'I haven't heard of such a place.' 'Oh, come: there's an enormous botanical garden there and the best orangery in Europe.' 'Let's ask the gardener.' They asked, ami he did not know. Vensky unrolled the map.
'There it is, quite close to Richmond '' It was Kew.
::\1 Y P A S T A N D T H 0 U G H T S
532
Russia after the death of Nicholas and made a luminous band against the sullen background of Petersburg imperialism. True, he did bring a bad account of the health of Granovsky and Ogarev, but even this disappeared in the glovving picture of an awakening society, of which he himself was a specimen.
How avidly I listened to his stories, cross-questioned him and ferreted out details. I do not know whether he knew then or appreciated afterwards the immeasurable good he did me.
Three years of life in London had fatigued me. It is a laborious business to \VOrk without seeing the fmit from close at hand; and as well as this I was too much cut off from any circle of my kin. Printing sheet after sheet with Chernetsky and piling up heaps of printed pamphlets in Triibner's cellars, I had hardly any opportunity to send anything across the frontier of Russia.4 I could not give up: the Russian printing-press was my life's work, the plank from the paternal home that the ancient Germans used to take with them when they moved; with it I lived in the atmosphere of Russia ; with it I was prepared and armed. But with all that, it wore one out that one's work was never heard of: one's hands sank to one's sides. Faith dwindled by the minute and sought after a sign, and not only was there no sign: there was not one single word of sympathy from home.
\Yith the Crimean \\'ar, \vith the death of Nicholas, n new time came on; out of the continuous gloom there emerged new masses, new horizons; some movement could be sensed: it was hard to see well from a distance--there had to be an eye-witness.
One appeared in the person of Vensky, who confirmed that these horizons were no mirage but reality, that the boat had moved and was under way. One had only to look at his glowing face to believe him. There had been no such faces at all in recent times in Russia.
Overwhelmed by a feeling so unusual for a Russian, I called to mind Kant taking off his velvet cap at the news of the proclamation of the republic in 1 792 and repeating, 'Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart.' Yes, it is good to fall asleep at dawn after a long night of bad weather, fully believing that a marvellous day is coming!
I ndeed, the morning was drawing near of the day for which I had been yearning since I was thirteen-a boy in a camlet jacket 4 For how literature that was illP�al in Russia was smuggled in from abroad. sec ;\lichacl Futrell : Northern Underground . . . 1865-1917
( Faber, 1 963 ) . (R.)
The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"
533
sitting with just such another 'malefactor' (only a year younger) in a little room in the 'old house'; in the lecture-room at the university, surrounded by an eager, lively brotherhood ; in prison and exile; in a foreign land, making my way through the havoc of revolution and reaction; at the summit of domestic happiness, and shattered, lost on the shores of England with my printed monologue. The sun which had set, lighting up Moscow below the Sparrow Hills and carrying with it a boyish vow . . . was rising after a twenty-year-long night.
What was the use now of rest and sleep? . . . To work! Arid to work I set myself with redoubled energy. The work no longer went for nothing, no longer vanished in a dark expanse: loud applause and burning sympathy were borne to us from Russia .
The Pole Star was bought u p like hot cakes. The Russian ear, unused to free speech, became reconciled to it, and looked eagerly for its masculine solidity, its fearless frankness.
Ogarev arrived in the spring of 1 856 and a year later ( 1 st July, 1857) the first sheet of the Kolokol (Bell) came out. Without a fairly close periodicity there is no real bond between a publication and its readership. A book remains, a magazine disappears; but the book remains in the library and the magazine disappears in the reader's brain and is so appropriated by him through repetition that it seems his very own thought; and, if the reader begins to forget this thought, a new issue of the magazine, never fearing to be repetitious, will prompt and revive it.
In fact, for one year the influence of The Bell far outgrew The Pole Star. The Bell was accepted in Russia as an answer to the demand for a magazine not mutilated by the censorship. We were fervently greeted by the young generation; there were letters at which tears started to one's eyes . . . But it was not only the young gf'neration that supported us . . .
'The Bell is an authority,' I was told in London in 1 859 by, horribile dictu, Katkov, and he added that it lay on the table at Rostovtsev's to be referred to about the peasant question . . . .
And before him · the same thing had been repeated by Turgenev, Aksakov, Samarin and Kavelin, by generals who were liberals, liberals who were counsellors of state, ladies of the court with a thirst for progress and aides-de-camp of literature; V. P. Botkin himself, constant as a sunflower in his inclination towards any manifestation of power, looked with tenderness on The Bell as though it had been stuffed with truffles. All that was wanting for a complete triumph was a sincere enemy. We were before the
l\I Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
534
Vchmgericht,5 and we had not long to wait for him. The year 1858 \vas not yet over when there appeared the accusatory lttter of Chicherin. With the haughty frigidity of an unbending doctrinaire, with the roideur of an incorruptible judge he summoned me to a reply and, like Biron, poured a bucket of cold water on my head in the month of December.6 The behaviour of this Saint-Just of bureaucracy astonished me; but now, after seven years, Chicherin's letter seems to me the flower of politeness after the strong language and strong pa triotism of the Jl.1ikha_rlovsky time.' Yes, and the temper of society was different in those days; Chicherin's 'indictment' provoked an explosion of indignation and we had to try to calm down our exasperated friends. \Ve received letters, articles, protests by dozens. To the accuser himself his former friends Vclass="underline" rote letters singly and collectively, full of reproaches, one of them being signed by common friends of ours (three-quarters of them now are more friendly with Chicherin than with me) ; with the chivalry of bygone times he sent on thi s letter himself to be kept in our arsenal.
At the palace The Bell had received its rights of citizenship even earlier. Its articles led the Emperor to give orders for a review of the affair of 'Kochubey8 the marksman' who winged his steward. The Empress wept over a letter to her about the upbringing of her children ; and it is said that Butkov, the bold Secretary of State, repeated in a fit of arrogant self-sufficiency that he \vas afraid of nothing, 'Complain to the Tsar, do what you like, \vrite to The Bell, if you must, it's all the same to me.'
An officer passed over for promotion seriously asked us to print the fact, with a particular hint to the Emperor. The story of 5 The Vehmgerichte were mediaeval German tribunals which tried capital charges and were dreaded for their severity. ( Tr.) 6 1n the novel of I . I. Lazhechnikov ( 1 792-1 860 ) . The House of Ice, i t is described how Biron's sen-ants, by pouring buckets of water over a disobedient Ukrainian, turned him into a statue of ice. (A.S. ) i The era of the orgy of reaction. when part of liberal society turned to nationalism, chauvinism and a state of mind reminiscent of the Black Hundro:>ds, is called by HPrzPn after two m<'n who personified reaction-1\Iikhail Katkov and M ikhail l\1uravev. (A.S.) 8 In 1 853 Prince L. V. Kochubey shot at his steward, I. Saltzmann, and wounded him : yet not only did he remain unpunished but, by bribing the judges, he managed to get Sal tzmann put in prison. H. devoted a series of notices in The Bell in 1 858 and 1 859 to the exposure of these abuses, with the result that the case was reviewed and Saltzmann was set free. (A.S.)