Volume 1 / Part 1 — Chapter 6 The Kremlin Department—Moscow University—Our Set—The Chemist—The Malov Affair—The Cholera—Filaret—V. Passek—General Lissovsky—The Sungurov Affair (continued 2)

Kostenetsky distinguished himself in the Caucasus and was promoted to the rank of an officer. It was the same with Antonovitch. The fate of the luckless Sungurov was incomparably more dreadful. On reaching the first étape on the Sparrow Hills, Sungurov asked leave from the officer in charge to go out into the fresh air, as the hut, packed to overflowing with exiles, was suffocating. The officer, a young man of twenty, went out himself into the road with him. Sungurov, choosing a favourable moment, turned off the road and disappeared. Probably he knew the locality well. He succeeded in getting away from the officer, but next day the gendarmes got on his track. When Sungurov saw that it was impossible to escape, he cut his throat. The gendarmes took him to Moscow unconscious and losing blood.

The unfortunate officer was degraded to the ranks.

Sungurov did not die. He was tried again, this time not as a political prisoner, but as a runaway convict: half his head was shaved: it is an original method (probably inherited from the Tatars) in use for preventing escapes and it shows even more than corporal punishment the complete contempt for human dignity of the Russian legislature. To this external disgrace the 172sentence added one stroke of the lash within the walls of the prison. Whether this sentence was carried out I do not know. After that, Sungurov was sent to Nertchinsk to the mines.

I heard his name pronounced once more and then it vanished for ever.

In Vyatka I once met in the street a young doctor, a fellow-student at the university, who was on his way to some post in a factory. We talked of old days and common acquaintances.

‘My God!’ said the doctor, ‘do you know whom I saw on my way here in the Nizhni-Novgorod Province? I was sitting in the posting-station waiting for horses. It was very nasty weather. An étape officer, in charge of a party of convicts, came in to get warm. We got into conversation; hearing that I was a doctor, he asked me to go to the étape to look at one of the convicts and see whether he were shamming or really were seriously ill. I went, of course, with the intention of declaring in any case that the convict was ill. In the small étape there were eighty men in chains, shaven and unshaven, women and children; they all moved apart as the officer went up, and we saw, lying on straw in a corner on the dirty floor, a figure wrapped in a convict’s greatcoat.

‘“This is the invalid,” said the officer.

‘I had no need to lie, the poor wretch was in a high fever; emaciated and exhausted by prison and the journey, with half his head shaven and his beard uncut, he looked terrible as he stared about aimlessly, and continually asked for water.

‘“Well, brother, are you very bad?” I said to the sick man, and added to the officer: “it is impossible for him to go on.”

‘The sick man fixed his eyes upon me and muttered “Is that you?”—he mentioned my name. “You don’t 173know me?” he added in a voice which went to my heart like a knife.

‘“Forgive me,” I said, taking his dry and burning hand, “I can’t recall you.”

‘“I am Sungurov,” he answered.

‘Poor Sungurov!’ repeated the doctor, shaking his head.

‘Well, did they leave him?’ I asked.

‘No, but they got a cart for him.’

After I had written this I learned that Sungurov died at Nertchinsk. His property which consisted of two hundred and fifty souls in the Bronnitsky district near Moscow, and four hundred souls in the Arzamas district of the Nizhni-Novgorod Province, went to pay for the keep of him and his comrades in prison while awaiting trial.

His family was ruined; the first care of the authorities, however, was to diminish it. Sungurov’s wife was seized with her two children, and spent six months in the Pretchistensky prison, and her baby died there. May the rule of Nicholas be damned for ever and ever! Amen!

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