Meetings of our circle were frequent, and I never missed them. We used to meet then in a suburban part of St. Petersburg, in a small house of which Sophie Peróvskaya, under the assumed name and the fabricated passport of an artisan’s wife, was the supposed tenant. She was born of a very aristocratic family, and her father had been for some time the military governor of St. Petersburg; but, with the approval of her mother, who adored her, she had left her home to join a high school, and with the three sisters Kornilov—daughters of a rich manufacturer—she had founded that little circle of self-education which later on became our circle. Now, in the capacity of an artisan’s wife, in her cotton dress and men’s boots, her head covered with a cotton kerchief, as she carried on her shoulders her two pails of water from the Nevá, no one would have recognized in her the girl who a few years before shone in one of the most fashionable drawing-rooms of the capital. She was a general favorite, and every one of us, on entering the house, had a specially friendly smile for her—even when she, making a point of honor of keeping the house relatively clean, quarreled with us about the dirt which we, dressed in peasant top-boots and sheepskins, brought in, after walking the muddy streets of the suburbs. She tried then to give to her girlish, innocent, and very intelligent little face the most severe expression possible to it. In her moral conceptions she was a “rigorist,” but not in the least of the sermon-preaching type. When she was dissatisfied with someone’s conduct, she would cast a severe glance at him from beneath her brows; but in that glance one saw her open-minded, generous nature, which understood all that is human. On one point only she was inexorable. “A women’s man,” she once said, speaking of someone, and the expression and the manner in which she said it, without interrupting her work, are engraved forever in my memory.
Peróvskaya was a “popularist” to the very bottom of her heart, and at the same time a revolutionist, a fighter of the truest steel. She had no need to embellish the workers and the peasants with imaginary virtues, in order to love them and to work for them. She took them as they were, and said to me once: “We have begun a great thing. Two generations, perhaps, will succumb in the task, and yet it must be done.” None of the women of our circle would have given way before the certainty of death on the scaffold. Each would have looked death straight in the face. But none of them, at that stage of our propaganda, thought of such a fate. Peróvskaya’s well-known portrait is exceptionally good; it records so well her earnest courage, her bright intelligence, and her loving nature. The letter she wrote to her mother a few hours before she went to the scaffold is one of the best expressions of a loving soul that a woman’s heart ever dictated.
The following incident will show what the other women of our circle were. One night, Kupreyanov and I went to Varvara B., to whom we had to make an urgent communication. It was past midnight, but, seeing a light in her window, we went upstairs. She sat in her tiny room, at a table, copying a programme of our circle. We knew how resolute she was, and the idea came to us to make one of those stupid jokes which men sometimes think funny. “B.,” I said, “we came to fetch you: we are going to try a rather mad attempt to liberate our friends from the fortress.” She asked not one question. She quietly laid down her pen, rose from the chair, and said only, “Let us go.” She spoke in so simple, so unaffected a voice that I felt at once how foolishly I had acted, and told her the truth. She dropped back into her chair, with tears in her eyes, and in a despairing voice asked: “It was only a joke? Why do you make such jokes?” I fully realized then the cruelty of what I had done.
Another general favorite in our circle was Serghéi Kravchínsky, who became so well known, both in England and in the United States, under the name of Stepniák. He was often called “the Baby,” so unconcerned was he about his own security; but this carelessness about himself was merely the result of a complete absence of fear, which, after all, is often the best policy for one who is hunted by the police. He soon became well known for his propaganda in the circles of workers, under his real Christian name of Serghéi, and consequently was very much wanted by the police; notwithstanding that, he took no precautions whatever to conceal himself, and I remember that one day he was severely scolded at one of our meetings for what was described as a gross imprudence. Being late for the meeting, as he often was, and having a long distance to cover in order to reach our house, he, dressed as a peasant in his sheepskin, ran the whole length of a great main thoroughfare at full speed in the middle of the street. “How could you do it?” he was reproachfully asked. “You might have aroused suspicion and have been arrested as a common thief.” But I wish that everyone had been as cautious as he was in affairs where other people could be compromised.
We made our first intimate acquaintance over Stanley’s book, How I Discovered Livingstone. One night our meeting had lasted till twelve, and as we were about to leave, one of the Kornilovs entered with a book in her hand, and asked who among us could undertake to translate by the next morning at eight o’clock sixteen printed
