The conversation of this landworker aroused in me a multitude of thoughts. The first to come to mind were the inequalities within the peasant estate. I compared state peasants with serfs.18 Both one and the other live in villages; but one group pays a fixed amount, while the other must be prepared to pay what the owner wishes. One set are judged by their equals, while the others are dead in the eyes of the law except in criminal matters.—It is only when he breaks the social bond, when he becomes a malefactor, that a member of society acquires the recognition of the government that protects him! Such an idea made my blood boil.—Be afraid, hard-hearted landowner, I see your condemnation on the brow of each of your peasants.—Plunged into these meditations, I unwittingly turned my gaze to my servant who, seated in front of me in the carriage, was swaying from side to side. Suddenly, I felt coursing through my blood a rapid chill that, by driving the heat upwards, forced it to spread across my face. The shame I felt in my very innards caused me nearly to weep.—In your rage, I said to myself, you are fixated on the proud owner who wears out his peasant in his field. But do you not do the same, if not worse? What crime has your poor Petrushka committed so that you prevent him from availing himself of sleep, the sweetener of our woes, the greatest gift of nature to an unfortunate man?—He receives payment, is fed, clothed, I never whip him with birches or a truncheon (O moderate man!)—and you think that a piece of bread and scrap of woolen cloth give you the right to treat a being who is your equal like a spinning top, and the only thing of which you can boast is that you do not strike him so often as to make him spin faster. Do you know what is written in the first law code of all, in the heart of each person? If I strike someone, he too may strike me.—Recall that day when Petrushka was drunk and was not in time to dress you. Recall the slap you gave him. Oh, if he had come to his senses while drunk and answered you in proportion to your demand!—And who gave you power over him?—The law.—The law? And you dare abuse this sacred name? Unfortunate one! …—Tears trickled from my eyes and this was the state I was in when the postal nags dragged me to the next station.
CHUDOVO
No sooner had I entered the postal cabin than I heard from the street the sound of the postal bell, and several minutes later my friend Ch…walked into the cabin. When I left him behind in Petersburg he had had no intention of leaving there immediately. An extraordinary event had prompted a man with the quick temper of my acquaintance to leave Petersburg, and here is what he recounted to me:
“You were already set for your departure when I left for Peterhof. I spent the holidays enjoyably, insofar as it is possible to enjoy oneself amidst hubbub and intoxication. But eager to turn my journey to benefit, I took the decision to make the trip to Kronstadt and Sisterbek19 where I had been told great changes had taken place. In Kronstadt, I stayed for two very pleasurable days, feasting my eyes on the multitude of foreign ships, the stone-clad fortress of Kronstadt, and the buildings that were going up rapidly. I had been curious to see the plan of the new Kronstadt and with pleasure envisaged the beauty of the projected construction. In a word, the second day of my visit ended happily and pleasantly. The night was calm, clear and the salubrious air filled my feelings with a certain tenderness that is easier to feel than to describe adequately. I decided to turn the beneficence of nature to my advantage and, for at least once more in my life, to take pleasure in a magnificent view of a sunrise, one which I had not yet managed to catch on a smooth watery horizon. I hired a twelve-oar sloop and departed for S…
“We sailed successfully for about four versts.* The monotonous sound of the oars incited in me a doziness, and my languid gaze barely came to life at the passing shimmer of drops of water as they fell from the tips of the oars. My poetic imagination was transporting me to the lovely pastures of Paphos and Amathus.20 Suddenly the sharp whistle of a wind arising from afar drove sleep away, and my drowsy eyes met the sight of densely packed clouds whose dark mass, it seemed, drove them toward our heads and threatened to crash down on us. The glassy patina of the water began to ripple, and calm gave way to an incipient splashing of the swells. I was glad about this sight as well; while I observed the magnificent features of nature, I can say without boastful arrogance that what had begun to terrify others gladdened me. From time to time, like Vernet, I exclaimed, “Oh, how pleasing!”21 But the wind, as it gradually strengthened, compelled me to think about reaching the shore. The sky became completely dark from the thickening of somber clouds. The strong surge of the waves crippled control of the helm, and the gusty wind, now forcing us upward onto wet ridges, now plunging us into the clifflike ruts of watery swells, sapped the rowers’ forward-moving force. Involuntarily going with the flow of the wind we were borne along randomly. That was when we began to dread even the shore; and then what might have comforted us on a successful voyage began to drive us into despair. Nature at that hour looked mean to us, and we now grew angry with her for not displaying her awesome majesty by flashing lightning bolts and disturbing our hearing with peals of thunder. But hope, which accompanies man into extremes, fortified us, and we bucked one another up as best we could.
“Borne by the waves, our vessel suddenly stopped, immobile. All our joint efforts were insufficient to shift us from the spot where it stood. While essaying to dislodge our vessel from what we thought was a shoal, we did not notice that, meanwhile, the wind had almost completely died down. Bit by bit the sky was cleared of the clouds obscuring the deep blue. But incipient dawn, instead of bringing us joy, revealed our dismal position. We perceived clearly that our sloop was located not on a shoal but rather wedged between two large rocks, and that no amount of effort would suffice for its rescue from there undamaged. Imagine, my friend, our situation. No matter what I can say, it would pale by comparison with my feeling. And even if I were able to give sufficient outline of each movement of my soul, it would still be too feeble to reproduce in you sensations similar to the ones that arose and crowded in my soul at that moment. Our vessel stood in the middle of a stone ridge encircling the bay and extending to S… We were positioned about one and a half versts* from the shore. The water had begun to enter our vessel from all sides and threatened to submerge us completely. In the final hour, when the light begins to depart from us and eternity yawns, then all distinctions erected between people by convention fall away. Man becomes simply man: hence, as we saw our end approaching, each of us forgot his status, and each thought about our salvation as we bailed out water, as handily as each could. But what was the use of that? As much water accumulated again as was sluiced by our combined efforts. To our most heartfelt distress, there was no passing vessel in sight either nearby or far off. Even had one appeared to bring joy to our stares, it would have intensified our despair on distancing itself from us in order to avoid the same fate as our own. In the end, our captain was more accustomed than the rest to the hazards of marine accidents because he had, perhaps unwillingly, coldly stared at death during various naval battles in the last Turkish War in the Archipelago.22 For that reason, he resolved either to save us by saving himself or to perish in this virtuous attempt. By staying put, we were certain to perish. He left the boat, and, stepping from stone to stone, aimed his advance toward the shore, attended by our heartfelt prayers. Initially, he progressed quite confidently, hopping from stone to stone, wading through the water in the shallows or swimming across when it got deeper. Our eyes never left him. At length, we saw that his strength had begun to give out, since he traversed the stones more slowly, frequently stopping and sitting down on a rock to rest. It seemed to us that he was sometimes deliberating and uncertain about the continuation of his way. This roused one of his companions to follow him to give him aid should he see that he was exhausted in trying to reach the shore; or to reach it himself if the captain failed. Our gaze was trained now on one, now on the other, and our prayer for their safety was unfeigned. At length, the second of these imitators of Moses in the crossing of depths of sea on foot without a miracle halted on a rock, while we lost the
first from view altogether.
“Each one’s agitations, until now hidden and trapped as it were by terror, became overt with the disappearance of hope. Meanwhile, the water level in the vessel rose, and our increasing labors to evacuate it began noticeably to exhaust our strength. A person of a violent and impatient constitution tore at his hair, bit his fingers, cursed the very hour of his departure. A person of meek spirit who had long felt, perhaps, the impact of stultifying slavery, sobbed, dousing with his tears the bench on which he lay prostrate. Another, in remembering his home, children, and wife, sat as if petrified, considering not his own but their destruction, since they were fed by the fruits of his labor. Since, my friend, you know me reasonably well, you can divine the state of my soul. I shall tell you only that I prayed to God assiduously. Finally, we all began to give way to despair, for our boat was more than half inundated, and we stood in water up to our knees. Not infrequently we considered whether to quit the vessel and to walk along the stone reef to the shore; however, that one of our fellow passengers had already been on the rock for several hours and that another had disappeared from view suggested to us that the danger of walking across was greater than might have actually been the case. Amidst these sorts of woeful ponderings, we spotted on the water near the opposite shore, at some distance from us that was hard to define precisely, two black specks that appeared to be moving. The black something seen by us, and it was moving, seemed gradually to get bigger; finally, as it approached, it presented clearly to our eyes two small ships heading straight for the place where we were located in a state of despair that exceeded hope by a hundred times. As when in a building sealed off from light suddenly a door opens and a ray of daylight, having swooped rapidly into the middle of the gloom disperses it, expanding to the furthest boundaries of the entire building, so a ray of hope in salvation suffused our souls when we saw the ships. Despair turned to rapture, woe into jubilation, and there was a danger lest our joyous movements and clapping bring disaster upon us before we could be wrested from danger. But a hope of living, returning to our hearts, again roused thoughts that slumbered during our peril about the difference in ranks. This time it served the common good. I cut short excessive rejoicing, being liable to turn harmful. After a bit of time, we saw two large fishing boats approaching us and at their reaching us we saw that in one of them was our savior who, having walked along the stone reef to the shore, had sought out these boats in order to extricate us from certain death. Without dawdling one bit, we left our boat and sailed to the shore in the boats that had come to us, not forgetting to retrieve from the rock our fellow companion who had spent about seven hours there. No more than half an hour passed before our boat, wedged in the rocks, relieved of the weight, floated up and disintegrated completely. While we sailed to the shore in a state of rejoicing and the raptures of salvation, Pavel—that was the name of the fellow passenger who saved us—told us the following:
“‘Having left you in imminent danger, I hastened along the rocks to the shore. The wish to save you gave me unnatural strength, but about one hundred sazhen* from the shore my strength began to give out, and I began to despair for your salvation and my life. Yet after I lay for half an hour on a rock, I rose with renewed vigor and with no further rest crawled, as it were, all the way to the shore. There I sprawled on the grass, and after I rested about ten minutes, got up and raced with all my might along the strand to S… And while the depletion of my energy was considerable, by remembering you I made it to the spot. It seems as though the Heavens wanted to test your resolve and my patience, since I had found no boat for your rescue on the strand or in S… itself. Finding myself practically in despair, I thought there was no better place to seek help than from the superior officer there. I ran to the house where he lived. It was already the seventh hour. In the entrance room I found the sergeant of the local guard. Having briefly told him why I came and of your situation, I asked him to awaken Mr…, who was still resting. Mr. Sergeant said to me, “My friend, I do not dare.” “What! You do not dare? When twenty people are drowning, do you not dare to wake up one who can save them? You good-for-nothing are lying, I will go myself….”—Mr. Sergeant grabbed me by the shoulder not very courteously and shoved me out the door. I almost burst with indignation. But thinking more about the danger you were in than about the insult to me, and about the hard-heartedness of the man in charge and his deputy, I rushed off to the sentry station at a distance of about two versts* from the wretched house from which I had been ejected. I knew that the soldiers living there kept boats in which while sailing around the bay they collected cobbles for sale as paving stones. I was not mistaken in my hopes. I found these two small boats and my rejoicing was indescribable: you shall all be saved! If you had drowned, then I would have thrown myself into the water after you.’ Pavel was dissolving into tears while saying this. Meanwhile, we had reached the shore. When I got out of the boat I fell on my knees, raised my hands to the sky. ‘Almighty Father,’ I cried out, ‘it pleased You that we should live. You led us to a test, may it be Your will.’ This, my friend, is a weak depiction of what I felt. The terror of the last hour had pierced my soul; I saw the moment when I would cease to exist. What would I be? I know not. A terrifying unknown. Even now I can feel it: my hour has struck; I am dead; motion, life, feeling, thought, all vanish instantly. Imagine, my friend, that you are on the edge of the grave, wouldn’t you feel the spasmodic chill pouring through your veins and prematurely cutting off your life. O my friend!”—But I have digressed from my narrative.
My prayer completed, rage entered into my heart. Is it possible, said I to myself, that in our age, in Europe, near the capital, in sight of a great ruler such inhumanity has occurred? I recalled the Englishmen incarcerated in the jail of the Bengal Subedar.*23
“I groaned in the depths of my soul.—In the meantime, we arrived at S… I thought that the superior officer, once up, would punish his sergeant and grant respite at least to those who had suffered on the water. This was my hope when I went straight to see him at home. But I was so exasperated by the action of his deputy that I was unable to moderate my words. When I saw him, I said, ‘Sir! Have you been informed that several hours previously twenty men were in danger of losing their lives at sea and requested help from you?’ He responded to me with the greatest indifference as he smoked tobacco: ‘I was told about this just now, but I was sleeping at the time.’ Thereupon I began to tremble in a humanity-incensed rage. ‘If your sleep is so sound you should have given the order to be roused with a hammer to the head when people are drowning and in need of your aid.’ Guess, my friend, what his reply was. I thought I was going to have a stroke when I heard it. He said to me, ‘That is not my duty.’ I lost patience: ‘As if it were your duty to kill people, wretch. And you wear decorations, you are in charge of others! …’ I was unable to finish my speech, practically spat in his mug, and walked right out. I tore my hair from indignation. I was devising a hundred schemes for taking revenge on this beastly superior officer not for myself but on behalf of humanity. When I regained control, by rehearsing in my memory many examples I grew convinced that my vengeance would be fruitless; that I would then get the reputation for being either mad or an evil person. I became resigned.
“Meanwhile, my people called on a priest who greeted us gladly, warmed and fed us, gave repose. We spent an entire twenty-four hours with him, benefitting from his hospitality and refreshment. The next day, after finding a large sloop, we arrived safely in Oranienbaum.24 In Petersburg, I recounted this to one person and another. All empathized with the danger I had been in, all disparaged the hard-heartedness of the superior officer; no one wanted to broach the matter with him. If we had drowned then he would have been our murderer. But someone said: ‘It was not prescribed as his duty to save you.’ Now I shall part with the city forever. There is no way I shall return to this den of tigers. Their only enjoyment is to maul one another; their joy is to torment the weak till they croak and to kowtow to power. And you want
ed me to settle in the city! No, my friend,” said my storyteller, jumping up from his seat, “I shall go where people do not go, where they do not know what man is, where his name is unknown. Farewell.” He got into his carriage and galloped off.
* two and two-thirds miles—Trans.
* one mile—Trans.
* two hundred yards—Trans.
* one and one-third miles—Trans.
* The English took under their protection in Calcutta a Bengal official who defected to them when liable to execution for taking bribes. The Subedar was offended, rightly so, gathered a force, attacked the city and took it. He ordered the English prisoners of war to be thrown into a crowded dungeon in which they expired in half a day. Of their total only twenty-three people remained. These unfortunate ones promised great sums of money to their guards to get them to tell the ruler of their plight. Their cries, their groans reached the people who felt anguished for them, but nobody wished to tell the ruler. “He is resting” was the answer given to the dying Englishmen; and not a single person in Bengal thought he must disturb momentarily the sleep of this tyrant to save the lives of one hundred fifty unfortunate men.
What is a tyrant? Or rather what sort of people is it that has become accustomed to the yoke of tyranny? Is it reverence or fear that keeps them bowed down? If it is fear then the tyrant is worse than the gods to whom man sends either a prayer or a lament during the night or in the hours of day. If it is reverence, then one can induce man to respect the contributors to his woes: a miracle that is possible only because of superstition. What is there to wonder at more, the ferocity of the sleeping nabob or the cravenness of him who does not dare to wake him?—Raynal, Histoire des Indes, vol. 2.
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Page 5