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that it was an error on his part; that he had really meant to give it not to me but to a certain political circle in Petersburg, and that, not knowing how to do this, he had given it to me in London. The audacity of these opinions was the more remarkable that Bakhmetev's surname was as unknown as was his very existence, and that he had not spoken to anyone else of his proposal before his departure, nor had anyone spoken to him since then.
Some needed the money in order to send emissaries; others for establishing centres on the Volga ; others still for the publication of a journal. They were dissatisfied with The Bell, and did not readily respond to our invitation to work on it.
I absolutely refused to give the money; and let those who demanded it tell me themselves what would have become of it if I had.
'Bakhmetev may return without a farthing,' I said ; 'it is not easy to make a fortune by founding a socialist colony in the Marquesas Islands.'
'He is dead for sure.'
'But what if he is alive to spite you?'
'Well, but he gave the money for the propaganda, you know.'
'So far I haven't needed it.'
'But we do.'
'What for precisely?'
'We must send someone to the Volga and someone to Odessa . . . .'
'I don't think that is very necessary.'
'So you don't believe in the indispensability of sending them?'
'I do not.'
'He is growing old and getting miserly,' the most resolute and ferocious said about me in different keys.
'But why mind him? Just take the money from him and have done with it,' the still more resolute and ferocious added, 'and if he resists, we will go for him in the papers and teach him to keep back other people's money.'
I did not give up the money.
They did not go for me in the papers. I was abused in the press much later, but that was over money too . . . .
These more ferocious ones of whom I have spoken were the clumsy and uncouth representatives of the 'New Generation,'
who may be called the Sobakeviches and Nozdrcvs5 of Nihilism.
However superfluous it may be to make a reservation, yet I
" Two characters in Gogol's Dead Souls. ( R. )
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shall do so, knowing the logic and the manners of our opponents.
I have not the slightest desire in what I am saying to fling a stone at the younger generation or at Nihilism. Of the latter I have written many times. Our Sobakeviches of Nihilism do not constitute its most powerful expression, but only represent its exaggerated extremes.6
Who would judge of Christianity from the Flagellants of Origen or of the Revolution from the September butchers and the tricoteuses of Robespierre?
The arrogant lads of whom I am speaking are worth studying, because they are the expression of a temporary type, very definitely marked and very frequently repeated, a transitional form of the sickness of our development from our former stagnation.
For the most part they were lacking in the deportment which is given by breeding, and the staying power which is given by scientific studies. In the first fervour of emancipation they were in a hurry to cast off all the conventional forms and to push away all the rubber fenders which prevent rough collisions. This made difficult the simplest relations with them.
Removing everything to the last rag, our enfants terribles proudly appeared as their mothers bore them, and their mothers had not borne them well, not as simple, rather too plump lads but as inheritors of the evil, unhealthy life of our lower classes in Petersburg. Instead of athletic muscles and youthful nakedness, they displayed the melancholy traces of hereditary anaemia, the traces of old sores and of various fetters and collars. There were few among them who had come up from the people. The hall, the barrack-room, the seminary, the petty proprietor's farm survived in their blood and their brains, and lost none of their characteristic features though twisted in an opposite direction. So far as I know, this fact has attracted no serious attention.
On the one hand, the reaction against the old narrow, oppressive world was bound to throw the younger generation into antagonism and negation of their hostile surroundings; it was useless to expect moderation or justice in them. On the contrary, everything was done in defiance, everything was done in resentment. 'You are hypocrites, we shall be cynics; you have been moral in words, '"e will be wicked in words; you have been polite to your superiors and rude to your inferiors, we shall be G At that very time in Petersburg and l\1oscow. and even in Kazan and Kharkov, there were circles h<'ing formed among the university youth who devoted themseh·es in earnest to the study of science. especially among the medical students. They worked honestly and conscientiously but, cut off from acti,·e participa tion in the questions of the day, they were not forced to leave Russia and we scarcely knew anything of them.
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ru.de to everyone; you bow down to those whom you do not respect, we will jostle people without apologising; your feeling of personal dignity consisted in nothing but decorum and external honour, we make it our point of honour to flout every decorum and to scorn every point d'honneur.'
But on the other hand, though disowning all the ordinary forms of social life, their character was full of its own hereditary ailments and deformities. Casting off, as we have said, all veils, the most desperate played the dandy in the costume of Gogol's Petukh7 and did not preserve the pose of the MediCi Venus.
Their nakedness did not conceal, but revealed, what they were.
It revealed that their systematic uncouthness, their rude and insolent talk, had nothing in common with the inoffensive and simple-hearted coarseness of the peasant, but a great deal in common with the manners of the low-class pettifogger, the shopboy and the flunkey. The people no more considered them as one of themselves than they did a Slavophil in a murmolka. To the people these men have remained alien, the lowest stratum of the enemies' camp, skinny young masters, scribblers out of a job, Russians turned Germans.
To be completely free, one must forget one's liberation and that from which one has been liberated, and cast off the habits of the environment out of which one has grown. Until this has been done we cannot help being conscious of the servants' hall, the barrack-room, the government office or the seminary in every gesture they make and every word they utter.
To hit a man in the phiz at the first objection he advances-if not with a fist then with a word of abuse-to call Stuart Mill a rascal,8 forgetting all the service he has done, is not that the same as the Russian master's way of 'punching old Gavrilo in the snout for a crumpled cravat'?9 In this and similar pranks do you not recognise the policeman, the district officer, the village constable dragging a bailiff by his grey beard? Do you not, in the insolent arrogance of their manners and answers, clearly recognise the insolence of the officers of the days of Nicholas?