Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

by Irina Reyfman

  “In his village there lived a young peasant wench. She was not bad looking, and promised in marriage to a young peasant of the same village. The middle son of the assessor fancied her, and he did everything he could to woo her affections. But the peasant girl was faithful, having plighted her troth to her groom, a rare thing that does occasionally happen among the peasantry. The wedding was due to take place on a Sunday. According to the custom introduced by many landowners, the father of the groom accompanied his son to the manor house and brought with him two poods* of honey as a bridal tribute to his master. This was the moment the young master decided to use in order to satisfy his own lust. He took along his two brothers, used a strange boy as intermediary to lure her into the courtyard, gagged her while dragging her into a pen. Unable to cry out, she resisted with all her might the ferocious intention of her young master. Overwhelmed in the end by all three, she was coerced into submitting to their violence, and thus it was that when the horrid monster was on the brink of satisfying his intention, the bridegroom returned from the manor house, entered the courtyard, and, spotting one of the young masters near the pen, became suspicious about their evil plan. He called for his father to come help and then quicker than lightning flew to the pen. What a sight awaited him! As he approached, the door to the pen closed shut but the combined strength of two brothers was unequal to contain the headlong charge of the enraged groom. He grabbed a stake lying nearby, jumped into the pen and bashed on the back his bride’s predator. They were about to grab him but when they saw the groom’s father running, also with a stake in hand, to his aid, they abandoned their prey, scampered out of the pen, and ran. But the bridegroom caught up with one of them and with his stake bashed him on the head, smashing it in. These villains, wishing to avenge their injury, went straight to their father and told him that they had been walking around the village when they had met the bride and joked with her; and that when her bridegroom saw this he attacked them, aided by his father. As proof they showed him one of the brothers’ smashed-in head. Enraged to the innermost part of his heart by the injury to his own born, the father boiled over with the wrath of fury. At once he ordered that the three villains, as he called the groom, bride, and groom’s father, be brought before him. When the three were in his presence, his first question was as to who had smashed open his son’s head. The groom did not deny what he had done and gave an account of the entire incident. ‘How did you dare,’ said the old assessor, ‘to lift a hand against your master? Even if he had spent the night before your wedding with your bride you should have been grateful for this to him. You shall not marry her. She will remain in my home and you will be punished.’ The decision made, he ordered that the groom, having given him over to his sons to do as they please, be whipped mercilessly with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Bravely did he withstand their beating, and his spirit was unflinching as he watched them begin to torture his father in the same way. But he was unable to bear it when he saw the master’s servants make to remove his bride into the house. The punishment was being delivered in the courtyard. In a split second he wrested her from the hands of her captors; freed, the pair of them fled the yard. Seeing this, the master’s sons stopped whipping the father and gave chase. Sensing they were catching up with him, the groom grabbed a plank and fought back. Meanwhile, the noise attracted other peasants to the courtyard of the manor house. Sympathizing as they did with the plight of the young peasant, and their hearts filled with rancor against their masters, they took his side. Seeing this, the assessor rushed there, began to chew them out, and with his walking stick landed such a blow on the first person he saw that he fell to the ground senseless. This was the signal for a general assault. All four of the masters were surrounded and, to put it succinctly, beaten to death on the very spot. They were all so reviled that not a single person wished to be denied the chance to participate in this killing, as they admitted themselves later. It was just at that moment that the chief of police of this district was passing through with his squad. He was an eyewitness to some of what occurred. He arrested the guilty men—and half the village was guilty; the investigation he conducted eventually went to the criminal court. The case was laid out very clearly and the guilty confessed to everything. In their defense, they cited only the excruciating deeds of their owners about which the entire province already knew. Such was the case on which, by virtue of my position, I was obliged to establish a final verdict: to condemn the guilty to a death sentence, commuted to a public beating and the life sentence of hard labor.

  “In reviewing the case, I did not find sufficient or convincing grounds for conviction of the criminals. The peasants who killed their master committed murder. But was this murder not coerced? Was not its cause the dead assessor himself? Just as a third number obviously follows two numbers arithmetically, in this case, too, the consequence was necessary. The innocence of the killers was, at least to me, a mathematical certainty. If while I am walking a villain attacks me and, raising a knife above my head, wants to stab me, would I be considered a murderer if I prevent the crime and knock him down lifeless at my own feet? If some present-day fop should want to get even with me for well-deserved disdain and, on meeting me in an isolated place, draws his sword to attack me either to deprive me of my life or at the very least to wound me, would I be guilty if, having pulled out my sword for my own defense, I were to relieve society of a member causing a disturbance to the peace? Can we consider that such a deed violates the safety of a member of society if I commit it for my own salvation, if I do it to preempt my demise, if without it my own welfare would be irretrievably pitiable?

  “Imbued with these thoughts, I felt, as you can imagine, a torment in my soul when considering the case. With my customary frankness, I disclosed my thoughts to my fellow justices. They raised their voices unanimously against me. They considered clemency and philanthropy a culpable defense of criminal deeds. They called me a fomenter of murder; they called me an accessory to the murderers. Their opinion was that all domestic security would vanish if my opinions were to spread. ‘Would any nobleman,’ they said, ‘henceforth be able to live securely on his estate? Would he see his commands fulfilled? If those who defied the will of their master, not to mention his murderers, were declared not guilty, then obedience would be disrupted, the domestic contract would be destroyed, the chaos inherent in primordial societies would recur. Agriculture would die out, its tools would be destroyed, cultivated fields would be barren and be overgrown with unproductive weed; villagers, unencumbered by any authority above them, would rove about indolent and slothful and would disperse. Cities would experience the omnipotent hand of destruction. Craft would become alien to city dwellers, manufacture would forfeit application and diligence, trade would dry up at the source, wealth would surrender to miserable poverty, the grandest buildings would become dilapidated, the laws would be eclipsed and grow ineffectual. At that point, the immense organism of society would fall into pieces that, separated from the whole, would atrophy; then the seat of royalty, on which the support, bulwark, and integration of society currently rest, would decay and collapse; then the ruler of nations would become a simple citizen and society would witness its end.’ This picture, worthy of a hellish brush, my colleagues endeavored to lay before the gaze of anyone who happened to hear about the case. ‘It is natural that the president of our court,’ they pontificated, ‘is minded to defend a murder committed by peasants. Inquire of him as to his social origins. Unless we are mistaken, he himself walked behind the plow in his youth. It is always these newly minted members of the nobility who have odd ideas about the natural rights of the nobility over the peasants. If this depended on him, he would, we believe, lump us all together as peasants with land57 in order to level his class origins with our own.’ These were the words with which my colleagues thought they could insult me and make me hated by the entire society. But this was not enough for them. They said that I had taken a bribe from the wife of the murdered assessor who did not want to be deprived of th
e peasants she owned if they were sent off to do labor, and that this was the real reason for strange and harmful views of mine that were broadly offensive to the rights of the entire gentry. Mindless as they were, they thought that their mockery would wound me, that their calumny would humiliate me, that their misrepresentation of my good purpose would alienate me from it! They had no knowledge of my heart. They were ignorant that I would always remain unflinching and staunch before the judgment of my conscience, and that my cheeks had no cause to blush with the crimson flush of conscience.

  “My venality they alleged on the grounds that the wife of the assessor did not wish to avenge the death of her husband, but rather, led by her own greed and following the practice of her husband, preferred to spare the peasants punishment in order, as she said, not to forfeit her estate. She also came to see me with a request along these lines. I agreed with her about forgiving the murder of her husband, but our motivations differed. She assured me that she would punish them quite enough, whereas I tried to persuade her that in acquitting her husband’s murderers it was important not to submit them to the same extreme punishment so that they wouldn’t again become evildoers—as they were wrongly called.

  “The governor-general was soon informed of my view on this matter, learned that I had tried to win over my colleagues to my thoughts, and that they were beginning to waiver in their reasoning—wherein it was not the firmness and persuasiveness of my arguments that proved conducive but rather the money of the assessor’s wife. Being himself a product of the rules of unlimited power over the peasants, he does not agree with my judgments and, indignant on seeing this reasoning, begins to prevail in the deliberation of this affair albeit for other reasons. He sends for my colleagues, admonishes them, asserting the deplorable nature of such views as injurious to noble society, injurious to supreme power because they violate legal statutes; he promises reward to all those who fulfilled the law, threatening with sanction anyone who does not obey it; and he soon brings round to their previous views weak judges lacking principles in their reflections or firmness of spirit. I was not surprised to note the change, since their previous reversal caused me no surprise. It is natural for weak, timid, and base souls to shudder at the menace of power and to embrace its acceptance.

  “Our governor-general, having reversed the opinions of my colleagues, perhaps planned, and flattered himself on this, to change mine, too. He had this goal in mind when he summoned me on the morning of what happened to be a holiday. He was obliged to summon me, since I was not in the habit of attending those mindless audiences that pride regards as the duty of subordinates, flattery regards as necessary, but the wise man regards as loathsome and offensive to humanity. He deliberately chose a day of celebration when a large number of people attended his gathering; he deliberately chose a public gathering for his speech, reckoning that this would convince me more conclusively. He counted on discovering in me either a timorous soul or mental weakness. He took aim at both of these in his speech. But I consider it unnecessary to paraphrase for you all that his arrogance, sense of power, and overweening confidence in his astuteness and learning imparted to his eloquence. To his arrogance I replied with indifference and calm; to his power—with firmness, matching logical argument for argument, and I spoke for a long time with icy control. But in the end a shaken heart spilled out its surplus of feeling. The clearer the audience’s acquiescence became, the more emotional my speech. In a firm voice and ringing enunciation I finally cried out: ‘Each person is born into this world the equal of any other. We all have similar limbs, we all have reason and will. Man considered, therefore, outside society is a being dependent on nobody else for his own deeds. But he puts a limit on these, consents not to subordinate himself to his own will alone, and becomes obedient to the commands of other human beings, in a word becomes a citizen. For the sake of what cause does he restrain his desires? For what purpose does he set a power over himself? Unlimited in the exercise of his willpower, why does he limit it through obedience?—For his own sake,—says reason.—For his own sake,—says an inner voice.—For his own sake,—says wise legislation. It follows that where it is not in his interest to be a citizen there is no citizen. It follows, therefore, that whoever wants to deprive him of the advantage of being a citizen is his enemy. He seeks in the law defense and retribution against his enemy. If the law either does not have the power to defend him or does not wish to do so, or lacks the power to help him immediately in his present woe, then the citizen uses his natural right of defense, preservation, welfare. For the citizen, insofar as he has become a citizen, does not cease to be a person whose first duty, stemming from his organism, is preservation, defense, welfare. The assessor murdered by the peasants violated with his bestial actions their rights as citizens. At that moment when he condoned the violence of his sons, when to the heartache of the betrothed he added rape, when he threatened punishment because they resisted his hellish domination, at that moment the law intended to protect the citizen was remote and its efficacity was negligible. That was when the law of nature awakened and the insulted citizen’s power, which positive law does not take away when he is injured, came into force. The peasants who killed the bestial assessor are innocent before the law. Based on the conclusions of reason, my heart acquits them; and the death of the assessor, while violent, was just. Let no one conceive of basing political decisions on prudence, basing the condemnation of the murder of the assessor who gasped his last breath in such malice on the desire for social calm. No matter the station of life into which he was fated to have been born, the citizen is and always will be a person, and for as long as he is a person, the law of nature as the abundant source of benefits will never dry up in him. And one who dares to damage what is in him a natural and indestructible property is a criminal. Woe unto him if the civil law does not punish him. He will be tainted, marked out as despicable among his fellow citizens and every person of adequate strength should avenge the injury done by him.’ I fell silent. The governor-general did not address a word to me. Now and again he raised toward me sullen looks charged with the rage of impotence and malignancy of revenge. Everyone remained silent, expecting that I would be taken into custody for offending against all privileges. Now and again from the lips of the servile, one heard a rumbling of indignation. Everyone averted their eyes from me. Terror, it seems, gripped those standing near me. They imperceptibly withdrew as though from someone afflicted with a fatal plague. Fed up with the spectacle of such a mixture of arrogance and the most craven baseness, I departed from this assembly of lickspittles.

  “Having failed to find a way to save the innocent murderers whom my heart absolved, I did not want to be complicit in their punishment or be its witness. I petitioned for retirement, received it, and here I am now journeying to lament the pathetic state of the peasants’ station, and to alleviate my distress by associating with friends.” We parted on this note, and each headed off in his direction.—

  My trip that day was not a success. The horses were bad and had to be changed over and over; and finally as we went down a small hill the axle of the carriage splintered and I was unable to advance.—I am accustomed to walking. Seizing my staff, off I marched to the postal station. But for a resident of St. Petersburg a walk along the highway is not very pleasant and bears no resemblance to a stroll in the Summer Garden or the Baba.58 I got worn out quite quickly and needed to sit down.

  While I sat on a stone and drew figures of one kind or another in the sand, sometimes irregular and not at right angles, and thought about this and that, a carriage raced past me. The passenger spotted me and ordered the coach to stop. In him I recognized my acquaintance. “What are you doing?” he asked me. “I am having a think. There is more than enough time for reflection. An axle splintered. What’s new?” “Same old rubbish. The weather changes with the wind, now sleet, now fair weather. Ah! … There is something new. Duryndin has got married.” “That can’t be true—he’s about eighty.” “That’s right. Look, here is a lett
er for you…. Read it at your leisure, but I have to be getting on. Bye—,” and we parted.

  The letter was from my friend. Avid for all sorts of news items, he promised to supply me with them during my absence and kept his word. In the meanwhile they had fitted to my carriage a new axle, fortunately kept as a spare. As I rode I read: