Valerian A. Panaev (i824-i899) was a railway engineer, a commentator, and the author of a plan to free the serfs that was published in the i858 collection Voices from Russia.
Herzen notes that he is citing The St. Petersburg Gazette.
Vladimir D. Skaryatin was an arch-conservative nobleman, one of whose family members had participated in the assassination of Paul I.
Ivan M. Martynov was a Russian emigrant and Jesuit whose letter published in the March 4, i864, issue of The Day was an answer to an article criticizing the Jesuits. The answer by the prominent Slavophile writer Yury Samarin, as abstract as Martynov's, was spread over four issues and also published separately. Herzen's own published political criticisms of material in The Day remained unanswered.
^ 77 ^
The Bell, No. 2i2, January i5, i866. Herzen's interest in the Decembrists dates back to i825; the uprising was without doubt one of the most decisive influences in his life. He used the Free Russian Press to publish materials by and about the Decembrists, and the title Polestar was a tribute to the five martyrs. For all these reasons, to speak with a survivor was an exciting and deeply moving experience. After being released from exile in i856, the Decembrist Sergey Volkonsky traveled abroad for his health, meeting with Herzen in Paris in late June-early July i86i. The two got along very well and met on several occasions, allowing Herzen to learn a great deal more about the Decembrists. He found Volkonsky an admirable and fascinating figure, an example of righteousness and resilience in a progressive cause; one witness to their meetings said that Herzen's affection for Volkonsky was that of a son (Let 3:224-26). Friends and family members of the last prince were not entirely happy with the tribute below, which they claimed was a "distorted view" of the old prince, who was highly unlikely to have revealed so much information in the presence of strangers. The Decembrist legacy was problematic for the prince's son, M. S. Volkonsky, a rising figure in government service in the 1860s, and for grandson S. M. Volkonsky, who in spring 1917 was horrified by the thought that Decembrist memoirs might wind up in a museum of the revolution (Eidel'man, Svobodnoe slovo, 390-91).
In Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, Orlando Figes adds substantially (72-146) to the biographical details presented in the document below. Volkonsky's ancestors include the fourteenth-century prince Mikhail Chernigorsky, whose service to Muscovy against the Mongols led to his canonization. By Alexander I's reign, this ancient family was closer than any other to the tsar, with more than a few Volkonskys serving at court, including the young Sergey Grigorevich, who was awarded the right to enter the emperor's private apartments unannounced. He even spent time with the much younger Nikolay Pavlovich—the future Nicholas I—playing with toy soldiers. After more than fifty real-life battles, including Borodino, and the triumphal march to Paris and Vienna, Sergey Volkonsky returned to Russia convinced of two things: Russia could not realize its potential without civil rights, and the serfs had shown beyond any doubt the depth of their patriotism. As a member of the Union of Welfare, Volkonsky was asked to recruit Pushkin, a close friend of his wife's family, but refrained from doing so. Once he was convicted, his mother's influence at court spared him a death sentence, but he lost his title, rank, and battlefield medals, and was sent to hard labor and exile by the tsar he had entertained, and by chief of police Benkendorf, an old friend from school and service.
During three decades in Siberia, Volkonsky rejected aristocratic ways and embraced peasant life, including the commune, although it is said that he retained his impressive conversational skills in French. Released by Alexander II, Volkonsky found in European Russia servility, hypocrisy, and a lack of dignity, which he deplored in his memoirs. The tsar finally returned the general's war medals in 1864, and in 1903 his portrait found its place again among the Hermitage's heroes of 1812 at the request of his nephew, who was at that time the gallery's director. In Volkonsky, Herzen found a perfect hero.
Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky [1866]
The great martyrs of the Nicholaevan era, our fathers in spirit and in freedom, the heroes of Russia's first awakening, participants in the great war of 1812 and the great protest of 1825, are going to their graves. It is becoming empty...and petty without them.
Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky died the 28th of November (the 10th of December).
With pride and tender emotion we remember our meeting with the venerable old man in 1861. Speaking about it in The Bell (No. 186, 1864), we were afraid to name him.1
". The venerable old man, the stately old man, eighty years old, with a long silver beard and white hair that fell to his shoulders, told me about those times, about his people, about Pestel, the solitary prison cell, hard labor, to which he was sent as a brilliant young man and from which he returned gray, old, still more brilliant, but from another world.
"I listened and listened to him, and when he had finished, I wanted to ask his blessing for life's journey, forgetting that it had already passed. [. . .] Between the gallows on the Kronverk rampart and the gallows in Poland and Lithuania, these milestones of the imperial highway, three columns had passed, relieving each other in the cold, dark twilight.soon their outlines fade and are lost in the distant blue sky." [. . .]
A remarkable group of people. Where did the 18th century get the creative force to bring forth giants everywhere and in everything, from the Niagara and Amazon rivers to the Volga and Don?.. What remarkable fighters they were, what personalities, what people!
We hasten to pass on to our readers the obituary of S. G. Volkonsky, sent to us by Prince P. V. Dolgorukov.2
AN OBITUARY
Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky was remarkable for the firmness of his convictions and the selflessness of his character. He was born in 1787, and everything smiled upon him from birth: wealth, nobility, connections—fate gave him everything: he was the son of a holder of the St. Andrew's cross and a lady-in-waiting; he was the grandson of Field Marshal Repnin, in whose house he was raised until the age of 14, i.e., until the death of his grandfather; at 24 he was a colonel and an aide-de-camp; at 26 he was promoted to major general and a few weeks later, in recognition of the Battle of Leipzig, he was awarded a ribbon of the Order of Anna. He sacrificed all of this to his convictions, to his burning desire to see his homeland free, and at the age of thirty-nine he set off for hard labor in the Nerchinsk mines. just when Volkonsky had intended to quit the service completely and travel, he was accepted into the secret society by Mik. Al. fon Vizin in the house of Count Kiselev, where Pestel read excerpts from his "Russian Justice." Pestel and other members of the society demanded that Volkonsky continue serving without fail, because there was the possibility that, due to his rank, he would receive a brigade and maybe even a division, and he could be useful to the society in case of an uprising.
The Emperor Alexander knew that Volkonsky was taking part in the schemes of the better part of contemporary youth; he commanded the first brigade of the i9th Infantry Division, and when the commander-in-chief, Prince Wittgenstein, asked the sovereign in i823 about naming him a division commander, saying that Volkon- sky had excellent preparation for the service, Alexander answered: "If only he confined his activities to the service he would long ago have commanded a division!" One day, on maneuvers, Alexander, having summoned Volkonsky to congratulate him on the excellent condition of the Azovsky and Dneprovsky regiments, said: "Prince, I advise you to occupy yourself with your brigade and not with government affairs; it will be more useful for the service and for you."3