The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  Of his father’s ancestors, Maklakov knew only his grandfather, a man who pursued several careers fitfully—doctor, entrepreneur, playwright, and translator. The entrepreneurship seemed never to pan out. His development of a special breed of cocks for fighting went nowhere; so, too, did his efforts to design a perpetual motion machine. He unsuccessfully urged Maklakov’s father to join him at Monte Carlo to exploit a surefire gambling scheme. His efforts at dairy farming were effective at least in luring Vasily’s family out to visit the site, leaving Vasily with a memory of washing pigs, who squealed when they got soap in their eyes. In the end, the grandfather developed a passion for literature, writing a play that was produced at the Mali Theater in Moscow, and he learned English and translated Shakespeare. In his later years he lived permanently at the house of a hospitable neighbor, Count Olsufiev—presumably a sign of some charm on his part, unless the count was a complete pushover. He and his second wife lived apart, although they were not divorced; whenever he learned that she was at Vasily’s family’s house, he wouldn’t enter it.5

  Vasily’s mother had been well educated and spoke three languages besides Russian; her bookshelves were full of classic works in Russian and foreign languages, which she often offered the children. The good education was coupled with a religiosity that seems extreme by modern standards. Maklakov believed it explained her indifference to the stirrings of reform in the 1860s. When her children wondered why they, though faithful, could not move mountains, she explained that it was because their faith was too weak. She managed, he thought, to live the maxim that one should hate the sin but love the sinner, never getting angry and always defending everyone.6

  Given Alexei Maklakov’s career in science, he was naturally more inclined to empiricism than his wife. But he was skeptical rather than anti-religious. Seeing crowds of people taking off their hats and crossing themselves on Red Square at Easter, he mused, “Whatever the smart alecs say, what does this feeling come from?” It was probably typical of him to address the matter as a question. On one occasion young Vasily reported a conversation with a schoolmate who had offered an explanation of the origins of the universe: it had started, he said, with the appearance of a red-hot sphere. Vasily had asked, “Where did the sphere come from?” His father took delight and obvious pride in the response.7

  Alexei had wanted to be a surgeon, but a shooting injury to his hand scotched that and also forced him to give up the violin. He redirected his medical interests to ophthalmology and, as Vasily saw it, pursued it with the spirit of a natural scientist, always looking for underlying explanations. The son’s perception seems confirmed by Alexei’s publishing ophthalmology articles in scientific journals in France. Life replicated Alexei’s scientific intellect rather directly in his son Alexei Alexeevich, another younger brother of Vasily, who became a professor of ophthalmology at Moscow University and director of the Moscow Eye Clinic.

  As was evidently true for all who worked in the Moscow Eye Clinic, the family lived on-site. The clinic had been founded with private funds in 1826 and occupied a large building in central Moscow that not only survives to this day but is still an eye clinic. Vasily and several siblings remained there until their father’s death in 1895, so it was home to Vasily for his first twenty-six years.

  The clinic gave Vasily a glimpse at the relation between accomplishment and privilege in late nineteenth-century Russia. One G. V. Grudev was chairman of the council nominally guiding the clinic. At the outset, so far as Vasily knew, he declared himself to be 84 years old, but after some years at that age he started losing years and worked down to 70. A passionate gardener, he had much of the hospital grounds set aside for his personal garden. Though his role was “purely decorative,” no one was troubled at his holding a nominally responsible position: “on the contrary, all would have found it quite improper to remove him.” Occupying the top managerial position was one G. I. Kertselli, also superannuated, who spent most of his day reading the paper. Actually running the place was a steward, Aleksei Ilych Lebedev, so much in charge that when any problem arose, one heard the phrase, “We must ask Aleksei Ilych.” Below him, managing the clinic’s lower-level personnel, was the clinic’s porter, who bossed them around as a noncommissioned officer bosses the troops.8

  The clinic’s head doctor, Professor Gustav Ivanov Braun, extended the pattern of disconnect between responsibility and title, limiting his actual work at the clinic to giving lectures. At least in some instances he turned responsibility over to Maklakov’s father, but it appears that most issues were resolved by consensus—one largely driven by conservatism. Maklakov: “I recall that my father complained about the impossibility of ever making improvements; his colleagues always found a reason to keep the old ways.”9

  There may have been a gap between his parents in political inclinations. Alexei met his future bride while visiting her house, first as a doctor and then as a friend. He was evidently slow to open up about his interest in Elizaveta, for when he first did so, her mother said, “Finally, sir, at last.” Vasily knew of the story and wondered whether Alexei’s slowness was due to shyness, to concern about marrying someone of wealth, or to concern about the possible gulf in political sympathies between the families. But as he seems not to have heard his mother express political views, it seems likely that her religious perspective rendered politics unimportant. Alexei’s own views were clear: he enthusiastically supported the emancipation and the other Great Reforms of the 1860s—above all, local self-government in the countryside (the zemstvo) and judicial reform, of which the key was a start on judicial independence. And he regarded the Great Reforms as simply the beginning of a process that should go much further. In a general way, these were the views of Alexei’s friends, many of whom were active in the city council (its duma) and often talked of municipal and rural self-government. Alexei himself served at times as a member of the Moscow City Duma and of the Moscow province zemstvo. They valued their own culture and education and believed the state should make these available to others (without making them yield their place). If Vasily had a fault to find in these views, it was that they failed to grasp the less patient mood prevailing among the unprivileged.10

  In 1881 Elizaveta and the children visited Red Square on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, as they had usually done. The children had such a good time that they asked her if they could skip their music lessons. In words with a curiously religious tint, she answered, “Yes, fine, perhaps I’ll forgive you.” The next morning she didn’t come down to breakfast. Doctors came and gave prescriptions, but she lost consciousness on Monday. That evening the children were taken to her to say good-bye. Maklakov and his oldest sister tried to use the ultimate resource—they went to pray at the miracle-working icon of the Savior in a church on Ostozhenka, to which their mother had often taken them. But when they came home, their mother was no better. A little later Alexei told the children that she had died. Having borne eight children, of whom seven survived, she was dead at 33. For a long time Maklakov reproached himself for the failure of his prayers and for the lack of faith that this failure must imply. He was just short of 12 years old.11

  The seven Maklakov children, with the youngest girl, Mariia, at extreme left, Vasily third from the right, and Nikolai fourth from the right. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.

  By the time of his mother’s death Vasily was enrolled in the gymnasium. His parents had disagreed on whether he should be sent there—his mother favored tutors at home; his father preferred the gymnasium for the exposure to real life, including its “dark side.” The school, in fact, gave Vasily an early hint of some of the stultifying, oppressive, pedantic, and humorless qualities he was to encounter at the university. The students themselves did not represent an abrupt switch for him: they seemed to have been drawn from a similar social niche, being generally the children of such people as doctors and professors. One classmate was the son of a cook. With the revelation of this background and a suggestion from on high (probably the school a
dministration) that the son of a cook didn’t belong, “he grew in our eyes like a rare bird.”

  Maklakov did very well academically, never getting less than a “five,” the highest grade possible. He was especially good at foreign languages and studied Greek on his own, just out of curiosity. (But he acknowledges in his memoirs that at an audience with the pope in 1904, he was unable to converse in Latin.) Though admitting that there were some excellent teachers, he deplored the teaching methods generally. For ancient languages there was a great focus on grammar rules, at the expense of reading literature. When a teacher took up actual thoughts expressed in classical literature, it was “like contraband.” History similarly seemed to consist of pumping the students full of isolated facts. It seemed to Vasily as if the object must have been to kill any interest in history or literature. Reflecting on it later, he thought that perhaps the state’s true goal was to weaken freedom of thought and any concomitant ideas of opposing the regime.12

  The students responded rather creatively. One, the son of a professor at an agricultural academy, taught others zoology and the basics of evolution, making the subject interesting enough for Maklakov to take it up on his own. Another was able to give instruction in chemistry. As to discipline, they reacted with a “we, they” attitude: they met the school authorities with their united strength, learning to defend their own, never betray their fellows, and never help “the enemy.”

  It was on the disciplinary front that the school nearly bested Maklakov. The atmosphere is suggested by his story of a martinet, who, finding a student missing a button on his uniform, told him: “Today you’ve lost a button; tomorrow you’ll go about without trousers; and the next day you’ll be rude to supervisors. . . . Regicide! To the stocks.” Under such a regime, it’s hardly surprising that Maklakov got into endless scrapes, which ultimately put his access to a university education at risk. His bounding down a staircase elicited a reprimand from the school’s director. When he repeated (quite a few times, it appears) a sardonic reaction to Alexander III’s April 29, 1881, assertion of his commitment to “unshakeable autocracy,” his name was posted for the offense of “stupid talk.” He once used a rucksack buckle to carve a criticism of the school onto a desk; he was disciplined not for the vandalism (which, depending on the carving and the prior condition of the desk, may have been minor) but for “raising the banner of rebellion.” Maklakov’s own account of his scrapes is doubtless incomplete. A schoolmate from the class above him wrote in his diary years later, when Maklakov was quite famous and the schoolmate (M. M. Bogoslovskii) was a professor, “This demagogue, standing behind a column, cried out ‘Marseillaise, Marseillaise!’ and then sat down so as to hide himself.”13 The hijinks led to various marks of disfavor, such as being deprived of the special seating and public listing that normally celebrated high academic achievement. They also made him locally famous. One teacher at the school exclaimed, “Who is this Maklakov?”

  The discipline problems came to a head on the verge of transition to university. During a language exam, Maklakov checked with a neighboring student on the translation of a word. The director happened to be passing by, heard the exchange, and ordered Maklakov to gather his papers and leave the examination room. The apparent cheating doesn’t reflect well on Maklakov, but it’s hard to assess. The director, speaking of it later, mistakenly described Maklakov’s behavior as helping the other student; the fact that the director got it exactly backwards, as well as Maklakov’s general track record, suggest that whatever was going on in Maklakov’s mind, this was not an attempt to get better marks than his competence and diligence deserved. Because entrance into the university required that a student receive “full credit” for behavior, the school was in a bit of a bind. Full credit might seem a stretch under the circumstances, but it also would be hard to block the progress of so talented a student. The outcome was a deal. He was given full credit, but denied an honor that naturally would have been his—a gold medal for outstanding scholarship and conduct.14

  In 1885, during Vasily’s last years at the gymnasium, his father remarried. Lydia Filippovna Koroleva was a literary figure in her own right, author of a story published in Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe) that had won great praise from Turgenev; more important in the Maklakov family, she had written a children’s book that Vasily and his siblings knew and loved. Her first husband had killed himself shortly after their marriage, and she had been the common-law wife of Vasily Sleptsov, a journalist, social activist, promoter of feminism, and writer of short stories and a novella who died in 1878. A distinguished Russian author, visiting Lydia in 1930 in the old-age section of the Soviet House of Scholars to talk with her about Sleptsov (she was nearly 80 years old), spotted on her desk “Faust in German, Marcel Prévost’s Les Demi-Vierges in French, and the 1861 edition of Nekrasov.”15 She thus brought into the family the atmosphere of intellectual, literary circles. Among her friends was the great Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii. On one occasion six members of the Maklakov family (Lydia, Alexei, and Vasily, plus two daughters and another son) wrote to him jointly, explaining that a desire to see him had sprung up among all six at the same time and extending “a collective request” that he pay them a visit.16 Among the other distinguished friends that Lydia brought into their circle were the writer Maxim Gorky and the lawyer who became the speaker of the First Duma, Sergei Muromtsev. Another close friend, who had lived abroad since his participation in one of Garibaldi’s campaigns, was the geographer Lev Ilych Mechnikov, brother of Ilya Ilych Mechnikov, the Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine, and of Ivan Ilych Mechnikov, the model for Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilych. Maklakov found himself captivated by one of Lev Mechnikov’s articles laying out a grand theory of history. It claimed to show a natural law tending to steady human improvement as work became specialized and people, acting on their own initiative, found their niches and ways of productive cooperation.17

  Despite the gain in intellectual breadth for the Maklakov children, the remarriage took its toll. Maklakov observed that it was naturally hard for his stepmother to reconcile her literary ambitions with taking charge of a household with seven children. “Both sides,” he observed, “suffered from the unusual relationship, though both, for the sake of our father, tried to hide it; he, of course, understood and suffered more than anyone.”18

  Maklakov graduated from the gymnasium in 1887 and then proceeded to Moscow University, where his career looks a little like that of a perpetual student. He studied in three different faculties—natural sciences, history, and then law, ultimately taking his law degree in 1896. The two transitions—from natural sciences to history and from history to law—are fairly easily explained. He had been rather purposeless in choosing natural sciences. In view of his success in ancient languages at school, they would have been a more plausible specialty, but he rejected them, he later explained, at least in part out of a foolish spite toward the gymnasium. To the extent that he had been drawn to natural sciences by the excitement of public polemics on Darwinism, he was disappointed; the lectures were highly technical, probing, for example, details about grubs. Partly in response to this, he started going to lectures elsewhere in the university, most notably those of Kliuchevskii, whose lectures were “an aesthetic delight. . . . He was an actor, not a lecturer.” Further, because of his involvement in student disturbances (of which more later), Maklakov was rather pointedly told that the natural sciences faculty had the highest proportion of participants in disorders and that he would do well to move to history. Maklakov was surprised by this advice, which coincided with what he’d been told by Jacques Elisée Rekliu, an anarchist geographer whom he had met in Switzerland through his stepmother’s connection with Lev Mechnikov, and with whom he had long walks and talks about history and the prospects of mankind.19

  A distinct episode precipitated the second switch, from history to law. Maklakov had done well in history, and Professor Paul Vinogradov, his friend, mentor, and hero (for his courage in express
ing viewpoints that could easily lead to a professor’s dismissal),20 proposed that he stay at the university to be groomed for a professorship. But when Vinogradov sought the agreement of the history faculty’s “tutor,” Nikolai Pavlovich Bogolepov, whose consent was essential, Bogolepov declared, apparently on the basis of the political unreliability shown by Maklakov’s involvement in student disorders, “So long as I am tutor, Maklakov will never occupy a chair.” Vinogradov urged Maklakov not to take it too seriously: “Bogolepov’s a fool; he won’t be tutor for long.” In fact, Bogolepov rose in the educational establishment, becoming minister of education in 1898. Unfortunately for Bogolepov, his activity as minister drew the attention of a Socialist Revolutionary student who walked into his office in 1901 and fatally shot him. Maklakov could not know of that denouement in advance. Even if he had, not only could Bogolepov have dampened his career prospects for another six years, but Bogolepov clones in the education establishment might have been able to do so indefinitely. Moved by Bogolepov’s edict and his own doubts about his suitability for a purely scholarly career (“I didn’t have the spirit of a true scholar, that is, a searcher after truth for its own sake”), Maklakov turned to the law.21

  Much of Maklakov’s university education naturally took place outside of classes. Because brushes with authorities played such a key role in his academic transitions, it makes sense to start with them. The administration and police seemed to wobble between heavy-handedness, driven by near paranoia at the thought of independent, united student activity, on the one hand, and a relatively laissez-faire attitude on the other. In late November 1887, at a university orchestra concert, a student named Siniavskii slapped a high university official, A. A. Bryzgalov, in the face. The slap was not Siniavskii’s spontaneous individual act of protest against Bryzgalov’s perceived hostility to students; he had been chosen to strike the blow by the members of a kind of “primitive conspiracy.” Siniavskii was arrested, and student buzz designated the next day at noon as the time for a protest meeting in a university courtyard. An angry crowd of students gathered and then began to move onto the streets of Moscow. After a while Maklakov and other students drifted back to the vicinity of the university. The police chief, N. I. Ogarev, who unlike Bryzgalov was popular in Moscow, sought to calm things down by telling the students in the most peaceable tone that everything was over for the day and that they should disperse. Maklakov, though he claimed in his memoirs not to have been really involved in the disturbance, happened to be close by. He rather loudly answered Ogarev, “We won’t disperse till you clear out the police.” Ogarev shouted to the police, “Grab him.” All this was in the sight of the students and, according to Maklakov, created a mild sensation.22