and the crowd hurri<>rlly ohPyed the order. ThP Tsar, seeing se\·eral people dressed in ciYil ian clothes ( ilmong ! hose following the carriage) .
imagined thil t they wen' suspicious cililracters. and ordered the poor
\H!'tches to he takl'n to the lock-up and. turning to the peoplP. began shouting: ''Tlwy are all Yile Poll's; th<'y haYe <>gg<'rl you on." Such iln ill-timed Sillly compl<'t<'ly ruinl'd the effpct. in my opinion.'
A strilng<' sort of hinl was this Nirholilsl
�4 They wPre made to sen-!' in thl' ilrmy as priYiltes. ( ,t.S.)
�a Herz<>n. Ogarcv, N. I. Sazonm·, N. M. Satin, A. N. Savich. ( A.S.)
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tutors, and been educated at home or at a boarding-school preparatory for the university. Vadim had been born in Siberia during his father's exile, in the midst of want and privations.
His father had been himself his teacher. He had grown up in a large family of brothers and sisters, under a crushing weight of poverty but in complete freedom. Siberia sets its own imprint on a man, which is quite unlike our provincial stamp; it is far from being so vulgar and petty; it displays more healthiness and better tempering. Vadim was a savage in comparison with us.
His daring was of another kind, unlike ours, more that of the bogatyr, 20 and sometimes arrogant; the aristocracy of misfortune had developed in him a peculiar self-esteem ; but he knew how to love others, too, and gave himself to them without stint.
He was bold, even reckless to excess-a man born in Siberia, and in an exiled family too, has an advantage over us in not being afraid of Siberia.
Vadim from family tradition hated the autocracy with his whole soul, and he took us to his heart as soon as we met. vVe made friends very quickly-though, indeed, at that time, there was neither ceremony nor reasonable precaution, nothing like it, to be seen in uur circle.
'Would you like to make the acquaintance of Ketscher, of whom you have heard so much? ' Vadim said to me.
'I certainly should.'
'Come to-morrow evening, then, at seven o'clock; don't be late: he'll be at my place.'
I went-Vadim was not at home. A tall man with an expressive face and a good-naturedly menacing look behind his spectacles was waiting for him. I took up a book: he took up a book.
'But perhaps you,' he said as he opened it, 'perhaps you are Herzen?'
'Yes; and you're Ketscher?'
A conversation began and grew more and more lively.
'Allow me,' Ketscher interrupted me roughly. 'Allow me: do me the kindness to use "thou" to me.'
'Let us use "thou." '
And from that minute (which may have been at the end of 1831 ) we were inseparable friends ; from that minute the anger and kindness, the laugh and the shout of Ketscher have resounded at all the stages, in all the adventures of our life.
20 Legendary hero. (R.)
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Our meeting with Vadim introduced a new element into our Cossack brotherhood.
A year passed, the trial of my arrested comrades was over. They were found guilty (just as we were later on, and later still the Petrashevsky group) 27 of a design to form a secret society, and of criminal conversations; for this they were sent as common soldiers to Orenburg. Nicholas made an exception of one of them, Sungurov. He had completed his studies, and was in the service, married and had children. He was condemned to be deprived of his rights of status and to be exiled to Siberia.
'What could a handful of young students do? They destroyed themselves for nothing ! ' All that is very sensible, and people who argue in that wa.v ought to be gratified at the good sense of the younger generation of Russians that followed us. After our affair, \"·:hich followed that of Sungurov, fifteen years passed in tranquillity before the Petrashevsky affair, and it was those fifteen years from which Russia is only just beginning to recover and by which two generations were broken, the elder smothered in violence, and the younger poisoned from childhood, whose sickly representatives we are seeing to-day.
After the Decembrists all attempts to form societies were, i n effect, unsuccessful ; the scantiness o f our forces and the vagueness of our aims pointed to the necessity for another kind of work-for preliminnry work upon ourselves. All that is true.
But what would young men be made of who could wait for theoretical solutions while calmly looking on at what was being done round them, at the hundreds of Poles clanking their fetters on the Vladimir Road, at serfdom, at the soldiers flogged in the Khodynsky field by some General Lashkevich, at fellow-students who disnppeared and were never heard of again? For the moral purification of the generation, as a pledge of the future, they were bound to be so indignant as to be senseless in their attempts and disdainful of danger. The savage punishments inflicted on boys of sixteen or seventeen served as a stern lesson and a kind of hardening process; the paw of the beast hung over every one of us, proceeding from a brenst without a heart, and dispelled for good all rosy hopes of indulgence for youth. It was dangerous to 27 The members of the Petrashevsky group. of whom Dostoevsky was one, were condemned to death. and led out to the scaffold. At the last moment their sentence was commuted to penal servitude in Siberia. ( Tr.)
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play at Liberalism, and no one could dream of playing at conspiracy. For one badly concealed tear over Poland, for one boldly uttered word, there were years of exile, of the white strap,28 and sometimes even the fortress; that was why it was important that those words were uttered and those tears were shed. YoWlg people sometimes perished but they perished without checking the mental activity that was trying to solve the sphinx riddle of Russian life; indeed, they even justified its hop('S.
Our turn came now. Our names were already on the list-s of the secret police.29 The first play of the light-blue cat with the mouse began as follows.
When the young men who had been condemned were being sent off to Orenburg on foot under escort without sufficient warm clothing, Ogarev in our circle, I. Kircyevsky in his, got up subscriptions. All the condemned men were without money. Kireyevsky brought the money collected to the commander, Staal, a good-natured old man of whom I shall have more to say later.
Staal promised to remit the money and asked Kireyevsky,
'But what arc these papers?'
'The names of those who subscribed,' answered Kireycvsky,
'and the amounts.'
'You do believe that I shall remit the money?' asked the old man.
'There's no doubt of that.'