Aleksandr Herzen

“ The political prisoners, who are mostly of noble birth, are strictly guarded and vindictively punished; but they suffer infinitely less than the unfortunate “men with beards.” With them the police stand on no ceremony. In what quarter can a peasant or workman seek redress? Where will he find justice?
The Russian system of justice and police is so haphazard, so inhuman, so arbitrary and corrupt, that a poor malefactor has more reason to fear his trial than his sentence. ”

“ Without a knowledge of natural science, there is no salvation for the modern man. This wholesome food, this strict training of the mind by facts, this proximity to the life that surrounds ours, and this acknowledgement of its independence—without these there lurks somewhere in the soul a monastic cell, and this contains a germ of mysticism which may cover like a dark cloud the whole intellect.
Before I had gone through College, The Chemist had moved to Petersburg, and I did not meet him again till my return from exile. ”

“ People who would not have dreamed of publishing their articles in the Moscow Gazette or the Petersburg newspapers, now began to print their writings in the privacy of their own houses. Thus the dangerous habit of possessing an organ of one’s own took root, and men became accustomed to publicity. And indeed it is not a bad thing to have a weapon which is always ready for use. A printing press, like the human tongue, has no bones. ”

“ When he had read the newspaper, he noticed for the first time the presence of Sonnenberg in the room. When Niko reached the age of fifteen, Sonnenberg professed to start a shop; but having nothing to sell and no customers, he gave it up, when he had spent such savings as he had in this useful form of commerce; yet he still called himself “a commercial agent.” He was then much over forty, and at that pleasant age he lived like the fowls of the air or a boy of fourteen; he never knew to-day where he would sleep or how he would secure a dinner to-morrow. ”

“ In that dreary distant backwater of exile, separated from all I loved, surrounded by the unclean horde of officials, and exposed without defence to the tyranny of the Governor, I met nevertheless with many warm hearts and friendly hands, and there I spent many happy hours which are sacred in recollection.
Where are you now, and how are you, my snowbound friends? It is twenty years since we met. I suppose you have grown old, as I have; you are thinking about marrying your daughters, and have given up drinking champagne by the bottle and tossing off bumpers of vodka. ”

“ It was nine months since I had taken a walk without the presence of a sentry.
I had been walking half an hour when a man came up to me; he was wearing uniform without epaulettes and a blue medal-ribbon. He stared very hard at me, walked past, turned round at once, and asked me in an insolent manner:
“Is it you who are going to Perm with a police-officer?”
“Yes,” I answered, still walking.
“Excuse me! excuse me! How does the man dare...?” ”

“ Ogaryóv had that magnetic power which forms the first point of crystallisation in any medley of disordered atoms, provided the necessary affinity exists. Though scattered in all directions, they become imperceptibly the heart of an organism. In his bright cheerful room with its red and gold wall-paper, amid the perpetual smell of tobacco and punch and other—I was going to say, eatables and drinkables, but now I remember that there was seldom anything to eat but cheese—we often spent the time from dark till dawn in heated argument and sometimes in noisy merriment. ”

“ He knew his guests thoroughly and despised them. Sometimes he showed his claws, but he generally treated them as a man treats his dogs, either with excessive familiarity or with a roughness beyond all bounds. But all the same he continued to invite them, and they came in a flutter of joy, prostrating themselves before him, currying favour by tales against others, all smiles and bows and complaisance.
I blushed for them and felt ashamed.
Our intimacy did not last long: the Governor soon perceived that I was unfit to move in the highest circles of Vyatka. ”

“ I broke my journey at the village of Perkhushkov, the place where we had so often stayed in my youth. The Chemist was expecting me there; he even had dinner ready for me, and two bottles of champagne. Four or five years had made no change in him, except that he looked a little older. Before dinner he said to me quite seriously: “Please tell me frankly how marriage and domestic life strike you. Do you find it to your taste, or only passable?” I laughed, and he went on: “I am astonished at your boldness; no man in a normal condition could ever decide on so awful a step. ”

“ To readers who are not countrymen or contemporaries of Herzen’s, the Memoirs are certainly the most interesting part of his production. They paint for us an astonishing picture of Russian life under the grim rule of Nicholas, the life of the rich man in Moscow, and the life of the exile near the Ural Mountains; and they are crowded with figures and incidents which would be incredible if one were not convinced of the narrator’s veracity. Herzen is a supreme master of that superb instrument, the Russian language. ”

“ Next morning Count Apraxin gave me leave to stay three days at Kazán and to put up at a hotel.
For those three days I wandered about the city, attended everywhere by my keeper. The veiled faces of the Tatar women, the high cheekbones of their husbands, the mosques of true believers standing side by side with the churches of the Orthodox faith—it all reminds one of Asia and the East. At Vladímir or Nizhni the neighbourhood of Moscow is felt; but one feels far from Moscow at Kazán. ”

“ Eastern Siberia is governed in a still more casual fashion. The distance is so great that all rumours die away before they reach Petersburg. One Governor of Irkutsk used to fire cannon at the town when he was cheerful after dinner; another, in the same state, used to put on priest’s robes and celebrate the Mass in his own house, in the presence of the Bishop; but, at least, neither the noise of the former nor the piety of the latter did as much harm as the state of siege kept up by Pestel and the restless activity of Kaptsevitch. ”

“ A rich merchant at Perm had a travelling carriage for sale. The doctor called on him and delivered the following speech all in a breath. “You are selling a carriage, I need one. Because you are rich and a millionaire, everyone respects you, and I have come to testify my respect for the same reason. Owing to your wealth, it does not matter twopence to you whether you sell the carriage or not; but I need it, and I am poor. You will want to squeeze me and take advantage of my necessity; therefore you will ask 1,500 roubles for it. ”

“ The father is banished to a distance, the mother is sent to prison, the son to the Army; it all comes upon them as suddenly as a clap of thunder, and in most cases it is undeserved. The object of it all is money. Pay up! If you don’t, an inquest will be held on the body of some drunkard who has been frozen in the snow. A collection is made for the village authorities; the peasants contribute their last penny. Then there are the police and law-officers—they must live somehow, and one has a wife to maintain and another a family to educate, and they are all model husbands and fathers. ”

“ Our age has ceased to produce those strong, complete natures; but last century evoked them everywhere, even in countries where they were not needed and where their development was bound to be distorted. In Russia, men who were exposed to the influence of this powerful European current, did not make history, but they became unlike other men. Foreigners at home and foreigners abroad, spoilt for Russia by European prejudices and for Europe by Russian habits, they were a living contradiction in terms and sank into an artificial life of sensual enjoyment and monstrous egoism. ”

“ As a rule, children are attached to servants. Parents, especially Russian parents, forbid this intimacy, but the children do not obey orders, because they are bored in the drawing-room and happy in the pantry. In this case, as in a thousand others, parents don’t know what they are doing. I find it impossible to imagine that our servants’ hall was a worse place for children than our morning-room or smoking-room. It is true that children pick up coarse expressions and bad manners in the company of servants; but in the drawing-room they learn coarse ideas and bad feelings. ”

“ When the period of exile came to an end, and when she had seen her children in their youth and beauty and fine promise for the future, life had nothing more to give her. Any man who values happiness should seek to die young. Permanent happiness is no more possible than ice that will not melt.
Vadim’s eldest brother died a few months after Diomid, the soldier, fell in Circassia: a neglected cold proved fatal to his enfeebled constitution. ”

“ Western nations talk of our duplicity and cunning; they believe we want to deceive them, when we are only trying to make a creditable appearance and pass muster. A Russian will express quite different political views in talking to different persons, without any ulterior object, and merely from a wish to please: the bump of complaisance is highly developed in our skulls.
“Prince Dmitri Golitsyn,” said Lord Durham on one occasion, “is a true Whig, a Whig at heart.” ”

“ And yet it was hateful to see the triumph of his subordinates. Asses in plenty raised their heels against this stricken wild-boar. To compare small things with great, the meanness of mankind was shown as clearly then as when Napoleon fell. Between Tufáyev and me there had been an open breach for a long time; and if he had not been turned out himself, he would certainly have sent me to some frontier town like Kai. ”

“ Milorádovitch advised Vitberg to have granite monoliths for the great pillars of the lowest church. Someone pointed out that the process of bringing these from Finland would be very costly. “That is the very reason why we should get them,” answered Milorádovitch; “if there were granite quarries on the Moscow River, where would be the wonder in erecting the pillars?”
Milorádovitch was a soldier, but he understood the element of romance in war and in other things. Magnificent ends are gained by magnificent means. Nature alone attains to greatness without effort. ”

“ The Christian faith began to contend with scepticism, the Gothic spire with the Greek façade, religious sanctity with worldly beauty. This is why St. Peter’s at Rome is so significant; in that colossal erection Christianity is struggling to come alive, the Church turns pagan, and Michael Angelo uses the walls of the Sistine Chapel to depict Jesus Christ as a brawny athlete, a Hercules in the flower of youth and strength. ”

“ If it is said that I approve of the worst form of profligacy, in which a woman sells herself for the occasion, I say that it is you, not I, who approve of it—not you in particular but people in general. ”

“ So long as a man moves modestly forwards, never stopping and never reflecting, and until he comes to the edge of a precipice or breaks his neck, he continues to believe that his life lies ahead of him; and therefore he looks down upon his past and is unable to appreciate the present. But when experience has laid low the flowers of spring and chilled the glow of summer—when he discovers that life is practically over, and all that remains a mere continuance of the past, then he feels differently towards the brightness and warmth and beauty of early recollections. ”

“ Hundreds of boats of every description, filled with peasants and their wives, native tribesmen and shopkeepers, make up a lively scene, as they sail in the wake of the Saint. In front of all sails the Governor’s barge, decorated with scarlet cloth. It is a remarkable sight. The people gather from far and near in tens of thousands, wait on the bank for the arrival of the Saint, and move about in noisy crowds round the little village by the river. It is remarkable that the native Votyaks and Cheremisses and even Tatars, though they are not Christians, come in crowds to pray to the ikon. ”

“ Possibly the peasants, but no others, might have some claim to superiority.
The difference between the class of nobles and the class of servants is not great. I hate, especially since the calamities of the year 1848, democrats who flatter the mob, but I hate still more aristocrats who slander the people. By representing those who serve them as profligate animals, slave-owners throw dust in the eyes of others and stifle the protests of their own consciences. ”

“ These chinóvniks are an artificial, ill-educated, and hungry class, incapable of anything except office-work, and ignorant of everything except official papers. They form a kind of lay clergy, officiating in the law-courts and police-offices, and sucking the blood of the nation with thousands of dirty, greedy mouths.
Gógol raised one side of the curtain and showed us the Russian chinóvnik in his true colours; [97] but Gógol, without meaning to, makes us resigned by making us laugh, and his immense comic power tends to suppress resentment. ”

“ The clergy, in the concealment of their houses, eat and drink to excess with the merchant class. The nobles get drunk in the light of day, gamble recklessly, strike their men-servants and run after the maids, mismanage their affairs, and fail even worse as husbands and fathers. The official class are as bad in a dirtier way; they curry favour, besides, with their superiors and they are all petty thieves. The nobles do really steal less: they take openly what does not belong to them, though without prejudice to other methods, when circumstances are favourable. ”

“ The president had proposed to elect Arakchéyev, on the ground of his nearness to the Tsar. Labzin then proposed the election of Ilyá Baikov, the Tsar’s coachman. “He is not only near the Tsar but sits in front of him,” he said.
The tone of society changed visibly; and the rapid demoralisation proved too clearly how little the feeling of personal dignity is developed among the Russian aristocracy. Except the women, no one dared to show sympathy or to plead earnestly in favour of relations and friends, whose hands they had grasped yesterday but who had been arrested before morning dawned. ”