Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 243
of honnete et modere twaddle. Belinsky was lying on a sofa in the corner and as I passed him he took me by the tail of my coat and said:
'Do you hear the rubbish that monster is talking? My tongue has long been itching, but my chest hurts a bit and there are a lot of people. Be a father to me, make a fool of him somehow, squash him, crush him with ridicule, you can do it better-come, cheer me up.'
I laughed and told Belinsky that he was setting me on like a bull-dog at a rat. I scarcely knew the gentleman and had hardly heard what he said.
Towards the end of the evening, the magister in the blue spectacles, after abusing Koltsov for having abandoned the national costume, suddenly began talking of Chaadayev's famous
'Letter,' and concluded his commonplace remarks, uttered in that didactic tone which of itself provokes derision, with the following words: 'Be that as it may, I consider his action contemptible and revolting: I have no respect for such a man.'
There was in the room only one man closely associated with Chaadayev, and that was I. I shall have a great deal to say about Chaadayev later on; I always liked and respected him and was liked by him ; I thought it was unseemly to let pass this savage remark. I asked him dryly whether he supposed that Chaadayev had had ulterior aims in writing his letter, or had been insincere.
'Certainly not,' answered the magister.
An unpleasant conversation followed ; I demonstrated to him that the epithets 'revolting and contemptible' were themselves revolting and contemptible when applied to a man who had boldly expressed his opinion and had suffered for it. He expatiated to me on the oneness of the people, the unity of the fatherland, the crime of destroying that unity, and of sacred things that must not be touched.
Suddenly Belinsky mowed down the speech I was making: he leapt up from his sofa, came up to me as white as a sheet, slapped me on the shoulder and said:
'Here you have them, they have spoken out-the inquisitors, the censors-keeping thought in leading-strings . . .' and so he went on and on.
He spoke with formidable inspiration, seasoning serious words with deadly sarcasms:
'We are strangely sensitive: men are flogged and we don't resent it, sent to Siberia and we don't resent it; but here Chaadayev, you see, has rubbed the people's honour the wrong
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
244
way: he mustn't dare to talk; to speak is insolence-a flunkey must never speak ! V\!hy is it that in more civilised countries, where one would expect susceptibilities, too, to be more developed than in Kostroma and Kaluga, words are not resented?'
'In civilised countries,' replied the magister, with inimitable self-complacency, 'there are prisons in which they confine the senseless creatures who insult what the whole people respect
. . . and a good thing too.'
Belinsky seemed to tower: he was terrifying, great at that moment. Folding his arms over his sick chest and looking straight at the magister, he ansv•;ered in a hollow voice:
'And in still more civilised countries there is a guillotine to deal with those who think that a good thing.'
Having said this, he sank exhausted in an easy-chair and spoke no more. At the word 'guillotine' our host turned pale, the guests
'>vere disquieted and a pause follov•;ed. The magister had been annihilated, but it is just at such moments that human vanity takes the bit between its teeth. I. Turgenev advises a man, when he has gone such lengths in argument that he begins to feel frightened himself, to move his tongue ten times round the inside of his mouth before uttering a word.
The magister, unaware of this homely advice, went on babbling feeble trivialities, addressing himself rather to the rest of the company than to Belinsky.
'In spite of your intolerance,' he said at last, 'I am certain that
�·ou will agree with one . . .'
'No,' answered Belinsky; 'whatever you said I shouldn't agree with anything! '
Everyone laughed and went in to supper. The magister picked up his hat and went away.
Suffering and privation soon completely undermined Belinsky's sickly constitution. His face, particularly the muscles about his lips, and thl' mournfully.· fixl'cl look in his eves, testified equally to the intense workings of his spirit and the rapid dissolution of his body.
I saw him for the last time in Paris in the autumn of 1 847; he was in a very bad way and afraid of speaking aloud ; it was only at moments that his former energy revived and its ebbing fires glowed brightly. It was at such a moment that he wrote his letterH to Gogol.
14 TIH• reference is to the open letter in which Belinsky expressed his passionate indignation at the Correspondence with Friends, by Gogo!.
( Tr.)
Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 245
The news of the revolution of February found him still alive; he died taking its glow for the flush of the rising dawn!
So this chapter ended in 1 854; since that time much has changed. I have been brought much closer to that time, closer because of my increasing remoteness from people here, and through the arrival of Ogarev15 and by two books: Annenkov's Biography of Stankevich and the first parts of Belinsky's complete works. From the windows suddenly thrown open the fresh air of the fields, the young breath of spring was wafted into the hospital wards. . . .
Stankevich's correspondence was unnoticed when i t came out.
It appeared at the wrong moment. At the end of 1 857 Russia had not yet come to herself after the funeral of Nicholas; she was expectant and hopeful; that is the worst mood for reminiscences
. . . but the book is not lost. It will remain in the paupers' burialground one of the rare memorials of its times from which any man who can read may learn what in those days was buried without a word. The pestilential streak, running from 1 825 to 1855, will soon be completely cordoned off; men's traces, swept away by the police, will have vanished, and future generations will often come to a standstill in bewildermt>nt before a waste land rammed smooth, st>eking the lost channels of thought which actually were nevpr interrupted. The current was apparently checked : Nicholas tied up the main artery-but the blood flowed along side-channels. It is just these capillaries which have left their trace in the works of Belinsky and the correspondence of Stankevich.
Thirty years ago the Russia of the future existed exclusively among a few boys, hardly more than children, so insignificant and unnoticed that then• was room for them between the soles of the great boots of the autocracy and the ground-and in them was the hPritage of the 1 4th of December, the heritage of a purely national Russia, as well as of the learning of all humanity. This new life sprouted like the grass that tries to grow on tht> lip of a still smouldering crater.