Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

by Irina Reyfman

  “In your infancy and adolescence, I did not burden your reason with readied reflections or alien thoughts, did not burden your memory with too many topics. But having offered you the path to knowledge, since that time you have begun to sense the power of your own reason, you stride by yourselves along the way that is open to you. Your knowledge is better founded because you acquired it not through repetition, as the proverbial saying goes, like parroting birds. In accordance with this rule, for as long as your powers of reason were inactive, I did not present you concepts about the Almighty Being and even less about Revelation. For what you learned before you acquired reason would have been prejudice in you and hindered reasoning. When I then observed that in your ratiocinations you were led by the mind, that was when I suggested to you the connection of concepts that lead to the awareness of God. I am convinced in the depth of my heart that it is more pleasant for the all-munificent Father to behold two unspoiled souls in whom the lamp of learning is not ignited by prejudice, but of their own accord rise aloft to the primal fire to be kindled. That was when I made a proposition to you about the law of Revelation without hiding from you everything that had been said by many in refutation of it. Because I wanted you to be able to discriminate between milk and bile, and joyously saw that you accepted this vessel of comfort boldly.

  “In giving you instruction in the sciences, I did not neglect to acquaint you with various peoples, having taught you foreign languages. But above all my duty was that you should know your own language so that you would be able in it to express your thoughts orally and in writing and so that your style would be unforced and not cause a drop of sweat to form on your face. I tried to give you greater familiarity with the English language,61 as well as Latin, than with others. For the resilience of the spirit of freedom, when transmuted into the signification of language, also trains reason in the concrete concepts essential to all governments.

  “But if I allowed your reason to guide your steps on the paths of learning, I endeavored to be all the more vigilant in your moral education. I tried to moderate in you momentary anger, subjecting to reason the anger that is extended and leads to retribution. Retribution! … Your soul abhors it. Of this natural inclination of creatures endowed with sensitivity you have only by defying the urge to repay violence kept the defensiveness of your organism.

  “The time has now arrived when your feelings, after reaching an apogee of agitation still short of a complete understanding about what has been stimulated, begin to be alarmed by every external stimulus and to produce a dangerous tremor within you. Now you have reached the time when, as it is said, reason becomes the determinant of your activity and inactivity; or better to say when feelings, earlier sustained by the fluidity of infancy, begin to feel disturbance, or when vital juices, having filled the vessel of youth, begin to overflow its brim in search of a path that suits their current. I preserved you inviolable until now from corrupt disturbances of feelings, but did not hide from you, by using the cloak of ignorance, the fatal consequences of being diverted from the path of moderation in sensual satisfaction. You were witnesses of how awful an excess of sensual satisfaction is and abhorred it; you were witnesses of the terrible tumult of passions that overflowed the banks of their natural course, recognized their fateful devastation and recoiled. My expertise, watching over you like a new Aegis, protected you from pointless pains. Now you shall be your own pilots, and while my advice will always be a lamp for your own initiatives, since your heart and soul are open to me, but like a light that grows dimmer as it grows distant from the object, so shall you, at a distance from my presence, feel the weak warmth of my friendship. And this is why I shall teach you the rules of private life and civic life so that you shall feel no disgust at activities done in a passionate state once they have subsided, and shall not know the meaning of remorse.

  “The rules of private life, insofar as this pertains to you, must relate to your body and morality. Never forget to use your physical powers and your feelings. Their moderate exercise will strengthen but not exhaust them, and will serve to benefit your health and longevity. And for that reason practice in the arts, crafts, and skills that you know. Mastery in them might sometimes be required. The future is unknown to us. Should inimical fortune strip you of everything it has given you, you will be rich in the moderation of your desires, sustained by the work of your hands. But if you neglect to practice in days of happiness, it will be late to think about this during sad times. Luxury, indolence, and the immoderate satisfaction of senses destroy both the body and spirit. For one who exhausts the body through lack of restraint exhausts the strength of the spirit. But use of your strength will reinforce the body and with it the spirit. If you feel an aversion to foodstuffs and illness comes knocking at the door, leap up then from your bed on which you indulge your senses, engage your sleeping limbs in action with exercise, and you will feel an immediate renewal of your strength. Restrain yourself from the food needed when you are healthy and hunger will make sweet the food that tasted bitter when you were full. Remember always that to put hunger to rest, all that is needed is a morsel of bread and ladle of water. If sleep, the beneficial deprivation of external sensations, should depart from the head of your bed and you are unable to renew your mental and physical powers—flee from your halls and once you have wearied your limbs to the point of exhaustion, lie down on your bed and you will fall asleep for the sake of health.

  “Be fastidious in your attire, keep your body clean since cleanliness conduces to health while negligence and fetidness of the body open an insidious path to vile vices. But in this too be not immoderate. Do not shirk from helping to raise up a cart stuck in the mud in a ditch and to help someone who has fallen: get your hands, legs, and body dirty but enlighten your heart. Enter the cabins of degradation, comfort one suffering from poverty, taste his victuals, and your heart will be assuaged through giving joy to the sufferer.

  “You have reached now, I repeat, that terrible time and hour when the passions begin to awaken, but when reason is still a weak curb on them. For on the scales of will, the tray of reason without experience will rise up but the tray of passions instantaneously drops very low. There is, therefore, no other way to approach equilibrium except by dint of effort. Put your body to work, your passions will not experience so strong a disturbance; put your heart to work by practicing goodness, sensibility, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and your passions will find a happy issue. Put your reason to work, laboring at reading, reflections, the search for truth and facts, and reason will guide your will and your passions. But do not have the presumption in a fit of reason that you are able to eliminate the roots of the passions and that you can be completely dispassionate. The root of the passions is good and founded by nature on our sensibility. When our senses, external and internal, weaken and become dulled the passions, too, weaken. They produce in man a beneficial disquiet without which he would fall asleep in inertness. An absolutely dispassionate person is a dolt and ludicrous dummy equally incapable of good and evil. There is no merit in holding back from bad designs if you are unable to carry them out. A man missing an arm is unable to wound anyone but nor can he give aid to a drowning man or restrain a man on the shore who falls into the abyss of the sea.—Therefore moderation in passion is a good; progress on the middle path is secure. Excess in passion is fatal, dispassion is moral death. Like the wayfarer who, wandering away from the middle of the path, risks the danger of falling into this or that ditch, so, too, is the pathway for morality. But should your passions be directed toward a positive goal by experience, reason, and the heart, throw off from them the reins of wearying prudence, do not stymie their flight; grandeur will always be their goal, and there only can they come to rest.

  “But if I encourage you not to be dispassionate, more important than anything is moderation of erotic passion in your youth. It has been planted in our heart by nature for our pleasure. Hence a mistake can arise in the lack of moderation and the object but never in its comin
g to life. Take care, therefore not to be mistaken in the object of your love and not to mistake a semblance for mutual ardor. If the object of love is good, you will not know the immoderateness of passion. As we are talking about love, it would be natural to speak as well about marriage, about this holy social union whose rules nature did not outline in the heart, but whose sanctity flows from the fundamental condition of society. To your reason, scarcely embarked on this path, this would not be clear; to your heart, as yet not having experienced in society the egotistical passion of love, a story about it would be imperceptible to you, and therefore useless. If you should wish to have an idea about marriage, recall her who gave birth to you. Remember me with her and with you, revive in your hearing our words and mutual kisses, and clasp this picture to your heart. You will then feel in it some sort of pleasant shudder. What is it? With time you will recognize, but for now be contented with its sensation.

  “Let us now briefly consider the rules of civic life. They cannot be prescribed accurately since their arrangement often takes shape according to momentary circumstances. But to avoid mistakes as much as possible, interrogate your heart in every initiative; it is good and can in no way betray you. What it tells you that is what you should do. By following your heart in youth you will not be mistaken if you have a good heart. But anyone is truly a madman who thinks he can follow reason even before they have hairs on their chin signifying experience.

  “The rules of civic society relate to the fulfilment of customs and popular mores, or to the fulfilment of the law, or to the performance of virtue. If in society mores and customs are not contrary to the law, if the law does not present obstacles to virtue on its path, then adherence to the rules of civil society is easy. But where does a society of this type exist? All those known to us are full of many contradictions in mores and customs, the laws and virtues. This is why the fulfilment of one’s duty as a human being and citizen becomes difficult, since they frequently occur in complete contradiction.

  “Inasmuch as virtue is the acme of human actions, its accomplishment, therefore, must not be hindered in any way. Disregard the mores and customs, disregard civil and sacred law, things held in such respect in society, when their accomplishment separates you from virtue. Do not attempt, above all, to cover up the failure of virtue with cowardly prudence. Without virtue you will be superficially fortunate but never blessed.

  “In following what customs and mores require of us, we acquire the goodwill of those with whom we live. By implementing the prescription of the law, we may acquire the name of an honest person. By observing virtue, we acquire general trust, respect, and admiration even among those who otherwise have no wish to feel these in their soul. When giving a cup of poison to Socrates, the treacherous Athenian Senate trembled inwardly before his virtue.

  “Never dare to observe customs contrary to the law. The law, however bad, is the connecting principle of society. And even if the ruler himself were to bid you to violate the law do not obey him, since he is mistaken to his own detriment and that of society. Should he abolish the law whose violation he orders, then obey it since the ruler is the source of laws in Russia.

  “But if the law, or ruler, or some other earthly power incited you to a lie and the ruin of virtue, remain steadfast. Fear not mockery nor torment nor illness nor prison nor even death. Remain resolute in your soul like a stone surrounded by rioting but powerless waves. The fury of your tormentors will be smashed on your firmness; and if you are consigned to death they will be mocked, while you will live on in the memory of noble souls to the end of time. Be careful in advance about calling weakness in affairs prudence: weakness is the first enemy of virtue. Today you will infringe virtue for some sort of deference, tomorrow its ruin will seem to be virtue itself; and thus it is that vice will come to reign in your heart and distort the features of innocence in your soul and on your face.

  “The virtues are private or civil. Motivations for the first are a good heart, gentleness, compassion, and their roots are always good. Motivations for civic virtues often have their origin in vanity and ambition. But one should not stop in their implementation. The purpose that moves them gives them importance. In the figure of Curtius who saved his fatherland from a fatal plague nobody sees a person who was vain or gloomy or desperate but rather a hero. If, however, the motivations to our civil virtues have their origin in a philanthropic firmness of soul, then their brilliance will be that much the greater. Always test yourself in the private virtues in order to be worthy of the implementation of the civic virtues.

  “I shall propound to you also several rules of life to follow.—More than anything try in all your actions to earn your self-respect so that when in moments of solitude you turn your gaze inward you shall not only have nothing to regret in what you have done but will look upon yourself with reverence.

  “Consistent with this rule, stay aloof insofar as possible from even the appearance of obsequiousness. When you enter the world, you will quickly learn that there is custom in society. The custom of visiting important figures in the mornings on celebratory days is miserable, meaningless, displaying in the visitors the spirit of timidity and in the visited a spirit of arrogance and feeble reason. The Romans had a similar practice, which they called ambition, that is ‘aspiration’ or ‘cultivation,’ which is why the love of honor is called ambition since the young through their visits to distinguished people sought for a path for themselves to ranks and distinctions. The same also happens now. But if the custom of the Romans was introduced so that young people could learn through their courting of experienced individuals, I doubt that the goal of this custom has always been preserved uncorrupted. In our times, in visiting distinguished lords nobody has education rather than the attainment of favor as a goal. And thus may your foot never cross the boundary separating obsequiousness from the discharging of a duty. Never visit the antechamber of an important lord if it is not in the performance of your duty. Then even the one whom the contemptible crowd adulates with servility will, in the depths of his soul, not confuse you with the rest, even if he does so with umbrage.

  “If it should happen that death truncates my days before you are firmly established on the good path, and the passions lure you off the path of reason while you are still young—do not despair when you see your sometimes misguided course. In your error, in your obliviousness to yourself, love the good. A debauched life, limitless ambition, arrogance, and all the vices of youth leave intact a hope for correction since they glide on the surface of the heart, not wounding it. I would prefer that you be debauched in your young years, spendthrift, arrogant, than tightfisted or even excessively frugal, foppish, more concerned with your appearance than anything else. A disposition we might call systematic to foppishness always indicates a closed mind. If it is recounted that Julius Caesar was a fop then his foppishness had a goal. A passion for women in his youth was the stimulus to this. But from a fop he would have clad himself in a flash in the vilest rag if that had facilitated the attainment of his desires.

  “In a young person not only is passing foppishness forgivable, but so is practically every kind of foolishness. If, however, you are going to camouflage treachery, mendacity, perfidy, avarice, pride, vengefulness, beastliness with dazzling actions then while you will blind your contemporaries with the brilliance of your shiny appearance (although you will find nobody who loves you sufficiently to hold up the mirror of truth to you) do not think, however, that it will dull the gaze of perspicacity.—It will penetrate the shiny raiment of cunning, and virtue will expose the blackness of your soul. Your heart will start to hate virtue, and like a sensitive plant will wither at your touch, its arrows will wound and torment you not immediately, but from afar.

  “Farewell, my dear ones, farewell, friends of my soul. Today, helped by a fair wind cast your boat off from shores of someone else’s experience, course along the waves of human life so you may learn to govern yourselves. Blessed you will be if, having avoided disaster, you reach the berth
we crave. Have a happy voyage, that is my sincere wish. My vital forces, exhausted by activity and life, will grow weak and will peter out. I shall leave you for evermore. But this now is my testament to you. If inimical fate exhausts all its arrows on you, if your virtue no longer can find a refuge on earth, if pushed to the last extreme you have no protection from oppression, remember then that you are a person, recall your majesty, seize the crown of beatitude though others attempt to filch it from you.—Die.—I bequeath you the words of the dying Cato.—But if you know how to die in virtue, then know how to die in vice as well, and be, one might say, virtuous in evil itself.—If you hasten after bad deeds, having forgotten my prescriptions, your soul accustomed to virtue will be alarmed, and I shall appear to you in a dream.—Rise, then, from your bedstead, follow in your soul my apparition.—If a tear flows from your eyes, you go back to sleep, you will wake up ready for improvement. But if amidst your bad initiatives, your soul remains unmoved and your eye remains dry…. Here is the steel, here is the poison.—Spare me the grief, spare the earth this shameful burden.—Remain, still, my son.—Die for virtue.”

  While the old man was speaking, a youthful blush covered his wrinkled cheeks; his glance emitted rays of hopeful rejoicing, the features of his face shone with a supernatural substance.—He kissed his children and, conducting them to the carriage, remained firm to the final farewell. But scarcely had the ring of the little postal bell announced to him that they had begun to withdraw from him, this resolute soul softened. Tears filled his eyes, his breast heaved; he reached out his arms for the departing and seemingly wanted to stop the horses in their rush. The youths, spotting from afar that their progenitor was in such a state of sorrow, began to sob so loudly that the breeze carried their pitiful groan to our hearing. They likewise stretched out their arms to their father and seemingly called him to them. The old man was unable to bear the spectacle, his strength waned, and he fell into my embrace. In the meanwhile a hillock screened the youths as they departed from our sight, and once the old man revived, he stood on his knees and raised his arms and eyes to the sky. “Lord,” he cried out, “I beseech You to strengthen them in the ways of virtue, pray that they will be blessed. Thou knowest, munificent Father, that I have never bothered You with a pointless supplication. I am certain in my soul how good and just You are. In us what is dearest to You is virtue; the actions of a pure heart are for You the best sacrifice…. Today I have separated my sons from myself…. Lord, may Your will be done upon them.” Troubled but resolved in his hope, he left for his home.