Free to set forth to foreign lands at will!
But is it not a dream, deceiving me?
Not so! To-morrow come the post-horses,
And then "von Ort zu Ort" I'll gallop on, Paying for passports what the price may be.
Well, I'll set forth! And then-what shall I find?
I know not! I have faith! And yet-and yet
God knows alone what still may be mr fate.
With fear and doubt I stand before the gate
Of Europe. And my heart is full
Of hope, of troubled, shadowy dreams.
I am in doubt, my friend, you see,
I shake my head despondinglr . . . .
N. P. 0GAREV, Humorous Verse, Part IP
'Six or seven sledges accompanied us as far as Chernaya Gryaz. There for the last time we clinked glasses and parted, sobbing.
'It was evening, the covered sledge crunched through the snow
. . . you looked sadly after us but did not guess that it meant a funeral and eternal separation. All were there, only one was missing, the nearest of the near: he alone was ill, and by
- his
absence, as it were, washed his hands of my departure.
'It was the 21st of January, 1 847 . . .'
The sergeant gave me back the passports; a little old soldier in a clumsy shako covered with oilskin, carrying a rifle of incredible size and weight, lifted the barrier; a Ural Cossack with narrow little eyes and broad cheekbones, holding the reins of his little, shaggy, dishevelled nag, which was covered all over with little icicles, rode up to wish me a happy journey; the pale, thin, dirty little Jewish driver with rags twisted four times round his neck clambered on the box.
'Good-bye ! Good-bye! ' said our old acquaintance, Karl Ivana-4 Translated by Juliet Soskice. (R.)
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vich, who was seeing us as far as Taurogen, and Tata's wetnurse, a handsome peasant woman, dissolved in tears as she said farewell.
The little Jew whipped up his horses, the sledge moved off. I looked back, the barrier had been lowered, the wind swept the snow from Russia on to the road and blew to one side the tail and mane of the Cossack's horse.
The nurse in a sarafan and a warm jacket was still looking after us and weeping; Sonnenberg, that symbol of the parental home, that comic figure from the days of childhood, waved his silk handkerchief-all round us was the endless steppe of snow.
'Good-bye, Tatyana ! Good-bye, Karl lvanovich! '
Here was a milestone and o n it, covered with snow, a thin, single-headed eagle with outspread wings . . . and that's a good thing: one head less.
P A R I S
I T A L Y
P A R I S
( 1 8 4 7 - 1 8 5 2 )
When I began to publish yet another part of My Past and Thoughts, I paused in hesitation before the discontinuity of the narratives, the pictures and of m_r, so to speak, interlinear comments on them. There is less external unity in them than in the earlier parts. I cannot weld them into one. In filling in the gaps it is very easy to give the whole thing a different background and a different lighting-the twth of that timP would be lost.
My Past and Thoughts is not an historical monograph, but the reflection of historical events on a man who has accidentally found himself in their path. That is why I have decided to leave my disconnected chapters as the.l· were, stringing them together like the mosaic pictures in Italian bracelets-all of which refer to one subiect but are onl_r held together br the setting and the chain.
l\1y Ll.'tters from France and Italy are essential for completing this part, especially in regard to the year 18-18; I had meant to make extracts from them, but that would hm·e involved so much reprinting that I could not make up my mind to it.
l\1any things that have not appeared in The Pole Star have been put into this edition, but I cannot give cvcr_rthing to my rcadrrs yet, for reasons both personal and public. The time is not far off when not onl_r the pages and chapters here omitted, but the u·hole volume, !dlicll is the most dear to me, will be published.
GE!'iEVA, 29th July, 1 866
1ne Journey
AT LAUTZAGEN the Prussian gendarmes invited me into the guard-room. An old sergeant took the passports, put on his spectacles, and with extraordinary precision began reading aloud all that was unnecessary:
Auf Befehl s.k. M. Nikolai des Ersten . . . . allen und jeden denen daran gelegen,
etc. etc . . . . Unterzeichner Peroffski,
Minister des lnnern, Kammerherr, Senator und Ritter des Ordens St. Wladimir . . . lnhaber eins goldenen Degens mit der lnschrift fur Tapferkeit . . .
This sergeant who was so fond of reading reminds me of another one. Between Terracino and Naples a Neapolitan carabineer came to the diligence four times, asking every time for our visas. I showed him the Neapolitan visa : this and the half carlino were not enough for him; he carried off the passports to the office, and returned twenty minutes later with the request that my companion and I should go to see the brigadier. The latter, a drunken old non-commissioned officer, asked me rather rudely:
'What is your surname and where do you come from?'
'Why, that is all in the passport.'
'I can't read it.'
We conjectured that reading was not the brigadier's strong point.
'By what law,' asked my companion, 'are we bound ro read you our passports aloud? We are bound to have them and to show them, but not to dictate them; I might dictate anything.'
'Accidenti!' muttered the old man, 'va ben, va ben!' and he gave back our passports without writing anything.
The learned gendarme at Lautzagen was of a different type; after reading three times in the three passports all General Perovsky's decorations, including his clasp for an unblemished record, he asked me:
'But who are you, Euer Hochwohlgeboren?'
I stared, not understanding what he wanted of me.
'Fraulein Maria E., Fraulein Maria K., Frau H.1-they are women, there is not one man's passport here.'
I looked : there really were only the passes of my mother and 1 Maria Kasparovna Ern (Reichel) , M<�ria Fedorovna Karsh and Luiza Ivanovna Haag, H.'s mother. (R.)
3 1 9
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two ladies we knew who were travelling with us; a cold shudder ran down my back.
'They would not have let me through at Taurogen without passport.'
'Bereits so, but you can't go further.'
'What am I to do?'
'Perhaps you have forgotten it at the guard-room. I'll tell them to harness a sledge for you; you can go yourself, and your people can warm themselves here meanwhile. Heh! Kerf! Lass er mal den Braunen anspannen.'
I cannot remember this stupid incident without laughing, just because I was so utterly disconcerted by it. I was overwhelmed by losing that passport of which I had been dreaming for several years, which I had been trying to obtain for two years, and losing it the minute after crossing the frontier. I was certain I had put it in my pocket, so I must have dropped it-where could I look for it? It would be covered by snow . . . . I should have to ask for a new one, to write to Riga, perhaps to go myself: and then they would send in a report, would notice that I was going to the mineral waters in January. In short, I felt as though I were in Petersburg again; visions of Kokoshkin and Sakhtynsky, Dubelt and Nicholas, passed through my mind. Good-bye to my journey, good-bye to Paris, to freedom of the press, to concerts and theatres . . . . once more I should see the clerks in the ministry, police-and every other sort of watcher, town constables with the two bright buttons on their backs that they use for looking behind them . . . and first of all I should see again the little scowling soldier in a heavy shako with the mysterious number '4' inscribed on it, the frozen Cossack horse . . .