Five more years passed. I was far from the Sparrow Hills, but near me their Prometheus, A. L. Vitberg, stood, austere and gloomy. In 1 842, returning finally to Moscow, I again visited the Sparrow Hills, and once more we stood on the site of the foundation stone and gazed at the same view, two together, but the other was not Nick.
Since 1 827 we had not been parted. In every memory of that time, general and particular, he with his boyish features and his love for me was everywhere in the foreground. Early could be seen in him that sign of grace which is vouchsafed to few, whether for woe or for bliss I know not, but certainly in order not to be one of the crowd. A large portrait of Ogarev as he was at that time ( 1 827-8), painted in oils, remained for long afterwards in his father's house. In later days I often stood before it and gazed at him. He is shown with an open shirt collar; the painter has wonderfully caught the luxuriant chestnut hair, the undefined, youthful beauty of his irregular features and his rather swarthy colouring; there was a pensiveness in the portrait that gave promise of powerful thought; an unaccountable melancholy and extreme gentleness shone out from his big grey eyes that suggested the future stature of a mighty spirit; such indeed he grew to be. This portrait, presented to me, was taken by a woman who was a stranger; perhaps these l ines will meet her eyes and she will send it to me.
I do not know why the memories of first love are given such precedence over the memories of youthful friendship. The fragrance of first love lies in the fact that it forgets the difference of the sexes, that it is passionate friendship. On the other hand, friendship between the young has all the ardour of love and all its character, the same delicate fear of touching on i ts feelings 5 The Sparrow Hills are now the Lenin Hills and the site of some highrise paleostalinolithic buildings belongmg to Moscow University, which, in name at least, was Herzen's a nd Ogarev's alma mater. (D.l\1.)
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with a word, the same mistrust of self and absolute devotion, the same agony at separation, and the same jealous desire for exclusive affection.
I had long loved Nick and loved him passionately, but had not been able to resolve to call him my friend, and when he was spending the summer at Kuntsevo I wrote to him at the end of a letter: 'Whether your friend or not, I do not yet know.' He first used the second person singular in writing to me and used to call me his Agathon after Karamzin,6 while I called him my Raphael after Schiller.
You will smile, perhaps, but let it be a mild, good-natured smile, such as one smiles when one thinks of the time when one was fifteen. Or would it not be better to muse over the question,
'Was I like that when I was blossoming out?'7 and to bless your fate if you have had youth (merely being young is not enough for this) , and to bless it doubly if you had a friend then.
The language of that period seems affected and bookish to us now; we have become unaccustomed to its vague enthusiasm, its confused fervour that passes suddenly into languid tenderness or childish laughter. It would be as absurd in a man of thirty as the celebrated Bettina will schlafen,8 but in its proper time this language of youth, this jargon de la puberte, this change of the psychological voice is very sincere; even the shade of bookishness is natural to the age of theoretical knowledge and practical ignorance.
Schiller remained our favourite.9 The characters of his dramas were living persons for us; we analysed them, loved and hated them, not as poetic creations but as living men. Moreover we saw ourselves in them. I wrote to Nick, somewhat troubled by his being too fond of Fiesco, that behind every Fiesco stands his Verrina. My ideal was Karl Moor, but soon I was false to him and went over to the Marquis of Posa. I imagined in a hundred variations how I would speak to Nicholas, and how afterwards 6 Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich ( 1 766-1 826) , author of a great History of the Russian State, and also of novels in the sentimental romantic style of his period. (Tr. ) 7 From A. S. Pushkin: Onegin's Travels. (A.S.) 8 See the Tagebuch of Bettina von Arnim for the account of her famous first interview with Goethe. ( Tr. )
9 Schiller's poetry has not lost its influence on me. A few months ago I read Wallenstein, that titanic work, aloud to my son. The man who has lost his taste for Schiller has grown old or pedantic, has grown hard or forgotten himself. \Vhat is one to say of these precocious altkluge Burschen who know his defects so well at seventeen?
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he would send me to the mines or the scaffold. It is a strange thing that almost all our day-dreams ended in Siberia or the scaffold and hardly ever in triumph; can this be the way the Russian imagination turns, or is it the effect of Petersburg with its five gallows and its penal servitude reflected on the young generation?
And so, Ogarev, hand in hand we moved forward into life!
Fearlessly and proudly we advanced, generously we responded to every challenge and single-heartedly we surrendered to every inclination. The path we chose was no easy one ; we have never left it for one moment: wounded and broken we have gone forward and no one has outdistanced us. I have reached . . . not the goal but the spot where the road goes downhill, and involuntarily I seek thy hand that we may go down together, that I may press it and say, smiling mournfully, 'So this is all ! '
Meanwhile i n the dull leisure to \vhich events have condemned me, finding in myself neither strength nor freshness for new labours, I am writing down our memories. Much of that which united us so closely has settled in these pages. I present them to thee. For thee they have a double meaning, the meaning of tombstones on which we meet familiar names .
. . . And is it not strange to think that had Sonnenberg known how to swim, or had he been drowned then in the Moskva, had he been pulled out not by a Cossack of the Urals but by a soldier of the Apsheronsky infantry, I should not have met Nick or should have met him later, differently, not in that room in our old house, where, smoking cigars on the sly, we entered so deeply into each other's lives and drew strength from each other.
l\!JJ� Fctt!Ler
THE INSU FFERABLE DREARI:\'ESS of our house grew greater every year. If my time at the university had not been approaching, if it had not been for my new friendship, my political inclinations and the liveliness of my disposition, I should have run away or perished.
My father was hardly ever in a good humour; he was per-
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petually dissatisfied with everything. A man of great intelligence and great powers of observation, he had seen, heard, and remembered an immense amount; an accomplished man of the world, he could be extremely amiable and interesting, but he did not care to be so and sank more and more into wayward unsociability.