"With this he told me an incident the truth of which I had an opportunity of verifying afterwards from documents in the secretariat of the Minister of Home Affairs.
Tyufyayev carried on an open intrigue with the sister of a poor government clerk. The brother \vas made a laughing-stock and he tried to break the liaison, threatened to report it to the authorities, tried to \vrite to Petersburg-in fact, he fretted and made such a to-do that on one occasion the police seized him and brought him before the provincial authorities to be certified as a lunatic.
The provincial authorities_ the president of the court, and the inspector of the medical board, an old German who was very much liked hY the \Yorking- people and whom I knew personally, all found that Petrovsky, i!S the man was called, was mad.
Our doctor knew Petrovsky_ who was a patient of his. He was asked too_ as a matter of form. He told the inspector that Petrovsky was not mad at all. and that he proposed that they should make a fresh inquiry into the case, otherwise he \vould 4 Pun on the R ussian "·onl for 'transl atP,' which a lso nwans 'transfer from o1w placr• to anotlwr.' ( Tr. )
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take the matter further. The local authorities were not at all opposed to this, but unluckily Petrovsky died in the madhouse without waiting for the day fixed for the second inquiry, although he was a robust young fellow.
The report of the case reached Petersburg. Petrovsky's sister was arrested (why not Tyufyayev? ) and a secret investigation began. Tyufyayev dictated the answers; he surpassed himself on this occasion. To hush it up at once and to ward off the danger of a second involuntary journey to Siberia, Tyufyayev instructed the girl to say that her brother had been on bad terms with her ever since, carried away by youth and inexperience, she had been deprived of her innocence by the Emperor Alexander on his visit to Perm, for which she had received five thousand roubles through General Solomka.
Alexander's habits were such that there was nothing improbable in the story. To find out whether it was true was not easy, and in any case would have created a great deal of scandal. To Count Benckendorf's inquiry General Solomka answered that so much money passed through his hands that he could not remember the five thousand.
'La regina ne aveva molto!' says the improvisatore in Pushkin's Egyptian Nights . . . .
So this estimable pupil of Arakcheyev's and worthy comrade of Kleinmikhel's, the acrobat, vagrant, copying clerk, secretary, and governor, this tender heart, and disinterested man who locked up the sane in a madhouse and did them to death there, the man who slandered the Emperor Alexander to divert the attention of the Emperor Nicholas, was now undertaking to train me in the service.
I was almost completely dependent upon him. He had only to write some nonsense to the minister and I should have been sent off to some place in Irkutsk. And no need to write: indeed he had the right to transfer me to any outlandish town, Kay or Tsarevo
Sanchursk, without any communications, without any resources.
Tyufyayev despatched a young Pole to Glazov because the ladies preferred dancing the mazurka with him to dancing it with His Excellency.
The government office was incomparably worse than prison. Not that the actual work was great, but tclass="underline" � stifling atmosphere, as of
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the Dogs' Grotto,5 of those musty surroundings, and the fearful, stupid waste of time made the office intolerable. Alenitsyn did not worry me: he \Vas, indeed, more polite than I expected; he had been at the Kazan High School and consequently had a respect for a graduate of Moscow University.
There were some twenty clerks in the office. For the most part they were persons of no education and no moral conceptions ; sons of clerks and secretaries, accustomed from their cradle to regard the service as a source of profit, and the peasants as soil that yielded revenue, they sold certificates, took twenty kopecks and quarter-roubles, cheated for a glass of 'vine, demeaned themselves and did all sorts of shabby things. My valet gave up going to the 'billiard room,' saying that the officials cheated there worse than anybody, and one could not teach them a lesson because they wt>re 'officers.'
So with these people, \vhom my servant did not thrash only on account of their rank, I had to sit every day from nine in the morning until two, and from five to eight in the evening.
Besides Alenitsyn, who was the head of the office, there was a head-clerk of the table at which I was put, who also was not an ill-natured creature, though drunken and illiterate. At the same table sat four clerks. I had to talk to and become acquainted with these, and, indeed, with all the others, too. Apart from the fact that these people would have paid me out sooner or later for being 'proud' if I had not, it is simply impossible to spend several hours of every day with the same people without making their acquaintance. Moreover it must not be forgotten that provincials make up to anyone from outside and particularly to anyone who comes from the capital, especially if there is some interesting story connected with him.
After spending the whole day in this galley, I would sometimes come home with all my faculties in a state of stupefaction and fling myself on the sof�, worn out, humiliated, and incapable of any work or occupation. I heartily regretted my Krutitsky cell with its charcoal fumes and black beetles, with a gendarme on guard and a lock on the door. There I had freedom, I did what I liked and no one interfered with me ; instead of these vulgar remarks, dirty people, mean ideas and coarse feelings, there had been the stillness of death and undisturbed leisure. And when I remembered that after dinner I had to go again, and again to-
;; At Trrme d'Agnano, west of NaplPs. tlwrp is a grotto, filled at the bottom with ca rbon d ioxide, where dogs sufforatrll. F. L. Lucas: The Search for Good Sense ( Collins. 1 958) , p. 2 H. (R.)
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morrow, I was at times overcome by fury and despair and tried to find comfort in drinking wine and vodka.
And then, what is more, one of my fellow-clerks would look in
'on his way' and relieve his boredom by staying on talking until it was time to go back to the office.
Within a few months, however, the office became somewhat more bearable.
Prolonged, regular persecution is not in the Russian charac�er unless a personal or mercenary element comes in; and this is not at all because the government does not want to stifle and crush a man, but is due to the Russian carelessness, to our laissez-aller.
Russians in authority are as a rule ill-bred, audacious, and insolent; it is easy to provoke them to rudeness, but persistent knocking about is not in their line: they have not enough patience for it, perhaps because it brings them no profit.
In the first heat, in order to display, on the one hand their zeal, and on the other their power, they do all sorts of stupid and unnecessary things; then little by little they leave a man in peace.