They pursued their aims in the higher spheres; they kept strictly aloof from any political agitation; but they never committed the fault of forgetting that their true force was in the masses of younger women, of whom a great number finally joined the radical or revolutionary circles. These leaders were correctness itself—I considered them too correct; but they did not break with those younger students who went about as typical nihilists, with short-cropped hair, disdaining crinoline, and betraying their democratic spirit in all their behavior. The leaders did not mix with them, and occasionally there was friction, but they never repudiated them—a great thing, I believe, in those times of madly raging prosecutions.
They seemed to say to the younger and more democratic people: “We shall wear our velvet dresses and chignons, because we have to deal with fools who see in a velvet dress and a chignon the tokens of ‘political reliability;’ but you, girls, remain free in your tastes and inclinations.” When the women who studied at Zürich were ordered by the Russian government to return, these correct ladies did not turn against the rebels. They simply said to the government: “You don’t like it? Well, then, open women’s universities at home; otherwise our girls will go abroad in still greater numbers, and of course will enter into relations with the political refugees.” When they were reproached with breeding revolutionists, and were menaced with the closing of their academy and universities, they retorted, “Yes, many students become revolutionists; but is that a reason for closing all universities?” How few political leaders have the moral courage not to turn against the more advanced wing of their own party!
The real secret of their wise and fully successful attitude was that none of the women who were the soul of that movement were mere “feminists,” desirous to get their share of the privileged positions in society and the state. Far from that. The sympathies of most of them went with the masses. I remember the lively part which Miss Stásova, the veteran leader of the agitation, took in the Sunday schools in 1861, the friendships she and her friends made among the factory girls, the interest they manifested in the hard life of these girls outside the school, the fights they fought against their greedy employers. I recall the keen interest which the women showed, at their pedagogical courses, in the village schools, and in the work of those few who, like Baron Korff, were permitted for some time to do something in that direction, and the social spirit which permeated those courses. The rights they strove for—both the leaders and the great bulk of the women—were not only the individual right to higher instruction, but much more, far more, the right to be useful workers among the people, the masses. This is why they succeeded to such an extent.
VII
For the last few years the health of my father had been going from bad to worse, and when my brother Alexander and I came to see him, in the spring of 1871, we were told by the doctors that with the first frosts of autumn he would be gone. He had continued to live in the old style, in the Stáraya Konúshennaya, but around him everything in this aristocratic quarter had changed. The rich serf-owners, who once were so prominent there, had gone. After having spent in a reckless way the redemption money which they had received at the emancipation of the serfs, and after having mortgaged and remortgaged their estates in the new land banks which preyed upon their helplessness, they had withdrawn at last to the country or to provincial towns, there to sink into oblivion. Their houses had been taken by “the intruders,”—rich merchants, railway builders, and the like—while in nearly every one of the old families which remained in the Old Equerries’ Quarter a young life struggled to assert its rights upon the ruins of the old one. A couple of retired generals, who cursed the new ways, and relieved their griefs by predicting for Russia a certain and speedy ruin under the new order, or some relative occasionally dropping in, were all the company my father had now. Out of our many relatives, numbering nearly a score of families at Moscow alone in my childhood, two families only had remained in the capital, and these had joined the current of the new life, the mothers discussing with their girls and boys such matters as schools for the people and women’s universities. My father looked upon them with contempt. My stepmother and my younger sister, Pauline, who had not changed, did their best to comfort him; but they themselves felt strange in their unwonted surroundings.
My father had always been unkind and most unjust toward my brother Alexander, but Alexander was utterly incapable of holding a grudge against anyone. When he entered our father’s sickroom, with the deep, kind look of large blue eyes and with a smile revealing his infinite kindness, and when he immediately found out what could be done to render the sufferer more comfortable in his sick-chair, and did it as naturally as if he had left the sickroom only an hour before, my father was simply bewildered; he stared at him without being able to understand. Our visit brought life into the dull, gloomy house; the nursing became brighter; my stepmother, Pauline, the servants themselves, grew more animated, and my father felt the change.
One thing worried him, however. He had expected to see us come as repentant sons, imploring his support. But when he tried to direct conversation into that channel, we stopped him with such a cheerful
