But Dvigubsky was not at all a good-natured professor; he receiver! us extremely curtly and was rude. I reeler! off a fearful rigmarole and was disrespectful ; the baron served the same story warmed up. The rector, irritilterl, told us to present ourselves next morning beforE' tlw Council ; and there for half an hour they questioned, condemned and sentenced us and sent the sentence to Prince Golitsyn for confirmation.
I had scarcely had time to give an imitation of the trial and the sentPnce of the Unin•rsity St>nate to tht:> students five or six times in the lecture-room when all at once, at the beginning of a lecture_ the inspector, who was a major in the Russian army and a French dancing-master, made his appearance with a noncommissioned officPr, bringing an order to take me and conduct me to the university prison. Some of the students came to see me on my way, and in the courtyard, too, there was a crowd of young men, so Pvidently I was not the first taken ; as we passed they all waved their caps and their hands ; the university soldiers tried to rnon• tlu'rn back but the students would not go.
In the dirty cellar which sPrved as a prison I found t\vo of the arrpsted mPn, Arapetov and Orlov; Prince Andrey Obolensky and RosPnheirn had bePn put in another room; in all, there were six of us punislwd for the Malov nffair. OrdPrs \Wre given that we should bP kPpt on bread and water; tlw rPctor sent some sort of soup, which we refused, and it was well we did so. As soon as it got dark and the university gre\Y empty, our comrades brought us chPPse, garnP, cigars, wine, and liqueurs. The soldier in chargP ''"a' nngry and started gmrnbling, but accepted twenty kopecks and carried in the provisions. After midnight he went
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further and let several visitors come in to us; so we spent our time feasting by night and going to bed by day.
On one occasion it happened that the assistant-director, Panin, the brother of the Minister of Justice, faithful to his Horse
Guard habits, took it into his head to go the round of the State prison in the university cellar by night. We had only just lit a candle and put it under a chair so that the light could not be seen from outside, and were beginning on our nocturnal luncheon, when we heard a knock at the outer door; not the sort of knock that meekly begs a soldier to open, which is more afraid of being heard than of not being heard ; no, this was a peremptory knock, a knock of authority. The soldier was petrified ; we hid the bottles and our visitors in a little cupboard, blew out the candle and threw ourselves on our pallets. Panin came in.
'I believe you are smoking?' he said, so lost in thick clouds of smoke that we could hardly distinguish him from the inspector who was carrying a lantern. 'Where do they get a light? Do you give it to them?'
The soldier swore that he did not. \Ve answered that we had tinder with us. The inspector undertook to remove it and to take away the cigars, and Panin withdrew without noticing that the number of caps in the room was double the number of heads.
On Saturday evening the inspector made his appearance and announced that I and one other of us might go home, but that the rest would remain until Monday. This proposal seemed to me insulting and I asked the inspector whether I might remain; he drew back a step, looked at me with that menacingly graceful air with which tsars and heroes in a ballet depict anger in a dance, and saying, 'Stay by all means,' went away. I got into more trouble at home for this last escapade than for the whole business.
And so the first nights I slept away from home were spent i n prison. Not long afterwards it was m y lot t o have experience o f a different prison, and there I stayed not eight days16 btU nine months, after which I went not home but into exile. All that comes later, however.
From that time forward I enjoyed the greatest popularity in the lecture-room. From the first I had been accepted as a good comrade. After the Malov affair I became, like Gogol's famous lady, a comrade 'agreeable in all respects.'
! G In a written deposition r;iven to th<> Commission of Inquiry in 1 834, Herzen testified that he had been under aaest for seventy-two hours in 1 83 1 in connection with the Malov case. ( A .S. )
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Did we learn anything with all this going on? Could Y>e study? I suppose we did. The teaching was more meagre and its scope narrower than in the 'forties. It is not the function of a university, however, to give a complete training in any branch of knowledge ; its business is to put a man in a position to continue to study on his own account; its work is to provoke inquiry, to teach men to ask questions. And this was certainly done by such professors as M. G. Pavlov, and on the other hand by such as Kachenovsky. But contact with other young men in the lecture-rooms and the exchange of ideas and of what they had been reading did more to develop the students than lectures and professors . . . . Moscow University did its work ; the professors whose lectures contributed to the development of Lermontov, Belinsky,1' Turgenev, Kavelin,IB and Pirogov19 may play their game of boston in tranquillity and still more tranquilly lie under the earth.
And what originals, what prodigies, there were among themfrom Fedor lvanovich Chumakov, who adjusted formulas to those in Poinsot's course with the perfect liberty of a privileged landowner, adding letters and taking them away, taking squares for roots and x for the known quantity, to Gavriil Myagkov, who lectured on military tactics, the toughest science in the world.
From perpetually dealing with heroic subjects Myagkov's very appearance had acquired a military mien; buttoned up to the throat and wearing a cravat that was quite unbending, he delivered his lectures as though giving words of command.
'Gentlemen! ' he would shout; 'Into the field!-Artillery!'
This did not mean that cannon were advancing into the field of battle, but simply that such was the heading in the margin.
What a pity Nicholas avoided visiting the university! If he had seen Myagkov, he would certainly have made him Director.
And Fedor Fcdorovich Reiss, who in his chemistry lectures 17 Belinsky, Vissarion Grigorevich ( 1 8 1 0-48), was the greatest of Russian critics. See below. "Return to Moscow and Intellectual Debate," pp.
229-53. ( D.M. )
18 Kavelin. Konstantin Dmitriyevich ( 1 818-85 ), a writer of brilliant articles on political and econom.ic questions. A friend of Turgenev. ( Tr.) 19 Pirogov, Nikolay Ivanovich ( 1 8 1 0-81 ) , the great surgeon and medical authority, was the first in Russia to investigate disease by experiments on animals, and to use anaesthetics for operations. He took an actiYe part in education and the reforms of the early years of Alexander I I's reign, and published many treatises on medical subjects. To his genius and influence as Professor of Medicine in Petersburg UniYersity is largely due the very high standard of medical training in Russia. (Tr.)
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never went beyond the second person of the chemical divinity, i.e. hydrogen! Reiss, who had actually been made Professor of Chemistry because not he, but his uncle, had at one time studied that science! Towards the end of the reign of Catherine, the old uncle had been invited to Russia ; he did not want to come, so sent his nephew instead . . . .