general in a noisy, closed seclusion of a sort, remote from the everyday, wholesale struggle for personal interests, though it clearly grasps general truths, nearly always comes to grief through a false understanding of their application to the needs of the day.