A Herzen Reader

If a similar disturbance is carried out by a group of students at an assembly or other public university gathering, then all students as a whole are subject to dismissal from the university unless they can offer the absolute evidence mentioned in point i that at the time of the incident in the assembly they were not present.

Certified true copy: Council secretary A. Savinsky

After a few days, the authorities ordered that this announcement—which we take as authentic on the counter-signature of the secretary Savinsky—be taken down.

If it were possible to take this as more than the espieglerie¹ of Pletnev and Kovalevsky,² then, based on the enlightened order of such a ministry, it fol­lows that if all Russia organizes some kind of demonstration, they will expel all of Russia, with the exception of those Russians who can offer absolute proof that they live abroad.

All of this commotion ensued from Kostomarov's desire to give a speech about the work of the late K. Aksakov, but the fathers of the enlightenment along with the fathers of the Third Department found it impossible that in the university a professor publicly praised a man about whom The Bell had written positively. From this emerged the ban on the speech, from this came the displeasure of the students, from this the threat of expulsion of several hundred members of the audience who attended the university and the retention of those who could prove that they did not attend it.

It is remarkable that in all of this the loser was not Kovalevsky, Kostoma- rov, The Bell, the Copy, or the Cannibals, but Alexander Nikolaevich. Now the censorship will not allow a single word about him. We did him more justice than Aksakov, and even without that, we allowed no abuse of him.

So when is Pletnev's jubilee?

Notes

Source: " 'Kolokol,' Kovalevskii, Kostomarov, kopiia, kannibaly," Kolokol, l. 96, April i5, i86i; i5:72-73, 336.

Mischief.

Petr A. Pletnev (i792-i865), critic, poet, professor, friend of Pushkin, editor of The Contemporary from i838 to i846, and rector of St. Petersburg University from Й40 to i86i.

♦ 34 *

The Bell, No. 96, April i5, i86i. Herzen reacts to the new fashion of celebrating the jubi­lees of reactionary officials. This essay displays the familiar use of puns and unexpected descriptive phrases.

The Abuse of a Fiftieth Anniversary [1861]

For us every kind of public declaration of joy, grief, sympathy, and repug­nance is still so new that like children, we do not know when to stop and we make the most innocent game offensive. After the imperial journey through Russia of Alexander Dumas and the election of Molinari into the company of genuinely secret great men¹—we have flung ourselves into fiftieth anni­versaries. Grech imitates the old men, Grech reads to the old men, with old lips Grech chews the jubilee victuals, and then describes the dishes and the old men in his own gray speeches.² The appearance of Grech at the table will soon inspire horror in a family, reminding them that someone is past seventy. We hardly had time to recover from the delightful feelings aroused in us by Grech's story of how, fifty years earlier, at the entry guardhouse to St. Petersburg, there arrived a young student from Kazan, poor in money but rich in pure mathematics, how he became a professor, despite the fact that he knew what his field was, that he—more an artist and poet—could not for long be satisfied with pure mathematics and entered the ministry of impure mathematics, and now has himself become minister and is now celebrating his jubilee, and all the same—the old Nestor of jubilees could have said—he is repelled by everything pure and because of that hindered the emancipation of the serfs.³