Memoirs of a Revolutionist quotes

and who could show on parade a row of soldiers as perfectly aligned and as motionless as a row of toy soldiers.

“Very good,” the Grand Duke Mikhael said once of a regiment, after having kept it for one hour presenting arms⁠—“only, they breathe!”

To respond to the then current conception of a military man was certainly our father’s ideal.

“What of that?” replied he, in the most naive way.

“Was he not my man? It is all the same.”

He also took some part in the campaign of 1831, during the Polish Revolution, and in Warsaw he made the acquaintance of, and fell in love with, the youngest daughter of the commander of an army corps, General Sulíma.

While combing our hair, or signing us with the cross in our beds, Uliana would often say, “And your mamma must now look upon you from the skies, and shed tears on seeing you, poor orphans.”

Our whole childhood is irradiated by her memory.

How often, in some dark passage, the hand of a servant would touch Alexander or me with a caress; or a peasant woman, on meeting us in the fields, would ask, “Will you be as good as your mother was? She took compassion on us.

We were her children, we bore likeness to her, and they lavished their care upon us, sometimes in a touching form, as will be seen later on.

Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives.

It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is not that an immortality worth striving for?

The relative freedom which Alexander found at school, and especially the influence of two of his teachers in literature, developed his intellect rapidly, and later on I shall have ample occasion to speak of the beneficial influence that he exercised upon my own development.

It is a great privilege to have had a loving, intelligent elder brother.

In the meantime I remained at home. I had to wait till my turn to enter the corps of pages should come, and that did not happen until I was nearly fifteen years of age. M.

“Don’t you find, children,” she says, “that the soup is delicious?”

Tears suffocate me, and immediately after dinner is over I run out, catch Makár in a dark passage, and try to kiss his hand; but he tears it away, and says, either as a reproach or as a question, “Let me alone; you, too, when you are grown up, will you not be just the same?”

Yet father was not among the worst of landowners. On the contrary, the servants and the peasants considered him one of the best. What we saw in our house was going on everywhere, often in much more cruel forms.

and the teasing ended in a fierce scrimmage, which brought our sister Hélène to a state of despair. But Alexander was so devoid of revengefulness that peace was soon concluded, and we loved each other immensely.

Among boys, scrimmage and love seem to go hand in hand.

I had even then taken to journalism. In my twelfth year I began to edit a daily journal. Paper was not to be had at will in our house, and my journal was in 32º only.

simply put me in ecstasy, and till now it has retained its power over me. Every verse gradually became a dear friend.

And then, is there a higher aesthetic delight than to read poetry in a language which one does not yet quite thoroughly understand?

The whole is veiled with a sort of slight haze, which admirably suits poetry. Words, the trivial meanings of which, when one knows the language colloquially, sometimes interfere with the poetical image they are intended to convey, retain but their subtle, elevated sense;

… type of teacher seems not to be generally known, but in Russia there is not a man or woman of mark, in literature or in political life, who does not owe the first impulse toward a higher development to his or her teacher of literature.

Every school in the world ought to have such a teacher.

Each teacher in a school has his own subject, and there is no link between the different subjects.

The culprit went at once to make excuses.

“One must learn, learn, sir,” was all that Ebert said in reply, with sadness in his voice.

All became silent after that, and at the next lesson, as if we had settled it beforehand, most of us wrote in our best possible handwriting, and took our books to Ebert, asking him to correct them. He was radiant; he felt happy that day.

Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory.

“Read poetry,” he wrote: “poetry makes men better.”

How often, in my after life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better. He himself was a poet, and had a wonderful facility for writing most musical verses;

His favorite Russian poet was Venevitinov, while mine was Nekrasov, whose verses were very often unmusical, but appealed most to my heart by their sympathy for “the downtrodden and ill-treated.”

“One must have a set purpose in his life,” he wrote me once. “Without an aim, without a purpose, life is not life.”

And he advised me to get a purpose in my life worth living for. I was too young then to find one; but something undetermined, vague, “good” altogether, already rose under that appeal, even though I could not say what that “good” would be.

I never saw in a Russian peasant that servility, grown to be a second nature, with which a small functionary talks to one of high rank, or a valet to his master.

The peasant too easily submits to force, but he does not worship it.

I returned that summer from Nikólskoye to Moscow in a new fashion. There being then no railway between Kaluga and Moscow, there was a man, Buck by name, who kept some sort of carriages running between the two towns.

… to walk through the dark and gloomy inner courts of the fortress to the cathedral, to the sound of the gloomy chime of the fortress bells, a cold shiver seized me at the thought of the prisoners who were immured somewhere in this Russian Bastille.

“Who knows,” thought I, “whether in my turn I shall not also have to join them some day.”

The burial did not pass without an accident, which might have had serious consequences. An immense canopy had been erected under the dome of the cathedral, over the coffin.

They well understood what it meant. When I came out of the church, two peasants, who stood in the gateway, said to me in such a droll way, ‘Well, sir? now—all gone?’ ” And he mimicked how they had shown him the way out.

Years of expectation were in that gesture of sending away the master.

I read and reread the manifesto. It was written in an elevated style by the old Metropolitan of Moscow, Philarète, but with a useless mixture of Russian and Old Slavonian which obscured the sense. It was liberty;

Well, now, father, the evening is so beautiful, the balm comes from the prairies, and I sit and read, ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ ”

This is what the abolition of serfdom meant for the peasant.

… what was going on behind the scenes, I realized not only the futility of these shows and the things they were intended to conceal, but also that these small things so much absorbed the court as to prevent consideration of matters of far greater importance.

The realities were often lost in the acting.

And then from Alexander II himself slowly faded the aureole with which my imagination had surrounded him;

I was that afternoon at the Corps, dining at the house of one of our officers, and we dashed to the spot as soon as we saw from the windows the first clouds of smoke rising in our immediate neighborhood. The sight was terrific.

Like an immense snake, rattling and whistling, the fire threw itself in all directions, right and left, enveloped the shanties, and suddenly rose in a huge column, darting out its whistling tongues to lick up more shanties with their contents.

Whirlwinds of smoke and fire were formed; and when the whirls of burning feathers from the bedding shops began to sweep about the space, it became impossible to remain any longer inside the burning market. The whole had to be abandoned.

He violently spurred his horse, and rode out of our circle. Next morning, the 14th of June, by his orders, three officers were shot at Módlin in Poland, and one soldier, Szur by name, was killed under the rods.

“Reaction, full speed backwards,” I said to myself, as we made our way back to the Corps.

I saw Alexander II once more before leaving St. Petersburg. Some days after our promotion, all the newly appointed officers were at the palace, to be presented to him.

He looked straight at me; he became pensive; at last he said, “Well, go; one can be useful everywhere;” and his face took on such an expression of fatigue, such a character of complete surrender, that I thought at once, “

He is a used-up man; he is going to give it all up.

”

Finally, my extensive journeys, during which I traveled over fifty thousand miles in carts, on board steamers, in boats, but chiefly on horseback, had a wonderful effect in strengthening my health.

They also taught me how little man really needs as soon as he comes out of the enchanted circle of conventional civilization.

With a few pounds of bread and a few ounces of tea in a leather bag, a kettle and a hatchet hanging at the side of the saddle, and under the saddle a blanket, to be spread at the campfire upon a bed of freshly …

After much hesitation, it was decided at last that I should go to make an investigation on the spot, and collect evidence against the man. This was not by any means easy, because the peasants, terrorized by him, and well knowing an old Russian saying,

“God is far away, while your chief is your next-door neighbor,”

did not dare to testify. Even the woman he had flogged was afraid at first to make a written statement.

I often spoke with the Polish exiles in Siberia upon this subject, and some of them understood the mistake that had been made.

A revolution, from its very outset, must be an act of justice towards “the downtrodden and the oppressed,” not a promise of such reparation later on; otherwise it is sure to fail.

Unfortunately, it often happens that the leaders are so much absorbed with mere questions of military tactics that they forget the main thing.

I never forced the men to cross, but they themselves, knowing why I had to hurry, would decide at a given moment that an attempt must be made.

“There are not seven deaths in one’s life, and one cannot be avoided,” they would say, and, signing themselves with the cross, they would seize the oars and pull over.

I soon reached the place where the main destruction of our barges had taken place. Forty-four of them had been wrecked by the storm. Unloading had been impossible, and very little of the cargo had been saved. Two thousand tons of flour had been destroyed.

“What sort of receipt do you want?”

“Well, you write on a paper: ‘I, the undersigned, hereby testify that I was drowned by the will of God, and through no fault of the peasants,’ and you give us that paper.”

“With pleasure—on the other shore.”

Finally I reached Moscow, where my brother met me at the station, and thence we proceeded at once to St. Petersburg.

Youth is a grand thing.

After such a journey, which lasted twenty-four days and nights, arriving early in the morning at St. Petersburg, I went the same day to deliver my dispatches, and did not fail also to call upon an aunt, or rather upon a cousin of mine.

He unfolded the immense sheet and pointed out the eagle. “That pass was to show to you,” our elder said, “but this is what we have for ourselves.” “Why, is it all written about you?” the old man asked, with terror.

“All about us,” our elder replied, without even a twinkle in his eyes.

The old man—a true functionary—looked quite dumbfounded at seeing such a proficiency of writing. He examined every one of us, nodding with his head.

Although I did not then formulate my observations in terms borrowed from party struggles, I may say now that I lost in Siberia whatever faith in state discipline I had cherished before.

I was prepared to become an anarchist.

From the age of nineteen to twenty-five I had to work out important schemes of reform, to deal with hundreds of men on the Amúr, to prepare and to make risky expeditions with ridiculously small means, and so on;

Men of initiative are required everywhere; but once the impulse has been given, the enterprise must be conducted, especially in Russia, not in military fashion, but in a sort of communal way, by means of common understanding.

I wished that all framers of plans of state discipline could pass through the school of real life before they begin to frame their state Utopias.

We should then hear far less than at present of schemes of military and pyramidal organization of society.

High border ridges have towered up along its fringes, and in the course of ages, terraces, formed by later sediments, have emerged from the sea, thus adding on both sides to the width of that primitive backbone of Asia.

There are not many joys in human life equal to the joy of the sudden birth of a generalization, illuminating the mind after a long period of patient research.

What has seemed for years so chaotic, so contradictory, and so problematic takes at once its proper position within an harmonious whole.

From somebody’s mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.

Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know.

But we already know much! What if that knowledge—and only that—should become the possession of all?

but with the majority the fear of seeing their reviews suppressed, and both editors and contributors marched “to some more or less remote part of the empire,” dominated all other feelings.

Fear and hope equally paralyzed them.

The more radical they had been ten years before, the greater were their fears. My brother and I were very well received in one or two literary circles, and we went occasionally to their friendly gatherings;

Petersburg, was full of men of advanced opinions, who seemed ready at that time to make any sacrifices for their ideas. “What has become of them?” I asked myself. I looked up some of them; but, “Prudence, young man!” was all they had to say.

“Iron is stronger than straw,” or “One cannot break a stone wall with his forehead,”

and similar proverbs, unfortunately too numerous in the Russian language, constituted now their code of practical philosophy. “We have done something in our life: ask no more from us;” or “Have patience:

When they were reproached with breeding revolutionists, and were menaced with the closing of their academy and universities, they retorted, “Yes, many students become revolutionists; but is that a reason for closing all universities?”

How few political leaders have the moral courage not to turn against the more advanced wing of their own party!

The real secret of their wise and fully successful attitude was that none of the women who were the soul of that movement were mere “feminists,” desirous to get their share of the privileged positions in society and the state. Far from that.

First of all, the nihilist declared war upon what may be described as “the conventional lies of civilized mankind.”

Absolute sincerity was his distinctive feature, and in the name of that sincerity he gave up, and asked others to give up, those superstitions, prejudices, habits, and customs which their own reason could justify.

He refused to bend before any authority except that of reason, and in the analysis of every social institution or habit he revolted against any sort of more or less masked sophism.

… so-called “worship of the beautiful” was but a mask to cover the most commonplace dissoluteness—inspired him with disgust, and the criticisms of art which Tolstoy, one of the greatest artists of the century, has now so powerfully formulated, the nihilist expressed in the sweeping assertion,

“A pair of boots is more important than all your Madonnas and all your refined talk about Shakespeare.”

Marriage without love, and familiarity without friendship, were equally repudiated. The nihilist girl, compelled by her parents to be a doll in a Doll’s House, and to marry for property’s sake, preferred to abandon her house and her silk dresses.

In the nihilists of Chernyshévsky, as they are depicted in his far less artistic novel, What Is to Be Done? they saw better portraits of themselves.

“It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves,” our poet Nekrasov wrote.

The young generation actually refused to eat that bread, and to enjoy the riches that had been accumulated in their fathers’ houses by means of servile labor, whether the laborers were actual serfs or slaves of the present industrial system.

She had no need to embellish the workers and the peasants with imaginary virtues, in order to love them and to work for them. She took them as they were, and said to me once:

“We have begun a great thing. Two generations, perhaps, will succumb in the task, and yet it must be done.”

None of the women of our circle would have given way before the certainty of death on the scaffold. Each would have looked death straight in the face. But none of them, at that stage of our propaganda, thought of such a fate.

She spoke in so simple, so unaffected a voice that I felt at once how foolishly I had acted, and told her the truth. She dropped back into her chair, with tears in her eyes, and in a despairing voice asked:

“It was only a joke? Why do you make such jokes?”

I fully realized then the cruelty of what I had done.

Serghéi, from whom it was impossible to obtain a cipher letter, took to this kind of correspondence, and used to send me letters containing stories with thrilling incidents and dramatic endings. He said to me afterward that this correspondence helped to develop his literary talent.

When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.

In January or February, 1874, I was at Moscow, in one of the houses in which I had spent my childhood. Early in the morning I was told that a peasant desired to see me.

“We shall probably be sent to Siberia, one of these days; and you—part of you—will be kept long months in prison for having listened to us.” This gloomy prospect did not frighten them. “After all, there are men in Siberia, too—not bears only.”

“Where men are living others can live.”

“The devil is not so terrible as they paint him.” “If you are afraid of wolves, never go into the wood,” they said, as we parted. And when, afterward, several of them were arrested, they nearly all behaved bravely, sheltering us and betraying no one.

This gloomy prospect did not frighten them. “After all, there are men in Siberia, too—not bears only.” “Where men are living others can live.” “The devil is not so terrible as they paint him.”

“If you are afraid of wolves, never go into the wood,”

they said, as we parted. And when, afterward, several of them were arrested, they nearly all behaved bravely, sheltering us and betraying no one.

I could hardly express now the immensity of relief I then felt at being enabled to resume writing.

I would have consented to live on nothing but bread and water, in the dampest of cellars, if only permitted to work.

I was, however, the only prisoner to whom writing materials were allowed. Several of my comrades spent three years and more in confinement before the famous trial of “the hundred and ninety-three” took place, and all they had was a slate.

The worst was the silence, as of the grave, which reigned about me.

In vain I knocked on the walls and struck the floor with my foot, listening for the faintest sound in reply. None was to be heard. One month passed, then two, three, fifteen months, but there was no reply to my knocks.

“Why! Were you such in the corps of pages?” he asked me with terror.

“In the corps I was a boy, and what is indefinite in boyhood grows definite in manhood.”

He asked me some other similar questions, and as he spoke I distinctly saw what he was driving at. He was trying to obtain avowals, and my imagination vividly pictured him saying to his brother: “All these examining magistrates are imbeciles.

So a tradition grew up amongst the soldiers of the St. Petersburg garrison that it was the grand duke himself who came to rescue me and kidnapped me.

Thus are legends created even in times of newspapers and biographical dictionaries.

As soon as I was taken back to my cell I wrote to my friends to communicate to them the welcome news. “I feel well-nigh unable to use the cipher,” I wrote with a tremulous hand, tracing almost illegible signs instead of figures. “

This nearness of liberty makes me tremble as if I were in a fever.

They took me out today in the yard; its gate was open, and no sentry near it. Through this unguarded gate I will run out; my sentries will not catch me,”—and I gave the plan of the escape.

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. The sentry was so near to me that he felt sure of catching me.

“Don’t tell me any of your tales!” retorted the soldier. “I know better. It was the first thing I looked at under the microscope.” This animated discussion took place just as I ran past them and sprang into the carriage.

It sounds like fable, but it is fact.

The carriage turned sharply into a narrow lane, past the same wall of the yard where the peasants had been piling wood, and which all of them had now deserted in their run after me.

“What shall we do in the meantime?” I asked my friend. He also pondered over that question. “To Donon!” he suddenly called out to the cabman, naming one of the best St. Petersburg restaurants.

“No one will ever think of looking for you at Donon,” he calmly remarked.

“They will hunt for you everywhere else, but not there; and we shall have a dinner, and a drink too, in honor of the success of your escape.”

… the sound of a military band, was such that I do not know what feeling prevailed in most of us, during the first moments after we reached the hall—relief at having been spared an undesired fight, or regret that the fight did not take place.

Man is a very complex being.

Our main activity, however, was in working out the practical and theoretic aspects of anarchist socialism, and in this direction the federation has undoubtedly accomplished something that will last.

To make one feel sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart all over the world, with its revolt against age-long injustice, with its attempts at working out new forms of life—this should be the chief duty of a revolutionary paper.

It is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions.

Historians often tell us how this or that system of philosophy has accomplished a certain change in human thought, and subsequently in institutions. But this is not history.

and this succession of hopeless efforts, related in the paper, exercises a most depressing influence upon the reader. To counterbalance that effect, the editor has to rely chiefly upon burning words by means of which he tries to inspire his readers with energy and faith.

I thought, on the contrary, that a revolutionary paper must be, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, the growing revolt against antiquated institutions.

These symptoms should be watched, brought together in their intimate connection, and so grouped as to show to the hesitating minds of the greater number the invisible and often unconscious support which advanced ideas find everywhere, when a revival of thought takes place in society.

… for the last sixteen years at Paris, the money comes in, and a yearly debit of about eight hundred pounds is made up—mainly out of the pennies and small silver coins of the workers—to cover the yearly expenditure for printing the paper and the pamphlets.

For a paper, as for everything else, men are of an infinitely greater value than money.

We started our printing-office in a tiny room, and our compositor was a man from Little Russia, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very modest sum of sixty francs a month.

Hanging became the order of the day. Twenty-three persons perished in two years, including a boy of nineteen, who was caught posting a revolutionary proclamation at a railway station; this act—I say it deliberately—was the only charge against him.

He was a boy, but he died like a man.

Then the watchword of the revolutionists became “self-defense:” self-defense against the spies who introduced themselves into the circles under the mask of friendship, and denounced members right and left, simply because they would not be paid if they did not accuse large numbers of persons;

And it was one of the terrorists, Yemelyanov, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the risk of being arrested on the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man.

Human nature is full of these contrasts.

Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander II’s life. People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met his death at the hands of revolutionists.

We were sure that in France I should soon be arrested; but we often said to each other;

“Better a French prison than this grave.”

Those who are prone to speak of the slowness of evolution ought to study the development of socialism in England. Evolution is slow; but its rate is not uniform. It has its periods of slumber and its periods of sudden progress.

Those who are prone to speak of the slowness of evolution ought to study the development of socialism in England.

Evolution is slow; but its rate is not uniform. It has its periods of slumber and its periods of sudden progress.

No! gentlemen, it was written in order to inspire him with hatred for our grand and beautiful institutions, in order only the better to infuse into him the venom of anarchism, in order to make of him only a more terrible enemy of society.

Cursed be the day when Kropotkin set his foot upon the soil of France!

”

he might possess in perfection the nihilist slang and manners, but he never could assimilate that sort of nihilist ethics which had grown up amongst the Russian youth; and this alone kept him at a distance from our colony.

Spies can imitate anything else but ethics.

When I was working with Reclus, there was at Clarens one such individual, from whom we all kept aloof.

There were no cabs in the neighborhood; so I ran up to Trafalgar Square, where I got one. I then drove after him, and he alighted at the above address.”

Every fact of it is true again⁠—the address and everything; but how mysterious it all reads.

I had warned a Russian friend of my arrival, but there was a dense fog that morning, and he overslept. We waited for him half an hour, and then, leaving our luggage in the cloakroom, drove to his house.