I had no money! I did not want to wait for a remittance from Moscow and so I commissioned Matvey to try to borrow fifteen hundred paper roubles for me. An hour later Mah·ey appeared with an innkeeper called Gibin, whom I knew, and at whose hotel I had stayed for a week. Gibin, a stout merchant with a good-natured expression, bowed and handed me a packet of notes.
'How much interest do you want?' I asked him.
'"Well, you see,' answered Gibin, 'I don't do this sort of business and I don't lend money at interest, but since I heard from Matvey Savelyevich that you need money for a month or two, and we very much approve of you, and thank God have the money to spare, I've brought it along.'
I thanked him and asked him which he would like, a simple receipt for the money or a promissory note; but to this, too, Gibin answered: 'Extra work ; I trust your word more than a piece of stamped paper.'
'Upon my word, but I may die you know.'
'Well then, in my sorrow at your decease I shouldn't worry much about the loss of the money.'
I was touched and pressed his hand warmly instead of giving him a receipt. Gibin embraced me in the Russian fashion and said: 'We know it a ll, of course ; we know you were not serving of your own will and didn't behave yourself like the other officials, the Lord forgive them, but stood up for the likes of us and the ignorant people, so I am glad a chance has come to do you a good turn too.'
As we were driving out of the town late in the evening our driver pulled up the horses at the inn and Gibin gave me a pie the size of a cart-wheel as provision for the journey.
That was my 'medal for good service.'
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0Ltr J-?riends
WITH ouR VISIT to Pokrovskoye and the quiet summer [ 1 843 ] we spent there begins the gracious, grown-up, active part of our MoscO\v life, which lasted till my father's death and perhaps until \Ye went abroad.
Our nerves, overstrained in Petersburg and Novgorod, had relaxed, our inner storms had subsided. The agonising analysis of ourselves and of each other, the useless reopening with our words of recent wounds, the i nce5sant return to the same painful subjects were over ; and our shaken faith in our own infallibility gave a truer and more earnest quality to our lives. My article
'On a Drama' was the last \vord of the sickness we had passed through.
Externally the only restriction we suffered from was police supervision ; I cannot say it was very tiresome, but the unpleasant feeling of a cane of Damocles, wielded by the local police-constable, was very disagreeable.
Our new friends received us warmly, much better than two years before. Foremost among them stood Granovsky: to him belongs the chief place in those five years. Ogarcv was abroad almost all the time. Granovsky filled his place for us, and we are indebted to him for the happiest moments of that time. There was a wonderful power of love in his nature. With many I was more in agreement in opinion, but to him I was nearer-somewhere deep down in the soul.
Granovsky and all of us were very busy, all hard at work, one lecturing at the university, another contributing to reviews and magazines, another studying Russian history; the first beginnings of all that \vas done afterwards date from this time.
By now we were far from being children ; in 1 842 I was thirty; we knew only too well where our work was leading us, but we went on. We went along our chosen path, not rashly but deliberately, with the calm, even step to which experience and family life had trainf'd us. This did not mean that we had grown old : no, we \Wrf' still young, and that is how it was that some speaking in the university lecture-room, others publishing articles or editing a newspaper were every day in danger of being arrested, dismissf'd, exiled.
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Such a circle of talented, cultured, versatile and pure-hearted people I have met nowhere >ince, neither in the highest ranks of the political nor on the summits of the literary and artistic worlds. Yet I have travelled a great deal, I have lived everywhere and with all sorts of people. I have been thrust by revolution into the extremes of progress, beyond which there is nothing, and conscientiously I am bound to say the same thing.
The finished, self-contained personality of the Westem European, which surprises us at first by his specialisation, surprises us later by his one-sidedness. He is a lways satisfied with himself, and his suffisance offends us. He never forgets his personal views, his position is generally cramped and his morals only appropriate to paltry surroundings.
I do not think that men were always l ike this here ; the vVestern European is not in a normal condition, he is moulting.
Unsuccessful revolutions have been absorbed and none of them has transformed him, but each has left its trace and confused his ideas, while the natural surge of historical process has splashed up into the foreground the slimy stratum of the petit bourgeois, under which the fossilised aristocratic class is buried and the rising masses submerged. Petite bourgeoisie is incompatible with the Russian character-and thank God for it!
Whether it is due to our carelessness, or our lack of moral stability and of defined activity, or our youth in the matter of education, or the aristocratic way in which we are brought up, yet we a re in our living on the one hand more artists, and on the other far simpler than Western Europeans; we have not their specialised knowledge, but to make up for that we are more versatile than they. Well developed personalities are not common amongst us, but their development is richer, wider in its scope, free from hedges and barriers. It is quite different in Western Europe.
When you are talking to the most likeable people here1 you immediately reach contradictions where you and they have nothing in common, and it is impossible to convince. In this stubborn obstinacy and unintentional incomprehension you seem to be knocking your head against the frontier of a world that is completed.
Our theoretical differences, on the contrary, brought more living interest into our lives, and a need for active exchange of opinions kept our minds more vigorous and helped us to progress; we grew in this friction against each other, and in reality 1 Written in England. (Tr.)
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were the stronger thanks to that 'composite' workmen's association which Proudhon has so superbly described in the field of mechanical labour.
I love to dwell on that time of work in unison, of a full exalted pulse, of harmonious order and virile struggle, on those years in which we were young for the last time! . . .
Our little circle assembled frequently, a t the house sometimes of one, sometimes of another, and oftenest of all at mine. Together with chatter, jest, supper and wine, there was the most active, the most rapid exchange of ideas, news and knowledge; everyone handed on what he had read and learned. Opinion was disseminated through arguments and what had been worked out by each became the property of all. There was nothing of significance in any sphere of knowledge, in any literature or in any art, which did not come under the notice of some one of us, and was not at once communicated to all.