'But here he is, sir,' added the waiter, moving aside. What I saw first, however, was not a man but a tray of terrific size, on which were piles of all sorts of good things, a cake and cracknels, oranges and apples, eggs, almonds, raisins . . . and behind the tray appeared the grey head and blue eyes of the village headman, from my father's Vladimir estate.
'Gvrilo Semenych,' I cried, and rushed to embrace him. This was the first of our own people, the first figure out of my former life, whom I met after imprisonment and exile. I could not take my eyes off the intelligent old man, and felt as though I would never say all I had to say to him. He was the living proof of my nearness to Moscow, to my horne, to my friends ; only three days before he had seen them all, he brought me greetings from them all. . . . So it was not so far away!
The governor, who was a clever Greek called Kuruta, had a thorough knowledge of human nature, and had long become indifferent to good and evil. He grasped my situation at once and did not make the slightest attempt to be a nuisance to me.
Official forms were not even referred to; he commissioned me and a master at the high-school to edit the Vladimir Provincial News-that was my only duty.
The work was familiar to me; in Vyatka I had put the unofficial part of the Provincial News on its feet, and had published in it an article which almost got my successor into trouble. Describing the festival on the Great River, I said that the mutton sacrificed to St Nicholas of Khlynov used in old days to be distributed to the poor, but now was sold. The bishop was incensed and the govemor had difficulty in persuading him to let the matter drop.
These provincial newspapers were introduced in 1837. The very original idea of training the inhabitants of the land of silence and dumbness to express themselves in print occurred to Bludov, the Minister of Horne Affairs. This man, famous for being chosen to continue Kararnzin's History, though he never actually added a line to it, and for being the author of the report of the committee of investigation into the affair of the 14th of December, which it would have been better not to write at all, belonged to the group of doctrinaire statesmen who appeared on the scene at the end of the reign of Alexander. They were intel-
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ligent, cultured, honourable old 'Arzamas geese'2 who had risen and grown old in the service. They could vvritc Russian, were patriots, and were so zealously engaged in the history of their native land that they had no time to give serious attention to its present condition. They all cherished the never-to-be-forgotten memory of N. M. Karamzin, loved Zhukovsky, knew Krylov by heart, and used to go to Moscow to converse with I. I. Dmitriyev in his house in Sadovaya Street, where I too visited him as a student, armed with romantic prejudices, a personaL acquaintance with N. Polevoy, and a concealed disapproval of the fact that Dmitriyev, who was a poet, should be Minister of Justice.
Great things were hoped of them, and like most doctrinaires of all countries they did nothing. Perhaps they might have succeeded in leaving more permanent traces under Alexander, but Alexander died and they were left with nothing but their desire to do something worth doing.
At Monaco there is an inscription on the tombstone of one of the hereditary princes: 'Here lies the body of Florestan So-andso-he desired to do good to his subjects.'3 Our doctrinaires also desired to do good, not to their own subjects but to the subjects of Nicholas Pavlovich. but they reckoned without their host. I do not know ·who hindered that Florestan, but these were hindered by om Florestan. They were dra\\·n into complicity in all the measures detrimental to Russia and had to restrict themselves to useless innovations, mere alternations of name and form. Every
!wad of a department among us thinks it his highest duty to produce at intervals a project, an innovation, usually for the worse but sometimes simply neutral. They thought it necessary for instance to call the secrPtary in the governor's office by a name of purely Russian origin,4 while they left the secretary of the provincial office untranslated i nto Russian.5 I remember that the Minister of Justice brought forward a plan for essential changes in the uniforms of civil sPrvants. This scheme opened in a maj<>stic and so!C'mn style: 'Taking into special consideration tlw lack of unity. of standard, in the make and pattern of certain uniforms in the civil department and adopting as a fundamental principlP,' and so on.
� ThP rf'fl'I"PllCP is to til!' ':\rzamas.' a litPrarv cluh of which Karamzin.
BatvushkoY, l'Ya ro\'. this Bl wlo\' and som<' ;ltlwrs wf're mpm)wrs. Th<•
tow.n :\ rzamas is noted for its geese. ( Tr.)
:< II " t·oulu lr hirn rf,· srs su;rts.
I 'l'rr11 itd' dl'i' ( } i t. ·m;mag••r of a ffil i rs' ) . ( /I . )
:; 'S,·kr.•/(Jr. ' ( II.)
Prison and Exile
223
Possessed by the same mania for reform the Minister for Home Affairs replaced the rural assessors by police inspectors. The assessors lived in the towns and used to visit the villages. The police inspectors sometimes met together in the town but l ived permanently in the country. In this way all the peasants were put under the supervision of the police and this was done with full knowledge of the predatory, carnivorous, corrupt character of our police officials. Bludov introduced the policeman into the secrets of the peasants' industry and wealth, into their family life, into the affairs of the mir, and in this way laid his hand on the last refuge of peasant life. Fortunately our villages are very many and there are only two police inspectors in a district.
Almost at the same time the same Bludov had the notion of establishing provincial newspapers. In Russia, although the government has no regard for popular education, it has great literary pretensions, and while in England, for instance, there are no official organs, every one of our departments has i ts own magazine, and so have the universities and the academy. We have journals relating to mining, to dry-salting, French and German ones, naval and military ones. All these are published at the government expense; contracts for literary articles are made in the ministries exactly as contracts are for fuel and candles, but without competition ; there are plenty of statistics, invented figures and fantastic inferences from them. After monopolising everything else, the government has now taken the monopoly of talk and, imposing silence on everyone else, has begun chattering unceasingly. Continuing thi s system, Bludov c�mmanded every provincial government to publish its own newspaper, which was to have an unofficial part for articles on historical, litt>rary, and other subjects.
No sooner said than done, and the officials in fifty provinces were tearing tht>ir hair ovPr this unofficial part. Priests with a seminary education, doctors of medicine, high-school teachers, all who could be suspected of a tinge of culture and ability to spell correctly were requisitioned. After much reflection and reading over of the Library of Good Reading and the Notes of the Fatherland, with tremors and false starts they at last wrote the articles.