BEHIND THE SCENES (1863 TO 1864)

We were left alone without faith listening to the far-away thunder of cannon, the far-away moan of the wounded. Early in April the news came that Potyebnya had been killed in battle at the Pyeskov Rock. In May Padlewski was shot at Plotsk, and so it went on and on.

It was a hard, unbearably hard, time! And, to add to all the gloom, one was the involuntary spectator of the stupidity, the senselessness of men, the cursed recklessness destroying every force about one.

V. I. Kelsiev

The name of V. Kelsiev has gained a mournful notoriety of late: the rapidity of his inward and the haste of his outward transformation, the success of his penitence, the urgent craving for a public confession and its strange scantiness, the tactlessness of his story, its inappropriate jocosity together with the easy levity so unseemly in the penitent and forgiven—all this, among people so unaccustomed as we are to abrupt and public conversions, set the better part of our journalists in arms against him. Kelsiev wanted at all costs to occupy the public attention; he made himself a target at which every one flings a stone without sparing. I am far from condemning the intolerance displayed in that case by our slumbering journalism. This indignation proves that there is still much that is uncorrupted and vigorous left among us, in spite of the black period of moral sloppiness and immoral talk. The indignation poured upon Kelsiev was the same as that which was unsparing of Pushkin for one or two poems and turned against Gogol for his ‘Correspondence with Friends.’

To cast a stone at Kelsiev is superfluous; a whole pavement has been thrown at him already. I want to tell others and to remind him what he was like when he came to us in London, and what he was like when for the second time he went away to Turkey.

Let him compare the bitterest moments of his life then with the sweetest of his present career.

These pages were written before his penitence and conversion, before his metempsychosis and metamorphosis. I have changed nothing and added nothing but extracts from letters. In my hasty sketch Kelsiev is presented as he remained in my memory until his arrival on a boat at the Skulyany⁠[30] Customs in the character of prohibited goods asking to be confiscated and to be treated according to the law.

In 1859 I received the first letter from him.

The letter came from Plymouth. Kelsiev had arrived there on the steamer of a North American company, and was going on to a job in the Aleutian Islands. After spending a little time in Plymouth he gave up the idea of going to the Aleutian Islands, and wrote to me asking whether he could gain a livelihood in London. He had already succeeded in making the acquaintance of some theological gentlemen in Plymouth, and told me that they had called his attention to remarkable interpretations of prophecy. I warned him off the English clergymen, and invited him to London ‘if he really wanted to work.’ A fortnight later he made his appearance.

A rather tall, thin, sickly-looking young man with a rectangular skull and a thick crop of hair on his head, he reminded me—not by his hair (for the other was bald) but by his whole character—of Engelson, and he really was like him in very many ways. From the first glance one could discern in him much that was inharmonious and unstable, but nothing that was vulgar. It was evident that he had escaped from every form of bondage and authority but had not yet enrolled himself in the service of any cause or party: he had no definite object. He was much younger than Engelson, but yet he did belong to the latest section of the Petrashev group, and had some of their virtues and all of their defects, had studied everything in the world and learnt nothing thoroughly, read everything of every sort, and worried his brains rather uselessly over it all. Through continual criticism of every accepted idea, Kelsiev had shaken all his moral conceptions without discovering any guiding principle of conduct.

What was particularly original about Kelsiev was that in all his sceptical questioning there remained an element of fantastic mysticism: he was a Nihilist with the ways and manners of the religious, a Nihilist in the robes of a deacon. The flavour of the Church, its manner of speech and imagery, were retained in his deportment, his language, his style,⁠[31] and gave his whole life a peculiar character, a peculiar unity, made by the welding together of opposing metals.

Kelsiev was passing through that stage of revaluation so familiar to us which almost every truly awakened Russian accomplishes within himself, and of which the Western European through practical preoccupations and lack of leisure never dreams at all, drawn as he is by his specialised knowledge into other tasks. Our elder brothers never verify their elementary assumptions, and that is how it is that their generations succeed each other, building and destroying, rewarding and punishing, bestowing crowns and fetters, always firmly convinced that it is the right thing and that they are doing their job. Kelsiev, on the contrary, doubted everything and refused to accept on hearsay that good was good or that evil was evil. This haughty spirit that denies all previous morality and accepted truths was particularly strong in the mi-carême of our Lent under Nicholas, and found striking expression as soon as the yoke that weighed on our brains was lifted one inch. This analysis, so full of life and vigour, was fiercely attacked by the conservative literary movement—conserving God knows what—and after it by the Government.

At the time of our awakening in the din of the Sevastopol cannon, many of our clever fellows kept repeating the words they had heard from others, that Western European conservatism was the right thing for us, that we had been hurriedly thrust into European culture, not that we might share their hereditary diseases and out-of-date prejudices, but that we might compare ourselves with our elder brothers, so that it might be possible to advance in step with them. But as soon as in actual fact we see that in awakening thought, that in mature speech there is no firm principle, ‘nothing sacred,’ nothing but questions and problems, that thought is seeking, that speech is denying, that the most certain good is tottering together with what is bad, and that the spirit of doubt and experiment is dragging everything indiscriminately into an abyss, from which all safeguards have been removed—then a cry of consternation and horror bursts from the lips, and the first-class passengers close their eyes that they may not see the train leaving the rails while the drivers try to put on the brakes and stop the engine.

In reality there was no cause to be afraid: the rising force was too weak to change the course of sixty millions materially. But it had a programme, perhaps a prophecy.

Kelsiev had developed under the first influence of the period of which we are speaking. He was far from having attained clarity or reached any equilibrium; his moral property was in complete liquidation. All that was old he denied, all that was solid he had dissolved, he had shoved off from the shore and was drifting recklessly into the open sea; with equal suspicion and mistrustfulness he regarded belief and disbelief, Russian methods and the methods of Western Europe. The one thing that had sent deep roots into his heart was a passionate and profound recognition of the economic injustice of the present political order, a hatred for it and an intense but vague passion for the social theories in which he saw a solution.

Apart from all understanding of it, he had an undeniable right to this sense of injustice and this hatred of it.

In London he settled in one of the remotest parts of the town, in a blind alley of Fulham, inhabited by pale, smutty Irish and emaciated workmen of all sorts. In these damp, stony, unroofed corridors, it is fearfully still, there is almost no sound nor light nor colour: people, flower-pots and houses, all are faded and shrunk. Smoke and soot have wrapped all outlines in a shroud of mourning. No tradesmen’s carts rattle down them with provisions, no cabmen drive that way, no hawkers cry their wares, no dogs bark (there is absolutely nothing to feed the latter on); only from time to time a thin, dishevelled-looking, smutty cat emerges, clambers on to the roof and goes up to the chimney to get warm, arching her spine and betraying unmistakably how chilled she has been indoors.

The first time I visited Kelsiev I did not find him at home. A very young, very plain woman—thin, lymphatic, with tear-stained eyes—was sitting on the floor by a mattress, on which a baby of a year or a year and a half was tossing in a high fever, suffering and dying.

I looked at its face, and thought of the face of another baby on the point of death: it was the same expression. A few days later it died, and another was born.

No poverty could have been more complete. The young frail woman, or rather married child, endured it heroically and with extraordinary simplicity.

No one looking at her sickly, scrofulous, feeble appearance could have imagined what energy, what force of devotion, resided in that frail body. She might have served as a bitter lesson for our popular novelists. She was, or rather wanted to be, what was afterwards called a Nihilist: did her hair queerly, was careless in her dress, smoked a great deal, and was not afraid either of bold thoughts or bold words; she was not enthusiastic over the domestic virtues, did not talk of the sacredness of duty and the sweetness of the sacrifice she made daily, or of the lightness of the burden that weighed on her young shoulders. There was no pose or affectation about her struggle with poverty; and she did everything—sewed, washed, suckled her baby, cooked the meat and scrubbed the room. She was a resolute comrade to her husband, and like a great martyr laid down her life in the distant East, following her husband’s restless, wandering flight and losing her two last children in succession.

At first I struggled with Kelsiev, trying to persuade him not to cut himself off from the path of return before he knew what the life of an exile was like.

I had told him that he ought first to learn what poverty in a strange land meant, poverty in England, particularly in London; I told him that every vigorous man was precious now in Russia.

‘What are you going to do here?’ I asked him. Kelsiev proposed to study everything and to write about everything; most of all, he wanted to write about the Woman Question and the reorganisation of the family.

‘Write first,’ I told him, ‘about the necessity that the peasants should have the land when they are emancipated. That is the first question that confronts us.’

But Kelsiev was not attracted in that direction. He did, as a fact, bring me an article on the Woman Question. It was incredibly poor. Kelsiev was angry with me for not publishing it, though he thanked me for it two years later.

He did not want to go back. Work had to be found for him at all costs. We did our best to find it. His theological eccentricities assisted us in doing so. We obtained for him the job of correcting the proofs of the Russian edition of the Scriptures published by the London Bible Society, and then handed over to him a heap of papers we had received at various times relating to the Old Believers. Kelsiev undertook the task of arranging and editing them with enthusiasm. What he had been groping for and dreaming of lay revealed before him: he discovered in the dissenters a coarsely naïve socialism in a gospel setting. This was the best period in Kelsiev’s life. He worked passionately, and used to run in to see me in the evening to tell me of some socialistic idea of the Duhobors or the Molokans, or some communistic doctrine of the Fedoseyevtsy. He was delighted with their wanderings in the forests, and found an ideal for his life in wandering among them and becoming the founder of a socialist Christian sect in Belaya-Krinitsa,⁠[32] or Russia.

And indeed Kelsiev was a ‘vagrant’ soul, a vagrant morally and in practice: he was tormented by unstable thoughts, by depression. He could not remain in one spot. He had found work, occupation, a livelihood free from want, but he did not find work which would completely absorb his restless temperament; he was ready to go anywhere to seek it, even to become a monk, to accept the holy calling without faith in it.

A typical Russian, Kelsiev made a new programme of work every month, thought of new schemes and took up a new task without finishing the old one. He worked by bouts, and by bouts did nothing. He grasped things easily, but was at once satisfied and cloyed; he plucked at once all the essence out of a thing, to the last deduction, sometimes even more than was in it.

The book about the raskolniks came off successfully; he published six parts, which were quickly distributed. The Government, seeing this, allowed the publication of the facts concerning the Old Believers. The same thing happened with the translation of the Bible. The translation from the Hebrew was not successful. Kelsiev tried to perform a tour de force and to translate it word for word, regardless of the fact that the grammatical forms of the Semitic tongues do not correspond with those of the Slavonic. Nevertheless, the books that were issued were instantly sold, and the Holy Synod, alarmed at the success of the foreign edition, gave its blessing to the publication of the Old Testament in Russian. These back-handed victories were never put down to the credit of our press by any one.

At the end of 1862 Kelsiev went to Moscow with the object of establishing permanent relations with the raskolniks. This expedition he ought one day to describe himself. It was incredible, impossible, but it actually took place. The daring of this trip borders on insanity; its recklessness was almost criminal; but of course it is not for me to blame him for that. Incautious chatter at the frontier might have done a great deal of harm, but that is not the point, and has nothing to do with the estimate of the expedition itself.

On his return to London he undertook the suggestion of Trübner to compile a Russian grammar for Englishmen, and to translate some financial book. He did not complete either of these tasks: his travels had ruined his Sitzfleisch. He was bored by work, sank into hypochondria and depression, while work was necessary, for again they had not a penny. Moreover, a new craze began to fret him. The success of this expedition, the daring he had incontestably displayed, the mysterious negotiations, the triumph over dangers—all this fanned the flame of vanity that was already strong in his heart; unlike Caesar, Don Carlos, and Vadim Passek, Kelsiev, passing his hands through his thick hair, would say, shaking his head mournfully: ‘Not yet thirty, and such immense responsibilities undertaken!’ From all this it might readily be deduced that he would not finish the grammar but would go away. And he did go. He went to Turkey with the firm intention of there getting into closer touch with the raskolniks, forming new ties and if possible remaining there, and beginning to preach the free church and communistic life. I wrote him a long letter, trying to persuade him not to go, but to stick to his work. The passion for wandering, the desire to do great deeds and to have a grand destiny, which haunted him, were too strong, and he went. He and Martyanov disappeared almost at the same time—one, after passing through a series of trials and misfortunes, to bury his dear ones and be lost between Jassy and Galatz, the other to bury himself in penal servitude, to which he was sent by the incredible stupidity of the Tsar and the incredible spite of the revengeful land-owning senators.

After them men of a different stamp appear upon the scene. Our social metamorphosis, having no great depth and affecting only a thin layer, rapidly wears out and changes its forms and colours.

A whole stratum lay between Engelson and Kelsiev, just as between us and Engelson. Engelson was a man injured and broken by his whole environment; the foul atmosphere which he had breathed from childhood had distorted him. A ray of light gleamed upon him and warmed him for three years before his death, but by then the sickness that was consuming him could not be arrested. Kelsiev, who was also damaged and injured by his environment, was yet free from despair and fatigue; he was not merely seeking peace abroad, but had simply run away from oppression; without looking behind him, he was going somewhere. Where? That he did not know (and therein lay the most prominent characteristic of his group), he had no definite aim; he was seeking it, and meanwhile looking about him and setting in order, and maybe in disorder, a whole mass of ideas caught up at school from books and from life. Within him that destructive process of which we have spoken was going on, and it was for him the essential question in which he lived, while waiting either for a cause which should absorb him or a thought to which he could devote himself.

After making his way to Turkey, Kelsiev decided to settle in Tulcea; there he meant to form a centre for his propaganda among the raskolniks, to found a school for Cossack children and to make the experiment of a communal life, in which profit and loss was to fall equally upon all, and the work, skilled or unskilled, light or heavy, should be divided among all. The cheapness of dwelling and of food made the experiment possible. He made the acquaintance of Gonchar, the old ataman of the Nekrassovtsys, and at first praised him up to the skies.

In the summer of 1863 his younger brother Ivan, a fine and gifted youth, joined him. He had been exiled from Moscow to Perm in connection with the students’ rising; there he came into collision with a wretch of a governor, who oppressed him. Then he was sent again to Moscow on account of some investigation; he was in danger of being exiled to some place more remote than Perm. He escaped from custody and made his way through Constantinople to Tulcea. His elder brother was extremely glad to see him. He was looking for comrades, and in the end sent for his wife, who was eager to go to him, and had been living under our protection in Teddington. While we were fitting her out, Gonchar himself arrived in London.

The crafty old man, who scented the approach of war and disturbance, had come out of his hole to sniff what was in the air and to see what he had to expect, and from which quarter; that is, with whom and against whom to ally himself. Knowing no single word of any language but Turkish and Russian, he set off for Marseilles, and from there reached Paris. In Paris he saw Czartorysczki and Zamoisky; I was even told that he had been taken to Napoleon, but I did not hear that from himself. His negotiations led to nothing, and the old Cossack, shaking his grizzled head and screwing up his cunning eyes, wrote in the scrawl of the seventeenth century, and, addressing me as Count, asked if he could come and see us and how he could reach us. We were then living in Teddington; it was not easy to find us without a word of English, and I went to London to meet him at the station. An old Russian peasant of the more prosperous sort, rather thin, but sturdy, muscular, fairly tall and sunburnt, with a big Russian beard, stepped out of the carriage, wearing a grey kaftan and carrying a bundle tied up in a coloured handkerchief.

‘You are Osip Semyonovitch?’ I asked him.

‘I am, my good sir, I am’; he gave me his hand. His kaftan flew open and I saw on his jerkin a big star—of course a Turkish one; Russian stars are not given to peasants. The jerkin was dark blue and was bordered with a wide coloured braid; I had not seen one like it in Russia.

‘I am Alexandr Ivanovitch Herzen. I have come to meet you and to take you to us.’

‘What did you put yourself out for, Your Excellency?... Why ... you might have sent some one or something....’

‘Evidently because I am not an Excellency. What put it into your head, Osip Semyonovitch, to call me Count?’

‘Well, Christ only knows how to address you; surely you are the head-man in your line. Well, I am an ignorant man, you see, so, says I, he is a Count, that is an Excellency, that is the chief.’ Not only Gonchar’s turn of speech, but even his accent was that of a Great Russian peasant. How have these men preserved their language so splendidly in the wilds, surrounded by natives of another race? It would be hard to explain it apart from the compact solidarity of the Old Believers. Their sect has divided them off so strictly that no foreign influence has crossed its barrier.

Gonchar spent three days with us. For the first two days he ate nothing but dry bread which he had brought with him and he drank nothing but water. The third day was Sunday, and he allowed himself a glass of milk, some boiled fish and, if I am not mistaken, a glass of sherry. Russian circumspection, Oriental cunning, the caution of a hunter, the reserve of a man accustomed from childhood to being entirely without rights and in close contact with powerful enemies, a long life spent in struggle, in unceasing toil among dangers—all this was apparent behind the seemingly simple features and simple words of the grey-headed Cossack. He was continually qualifying what he said, using evasive phrases, quoting texts from Scripture; he assumed a modest air while he very consciously described his successes, and if he was sometimes carried away in his stories of the past and said a good deal, he certainly never let drop a word concerning anything of which he meant to be silent.

This stamp of man scarcely exists in Western Europe. It is not needed there, as Damascus steel is not needed for the blade of a penknife.

In Europe everything is done wholesale, in the mass; the individual man does not need so much strength and caution.

He had no faith now in the success of the Polish rebellion, and spoke of his interviews in Paris, shaking his head. ‘It is not for us, of course, to judge: we are little, ignorant people, while they, look you, are grand gentlemen as is only right; but there, they are a bit light in their ways. “Don’t you doubt, Gonchar,” they say. “This is how we’ll manage, we will do this and that for you.... Do you understand?... It will all be satisfactory.” ... To be sure, they are good-natured gentlemen, but look you here, when will they manage it ... with politics like that...?’ He wanted to find out what connections we had with the raskolniks and what support in his country; he wanted to make certain whether there could be any practical benefit for the Old Believers in connection with us. In reality, it was all one to him; he would as readily have allied himself with Poland or with Austria, with us or with the Greeks, with Russia or with Turkey, if only it had been profitable for his Nekrassovtsy. He shook his head as he left us, too. He wrote two or three letters afterwards, in which, among other things, he complained of Kelsiev and, contrary to our advice, sent an appeal to the Tsar.

At the beginning of 1864 two Russian officers, both exiles, Krasnopyevtsev and V., went to Tulcea. At first the little colony set to work zealously. They taught the children and salted cucumbers, patched their clothes and dug in the kitchen-garden. Kelsiev’s wife cooked the dinner and made their clothes. Kelsiev was pleased with the beginning, pleased with the Cossacks and with the raskolniks, pleased with his comrades and with the Turks.⁠[33]⁠

Kelsiev was still writing us his humorous descriptions of their installation, but the dark hand of destiny was already menacing the little band of Tulcea Communists. In June 1864, just a year after his arrival, Ivan Kelsiev died of malignant typhus in his brother’s arms. He was only three-and-twenty. His death was a fearful blow for his brother; the latter fell ill himself, but somehow survived. His letters of that period are terrible reading. The spirit which had sustained the recluses drooped, they were overcome by gloomy depression; crimes and quarrels followed. Gonchar wrote that Kelsiev was drinking heavily. Krasnopyevtsev shot himself. V. went away. Kelsiev, too, could stand it no longer; he took his wife and his children (he had another by then), and without means or aim set off first for Constantinople, then for the Balkan States. Completely cut off from every one, for the time even cut off from us, it was then that he broke off all relations with the Polish exiles in Turkey. In vain he tried to earn a crust of bread, with despair he looked at the wan faces of his poor wife and children. The money we sent him now and then could not be sufficient. ‘It happened at times that we had no bread at all,’ his wife wrote not long before her death. At last, after long efforts, Kelsiev obtained in Galatz a job as ‘overseer of work on the high-roads.’ He was consumed, devoured by boredom. He could not but blame himself for the position of his family. The ignorance of the barbarous Eastern world oppressed him. He pined in it and longed to get away. He had lost his faith in the raskolniks; he had lost his faith in Poland; his faith in men, in science, in revolution, was growing more and more unsteady, and it was easy to predict when it too would collapse. He dreamt of nothing but at all costs struggling back again into the world and coming to us, and saw with horror that he could not leave his family. ‘If I were alone,’ he wrote several times, ‘I would set off at hazard with a daguerrotype machine, or a barrel-organ, and, wandering over the world, would reach Geneva on foot.’

Help was at hand.

Malusha (so they called the elder girl) went to bed quite well, but woke up in the night ill. Towards morning she died of cholera. A few days later the younger child died; the mother was taken to the hospital, she was found to be suffering from galloping consumption.

‘Do you remember,’ she said to him, ‘you promised once to tell me when I was going to die, that it was death? Is this death?’

‘It is death, my dear, it is.’

And she smiled once more, sank into forgetfulness and died.

Extract from a Letter

They write to us in Petersburg that the other day the official in charge of the Skulyany Customs House received a letter signed V. Kelsiev informing him that the passenger who would have to present himself at that Customs House with a regular Turkish passport bearing the name of Ivan Zheludkov was no other than himself, Kelsiev, and that, wishing to give himself up to the Russian Government, he begged the said official to arrest him and send him to Petersburg.