This affair, for which I too was imprisoned, deserves to be described.
Malov was a stupid, coarse, and uncultured professor in the Political Faculty. The students despised him and laughed at him.
'How many professors have you in your faculty?' the Director one day asked a student in the Politics lecture-room.
'Nine, not counting Malov,' answered the student.15
Well, this professor, who had to be left out of the reckoning in order that nine should remain, began to be more and more insolPnt in his treatment of the students; the latter made up their minds to drive him out of the lecture-room. After deliberating together they sent two delegates to our faculty to invite me to come with an auxiliary force. I at once proclaimed a declaration of war on Malov, and sevPral students \VPnt with me; when we went into the Politics lecture-room l\1alov was present and saw us.
On the faces of all the students was written the same fear: that on that day he might say nothing rude to them. This fear soon 13 At that time there were none of the inspectors and sub-inspectors who played the part of my Pctr FPdorovich in the lecture-rooms.
14 The MaloY affair happened on 1 6th March, 1 83 1 . (A.S.) 15 A pun on the name-the phrase meaning also 'Nine all but a little.'
(Tr.)
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passed. The overflowing lecture-room was restless and a vague subdued hum rose from it. Malov made some observation; there began a scraping of feet.
'You express your thoughts like horses, with your feet,' observed Malov, probably imagining that horses think at a gallop or a trot; and a storm arose, whistling, hisses, shouts; 'Out with him, pcreat!' Malov, white as a sheet, made a desperate effort to control the uproar but could not; the students jumped on to the benches. Malov quietly left the dais and, cowering down, tried to slip through to the door; his audience followed, saw him through the university court into the stref't and flung his galoshes after him. The last circumstance was important, for in the street the case at once assumed a very different character; but where in the world are there lads of seventeen or eighteen who would consider that?
The University Council was alarmed and persuaded the Director to present the affair as disposed of, and for that purpose to put the culprits, or somebody anyhow, in prison. This was prudent; it might otherwise easily have happened that the Tsar would have sent an aide-de-camp who, with a view to gaining a cross, would have turned the affair into a conspiracy, a rising, a rebellion, and "vould have proposed sendin� everyone to penal servitudf', which the Tsar would graciously have commuted to service as common soldiers. Seeing that vice was punished and virtue triumphant, the Tsar confined himself to giving His Majesty's sanction to the confirmation of the wishes of the students, and dismissed the professor. We had driven Malov out as far as the university gates and he turned him out of them. It was vae victis with Nicholas, but this time we had no cause to reproach him.
And so the affair went merrily on ; after dinner next day the watchman from the head office shuffled up to me, a grey-headed old man, who conscientiously assumed that the students' tips (given na vodku) were for vodka and therefore kept himself continually in a condition approximating more to drunkenness than sobriety. In the cuff of his greatcoat he brought a note from the rector; I was ordered to present myself before him at seven o'clock that evening. When he had gone a pale and frightened studf'nt appeared, a baron from the Baltic provinces, who had received a similar invitation and was one of the luckless victims led on by me. He began showering reproaches upon me and then asked advice as to what he was to say.
'Lie desperately, deny everything, except that there was an uproar and that you were in the lecture-room.'
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'But the rector will ask why I was in the Politics lecture-room and not in ours.'
'What of it? Why, don't you know that Rodion Heyman did not come to give his lecture, so you, not wishing to waste your time, went to hear another.'
'He won't believe it.'
'Well, that's his affair.'
As we were going into the university courtyard I looked at my baron: his plump little cheeks were very pale and altogether he was in a bad way.
'Listen,' I said, 'you may be sure that the rector will begin with me and not with you, so you say exactly the same with variations. You did not do anything in particular, as a matter of fact.
Don't forget one thing: for making an uproar and for telling lies ever so many of you will be put in prison, but if you blab, and implicate anyone in front of me, I'll tell the others and we'll poison your existence for you.'
The baron promised and kept his word honourably.
The rector at that time was Dvigubsky, one of the relics and patterns of the professors before the flood, or to be more accurate, before the fire, that is, before 1 8 1 2. They are extinct now; with the directorship of Prince Obolensky the patriarchal period of Moscow University comes to an end. In those days the government did not trouble itself about the university; the professors lectured or did not lecture, the students attended or did not attend ; besides, if they did attend, it was not in uniform jackets ad instar of light-cavalry officers, but in all sorts of outrageous and eccentric garments, in tiny little forage-caps that would scarcely stay on their virginal locks. The professors consisted of two camps or strata who quietly hated each other. One group was composed exclusively of Germans, the other of non-Germans.
The Germans, among whom were good-natured and learned men, were distinguished by their ignorance of the Russian language and their disinclination to learn it, their indifference to the students, their spirit of Western favouritism and uninspired routine, their immoderate smoking of cigars and the immense quantity of decorations which they never took off. The non
Germans for their part knew not a single (living) language except Russian, were servile in their patriotism, as uncouth as seminarists, were sat upon, and instead of an immoderate consumption of cigars indulged in an immoderate consumption of liquor. The Germans for the most part hailed from Gottingen and the non-Germans were sons of priests.
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Dvigubsky was one of the non-Germans: his appearance was so edifying that a student from a seminary, who carne in for a list of classes, went up to kiss his hand and ask for his blessing, and ah,·ays called him 'Father Rector.' At the same time he was awfully like an owl with an Anna ribbon round its neck, in which form another student, who had received a more worldly t>ducation, drew his portrait. When he carne into our lectureroom either with the dean, Churnakov, or with Kotelnitsky, who had charge of a cupboard inscribed Materia McdJca, kept for some unknown reason in the Mathematical lecture-room-or with Reiss, who had bet>n bespoken from Germany because his unclt> was a very goorl chemist, and who, when he read French, used to call a lamp-wick a beton de colon, and poison, poisson, and pronounced the word for 'lightning' so unfortunately that many people supposed he was swearing-we looked at them \vith round eyes as at a collection of fossils.