Then came the governor, who tried to persuade me that I must not sing, as it would have to be reported to the commander of the fortress, and so on.
“But my throat will become blocked and my lungs become useless if I do not speak and cannot sing,” I tried to argue.
“Better try to sing in a lower tone, more or less to yourself,” said the old governor in a supplicatory manner.
But all this was useless. A few days later I had lost all desire to sing. I tried to do it on principle, but it was of no avail. “The main thing,” I said to myself, “is to preserve my physical vigor. I will not fall ill. Let me imagine myself compelled to spend a couple of years in a hut in the far north, during an arctic expedition. I will take plenty of exercise, practice gymnastics, and not let myself be broken down by my surroundings. Ten steps from one corner to the other is already something. If I repeat them one hundred and fifty times, I shall have walked one verst” (two thirds of a mile). I determined to walk every day seven versts—about five miles: two versts in the morning, two before dinner, two after dinner, and one before going to sleep. “If I put on the table ten cigarettes, and move one of them each time that I pass the table, I shall easily count the three hundred times that I must walk up and down. I must walk rapidly, but turn slowly in the corner to avoid becoming giddy, and turn each time a different way. Then, twice a day I shall practice gymnastics with my heavy stool.” I lifted it by one leg, holding it at arm’s length. I turned it like a wheel, and soon learned to throw it from one hand to the other, over my head, behind my back, and across my legs.
A few hours after I had been brought into the prison the governor came to offer me some books, and among them was an old acquaintance and friend of mine, the first volume of George Lewes’s Physiology, in a Russian translation; but the second volume, which I especially wanted to read again, was missing. I asked, of course, to have paper, pen, and ink, but was absolutely refused. Pen and ink are never allowed in the fortress, unless special permission is obtained from the Emperor himself. I suffered very much from this forced inactivity, and began to compose in my imagination a series of novels for popular reading, taken from Russian history—something like Eugène Sue’s Mystères du Peuple. I made up the plot, the descriptions, the dialogues, and tried to commit the whole to memory from the beginning to the end. One can easily imagine how exhausting such a work would have been if I had had to continue it for more than two or three months.
But my brother Alexander obtained pen and ink for me. One day I was asked to enter a four-wheeled cab, in company with the same speechless Georgian gendarme officer of whom I have spoken before. I was taken to the Third Section, where I was allowed an interview with my brother, in the presence of two gendarme officers.
Alexander was at Zürich when I was arrested. From early youth he had longed to go abroad, where men think as they like, read what they like, and openly express their thoughts. Russian life was hateful to him. Veracity—absolute veracity—and the most openhearted frankness were the dominating features of his character. He could not bear deceit or even conceit in any form. The absence of free speech in Russia, the Russian readiness to submit to oppression, the veiled words to which our writers resort, were utterly repulsive to his frank and open nature. Soon after my return from Western Europe he removed to Switzerland, and decided to settle there. After he had lost his two children—one from cholera in a few hours, and the other from consumption—St. Petersburg became doubly repugnant to him.
My brother did not take part in our work of agitation. He did not believe in the possibility of a popular uprising, and he conceived a revolution only as the action of a representative body, like the National Assembly of France in 1789. As for the socialist agitation, he knew it only by means of public meetings and public speeches—not as the secret, minute work of personal propaganda which we were carrying on. In England he would have sided with John Bright or with the Chartists. If he had been in Paris during the uprising of June, 1848, he would surely have fought with the last handful of workers behind the last barricade; but in the preparatory period he would have followed Louis Blanc or Ledru Rollin.
In Switzerland he settled at Zürich, and his sympathies went with the moderate wing of the International. Socialist on principle, he carried out his principles in his most frugal and laborious mode of living, toiling on passionately at his great scientific work—the main purpose of his life—a work which was to be a nineteenth-century counterpart to the famous Tableau de la Nature of the Encyclopedists. He soon became a close personal friend of the old refugee Colonel P. L. Lavrov, with whom he had very much in common in his Kantian philosophical views.
When he learned about my arrest, Alexander immediately left everything—the work of his life, the life itself of freedom which was as necessary for him as free air is necessary for a bird—and returned to St. Petersburg, which he disliked, only to help me through my imprisonment.
We were both very much affected at this interview. My brother was extremely excited. He hated the very sight of the blue uniforms of the gendarmes—those executioners of all independent thought in Russia—and expressed his feeling frankly in their presence. As for me, the sight of him at St. Petersburg filled me with
