I shrugged my shoulders more than once while listening to this tramp; and with a pained heart lay down in my cart, set off on my journey.
* It is forbidden to make and complete bills for the sale of peasants at the time of conscription.
* thirty-six pounds—Trans.
ZAVIDOVO
The horses were already harnessed to the cart, and I was preparing to depart when suddenly a great commotion arose outside. People began running from one end of the village to the other. Outside I saw a military man in a grenadier hat who proudly strutted about and, holding a raised whip, shouted: “Quickly, horses! Where is the elder? His Excellency will be here in a minute. Present the elder to me now….” Doffing his hat at a hundred paces, the elder ran at top speed in response to the summons. “Quickly, horses.” “Right away, little father. An order for post horses please.” “Take it. And hurry up, or else …” he was saying, raising the whip over the head of the trembling elder. This unfinished speech was as full of expression as Aeolus’s speech to the winds “Or else …”117 in Virgil’s Aeneid. And cowed by the sight of the scourge of the all-powerful grenadier, the elder felt the might of the threatening warrior’s hand as vividly as the mutinous winds felt over them the power of Aeolus’s forceful trident. Surrendering the order for post horses to the latter day Polkan,118 the elder said: “His Excellency and his honorable family require fifty horses, and we only have thirty on hand, others are out.”119 “Make them, old devil. And if there are no horses, I will disfigure you.” “But where can I get them, if they are nowhere to be had?” “He’s still talking…. But I will have these horses….” And he grabbed the old man’s beard and began mercilessly beating him on the shoulders with the whip. “Have you had enough? Well there are three fresh ones,” said the judge, a stickler of the post station, pointing to the horses harnessed to my cart. “Unharness them for us.” “If the master will give them up.” “How can he not give them up? He’ll get the same from me that you’ve had. And who is he?” “Don’t know, some….” What honorific he gave me, I do not know.
Meanwhile I walked outside and stopped the brave precursor of His Excellency from fulfilling his intention to force me to spend the night in the post station by unharnessing my horses.
My spat with the Polkan of the guards was interrupted by the arrival of His Excellency. Even from afar one could hear the shouts of drivers and clatter of horses galloping with all their might. The rapid beating of hooves and the rotation of wheels invisible to the eye so thickened the air with a cloud of dust that His Excellency’s chariot was concealed by an impenetrable cloud from the gazes of the coachmen awaiting him as if he were a thundercloud. Don Quixote, for sure, would have seen something miraculous here, since the dust cloud that swirled under the eminent person of His Excellency suddenly stopped and parted, and he appeared before us gray-faced from dust looking like progeny born looking black at birth.
Between my arrival at the post station and the time when horses were again harnessed to my cart at least an entire hour passed. But the carts of His Excellency were hitched up in no more than a quarter of an hour … and away they galloped on the wings of the wind. Still, my nags, even though they looked superior to the ones privileged to carry the person of His Excellency, ran at a moderate trot since they did not fear the grenadier’s knout.
Blessed are the grandees of autocratic governments. Blessed are those decorated by ranks and sashes. All nature obeys them. Even senseless beasts cater to their desires and, lest they grow bored of yawning while on the way, gallop without sparing their legs or their lungs and often die of the effort. Blessed are—I will repeat—those whose appearance draws everyone to reverence. Among those who tremble when menaced by the lash, how many know that the one in whose name they threaten him is in the court grammar labeled “without voice”? That in all his life he could say neither A … nor O …?*120 That he is indebted for his prominence to someone whom he is ashamed to name? That in his heart he is the basest creature? That deception, perfidy, treachery, fornication, poisoning, thievery, robbery, murder cost him no more than drinking a glass of water? That his cheeks never reddened out of shame, perhaps only out of rage or from a slap? That he is a friend to every court stoker and the slave of anyone barely cutting a figure at court? But he is a sneering overlord to everyone ignorant of his baseness and obsequiousness. Eminence without true merit resembles village sorcerers. All peasants respect and fear them, thinking that they are masters of the supernatural. These impostors rule over them, however they want. But as soon as anyone unmoved by the grossest superstition turns up in the crowd of worshippers, their deceptions are exposed. Such clairvoyants do not dwell in the places where they work their wonders. In the same way, anyone who dares to expose the sorcery of grandees should also beware.
But how could I catch up with His Excellency? He raised a column of dust which disappeared as soon as he flew past, and on arriving in Klin I found that even the memory of him had perished with the noise he made.
* See the manuscript Court Grammar of Fonvizin.
KLIN
“It was in Rome, the city, Prince Euphemius there lived once upon a time….” This singer of this folk song titled “Alexei the Man of God” was a blind old man sitting by the gate of the post station and surrounded by a crowd mostly of children and youths. His hoary head, closed eyes, the look of calm visible on his face compelled those looking at the bard to stand before him in awe. While his tune was artless, its accompanying tenderness of elocution penetrated the hearts of his listeners. They were better attuned to take in nature than the ears of inhabitants of Moscow and Petersburg, trained in harmony, take in the ornate chant of Gabrielli, Marchesi, or Todi. None of those present remained unaffected by a deep shiver when the singer of Klin, as he reached the departure of his hero, barely recited his narrative, his voice breaking moment by moment. The place where his eyes used to be filled with tears emanating from a soul made sensitive by misfortunes, and streams of these poured down his cheeks. O Nature, how powerful you are! Looking at the old man cry, women began to weep; from the lips of youth flew off its habitual companion, the smile; on the face of adolescence appeared diffidence, a true sign of a painful if unknown feeling. Even a manly age, so habituated to cruelty, acquired а solemn appearance. “O Nature!,” I cried out again.
How sweet is a benign feeling of grief! How it renews the heart and its sensitivity. I wept after the gathering at the post station, and my tears were as sweet to me as tears wrenched from my heart by Werther…. O my friend, my friend! Why did not you too see this picture? You would shed tears with me, and the deliciousness of shared feeling would have been far sweeter.
At the end of the recital, everyone present gave the old man something, as it were, in reward for his labor. He received rather indifferently all the half- and quarter-kopecks, all the pieces and chunks of bread, each time augmenting his thanks with a bow, crossing himself, and saying to the giver: “May God grant you health.” I did not want to leave without being sent on my way with a prayer by this elder who was, of course, agreeable to heaven. I wanted his blessing for the fulfillment of my journey and my aspiration. It seemed to me—and I always have this wish—that the benediction of sensitive souls facilitates the path of progress and removes the thorn of doubt. Drawing near him, I placed a ruble in his trembling hand, my hand also trembling from the doubt whether I was acting from vanity. Crossing himself, he did not have a chance to utter his usual blessing to the donor, distracted as he was by the unusual sensation produced by what was in his palm. And this wounded my heart. “How much more a quarter-kopeck given to him pleases him!” I told myself. “He feels in it an ordinary human sympathy for sorrows; in my ruble he perhaps senses my arrogance. He does not offer his blessing to it.” Oh, how petty I then seemed to myself, how I envied those who gave the old man after his singing a quarter-kopeck and a chunk of bread! “Is not this a five-kopeck coin?” he said, directing his speech vaguely, just like his every word. “No, grandfather,
this here is a ruble,” a boy standing close to him said.—“Why such alms?” the old man said, lowering the hollow spots of his eyes and seemingly trying to imagine in his head what was lying in his palm. “What good is it to a man who cannot use it. If I were not deprived of sight, how great would be my gratitude. If I had no need, I could provide it to an indigent. Ah, if I had had it after a fire that took place here, the wail of my neighbor’s hungry chicks would have ceased if only for one day. But what’s it to me now? I can’t even see where to put it. It might even provide the occasion for a crime. There is not much gain in stealing a quarter-kopeck, but many people would willingly pocket a ruble. Take it back, kind sir: with your ruble you and I might create a thief.” O truth! when you are a rebuke how harsh you are to a feeling heart. “Take it back, I really do not need it, and I am not worth it now, since I did not serve the sovereign portrayed on it. It pleased the Creator to deprive me of my bearings when I was still vigorous. I patiently abide His chastisement. He visited me for my sins…. I was a soldier, took part in many battles with the enemies of my fatherland, and I always fought boldly. But one should be a warrior only out of necessity. Rage always filled my heart at the beginning of a battle. I never spared an enemy lying at my feet and did not grant mercy to the disarmed when he asked for it. Exalted by the victory of our arms, as I aimed for punishment and spoils, I fell, deprived of sight and feeling by the cannonball that flew past my eyes while still in all its force. O ye who come after me, be manly but remember humanity!”—He returned my ruble and calmly resumed his place.
“Take your holiday pie, grandfather,” a woman of about fifty said to the blind man when coming up.—How rapturously he took it with both hands. “Here is true benefaction, here true alms. For thirty years in a row I have been eating this pie on holidays and Sundays. You have not forgotten the promise you made in your childhood. Does what I did for your late father deserve your remembering me until my death? I, my friends, saved her father from the beating that itinerant soldiers often give to peasants. The soldiers wanted to confiscate something from him; he began to argue with them. The affair took place behind the threshing areas. Soldiers began to beat up the peasant. I was the sergeant in the same company as these soldiers and happened to be there. I came running when I heard the peasant’s cry and saved him from the beatings; perhaps even from something worse, not that one can guess beforehand. This is what my present benefactress remembered when she saw me here in my beggarly state. This is what she remembers every day and every holiday. My deed was not large, but it was kind. And a kind deed pleases God; He never allows it to go for naught.”
“Will you really insult me so in front of everyone, dear old man, and will you reject my alms alone?” I said to him. “Are my alms the alms of a sinner? Even so, they can be of use to him if they serve to soften his cruel heart.” “You distress a heart already distressed long ago by the punishment of nature,” the elder said. “I was unaware that I could offend you by not accepting a handout that could cause harm. Forgive me my sin, but give me, if you want to give me something, give me what can be useful to me…. We had a cold spring, my throat was sore; I did not have a smallest scarf to tie around my neck. God had mercy, the illness passed…. Do you not have a little old scarf? When my throat gets sore, I will tie it around; it will warm my neck, and my throat will stop hurting. I will remember you, if you need the recollection of a beggar.” I took the scarf from my neck and put it around the blind man’s neck…. And I took my leave.
When I was returning through Klin, I did not come across the blind singer again. He died three days before my return. But my scarf, as the woman who brought him pies on holidays recounted, he put around his neck after he fell suddenly ill shortly before his death, and they laid him in his coffin with it. Oh! should anyone feel the value of this scarf, he will also feel what passed in me when I heard this.
PESHKI
No matter how much I wished to hasten the completion of my journey, hunger—as the saying goes—smashes stone walls,121 and it forced me to enter the post hut and, until I could gain access once more to ragoÛts, fricassees, pâtés, and other French food invented to poison the stomach, to dine on the old piece of roast beef that traveled with me as stores. Having dined this time much worse than many colonels (not to mention generals) sometimes dine on long marches, I, according to praiseworthy common custom, poured into a cup the coffee prepared for me and assuaged my capriciousness with the fruits of the sweat of miserable African slaves.
Spotting the sugar in front of me, the hostess who was kneading dough, sent a small boy to me to ask for a little piece of this food of boyars. “Why boyars’?” I said to her, giving my remaining sugar to the child. “Can you, too, really not use it?” “It is boyars’ because we do not have the means to buy it, while boyars use it because they are not the ones who furnish the money. It is true that our steward, when he goes to Moscow, buys it, but he, too, pays with our tears.” “Do you really think that whoever uses sugar makes you weep?” “Not everyone, but all noblemen, yes. Is it not your peasants’ tears that you drink when they eat the same bread as we do?” As she said this, she showed me the composition of her bread. It consisted of three-quarters of chaff and one quarter of unsifted flour. “And even in the current bad harvests we thank God. Many of our neighbors are worse off. How much good can it do you, boyars, that you eat sugar while we go hungry? Children are dying, adults die too. But what can you do—you grieve for a while, you grieve but do what your master orders.” And she began to put bread loaves into the oven.
This rebuke, uttered not angrily or indignantly but with a deep feeling of stirring sorrow, filled my heart with grief. For the first time I examined carefully all the tools of the peasant hut. For the first time I turned my heart to something that it had previously only glided over.—Four walls covered halfway atop with soot, as was the entire ceiling. The cracked floor, covered with dirt at least a vershok* thick; the oven, although lacking a chimney, was the best protection from the cold, and its smoke filled the hut every morning in the winter and summer; window frames over which a bovine membrane was stretched allowed in a dingy midday light; two or three pots (lucky is the hut to have in one of them every day any meatless cabbage soup!). A wooden bowl and round platters called plates; a table hewn with an axe which is scraped clean for holidays. A trough to feed pigs or calves when there are any, and to sleep together with them, gasping air in which a burning candle looks as if it were in fog or behind a curtain. If lucky, they have a barrel with kvass tasting like vinegar and outside there is a bathhouse in which, when they do not steam in it, cattle sleep. A hempen shirt, footwear given by nature, leg wrappers and bast shoes to go out in.—Here is what is considered to be in all fairness the source of the state surplus, strength, power. But here also can be seen weakness, deficiencies and abuse of laws, and their, so to speak, rough side. Here can be seen the greed of the nobility, larceny, our tyranny, and the defenseless state of the poor.—Greedy beasts, insatiable bloodsuckers, what do we leave to the peasant? Just what we cannot take away: air. Yes, air alone. Often we deprive him not only of bread and water, a gift of Earth, but also of light itself.—The law forbids taking away his life.—Forbids only when it is done quickly. How many ways there are to take it away gradually! On the one side, you find near omnipotence; on the other side, defenseless vulnerability. For in relation to a peasant, the landlord is a lawgiver, judge, executor of his own decision, and, as suits him, plaintiff against whom the defendant dares not speak. This is the fate of someone in chains, this is the fate of someone locked in a fetid dungeon, this is the fate of a bullock in a yoke….
Cruel-hearted landowner, look at the children of the peasants subjected to you. They are almost naked. Why? Was it not you who imposed over and beyond fieldwork a quitrent on those who gave them birth into pain and sorrow? Is it not you who allocated for your own profit flax that was still unwoven? What do you care about the fetid rag which your hand, accustomed to luxury, loathes to lift?
It is scarcely fit to use for wiping the beasts that serve you. You take even what you do not need despite the fact that the uncovered nakedness of your peasants will be a reproach to you. If in this world there is no judge over you—well, you will come before the Judge respecting no persons, who once gave even you conscience, a guide to the good that your dissolute reason, however, long ago ousted from its dwelling, your heart. But do not flatter yourself that you have impunity. This vigilant guardian of your actions will catch you when you are alone and you will feel His punishments. Oh! if only these were of any use to you and to your subordinates…. Oh! if only man could confess his deeds to an implacable judge, his conscience, by entering frequently his inner self. Changed into an immobile pillar by a thunderous voice, he would not permit himself secret malefactions; ruination, devastation would become rare … and so on, and so on, and so on.
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Page 22