A Herzen Reader

One should not reproach us. We restrained ourselves up to the last instant, until there was open betrayal, until the criminal appointment of Panin, until the arbitrariness in the matter of Unkovsky and Evropeus, the police conspiracy as a result of which there were arrests of students, Profes­sor Kachenovsky,² and we don't know who else.³ We could draw back and yield when the mainstream was following the right channel, but now it is quite another matter!

Farewell, Alexander Nikolaevich, have a good journey! Bon voyage!.. Our path lies this way. [. . .]

We are grains of sand—physically cut off—of the awakening crowd, the Russian masses—we are strong only in our instinct, by which we guess how its heart beats, how it bleeds, what it wants to say but cannot.

We will return to that subject, but now we will look at the letters. We will relate only the factual parts and the rumors.

The myths and legends circulating about Panin's appointment are re­markable. One correspondent writes that "Muravyov and Panin were charged with sealing Rostovtsev's study. The sovereign himself appeared and found Panin alone; he waited one hour, and then another. 'Well, then I will name you the chair of the commission.' " Ben trovato! ⁴ Absurdities ought to be based on dumb chance. When people play blind man's bluff the amusing part is that they do not know ahead of time whom exactly they will catch hold of. And if the sovereign had caught Muravyov, he would not have gotten a bad deal. It's annoying that only courtiers are invited to these petit jeux,⁵ or maybe luck would have shone on the Parisian Kiselev—who understood the peasant collective even under Nicholas—or on the oldest fighter for peasant emancipation with land, N. I. Turgenev.⁶ They would have managed this business better than the previous chair. But with the whole embarrass du choix⁷—between old Adlerberg and young Adlerberg,⁸ between the tall Panin and the not-too-bright Dolgorukov—there is not much to choose. Diogenes with his lantern would not find anyone here except for Butkov.

There is another legend that is in no way inferior. Two correspondents write that the empress helped bring about Panin's appointment "as a result of her economic and religious ideas, which did not agree with the thought of the emancipation of the peasants with land!"

Indeed, neither pietism nor political economy will lead you to a land allotment. This is a purely German opinion, i.e., harmful, but logisch con­sequent.⁹ Christianity demands that we should all be poor and to some ex­tent tramps; moreover, it teaches us to care more for our neighbor than for ourselves. For that reason it is no wonder that the empress, while herself remaining in worldly comfort, wished first to free the serfs from tempo­rary land, making it easier for them to receive an eternal allotment—heav­enly plowland—endless acres¹⁰ which have been sown for ages and, what's more, with seeds not from any granary.

We do not blame the empress for simultaneously following the teach­ings of the apostle Paul and the apostle Malthus and for not knowing the Russian situation. But why should she interfere in such foreign matters as the emancipation of our Russian serfs and the allotment of our Russian land to them?

According to a third legend, it is said that, as he was dying, Rostovtsev nominated Panin to the sovereign. That is difficult to believe; could he re­ally have wished to end his career as he began it, or did he die in a state of delirium?¹¹

As for the hero of this novel, i.e., Viktor Nikitich [Panin], he immediately began to act like strychnine, inspiring a stupor and a stiffening in every liv­ing thing with his numbing formalism and the dead letter of the law. Here is what occupied this head on a pole, who had been summoned to trivialize the great business of emancipation: it ordered "members of the commis­sion to appear in a civil service uniform or in tails, and ordered them to compile a register of all matters resolved and unresolved, those which can be taken up for discussion and those which cannot be discussed."