I have always liked people capable of working, and doing their work properly. So Serghéi’s translation and his capacity of working rapidly had already influenced me in his favor. But when I came to know more of him, I felt real love for his honest, frank nature, for his youthful energy and good sense, for his superior intelligence, simplicity, and truthfulness, and for his courage and tenacity. He had read and thought a great deal, and upon the revolutionary character of the struggle which he had undertaken, it appeared we had similar views. He was ten years younger than I was, and perhaps did not quite realize what a hard contest the coming revolution would be. He told us later on, with much humor, how he once worked among the peasants in the country. “One day,” he said, “I was walking along the road with a comrade, when we were overtaken by a peasant in a sleigh. I began to tell the peasant that he must not pay taxes, that the functionaries plunder the people, and I tried to convince him by quotations from the Bible that they must revolt. The peasant whipped up his horse, but we followed rapidly; he made his horse trot, and we began to trot behind him; all the time I continued to talk to him about taxes and revolt. Finally he made his horse gallop; but the animal was not worth much—an underfed peasant pony—so my comrade and I did not fall behind, but kept up our propaganda till we were quite out of breath.”
For some time Serghéi stayed in Kazán, and I had to correspond with him. He always hated writing letters in cipher, so I proposed a means of correspondence which had often been used before in conspiracies. You write an ordinary letter about all sorts of things, but in this letter it is only certain words—let us say every fifth word—which has a sense. You write, for instance: “Excuse my hurried letter. Come tonight to see me; tomorrow I shall go away to my sister. My brother Nicholas is worse; it was late to perform an operation.” Reading each fifth word, you find, “Come tomorrow to Nicholas, late.” We had to write letters of six or seven pages to transmit one page of information, and we had to cultivate our imagination in order to fill the letters with all sorts of things by way of introducing the words that were required. Serghéi, from whom it was impossible to obtain a cipher letter, took to this kind of correspondence, and used to send me letters containing stories with thrilling incidents and dramatic endings. He said to me afterward that this correspondence helped to develop his literary talent. When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.
In January or February, 1874, I was at Moscow, in one of the houses in which I had spent my childhood. Early in the morning I was told that a peasant desired to see me. I went out and found it was Serghéi, who had just escaped from Tver. He was strongly built, and he and another ex-officer, Rogachov, endowed with equal physical force, went traveling about the country as lumber sawyers. The work was very hard, especially for inexperienced hands, but both of them liked it; and no one would have thought to look for disguised officers in these two strong sawyers. They wandered in this capacity for about a fortnight without arousing suspicion, and made revolutionary propaganda right and left without fear. Sometimes Serghéi, who knew the New Testament almost by heart, spoke to the peasants as a religious preacher, proving to them by quotations from the Bible that they ought to start a revolution. Sometimes he formed his arguments of quotations from the economists. The peasants listened to the two men as to real apostles, took them from one house to another, and refused to be paid for food. In a fortnight they had produced quite a stir in a number of villages. Their fame was spreading far and wide. The peasants, young and old, began to whisper to one another in the barns about the “delegates;” they began to speak out more loudly than they usually did that the land would soon be taken from the landlords, who would receive pensions from the Tsar. The younger people became more aggressive toward the police officers, saying: “Wait a little; our turn will soon come; you Herods will not rule long now.” But the fame of the sawyers reached the ears of one of the police authorities, and they were arrested. An order was given to take them to the next police official, ten miles away.
They were taken under the guard of several peasants, and on their way had to pass through a village which was holding its festival. “Prisoners? All right! Come on here, my uncle,” said the peasants, who were all drinking in honor of the occasion. They were kept nearly the whole day in that village, the peasants taking them from one house to another, and treating them to homemade beer. The guards did not have to be asked twice. They drank, and insisted that the prisoners should drink, too. “Happily,” Serghéi said, “they passed round the beer in such large wooden bowls that I could put my mouth to the rim of the bowl as if I were drinking, but no one could see how much beer I had imbibed.” The guards were all drunk toward night, and
