Bakunin used to get up late; he could hardly have done otherwise, since he spent the night talking and drinking tea.
One morning some time a fter ten o'clock he heard someone moving about in his room. His bed stood curtained off in a large alcove.
'Who's there?' shouted Bakunin, waking up.
'A Russian.'
'What is your name?'
'So-and-so.'
'Delighted to see you.'
'Why is it you get up so late and you a democrat?'
Silence: the sounds of splashing water, cascades.
'Mikhail Alexandrovich !'
'Well?'
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'I wanted to ask you, were you married in church?'
'Yes.'
'You d i d wrong. What a n example o f inconsistency; and here is Turgenev too, having his daughter legally married. You old men ought to set us an example.'
'What nonsense you are talking.'
'But tell me, did you marry for love?'
'What has that to do \Vith you?'
'There was a rumour going about that you married because your bride \vas rich ! 'l3
'Have you come here to cross-examine me? Go to the devil ! '
'Well now, here you are angry, and I really meant no harm.
Good-bye. But I shall come and see you again all the same.'
'All right, all right. Only be more sensible next time.'
Meanwhile the Polish storm was drawing nearer and nearer. In the autumn of 1 862 Potebnya appeared in London for a few days.
Melancholy, pure-hearted, devoted heart and soul to the hurricane, he came to talk to us for himself and his comrades, meaning in any case to go his own way. Poles began to arrive from their country more and more frequently; their language was sharper and more definite. They were moving directly and consciously towards the explosion. I felt with horror that they were going to unavoidable ruin.
'I am mortally sorry for Potebnya and his comrades,' I said to Bakunin, 'and the more so that I doubt whether their aims are the same as those of the Poles.'
'Oh yes they are, yes they arc,' Bakunin retorted. '"'e can't sit for evPr "·ith our arms folded, reflecting; we must take history as it presents itself, or else one "·ill always be too far behind or too far in front.'
Bakunin grew younger; he \vas in his element: he loved not only the uproar of the rPvolt and the noise of the club, the market-place and the barricade ; he loved the preparatory agitation, the excited and at the same time restrained life, spent among conspiracies, consultations, sleepless nights, conferences, agreements, corrections of cyphers, invisible inks and secret signs. Anyone who has taken part in rehearsals for private theatricals or in preparing a Christmas tree knows that the preparation is one of the best, most exquisite parts of it. But though he \Vas carried away by the preparations of the Christmas tree I had a gnawing at my heart; I -.vas continually 13 Bakunin took no dowry with his wife.
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arguing with him and reluctantly doing what I did not want to do.
Here I must stop to ask a sorrowful question. How, whence did I come by this readiness to give way, though with a murmur, this weak yielding, though after rebellion and a protest? I had, on the one hand, a conviction that I ought to act in one way, and, on the other, a readiness to act quite differently. This wavering, this dissonance, dieses Zogernde has done me infinite harm in my life, and has not even left me with the faint comfort of recognising that my mistake was involuntary, unconscious; I have made blunders a contre-coeur; I had all the arguments on the other side before my eyes. I have told in one of my earlier chapters of the part I took in the 1 3th of June, 1 849. That is typical of what I am saying. I did not for one instant believe in the success of the 1 3th of June; I saw the absurdity of the movement and its impotence, the indifference of the people, the ferocity of the reaction, and the pettiness of the revolutionaries.
(I had written about it already, and yet I went out into the square, laughing at the people who went with me.) How many misfortunes, how many blows I should have been spared in my life, if at all the crises in it I had had the strength to listPn to myself. I have been reproached for being easily carried away; I have been carried away, too, but that is not what matters most. Though I might be committed by my impressionable temper, I pulled myself up at once ; thought, reflection and observation almost always gained the day in theory, but not in practice. That is just what is hard to explain: why I let myself be led nolens volens. . . .
The reason for my quick compliance was false shame, though sometimes it was the better influences of love, friendship and indulgence; but did all this overcome my power of reasoning?
After the funeral of VVorcell on the 5th of February, 1 857, when all the mourners had dispersed to their homes and I, returning to my room, sat down sadly at my writing-table, a melancholy question came into my mind. Had we not lowered into the ground with that just man, and had we not buried with him all our relations with the Polish emigrants?
The gentle character of the old man, which was a conciliating element in the misunderstandings that were constantly arising, had gone for ever, but the misunderstandings remained. Privately, personally, we might love one or another among the Poles and be friendly with them, but there was little common undPrstanding between us in general, and that made our relations strained and conscientiously reserved ; we made concessions
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to one another, that is, weakened ourselves and decreased in each other what was almost the best and strongest in us. It was impossible to come to a common understanding by open talk. We started from different points, and our paths only intersected in our common hatred for the autocracy of Petersburg. The ideal of the Poles was behind them: they strove towards their past, from which they had been cut off by violence and which was the only starting-point from which they could advance again. They had masses of holy relics, while we had empty cradles. In all their actions and in all their poetry there is as much of despair as there is of living faith.
They look for the resurrection of their dead, while we long to bury ours as soon as possible. Our lines of thought, our forms of inspiration are different; our whole genius, our whole constitution has nothing in common with theirs. Our association with them seemed to them alternately a mesalliance and a marriage of convenience. On our side there was more sincerity, but not more depth: we were conscious of our indirect guilt, we liked their daring and respected their indomitable protest. What could they like, what could they respect in us? They did violence to themselves in making friends with us; they made an honourable exception for a few Russians.
In that dark prison-house the reign of Nicholas locked us into as fellow-prisoners, we had more sympathy with than knowledge of each other. But as soon as the window was opened a little space, we divined that we had been brought by different paths and that we should disperse in different directions. After the Crimean War we heaved a sigh of relief, and our joy was an offence to them: the new atmosphere in Russia reminded them not of their hopes but of their losses. For us the new times began with presumptuous demands; we rushed forward ready to smash everything; with them it began with requiems and services for the dead. But for a second time the government welded us together. At the sound of firing at priests and children, at crucifixes and women, the sound of firing above the chanting of hymns and prayers, all questions were silenced, all differences were wiped out. With tears and lamentations, I wrote then a series of articles14 which deeply touched the Poles.