Memoirs of a Revolutionist

A high, spacious bedroom, the corner room of our house, with a white bed upon which our mother is lying, our baby chairs and tables standing close by, and the neatly served tables covered with sweets and jellies in pretty glass jars⁠—a room into which we children are ushered at a strange hour⁠—this is the first half-distinct reminiscence of my life.

Our mother was dying of consumption; she was only thirty-five years old. Before parting with us forever, she had wished to have us by her side, to caress us, to feel happy for a moment in our joys, and she had arranged this little treat by the side of her bed, which she could leave no more. I remember her pale thin face, her large, dark brown eyes. She looked at us with love, and invited us to eat, to climb upon her bed; then all of a sudden she burst into tears and began to cough, and we were told to go.

Some time after, we children⁠—that is, my brother Alexander and myself⁠—were removed from the big house to a small side house in the courtyard. The April sun filled the little rooms with its rays, but our German nurse, Madame Búrman, and Uliana our Russian nurse, told us to go to bed. Their faces wet with tears, they were sewing for us black shirts fringed with broad white tassels.

Uliana, the housekeeper, stands in the passage leading to father’s room, and crosses herself; she dares neither to advance nor to retreat. At last, after having recited a prayer, she enters the room, and reports, in a hardly audible voice, that the store of tea is nearly at an end, that there are only twenty pounds of sugar left, and that the other provisions will soon be exhausted.

“Thieves, robbers!” shouts my father. “And you, you are in league with them!” His voice thunders throughout the house. Our stepmother leaves Uliana to face the storm. But father cries, “Frol, call the princess! Where is she?” And when she enters, he receives her with the same reproaches.

“You also are in league with this progeny of Ham; you are standing up for them;” and so on, for half an hour or more.

Then he commences to verify the accounts. At the same time, he thinks about the hay. Frol is sent to weigh what is left of that, and our stepmother is sent to be present during the weighing, while father calculates how much of it ought to be in the barn. A considerable quantity of hay appears to be missing, and Uliana cannot account for several pounds of such and such provisions. Father’s voice becomes more and more menacing; Uliana is trembling; but it is the coachman who now enters the room, and is stormed at by his master. Father springs at him, strikes him, but he keeps repeating, “Your highness must have made a mistake.”

That much was won; but the lowest form, the fifth, composed almost entirely of very young boys who had just entered the school, had still to obey the petty caprices of the pages de chambre. We had a beautiful garden, filled with old trees, but the boys of the fifth form could enjoy it little: they were forced to run a roundabout, while the pages de chambre sat in it and chattered, or to send back the balls when these gentlemen played ninepins. A couple of days after I had entered the school, seeing how things stood in the garden, I did not go there, but remained upstairs. I was reading, when a page de chambre, with carroty hair and a face covered with freckles, came upon me, and ordered me to go at once to the garden to run the roundabout.

“I shan’t; don’t you see I am reading?” was my reply.

Anger disfigured his never too pleasant face. He was ready to jump upon me. I took the defensive. He tried to give me blows on the face with his cap. I fenced as best I could. Then he flung his cap on the floor.

“Pick it up.”

“Pick it up yourself.”

Such an act of disobedience was unheard of in the school. Why he did not beat me unmercifully on the spot I do not know. He was much older and stronger than I was.

One night, after ten, a servant beckoned me, telling me to come out to the entrance hall. I went. “Come to the coachmen’s house,” the old majordomo Frol whispered to me. “Alexander Alexeievich is here.”

I dashed across the yard, up the flight of steps leading to the coachman’s house, and into a wide, half-dark room, where, at the immense dining-table of the servants, I saw Alexander.

“Sasha, dear, how did you come?” and in a moment we rushed into each other’s arms, hugging each other and unable to speak from emotion.

“Hush, hush! they may overhear you,” said the servants’ cook, Praskóvia, wiping away her tears with her apron. “Poor orphans! If your mother were only alive”⁠—

Old Frol stood, his head deeply bent, his eyes also twinkling.

“Look here, Pétya, not a word to anyone; to no one,” he said, while Praskóvia placed on the table an earthenware jar full of porridge for Alexander.

He, glowing with health, in his cadet uniform, already had begun to talk about all sorts of matters, while he rapidly emptied the porridge pot. I could hardly make him tell me how he came there at such a late hour. We lived then near the Smolénsk boulevard, within a stone’s throw of the house where our mother died, and the corps of cadets was at the opposite outskirts of Moscow, full five miles away.

He had made a doll out of bedclothes, and had put it in his bed, under the blankets; then he went to the tower, descended from a window, came out unnoticed, and walked the whole distance.

When I was there I turned round. The sentry had stopped five or six paces behind me; he was looking the other way. “Now or never!” I remember that thought flashing through my head. I flung off my green flannel dressing-gown and began to run.

For many days in succession I had practiced how to get rid of that immeasurably long and cumbrous garment. It was so long that I carried the lower part on my left arm, as ladies carry the trains of their riding habits. Do what I might, it would not come off in one movement. I cut the seams under the armpits, but that did not help. Then I decided to learn to throw it off in two movements: one casting the end from my arm, the other dropping the gown on the floor. I practiced patiently in my room until I could do it as neatly as soldiers handle their rifles. “One, two,” and it was on the ground.

I did not trust much to my vigor, and began to run rather slowly, to economize my strength. But no sooner had I taken a few steps than the peasants who were piling the wood at the other end shouted, “He runs! Stop him! Catch him!” and they hastened to intercept me at the gate. Then I flew for my life. I thought of nothing but running⁠—not even of the pit which the carts had dug out at the gate. Run! run! full speed!

The sentry, I was told later by the friends who witnessed the scene from the gray house, ran after me, followed by three soldiers who had been sitting on the doorsteps.