Such was the official St. Petersburg. Such was the influence it exercised upon Russia.
V
When we were leaving Siberia, we often talked, my brother and I, of the intellectual life which we should find at St. Petersburg, and of the interesting acquaintances we should make in the literary circles. We made such acquaintances, indeed, both among the radicals and among the moderate Slavophiles; but I must confess that they were rather disappointing. We found plenty of excellent men—Russia is full of excellent men—but they did not quite correspond to our ideal of political writers. The best writers—Chernyshévsky, Mikhailov, Lavrov—were in exile, or were kept in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, like Pisarev. Others, taking a gloomy view of the situation, had changed their ideas, and were now leaning toward a sort of paternal absolutism; while the greater number, though holding still to their beliefs, had become so cautious in expressing them that their prudence was almost equal to desertion.
At the height of the reform period nearly everyone in the advanced literary circles had had some relations either with Hérzen or with Turgenev and his friends, or with the Great Russian or the Land and Freedom secret societies which had had at that period an ephemeral existence. Now, these same men were only the more anxious to bury their former sympathies as deep as possible, so as to appear above political suspicion.
One or two of the liberal reviews which were tolerated at that time, owing chiefly to the superior diplomatic talents of their editors, contained excellent material, showing the ever growing misery and the desperate conditions of the great mass of the peasants, and making clear enough the obstacles that were put in the way of every progressive worker. The amount of such facts was enough to drive one to despair. But no one dared to suggest any remedy, or to hint at any field of action, at any outcome from a position which was represented as hopeless. Some writers still cherished the hope that Alexander II would once more assume the character of reformer; but with the majority the fear of seeing their reviews suppressed, and both editors and contributors marched “to some more or less remote part of the empire,” dominated all other feelings. Fear and hope equally paralyzed them.
The more radical they had been ten years before, the greater were their fears. My brother and I were very well received in one or two literary circles, and we went occasionally to their friendly gatherings; but the moment the conversation began to lose its frivolous character, or my brother, who had a great talent for raising serious questions, directed it toward home affairs, or toward the state of France, where Napoleon III was hastening to his fall in 1870, some sort of interruption was sure to occur. “What do you think, gentlemen, of the latest performance of La Belle Hélène?” or “What is your opinion of that cured fish?” was loudly asked by one of the elder guests—and the conversation was brought to an end.
Outside the literary circles, things were even worse. In the sixties, Russia, and especially St. Petersburg, was full of men of advanced opinions, who seemed ready at that time to make any sacrifices for their ideas. “What has become of them?” I asked myself. I looked up some of them; but, “Prudence, young man!” was all they had to say. “Iron is stronger than straw,” or “One cannot break a stone wall with his forehead,” and similar proverbs, unfortunately too numerous in the Russian language, constituted now their code of practical philosophy. “We have done something in our life: ask no more from us;” or “Have patience: this sort of thing will not last,” they told us, while we, the youth, were ready to resume the struggle, to act, to risk, to sacrifice everything, if necessary, and only asked them to give us advice, some guidance, and some intellectual support.
Turgenev has depicted in Smoke some of the ex-reformers from the upper layers of society, and his picture is disheartening. But it is especially in the heartrending novels and sketches of Madame Kohanóvsky, who wrote under the pseudonym of “V. Krestóvskiy” (she must not be confounded with another novel-writer, Vsévolod Krestóvskiy), that one can follow the many aspects which the degradation of the “liberals of the sixties” took at that time. “The joy of living”—perhaps the joy of having survived—became their goddess, as soon as the nameless crowd which ten years before made the force of the reform movement refused to hear any more of “all that sentimentalism.” They hastened to enjoy the riches which poured into the hands of “practical” men.
Many new ways to fortune had been opened since serfdom had been abolished, and the crowd rushed with eagerness into these channels. Railways were feverishly built in Russia; to the lately opened private banks the landlords went in numbers to mortgage their estates; the newly established private notaries and lawyers at the courts were in possession of large incomes; the shareholders’ companies multiplied with an appalling rapidity and the promoters flourished. A class of men who formerly would have lived in the country on the modest income of a small estate cultivated by a hundred serfs, or on the still more modest salary of a functionary in a law court, now made
