for long.
This is evident from the first question which involuntarily troubled him immediately after he left the university.
His pressing business was finished, he was left to himself, he was no longer led by others, but he did not know what he should do. There was nothing to go on with, there was no one and nothing around him that a ppealed to a lively man. A youth, when his mind had cleared and he had had time to look about him after school, found himself in the Russia of those days in the position of a traveller waking up in the steppe; one might go where one would-there were traces, there were bones of those who had perished, there WE're wild beasts and the empty desert on all sides with its dumb threat of danger, in which it is easy to perish and impossible to struggle. The one thing which could be pursued honourably and heartily was study.
And so Stankevich persevered in the pursuit of learning. He imagined that it was his vocation to be an historian, and began studying Herodotus; it could be foreseen that nothing would come of that pursuit.
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He would have liked to be in Petersburg, where there was such ebullition of activity of a sort and to which he was a ttracted by the theatre and- by nearness to Europe ; he would have liked to be an honorary superint<.'ndPnt of th!' school at Ostrogozhsk. He dct!'rmined to be of usc in that 'modest career'which \vas to be even less successful than Herodotus. He was in reality drawn to Moscow, to Germany, to his own university circle, to his own interests. He could not exist without intimate friends (another proof that there were at hand no interests very near to his heart) . The rwed for sympathy was so strong in Stankevich tha t he sometimes invented intellectual sympathy and talents, and saw and admired in people qualities in which they were completely lacking.I7
Rut-and in this lay his personal power-he did not often need to have recourse to such fictions; at every step he met wonderful people-he had the faculty of meeting them-and everyone to whom he opened his heart remained his passionate friend for life ; and to every such friend Stankevich's influence
\Vas !'ith<.'r an immf·nse bPnefit or an alleviation of his burden.
In Voronezh Stankevich used som!'times to go to the one local library for books. There hP usPd to meet a poor young man of humble station, modest and melancholy. It turned out that he
\Vas the son of a cattle-dealer who had business with Stankevich's fath!'r over supplies. Stankevich befriNidcd the young m<:m; the cattle-dealer's son was a great reader and fond of talking of books. Stankevich got to know him well. Shyly and timidly the youth confessed that he had himself tried his hand at writing verses and, blushing, ventured to show them. Stankevich was amazed at the immense talent not conscious nor confident of itself. From that minute he dicl not let him go until all Russia was reading Koltsov's songs with enthusiasm. It is quite likely that the poor cattle-dealer, oppressed by his relations. unwarmed by sympathy or r!'cognition, might have wasted his songs on the empty steppes beyond the Volga over which he drove his herds, and Russia would never have heard those wonderful, truly native songs, if Stankevich had not crossed his path.
When Bakunin finished his studies at the school of artillery, he received a commission as a n officPr in the Guards. It is said that his father was angry with him and himself asked that he should be transfcrrecl into the army of the line. Cast away in some 17 Klyushnikov vividly expressed this in the following image: 'Stankevich is a silver rouhle that envies the size of a copper piece.'-Annenkov, Biography of Stankevich, p. 1 33.
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God-forsaken village in White Russia with his guns, he grew farouche and unsociable, left off performing his duties, and would lie for whole days together on his bed wrapped in a sheepskin coat. His commanding officer was sorry for him; he had, however, no alternative but to remind him that he must either carry out his duties or go on the retired list. Bakunin had not suspected that he had a right to take the latter course and at once asked to be relieved of his commission. On receiving his discharge he came to Moscow, and from that date (about 1 836) for him life began in earnest. He had studied nothing before, had read nothing, and hardly knew any German. 'With great dialectical abilities, with a gift for obstinate, persistent thinking, he had strayed without map or compass into a world of fantastic projects and efforts at self-education. Stankevich perceived his talents and set him down to philosophy. Bakunin learnt German from Kant and Fichte and then set to work upon Hegel, whose method and logic he mastered to perfection-and to whom did he not preach it afterwards? To us and to Belinsky, to ladies and to Proudhon.
But Belinsky drew as much from the same source; Stankevich's views on art, on poetry and its relation to life, grew in Belinsky's articles into that powerful modern critical method, that new outlook upon the world and upon life which impressed all thinking Russia and made all the pedants and doctrinaires recoil from Belinsky with horror. It was Stankevich's lot to initiate Belinsky into the mysteries; but the passionate, merciless, fiercely intolerant talent that carried Belinsky beyond all bounds wounded the aesthetically harmonious temperament of Stankevich.
Petersbltrfj· arzd
tile Second B{tnisluneJzt
THoUGH W E WERE so comfortable i n Moscow, we had to move to Petersburg. My father insisted upon it. Count Strogonov, the Minister for Home Affairs, commanded me to enter his secretariat, and we set off there at the end of the summer of 1 840.
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was not long in the service. I got out of my duties in every possible \vay, and so I have not a great deal to tell about the service. The secretariat of the Ministry of Home Affairs had the same relationship to the secretariat of the Governor of Vyatka as boots that have been cleaned have to those who have not; the leather is the same, the sole is the same, but the one �ort show mud, and the others polish. I did not see clerks drunk in Petersburg. I did not see twenty kopecks taken for looking up a reference, but yet I someho\v fancied that under those close-fitting dress-coats and carefully combed heads there dwelt such vile, black, petty, envious, cowardly little souls tha t the head-clerk of my table at Vyatka seemed to me more of a man than any of them. As I looked at my new colleagues I recalled how, on one occasion, after having a drop too much at supper at the district surveyor's, he played a dance tune on the guitar, and at last could not rt>sist leaping up with his instrument and beginning to join in the dance ; but these Petersburg men are never carried away by anything: their blood never boils, and wine does not turn their heads. In some dancing class, in company with young Ge1·man ladies, they can walk through a French quadrille, pose as disillusioned_ rPpeot linPs from Timofeyev1 or Kukolnik2 • • .