The Gift

the Ruadze Hall a speech of iron and fire, that very speech which the hero of his novel was about to give, very likely, when upon returning to freedom he took a droshky and cried to the driver: “The Galleries!”

Events went very fast that windy spring. Fires broke out here and there. And suddenly—against this orange- and-black background—a vision. Running and holding on to his hat, Dostoevski sweeps by: where to?

Whit Monday (May 28, 1862), a strong wind is blowing; a conflagration has begun on the Ligovka and then the desperadoes set fire to the Apraxin Market. Dostoevski is running, firemen are galloping “and in pharmacy windows, in gaudy glass globes, upside down are in passing reflected” (as seen by Nekrasov). And over there, thick smoke billows over the Fontanka canal in the direction of Chernyshyov Street, where presently a new, black column arises…. Meanwhile Dostoevski has arrived. He has arrived at the heart of the blackness, at Chernyshevski’s place, and starts to beg him hysterically to put a stop to all this. Two aspects are interesting here: the belief in Nikolay Gavrilovich’s satanic powers, and the rumors that the arson was being carried out according to the same plan which the Petrashevskians had drawn up as early as 1849.

Secret agents, in tones also not void of mystic horror, reported that during the night at the height of the disaster “laughter was heard coming from Chernyshevski’s window.” The police endowed him with a devilish resourcefulness and smelled a trick in his every move. Nikolay Gavrilovich’s family went to spend the summer at Pavlovsk, a few miles from St. Petersburg, and there, a few days after the fires, on June 10th to be precise (dusk, mosquitoes, music), a certain Lyubetski, adjutant major of the Uhlan regiment of the Guards, a dashing fellow, with a name like a kiss, noticed as he was leaving the “vauxhall” two ladies capering about like mad things, and in the simpleness of his heart taking them for young Camelias (loose women), he “made an attempt to grasp them both by the waist.” The four students who were with them surrounded him and threatened him with retribution, announcing that one of the ladies was the wife of the writer Chernyshevski and the other her sister. What, in the opinion of the police, is the husband’s design? He tries to get the case to be submitted to the court of the officers’ association—not out of considerations of honor but merely for the clandestine purpose of bringing military men and university students together. On July 5th he had to visit the Secret Police Department in connection with his complaint. Potapov, its chief, refused his petition, saying that according to his information the Uhlan was prepared to apologize. Chernyshevski curtly renounced any claims and changing the subject asked: “Tell me, the other day I sent my family off to Saratov and am preparing myself to go there for a rest [The Contemporary had already been closed]; but if I should need to take my wife abroad, to a spa—you see she suffers from nervous pains—could I leave without hindrance?” “Of course you could,” replied Potapov good-naturedly; and two days later the arrest took place.

All this was preceded by the following event: a “universal exhibition” has just opened in London (the nineteenth century was unusually fond of exhibiting its wealth—a plentiful and tasteless dowry, which the present one has squandered); gathered there were tourists and merchants, correspondents and spies; one day at an enormous banquet Herzen, in a fit of carelessness, in view of everyone handed a certain Vetoshnikov, who was preparing to leave for Russia, a letter to the radical journalist Serno-Solovievich, who was asked to direct Chernyshevski’s attention to the announcement made in The Bell concerning its willingness to publish The Contemporary abroad. The nimble foot of the messenger had hardly had time to touch Russia’s sands when he was seized.

Chernyshevski was then living near the church of St. Vladimir (later his Astrakhan addresses were also defined by their proximity to this or that holy building) in a house where, before him, had lived Muravyov (later a cabinet minister), whom he was to depict with such helpless loathing in The Prologue. On July 7th two friends had come to see him: Doctor Bokov (who subsequently used to send medical advice to the exile) and Antonovich (a member of “Land and Freedom,” who in spite of his close friendship with Chernyshevski did not suspect that the latter was connected with that society). They were sitting in the drawing room, where they were presently joined by Colonel Rakeev, a thickset black-uniformed police officer with an unpleasant, wolfish profile. He sat down with the air of a guest; actually, he had come to arrest Chernyshevski. Again historical patterns come into that odd contact “which thrills the gamester in a historian” (Strannolyubski): this was the same Rakeev who as an embodiment of the government’s contemptible scurry had whisked Pushkin’s coffin out of the capital into posthumous exile. Having chatted a few minutes for the sake of decorum, Rakeev informed Chernyshevski with a polite smile (which caused Doctor Bokov to “turn chill inside”) that he would like to have a word with him alone. “Then let’s go to my study,” replied the latter and headed for it so precipitately that Rakeev, though not exactly disconcerted—he was too experienced for that—did not consider it possible in his role of guest to follow him with equal speed. But Chernyshevski immediately returned, his Adam’s apple convulsively bobbing as he washed something down with cold tea (swallowed papers according to Antonovich’s sinister guess), and looking over his spectacles, he let his guest enter first. His friends, having nothing better to do (waiting in the drawing room where most of the furniture was shrouded in dust-covers seemed uncommonly bleak), went out for a stroll (“It can’t be… I can’t believe it,” Bokov kept repeating), and when they returned to the house, the fourth in Bolshoy Moskovski street, they were alarmed to see that there now stood at the door—in a kind of meek and thus all the more loathsome expectation—a prison carriage. First Bokov went in to say good-by to Chernyshevski, then—Antonovich. Nikolay Gavrilovich was sitting at his desk, playing with a pair of scissors, while the colonel sat next to it, one leg folded over the other; they were chatting—still for the sake of decorum—about the advantages of Pavlovsk over other holiday areas. “And then the company there is so excellent,” the colonel was saying with a slight cough.

“What, you too are going without waiting for me?” said Chernyshevski, turning to his apostle. “Unfortunately I have to …” replied Antonovich, in deep confusion. “Well, good-by then,” said Nikolay Gavrilovich in a joking tone of voice, and lifting his hand high, he lowered it with a swoop into Antonovich’s: a type of comradely farewell which subsequently became very widespread among Russian revolutionaries.

“And so,” exclaims Strannolyubski at the beginning of the greatest chapter in his incomparable monograph, “Chernyshevski has been seized!” That night the news of the arrest flies around the whole city. Many a breast is swelled with resonant indignation. Many a hand is clenched…. But there were not a few gloating sneers: Aha, they’ve put the ruffian away, removed the “impudent, yowling yokel,” as it was expressed by the (slightly cracked, anyway) lady novelist Kokhanovski. Next, Strannolyubski gives a striking description of the complex work which the authorities had to carry out in order to create the evidence “which should have been there but was not,” for a very curious situation had arisen: judicially speaking there was nothing to fasten on to and they had to build a scaffolding for the law to climb up and work. So they worked with “dummy quantities,” calculating to remove carefully all the dummies only when the emptiness enclosed by the law was filled up by something actual. The case built up against Chernyshevski was a phantom; but it was the phantom of genuine guilt; and then—from outside, artificially, by a roundabout route—they managed to find a certain solution to the problem which almost coincided with the true one.

We have three points: C, K, P. A cathetus is drawn, CK. To offset Chernyshevski, the authorities picked out a retired Uhlan cornet, Vladislav Dmitrievich Kostomarov, who the previous August in Moscow had been reduced to the ranks for printing seditious publications—a man with a touch of madness and a pinch of Pechorinism about him, and also a verse-maker: he left a scolopendrine trace in literature as the translator of foreign poets. Another cathetus is drawn, KP. The critic Pisarev in the periodical The Russian Word writes about these translations, scolding the author for “The magnificent tiara’s Coruscation like a pharos” [from Hugo], praising his “simple and heartfelt” rendering of some lines by Burns (which came out as “And first of all, and first of all / Let all men honest be / Let’s pray that man be to each man / A brother first of all… etc.), and in connection with Kostomarov’s report to his readers that Heine died an unrepentant sinner, the critic roguishly advises the “grim denouncer” to “take a good look at his own public activities.” Kostomarov’s derangement was evidenced in his florid graphomania, in the senseless somnambulistic (even though made-to-order) composition of counterfeit letters studded with French phrases; and finally in his macabre playfulness: he signed his reports to Putilin (a detective): Feofan Otchenashenko (Theophanus Ourfatherson) or Ventseslav Lyutyy (Wenceslaus the Fiend). And, indeed, he was fiendish in his taciturnity, funest and false, boastful and cringing. Endowed with curious abilities, he could write in a feminine hand—explaining this himself by the fact that he was “visited at the full moon by the spirit of Queen Tamara.” The plurality of hands he could imitate in addition to the circumstance (yet one more of destiny’s jokes) that his normal handwriting recalled that of Chernyshevski considerably heightened the value of this hypnotic betrayer. For indirect evidence that the appeal proclamation “To the Serfs of Landowners” had been written by Chernyshevski, Kostomarov was given, first, the task of fabricating a note, allegedly from Chernyshevski, containing a request to alter one word in the appeal; and,