“He was cunning, he was,” he said. “When he was in the fortress, we were ordered, two of us—we were relieved every two hours—not to let him sleep. So we kept him sitting on a small stool, and as soon as he began to doze, we shook him to keep him awake. … What will you?—we were ordered to do so! … Well, see how cunning he was: he would sit with crossed legs, swinging one of his legs to make us believe that he was awake, and himself, in the meantime, would get a nap, continuing to swing his leg. But we soon made it out and told those who relieved us, so that he was shaken and waked up every few minutes, whether he swung his leg or not.” “And how long did that last?” my friend asked. “Oh, many days—more than one week.”
The naive character of this description is in itself a proof of veracity: it could not have been invented; and that Karakozov was tortured to this degree may be taken for granted.
When Karakozov was hanged, one of my comrades from the corps of pages was present at the execution with his regiment of cuirassiers. “When he was taken out of the fortress,” my comrade told me, “sitting on the high platform of the cart which was jolting on the rough glacis of the fortress, my first impression was that they were bringing out an india-rubber doll to be hanged; that Karakozov was already dead. Imagine that the head, the hands, the whole body were absolutely loose, as if there were no bones in the body, or as if the bones had all been broken. It was a terrible thing to see, and to think what it meant. However, when two soldiers took him down from the cart, I saw that he moved his legs and made strenuous endeavors to walk by himself and to ascend the steps of the scaffold. So it was not a doll, nor could he have been in a swoon. All the officers were very much puzzled at the circumstance and could not explain it.” When, however, I suggested to my comrade that perhaps Karakozov had been tortured, the color came into his face and he replied, “So we all thought.”
Absence of sleep for weeks would alone be sufficient to explain the state in which that morally very strong man was at the time of the execution. I may add that I am absolutely certain that—at least in one case—drugs were administered to a prisoner in the fortress, namely, Adrián Saburov, in 1879. Did Muravyov limit the torture to this only? Was he prevented from going any further, or not? I do not know. But this much I know: that I often heard from high officials at St. Petersburg that torture had been resorted to in this case.
Muravyov had promised to root out all radical elements in St. Petersburg, and all those who had had in any degree a radical past now lived under the fear of falling into the despot’s clutches. Above all, they kept aloof from the younger people, from fear of being involved with them in some perilous political associations. In this way a chasm was opened not only between the “fathers” and the “sons,” as Turgenev described it in his novel—not only between the two generations, but also between all men who had passed the age of thirty and those who were in their early twenties. Russian youth stood consequently in the position not only of having to fight in their fathers the defenders of serfdom, but of being left entirely to themselves by their elder brothers, who were unwilling to join them in their leanings toward Socialism, and were afraid to give them support even in their struggle for more political freedom. Was there ever before in history, I ask myself, a youthful band engaging in a fight against so formidable a foe, so deserted by fathers and even by elder brothers, although those young men had merely taken to heart, and had tried to realize in life, the intellectual inheritance of these same fathers and brothers? Was there ever a struggle undertaken in more tragical conditions than these?
VI
The only bright point which I saw in the life of St. Petersburg was the movement which was going on amongst the youth of both sexes. Various currents joined to produce the mighty agitation which soon took an underground and revolutionary character, and engrossed the attention of Russia for the next fifteen years. I shall speak of it in a subsequent chapter; but I must mention in this place the movement which was carried on, quite openly, by our women for obtaining access to higher education. St. Petersburg was at that time its main centre.
Every afternoon the young wife of my brother, on her return from the women’s pedagogical courses which she followed, had something new to tell us about the animation which prevailed there. Schemes were laid for opening a medical academy and universities for women; debates upon schools or upon different methods of education were organized in connection with the courses, and hundreds of women took a passionate interest in these questions, discussing them over and over again in private. Societies of translators, publishers, printers, and bookbinders were started in order that work might be provided for the poorest members of the sisterhood who flocked to St. Petersburg, ready to do any sort of work, only to live in the hope that they, too, would some day have their share of higher education. A vigorous, exuberant life reigned in those feminine centres, in striking contrast to what I met elsewhere.
Since the government had shown its determined intention not to admit women to the existing
