The happier his holidays, the worse his schooldays. The crisis came when Przhevalsky’s entire form rebelled against its teacher and the boys decided to destroy the form register in which all their attendances and absences were recorded. They drew lots and Przhevalsky was chosen to throw the register in the river. The whole class was incarcerated in the basement until the guilty party confessed. After four days and nights on bread and water Przhevalsky owned up. The school then decided to expel him. Yelena came up from Otradnoye to plead with the authorities. She begged them to commute the expulsion to a flogging. Yelena was planning to remarry, and she was trying to get Yevgeni into cadet college; she could not endure the thought of her eldest son being expelled at such a crucial time. The headmaster gave way; Przhevalsky was publicly flogged and had to be carried home on a stretcher.
While Przhevalsky was at school, in February 1854, Yelena married a Smolensk civil servant, Ivan Tolpygo. She was still, after all, in her thirties and a striking woman. Soon she had a new family: in 1855 a daughter, Alexandra, was born, in 1856 a son, Nikolay—who was later to build the Transcaspian railway to Samarkand—and in 1858 another son, Ippolit, who became a doctor. Yevgeni, meanwhile, was accepted for cadet college.
Przhevalsky got on well, if coolly, with his stepfather. But at school he became increasingly restive. Of the few books he read—crude illustrated stories, the fables of Krylov and the like, which the pedlars hawked about the district—one made a special impression: a didactic story called The Warrior Without Fear. By now, the Crimean War was raging and the newspaper reports of the siege of Sevastopol inflamed his patriotic imagination. In May 1855 both he and Vladimir left school for good: Vladimir was going to Moscow University; Nikolay was determined to join the army like his father Mikhail. They spent the summer of 1855 shooting, riding and netting perch with the servant boys. In September Yelena gave them her blessing and, wiping their tears, she, Nikolay and Vladimir set off in their own carriage on the two-hundred mile journey to Moscow. Vladimir enrolled in the university; Nikolay joined the infantry and moved south towards the front.
But the war against the Turks, the English and the French was virtually over. Though the Russian army had fought bravely, it was demoralized. Corruption and maladministration had undermined its pride and the defeat in the Crimea—the first war the Russian army had lost for well over a century—made men and officers despondent. Tsar Nicholas I was dead and everyone expected, with the accession of the liberally educated and well-intentioned Alexander II, an era of change. Officers listlessly waited for the army to be reorganized; the men were more concerned about the coming liberation of the serfs and the prospects of returning to own the land they tilled.
Przhevalsky was rapidly disabused of his hopes from the army. First impressions always counted most. Smolensk had given him a permanent aversion to cities and to schools. His first weeks in the infantry reserve, marching south eighteen miles a day to his post at the little town of Belev for training, living in filth, eating cabbage soup that tasted of slops, obliterated all his visions of military glory. His innate puritanism reacted against the drinking and gambling that relieved the boredom of his fellow trainee officers. Sending his mother some of the famous sweet dough of Kaluga, he wrote in December 1855: ‘There are about sixty of us, but most of them are good-for-nothings, drunks, gamblers. When I see myself with such comrades, I can’t help remembering the words “I’ll be a diamond but in a pile of dung”.’ The officer cadets were largely ignored by their officers, except to be persuaded to join in the drinking. Przhevalsky was too poor and too horrified by drunkenness to take part. He felt he could not belong. His officers declared that he was ‘not one of us, but just among us’.
Przhevalsky went home to his new family—stepfather and half-sister—for the New Year of 1856. On his return to the infantry he was posted to the Belev Regiment, and now that there was a prospect of fighting the British in Finland, he suddenly became enthusiastic. Letters to his mother are full of military topics of all sorts, right down to the design of the new rifles. But peace was finally concluded and instead of action Przhevalsky was condemned to an idle, pointless existence, stationed in the little town of Kozlov. The only excitement came from the regiment’s tradition of foraging. To feed themselves the officers and their servants confiscated grain and killed livestock. Half amused, half shocked, Przhevalsky wrote to his mother that the regiment was ‘a band of robbers … I bayonetted a turkey which we ate at the next post’. His batman, Ivan Markov, was such an old hand at foraging that officers and horses were fed for nothing.
But the boredom of a long, hot summer in Kozlov, remote from the political excitement in Petersburg and Moscow, drove Przhevalsky to read and daydream. Days spent shooting and reading books about travel, hunting and adventure began to give birth to dreams of becoming an explorer. The more tedious army life became, the more intense became his longing to escape, to escape into the unknown ‘black heart’ of Africa or Asia.
By 1857 Przhevalsky was commissioned as a lance-corporal in the Polotsk Regiment in the small town of Bely. If anything, conditions there were worse. The Polotsk Regiment was notorious for its officers’ misconduct, and the householders of Bely were reluctant to have them billeted. Przhevalsky found himself in rooms sparsely furnished with bedsteads, a bucket of vodka and tumblers in the middle of the floor. The officers’ only activity was getting drunk enough to terrify the populace and beat up the police. It was a lonely and unhappy time. Three more years passed, and of these five years from 1855 to 1860 all Przhevalsky could say was that he had undergone ‘an enormous change: I well understood and had studied the society I found myself in.’
The enormous change was complete by the time he was transferred to Kremenets, then a little Jewish town set in the northern slopes of the Carpathians. Here, shooting expeditions in the river valley among the mountains released a romantic love of nature, of solitude and of the wilderness. By 1860 Przhevalsky had decided to be an explorer of unknown wildernesses. He formally asked for a transfer to the Amur military district of Siberia, then the least explored part of the Russian empire, conceded that very year by China to Russia. The answer came quickly: three days’ arrest in barracks. Przhevalsky was all the more determined—his typical response to obstacles. Although not a scholar, he decided to take the stiff examination for entry into the Academy of the General Staff in St Petersburg. Long days of hunting gave way to hours—sometimes sixteen a day—spent studying.
Przhevalsky was not quite alone in his intellectual pursuits in Kremenets—he had one close friend, whom we know only as K., and together they devoured travel books, geography and adventure novels. Here perhaps his dreams of travel and exploration grew more intense. A draft of a paper ‘On the Essence of Life’ survives from this time. Przhevalsky must have read it, probably in January 1860, to a circle of officers. Philosophically inclined debating societies among Russian junior officers were nothing uncommon, especially in times of such intellectual ferment, but it is a surprising side of Przhevalsky’s otherwise unrelievedly philistine army days.
The manuscript speech, muddled, naive, bears the full imprint of Przhevalsky’s character. It is both materialist and mystical, it is erudite and original, it is diffident and forthright. Its content reflects wider reading than one might suppose available in Kremenets: the names of Humboldt the geographer, Audubon the zoologist and the great Cuvier are mentioned, and many of its ideas reflect the impact of Darwin on Russian intellectuals. In St Petersburg in the early 1860s the idealism of such young, radical luminaries as Pisarev had already incorporated materialism, Darwinian evolution and modern scientific analysis; Przhevalsky’s speculations in Kremenets show the same mingling of the modern and the romantic.
Przhevalsky’s epigraph in the speech is that ‘death is the regeneration of new life’, and his main idea is that the death of the individual is an unimportant event in the life of the species or the type. His aim is to move on from scientific observations and ‘by means of lo
gical conclusions to decipher and understand what life itself consists of’. Przhevalsky observes that the greatest scientists have baulked at defining life or nature, but this does not deter him. The materialist side of his thought comes out when he says that there is no sharp dividing line between animal and man, or vegetable and animal to allow for the idea of ‘soul’. He believes that the mystery of organic life will be revealed when the phenomena of electricity, galvanism and magnetism have been investigated. But he assumes that Darwinian evolution has stopped and that man and recent animals are the perfection of the forms shown by fossils. Idealistically, he dwells on the fact that all cultures have believed in life beyond the grave and that no human organizations could exist without it. ‘People would give in to passions’ if their faith in life after death were undermined. Even the educated—who are for Przhevalsky an élite—need this faith. Lastly, Przhevalsky clings to the idea that all animals have a spiritual basis—the ‘cause’ of life.
This welter of conflicting ideas contains the germs of Przhevalsky’s later attitudes and responses. The explorer who loved animals and shot them in droves, the European who looked down on the Asiatic and who at the same time feared the unleashing of terrible passions in European civilization, who dedicated himself to science, yet gave up the modern world for degenerate, this complex and contradictory character could only have stemmed from a man who grasped ‘the essence of life’ in such a two-handed way.
But cramming, not speculation, was the key to success in the Academy examinations. For a whole year Przhevalsky made up for his lost schooling. Then, in spring 1861, he stopped studying and spent many weeks duck-shooting for relaxation. He describes this period in his first published work, Memoirs of a Sportsman, an evocation of the most poetic moments of his youth: ‘When before me, like a broad mirror, the valley, flooded a mile wide, opened up, losing itself in the endless distance, then an involuntary quiver passed through my nerves and it was a quiver of uncontrollable delight.’
Returning to his studies, he took a preliminary test and passed. But before he could get to St Petersburg he needed money. In the end he borrowed 170 roubles from a lady who demanded 100 roubles’ interest, sinking Przhevalsky deeper into debt, and hardening his misogyny. When he arrived at the Academy, Przhevalsky found he was one of 180 candidates for 90 places, but he passed very near the top.
Photographs of Przhevalsky in later life, with his generalissimo’s figure and his facial resemblance to Joseph Stalin, are very unlike the tall, thin, highly-strung young man of the 1860s, his swarthy face and mass of dark hair set off by a wisp of white forelock. But those two subsequent years in St Petersburg were very different from the years of his later life. Lacking money, he went short of food. He was older and more single-minded than his fellow students; he made few friends. He attended lectures conscientiously and read history and natural sciences avidly. Most of the military courses were of direct interest to a future explorer: geography, surveying, navigation, astronomy were essential to both careers. As for the subjects which were of purely military interest, Przhevalsky relied on his memory to store the stencilled course notes.
Twice he came near to expulsion. The first summer of his course was to be spent surveying in the Borovichi area of western Russia. But Przhevalsky devoted his time to hunting game and had only a filthy, rough survey sheet to hand in. A lucky success in the oral test on geodesy saved him. The second lapse only came to light a century later. While he was at the Academy during the liberal ferment of 1861, a monthly magazine called the Military Collection (Voyenny Sbornik) was very popular among the officer-students. It was edited by the famous radical—and civilian—critic and novelist, Chernyshevsky, and by Colonel N. N. Obruchev, who was later to be a leading member of the terrorist ‘Land and Freedom’ movement. But in 1862 reaction set in in Petersburg; students were arrested, magazines were closed down. The editorship of the Military Collection was given to a more suitable major-general, who promptly accepted, translated and printed an article by a Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. The Prince reflected on the uselessness of education for army officers, on the merits of corporal punishment for soldiers and on force as the only quality necessary to a modern army.
The students of the Academy of the General Staff were annoyed. They objected to a German prince pontificating about the needs of the Russian army and 106 signed a protest which attracted attention: it was printed in the popular magazine, the Northern Bee, and, unfortunately for the signatories, it was praised by the émigré radical Herzen in The Bell. D. A. Milyutin, the War Minister, demanded from the censor a list of the officers who had signed the document. Some of the many apparently unaccountable obstacles that Przhevalsky was later to encounter in his military career are probably due to his participation in this radical protest.
But there were successes, too, for Przhevalsky at the Academy. His first achievement was to publish Memoirs of a Sportsman, which he had written in Kremenets. It is a re-creation of some of the more poignant moments of his youth, especially his departure from the countryside around Otradnoye. Its style is intense, even overblown; but there is a feeling for nature—a sympathy enveloping predator, prey and nature—that we can find in Turgenev’s early prose and certain passages of Tolstoy. The Memoirs were accepted for publication without fee by a magazine called Horsebreeding and Field Sports. More important was his second work, a dissertation for the Academy. Przhevalsky chose as his subject A Military and Statistical Review of the Amur Region. It was a compilation of every existing geographical, botanical, military and official account of the area. It was so thorough and topical that it gave its author a reputation outside the Academy in the St Petersburg Geographical Society and in government circles. Unwittingly, Przhevalsky had taken the first decisive step in his career. The Amur region, in particular the vast triangle of unknown territory between the Amur and Ussuri rivers and Pacific Ocean, had been annexed by Russia in 1858 and 1860, despite strong Chinese objections. Russia’s Siberian empire was now enriched by a territory that gave it not only untapped natural resources but, for the first time, harbours on the Pacific far enough south to be almost ice-free.
Despite the success of his dissertion, Przhevalsky decided not to finish the Academy course. Much of the syllabus bored him and he could not adapt to St Petersburg. In May 1863 fate intervened. The Polish gentry and intelligentsia had risen in a nationalist rebellion against Russian rule. The Poles, like many Russians, were disappointed that Alexander II’s reforms had not borne more fruit—more civil liberties and greater concessions to national feeling. Their language, their culture and their religion were being suppressed. But few Russians could sympathize with them. The Poles had enjoyed a constitution since 1818 and were in some respects freer than their Russian masters. Przhevalsky probably saw nothing inconsistent in signing a radical protest in 1862 and helping the Russian army crush a radical Polish movement in 1863. In any event, the officers of Przhevalsky’s year at the Academy were offered a commission, the chance of leaving in May 1863 (cutting a whole year), and recognition as having graduated if they went on active service in Poland. Przhevalsky accepted with alacrity. By the time he arrived in Poland, however, the rebellion was in its last agonies and he took part only in one punitive expedition. By 1864 the Russians had crushed the revolt and the very name of Poland was obliterated.
Soon Przhevalsky was back with his Polotsk Regiment. The regimental commander, Nilson, took a liking to him and made Lieutenant Przhevalsky the regimental adjutant. At first he enjoyed the post; if the officers were schoolboys and the commander their headmaster, then he was the school captain. He defended the regimental honour with energy. Early in 1864 one officer was caught embezzling; Przhevalsky organized a subscription of 126 roubles from each officer to cover up the losses. He wrote a circular to his brother officers, urging them to make this sacrifice: ‘Then each of us with full awareness of the grandeur and nobility of his action can say with pride: “I have saved a comrade”.’
But army li
fe in the small Polish town of Piotrków, south-west of Warsaw, soon palled and Przhevalsky became as depressed as he had been in Kozlov and Bely. In 1860 he had been driven to exclaim: ‘I asked myself: where then are man’s moral perfection, disinterestedness and nobility of action?’ It was now that his vein of misanthropy deepened: it led him to remark that ‘the breath of mankind is more terrible and more destructive than all the misfortunes of nature’. Much of his time was spent in reading, and in dreaming of being a second David Livingstone. His aspirations were encouraged when the St Petersburg Imperial Geographical Society elected him a member for his Amur dissertation. But he needed to get away by himself. In 1864 he took four months’ leave and went to Otradnoye to shoot and to dream for the coming summer and autumn.
Dreams began to take more practical shape: Przhevalsky began to teach himself botany and zoology. The earliest books that are still to be found in his library date from this period—textbooks on ornithology and flora, for example. It was at this time that Przhevalsky gave up his ideas of following Livingstone. Africa was too remote for any Russian organization to sponsor him and, in any case, Baker and Speke had already solved most of the mysteries of the Nile, while Livingstone had carried out most of his work on the Zambezi. Przhevalsky began to think of exploring Asia, where the interests of the Russian empire, still dominating the emirates of Turkestan towards the Oxus and unknown Tibet, coincided with the enigmas of geography.
The next step was fortuitous. Przhevalsky heard that the military authorities in Warsaw were opening a college for Junker cadets in December 1864. He applied for a post and was appointed teacher of history and geography, and librarian.
The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia Page 2