Meanwhile every event, every year, confirmed for them the frightful truth that not only the government was against them, with gallows and spies, with the iron hoop with which the hangman compressed Pestel's head, and with Nicholas putting this hoop on all Russia, but that the people, too, were not with them, 6 At this place in the Peter-Paul Fortress P. I. Peste!, K. F. Ryleyev, S. I. Muravev·Apostol, M. P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin and P. G. Kakhovsky,
'Decembrists,' were hanged on the night of 1 2th-1 3th July, 1 826. (A.S.) 6 Ivan hanovich Pushchin ( 1 798-1859), was a great friend of the poet Pushkin. (Tr.)
7 Mikhail Sergeyevich, one of the Decembrists. (Tr.) s See pp. 1 1 7-20 above. (D.M.)
9 Dmitri Vladimirovich ( 1 805-27 ) , a young poet of the greatest promise who died in 1 827 at the age of twenty-two. (Tr.) 10 From Pushkin's lines 'To Chaadayev.' (A.S.)
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or at least were completely strangers to them. If the people were discontented, the objects of their discontent were different. Together with this crushing recognition they suffered, on the other hand, from growing doubt of the most fundamental, unshakeable principles of Western European opinion. The ground was giving way under their feet; and in this perplexity they were forced actually to enter the Service or to fold their arms and become superfluous, idle. We venture to assert that this is one of the most tragic situations in the world. Now these superfluous men are an anachronism, but of course Royer-Collard or Benjamin Constant would also be an anachronism now. However, one must not cast a stone at them for that.
While men's minds were kept in distress and painful irresolution, not knowing where to find an escape or in what direction to move, Nicholas went his way with dull, elemental obstinacy, trampling down the cornfields and every sign of growth. A master of his craft, he began from the year 1831 to make war on the children; he grasped that he must erode everything human in the years of childhood in order to make faithful subjects in his own image and after his likeness. The upbringing of which he dreamed was organised. A simple word, a simple gesture was reckoned as much an insolence and a crime as an open neck or an unbuttoned collar. And this massacre of the souls of innocents went on for thirty years!
Nicholas-reflected in every inspector, every school director, every tutor and guardian-confronted the boy at school, in the street, i n church, even to some extent in the parental home, stood and gazed at him with pewtery, unloving eyes, and the child's heart ached and grew faint with fear that those eyes might detect some budding of free thought, some human feeling.
And who knows what chemical change in the composition of a child's blood and nervous system is caused by intimidation, by the checking or dissimulation of speech, by the repression of feeling?
The terrified parents helped Nicholas in his task; to save their children by ignorance, they concealed from them their one noble memory. The younger generation grew up without traditions, without a future, except a career in the Service. The government office and the barracks little by little conquered the drawingroom and society, aristocrats turned gendarmes. Kleinmikhels turned aristocrats; the narrow-minded personality of Nicholas was gradually imprinted on everything, vulgarising everything and giving everything an official, governmental aspect.
Of course, in all this unhappiness, not everything perished. No
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one plague, not even the Thirty Years' War, exterminated everyone. Man is a tough creature. The demand for humane progn�ss, the striving for independent initiative, survived, and most of all in the two 1\lacedonian phalanxes of our civilisation, Moscow University and the Tsarskoye Selo Lycee. On their youthful shoulders they carried across the whole kingdom of dead souls the Ark in which lay the Russia of the future; they carried her living thought, her living faith in what was to come.
History will not forget them.
But in this conflict they too lost, for the most part, the youthfulness of their early years: they were over-strained, grew overripe too soon. Old age was on them before their legal coming of age. These were not idle, not superfluous men ; these were exasperated men, sick in body and soul, men wasted by the affronts they had endured, who looked at everything askance, and were unable to rid themselves of the bile and venom accumulated more than five years before. They offer a manifest step forward, but still it is a sickly step; this is no longer a heavy, chronic lethargy, but an acute suffering which must be followed by recovery or the grave.
The superfluous men have left the stage, and the jaundiced, who are more angry with the superfluous than any, will follow them. Indeed, they will be gone very soon. They are too morose, and they get too much on one's nerves, to stand their ground long. The \vorld, in spite of eighteen centuries of Christian contrition, is in a very heathen fashion devoted to epicureanism and a la longue cannot put up with the depressing face of the Daniels of the Neva, who gloomily reproach men for dining without gnashing their teeth, and for enjoying pictures or music without remembering the misfortunes of this world.
Their relief is on its way ; already we see men of quite a different stamp, with untried powers and stalwart muscles, appearing from remote universities, from the sturdy Ukraine, from the sturdy north-east, and perhaps we old folks may yet have the luck to hold out a hand across the sickly generation to the fresh stock, who will briefly bid us farewell and go on their broad road.
We have studied the type of jaundiced men, not on the spot, and not from books; we have studied it in specimens who have crossed the Neman and sometimes even the Rhine since 1 850.
The first thing that struck us in them was the ease with which they despaired of everything, the vindictive pleasure of their renunciation, and their terrible ruthlessness. After the events of 1 848 they were at once set on a height from which they saw the
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defeat of the republic and the revolution, the regression of civilisation, and the insulting of banners-and they could feel no compassion for the unknown fighters. Where the likes of us stopped short, tried to restore animation, and looked to see if there was no spark of life, they went farther through the desert of logical deduction and easily arrived at those final, abrupt conclusions which are alarming in their radical audacity but which, like the spirits of the dead, are but the essence gone out of life, not life itself. In these conclusions the Russian on the whole enjoys a terrific advantage over the European ; he has -in this no tradition, no habit, nothing germane to him to lose. The man who has no property of his own or of others passes most safely along dangerous roads.
This emancipation from everything traditional fell to the lot not of healthy, youthful characters but of men whose heart and soul had been strained in every fibre. After 1 848 there was no living in Petersburg. The autocracy had reached the Hercules'
Pillars of absurdity; they had reached the instructions issued to teachers at the military academics, Buturlin's scheme for closing the universities and the signature of the censor Yelagin on patterns for stencils. Can one wonder that the young men who broke out of this catacomb were crazy and sick?