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. A huge gilded crown rose above it, and from this crown an immense purple mantle, lined with ermine, hung towards the four thick pilasters which support the dome of. the cathedral. It was impressive, but we boys soon made out that the crown was of gilded cardboard and wood, the mantle of velvet only in its lower part, while higher up it was red cotton, and that the ermine lining was simply cotton flannelette or swansdown, to which tails of black squirrels had been sewn; the escutcheons, which represented the arms of Russia, veiled with black crépe, were simple card- board. But the crowds, which were allowed at certain hours of the night to pass by the coffin, and to kiss in a hurry the gold brocade which covered it, surely had no time to closely examine the flannelette ermine or the cardboard escutcheons, and the desired theatrical effect was obtained even by such cheap means.
When a litany.is sung in Russia, all people present hold lighted wax candles, which have to be put out after certain prayers have been read. The imperial family also held such candles, and one day, the young son of the Grand Duke Constantine, seeing that the others put out their wax candles by turning them upside down, did the same. The black gauze which hung behind him from an escutcheon took fire,and in a second the escutcheon and the cotton stuff were ablaze. An immense tongue of fire ran up the heavy folds of the supposed ermine mantle.
The service was stopped. All looks were directed with AN ACCIDENT 111 terror upon the tongue of fire, which went higher and higher toward the cardboard crown and the woodwork that sup- ported the whole structure. Bits of burning stuff began to fall, threatening to set fire to the black gauze veils of the ladies present..
Alexander II. lost his presence of mind for a couple of seconds only, but he recovered immediately, and said in a composed voice: “The coffin must be taken!” The pages de chambre at once covered it with the thick gold brocade, and ‘we all advanced to lift it; but in the meantime the big tongue of flame had broken into a number of smaller ones, which now slowly devoured only the fluffy outside of the cotton stuff and, meeting more and more dust and soot in the upper parts of the structure, gradually died out in its folds.
I cannot say what I looked at most: the creeping fire or the stately slender figures of the three ladies who stood by the coffin, the long trains of their black dresses spreading over the steps which led to the upper platform, and their black lace veils hanging down their shoulders. None of them had made the slightest movement: they stood like three beautiful carved images. Only in the dark eyes of one of them, Mademoiselle Gamaléya, tears glittered like pearls.
She was a daughter of South Russia, and was the only really handsome lady amongst the maids of honor at the court.
At the corps everything was upside down. ‘The classes were interrupted; those of us who returned from the fortress were lodged in temporary quarters, and, having nothing to do, spent the whole day in all sorts of frolics. In one of them we managed to open a cupboard which stood in the room, and contained a splendid collection of models of all kinds of animals, for the teaching of natural history. That was its official purpose, but it was never even so much as shown to us, and now that we got hold of it we utilized it in our own way. With a human skull, which was in the 112 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST | collection, we made a ghostly figure wherewith to frighten other comrades and the officers at night. As to the animals, we placed them in the most ludicrous positions and groups: monkeys were seen riding on lions, sheep were playing with leopards, the giraffe danced with the elephant, and so on. The worst was that a few days later one of the Prussian | princes, who had come to assist at the burial ceremony (it | was the one, I think, who became later on the Emperor | Frederic), visited our school, and was shown all that con- | cerned our education. Our director did not fail to Boast | of the excellent educational appliances which we had, and brought his guest to that unfortunate cupboard. When the © German prince caught a glimpse of our zodlogical classifica- _ tion, he drew a long face and quickly turned away. The > director looked horrified; he had lost the power of speech, | and only pointed repeatedly with his hand at some sea stars, which were placed in glass boxes on the walls beside the cupboard. The suite of the prince tried to look as if they had noticed nothing, and only threw rapid glances at the | cause of so much disturbance, while we wicked boys made all sorts of faces in order not to burst with laughter.
VI VI Tne school years of a Russian youth are so different from the corresponding period in west European schools, that I must dwell further on my school life. Russian boys, as a rule, while they are yet at a lyceum or in a military school, take an interest in a wide circle of social, political, and philosophical matters. It is true that the corps of pages was, of all schools, the least congenial place for sucha development; but in those years of general revival, broader ideas penetrated even there, and carried some of us away, without, however, preventing us from taking a very lively part in ‘ benefit nights ”’ and all sorts of frolics.
While I was in the fourth form I became interested in history, and with the aid of notes made during the lessons, and helping myself with reading, I wrote quite a course of early mediaeval history for my own use. Next year, the struggle between Pope Boniface VIII. and the imperial power attracted my special attention, and now it became “my ambition to be admitted to the Imperial Library as a reader, to study that great struggle. That was contrary to the rules of the library, pupils of secondary schools not being admitted; our good Herr Becker, however, smoothed the way out of the difficulty, and I was allowed at last _to enter the sanctuary, and to take a seat at one of the readers’ small tables, on one of the red velvet sofas which then formed a part of the furniture of the reading-room. From various textbooks and some books from our own library, I soon got to the sources. Knowing no Latin, I discovered, nevertheless, a rich supply of original sources in Old Teutonic and Old French, and found an immense @ 114 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST esthetic enjoyment in the quaint structure and expres- siveness of the Old French in the chronicles. Quite a new structure of society and quite a world of complicated relations opened before me; and from that time I learned to value far more highly the original sources of history than the works of modernized generalizations in which the prejudices of modern politics, or even mere current for- mule, are often substituted for the real life of the period. Nothing gives more impetus to one’s intellectual develop- ment than some sort of independent research, and these studies of mine afterwards helped me very much.
Unhappily I had to abandon them when we reached the second form (the last but one). The pages had to study during the last two years nearly all that was taught in other military schools in three special forms, and we had a vast amount of work to do for the school. Natural sciences, mathematics, and military sciences necessarily relegated history to the background.
In the second form we began seriously to study physics. ‘We had an excellent teacher, a very intelligent man with a sarcastic turn of mind, who hated learning from memory, and managed to make us think, instead of merely learn- ing facts. He was a good mathematician, and taught us physics on a mathematical basis, admirably explaining at the same time the leading ideas of physical research and physical apparatus. Some of his questions were so original and his explanations so good that they engraved themselves forever in my memory.
Our textbook of physics was not bad (most textbooks for the military schools had been written by the best men at the time), but it was rather old, and our teacher, who followed his own system in teaching, began to prepare a short summary of his lessons, —a sort of aide-mémoire. How- ever, after a few weeks it so happened that the task of STUDYING THE NATURAL SCIENCES 115 writing this summary fell upon me, and our teacher, acting as a true pedagogist, trusted it entirely to me, only read- ing the proofs. When we came to the chapters on heat, electricity, and magnetism, they had to be written entirely anew, with more developments, and this I did, thus pre- paring a nearly complete textbook of physics, which was printed for the use of the school.
In the second form we also began to study chemistry, and in this, too, we had a first-rate teacher, — a passionate lover of the subject, who had himself made valuable original researches. The years 1859-61 were years of a universal revival of taste for the exact sciences. Grove, Clausius, Joule, and Séguin showed that heat and all physical forces are but divers modes of motion; Helmholtz began about that time his epoch-making researches in sound; Tyndall, in his popular lectures, made one touch, so to say, the very atoms and molecules. Gerhardt and Avogadro intro- duced the theory of substitutions, and Mendeléeff, Lothar Meyer, and Newlands discovered the periodical law of elements; Darwin, with his “Origin of Species,” revolu- tionized all biological sciences; while Karl Vogt and Moleschott, following Claude Bernard, laid the foundations of true psychology in physiology. It was a time of scientific revival, and the current which carried minds toward natural science was irresistible. Numbers of ex- cellent books were published at that time in Russian _ translations, and I soon understood that whatever one’s subsequent studies might be, a thorough knowledge of the natural sciences and familiarity with their methods must lie at the foundation. Five or six of us joined together to get some sort of laboratory for ourselves. With the elementary apparatus recommended for beginners in Stick- hardt’s excellent textbook, we started our laboratory in a small bedroom of two of our comrades, the brothers Zasetsky. Their father, an old admiral in retirement, was 116 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST delighted to see his sons engaged in so useful a pursuit, and did not object to our coming together on Sundays and during the holidays in that room, by the side of his own study. With Stéckhardt’s book as a guide, we systematic- ally made all experiments. I must say that once we nearly set the house on fire, and that more than once we poisoned all the rooms with chlorine and similar stuffs. But the old admiral, when we related the adventure at dinner time, took it very nicely, and told us how he and his comrades also nearly set a house on fire in the far less useful pursuit of punch making; while the mother only said, amidst her paroxysms of coughing: ‘ Of course, if it 7s necessary for your learning to handle such nasty smelling things, then there ’s nothing to be done! ” After dinner she usually took her seat at the piano, and. till late at night we would go on singing duets, trios, and choruses from the operas. Or we would take the score of some Italian or Russian opera and go through it from the beginning to the end,—the mother and her daughter act- ing as the prima donnas, while we managed more or less successfully to maintain all the other parts. Chemistry and music thus went hand in hand.
Higher mathematics also absorbed a great deal of my time. Several of us had already decided that we should not enter a regiment of the Guard, where all our time would be given to military drill and parades, and we intended to enter, after promotion, one of the military academies, — artillery or engineering. In order to do so we had to prepare in higher geometry, differential calculus, and the beginnings of integral calculus, and we took private lessons for that purpose. At the same time, elementary astronomy being taught to us under the name of math- ematical geography, I plunged into astronomical reading, especially during the last year of my stay at school. The A VARIETY OF STUDIES Vk never-ceasing life of the universe, which I conceived as life and evolution, became for me an inexhaustible source of higher poetical thought, and gradually the sense of Man’s oneness with Nature, both animate and inanimate — the Poetry of Nature — became the philosophy of my life.
If the teaching in our school had been limited to the subjects I have mentioned, our time would have been pretty well occupied. But we also had to study in the domain of humanitarian science, history, law, — that is, the main outlines of the Russian code, —and_ political economy in its essential leading principles, including a course of comparative statistics; and we had to master formidable courses of military science, — tactics, military history (the campaigns of 1812 and 1815 in all their details), artillery and field fortification. Looking back now upon this education, I think that apart from the subjects relating to military warfare, for which more de- tailed studies in the exact sciences might have been advan- tageously substituted, the variety of subjects which we were taught was not beyond the capacity of the average youth. Owing to a pretty good knowledge of elementary mathe- matics and physics, which we gained in the lower forms, most of us managed to do all the work. Some studies were neglected by the majority of us, especially law, as also modern history, for which we had unfortunately an old wreck of a master, who was kept at his post only in order to give him his full old-age pension. Moreover, some latitude was given us in the choice of the subjects we liked best, and while we underwent severe examina- tions in these chosen subjects, we were treated rather leni- ently in the remainder. But the chief cause of the relative success which was obtained in the school was that the teaching was rendered as concrete as possible. As soon as _ we had learned elementary geometry on paper, we relearned it in the field, with poles and the surveyor’s chain, and 118 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST next with the astrolabe, the compass, and the surveyor’s table. After such a concrete training, elementary astronomy offered no difficulties, while the surveys themselves were an endless source of enjoyment.
The same system of concrete teaching was applied to fortification. In the winter we solved such problems as, for instance, the following: Having a thousand men and a fortnight at your disposal, build the strongest fortification you ean build, to protect that bridge for a retreating army; and we hotly discussed our schemes with the teacher when he criticised them. In the summer we applied our know- ledge in the field. To these practical exercises I attribute the ease with which most of us mastered such a variety of scientific subjects at the age of seventeen or eighteen.
With all that, we had plenty of time for amusement and all sorts of frolics. Our best time was when the examt- nations were over, and we had three or four weeks quite free before going to camp, or when we returned from camp, and had another three weeks free before the beginning of lessons. The few of us who remained then in the school were allowed, during the vacations, to go out just as we liked, always finding bed and food at the school. I worked in the library, or visited the picture galleries of the Her- mitage, studying one by one all the best pictures of each school separately; or I went to the different Crown manu- factories of playing-cards, cottons, iron, china, and glass which are open to the public. Sometimes we went out rowing on the Neva, spending the whole night on the river; sometimes in the Gulf of Finland with fishermen, — a melancholy northern night, during which the morning dawn meets the afterglow of the setting sun, and a book can be read in the open air at midnight. For all this we found plenty of time.
After my visits to the manufactories I took a liking to INFLUENCE OF MUSIC 119 strong and perfect machinery. Seeing how a gigantic paw, coming out of a shanty, grasps a log floating in the N eva, pulls it inside, and puts it under the saws, which cut it "into boards; or how a huge red-hot iron bar is transformed into a rail after it has passed between two cylinders, I understood the poetry of machinery. In our present fac- tories, machinery work is killing for the worker, because he becomes a lifelong servant to a given machine, and never is anything else. But this is a matter of bad organi- zation, and has nothing to do with the machine itself. Overwork and lifelong monotony are equally bad whether the work is done with the hand, with plain tools, or with a machine. But apart from these, I fully understand the pleasure that man can derive from a consciousness of the might of his machine, the intelligent character of its work, the gracefulness of its movements, and the correctness of what it is doing; and I think that William Morris’s hatred of machines only proved that the conception of the ma- chine’s power and gracefulness was missing in his great poetical genius.
Music also played a very great part in my development. From it I borrowed even greater joy and enthusiasm than from poetry. The Russian opera hardly existed in those _ times; but the Italian opera, which had a number of first- Tate stars in it, was the most popular institution at St.
Petersburg. When the prima donna Bosio fell ill, thou-: sands of people, chiefly of the youth, stood till late at night at the door of her hotel to get news of her. She was not : beautiful, but seemed so much so when she sang that young _Men madly in love with her could be counted by the hun- dred; and when she died, she had a burial such as no one _had ever had at St. Petersburg before. All St. Petersburg /was then divided into two camps: the admirers of the Italian opera, and those of the French stage, which even _ then was showing in germ the putrid Offenbachian current <> 120 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST that a few years later infected all Europe. Our form was also divided, half and half, between these two camps, and I belonged to the former. We were not permitted to go to the pit or to the balcony, while all the boxes in the Italian opera were always taken months in advance, by subscription, and even transmitted in certain families as an hereditary possession. But we gained admission, on Satur- day nights, to the passages in the uppermost gallery, and had to stand there in a Turkish bath atmosphere, while to conceal our showy uniforms we used to wear our black overcoats, lined with wadding and with a fur collar, tightly buttoned in spite of the heat. It is a wonder that none of us got pneumonia in this way, especially as we came out overheated with the ovations which we used to make to our favorite singers, and stood afterwards at the stage door to catch one more glimpse of our favorites, and to cheer them. The Italian opera, in those years, was in some strange way intimately connected with the radical movement, and the revolutionary recitatives in “ Wilhelm Tell? and “The Puritans’? were always met with stormy applause and vociferations which went straight to the heart of Alexander II.; while in the sixth-story galleries, and in the smoking-room of the opera, and at the stage door the best part of the St. Petersburg youth came together in a common idealist worship of a noble art. All this may seem childish; but many higher ideas and pure inspirations were kindled in us by this worship of our favorite artists.
Vil Every summer we went out camping at Peterhof, with the other military schools of the St. Petersburg district. On the whole, our life there was very pleasant, and cer- tainly it was excellent for our health: we slept in spacious tents, bathed in the sea, and spent a oreat deal of time during the six weeks in open-air exercise.
In military schools the main purpose of camp life was evidently military drill, which we all disliked very much, “but the dullness of which was occasionally relieved by mak- ing us take part in manceuvres. One night, as we were going to bed, Alexander II. aroused the whole camp by having the alert sounded. Ina few minutes all the camp was alive, — several thousand boys gathering round their colors, and the guns of the artillery school booming in the stillness of the night. All military Peterhof came gallop- ing to the camp, but owing to some misunderstanding the Emperor remained on foot. Orderlies hurried in all direc- tions to get a horse for him, but there was none, and not being a good rider, he would not ride any horse but one of his own. He was very angry, and freely gave vent to {his anger. “Imbecile (durdk), have I only one horse? ” \I heard him shout to an orderly who reported that his horse was in another camp. With the coming darkness, the booming of the guns, and the rattling of the cavalry, we boys grew very much ex- cited, and when Alexander ordered a charge, our column charged straight upon him. Tightly packed in the ranks, _ with lowered bayonets, we must have had a menacing as- pect; and I saw the Emperor, who was still on foot, clearing J y ‘ 2 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST “ the way for the column in three formidable jumps. I understood then the meaning of a column which marches in serried ranks under the excitement of the music and the march itself. There stood before us the Emperor, our com- mander, whom we all venerated; but I felt that in this moving mass not one page or cadet would have moved an inch aside or stopped to make room for him. We were the marching column, he was but an obstacle, and the column would have marched over him. ‘‘ Why should he be in our way?” the pages said afterward. Boys, rifle in hand, are even more terrible in such cases than old soldiers.
Next year, when we took part in the great manceuvres of the St. Petersburg garrison, I saw some of the sidelights of warfare. For two days in succession we did nothing but march up and down in a space of about twenty miles, without having the slightest idea of what was going on round us, or for what purpose we were marched. Cannon boomed now in our neighborhood and now far away; sharp musketry fire was heard somewhere in the hills and the woods; orderlies galloped up and down, bringing an order to advance and next an order to retreat; and we marched, marched, and marched, seeing no sense in all these movements and counter movements. Masses of cavalry had passed along the same road, making it a deep bed of movable sand, and we had to advance and retreat several times over the same ground, till at last our column broke all discipline and became an incoherent mass of pilgrims rather than a military unit. The color guard alone remained in the road; the remainder slowly paced along the sides of the road in the wood. ‘The orders and the supplications of the officers were of no avail.
Suddenly a shout came from behind: ‘‘ The Emperor is coming! The Emperor!” The officers ran about, begging us to form ranks: nobody listened to them.
The Emperor came, and ordered a retreat once more.
PRACTICAL WORK IN SURVEYING 123 « About!” the word of command rang out. ‘The Em- peror is behind us; please turn round,” the officers whis- pered; but the battalion took hardly any notice of the command, and none whatever of the presence of the Em- peror. Happily, Alexander II. was no fanatic of militarism, and after having said a few words to cheer us, with a pro- mise of rest, he galloped off.
I understood then how much depends in warfare upon the state of mind of the troops, and how little can be done by mere discipline when more. than an average effort is re- quired from the soldiers. What can discipline do when tired troops have to make a supreme effort to reach the field of battle at a given hour! It is absolutely powerless; only enthusiasm and confidence can at such moments in- duce the soldiers to do “the impossible,” and it is the impossible that continually must be accomplished to secure success. How often I recalled to memory that object les- son later on, in Siberia, when we also had to do “ the impossible ” during our scientific expeditions!
Comparatively little of our time, however, during our \stay in the camp was given to military drill and mancu- vres. A good deal of it was employed in practical work in surveying and fortification. After a few preliminary exer- cises we were given a reflecting compass and told, “ Go ‘and make a plan of, say, this lake, or those roads, or that park, measuring a angles with the compass and the dis- tances by pacing.” Larly in the morning, after a hurriedly ‘swallowed breakfast, a boy would fill his capacious military pockets with slices of rye bread, and would go out for four or five hours in the parks, miles away, mapping with his compass and paces the beautiful shady roads, the rivulets, and the lakes. His work was afterward compared with accurate maps, and prizes in optical and drawing instru- ments, at the boy’s choice, were awarded. Jor me, these 124 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST surveys were a deep source of enjoyment. The independ. ent work, the isolation under the centuries-old trees, the life of the forest which I could enjoy undisturbed, while there was at the same time the interest in the work, — all these left deep traces on my mind; and when I became an explorer of Siberia, and several of my comrades became explorers of central Asia, these surveys were found to have been an excellent preparation.
Finally, in the last form, parties of four boys were taken every second day to some villages at a considerable dis- tance from the camp, and there they had to make a detailed survey of several square miles, with the aid of the survey- or’s table and a telescopic ruler. Officers of the general staff came from time to time to verify their work and to advise them. This life amid the peasants in the villages had the best effect upon the intellectual and moral develop- ment of the boys.
At the same time there were exercises in the construc- tion of natural size cross-sections of fortifications. We were taken out by an officer into the open field, and there we had to make the profile of a bastion, or of a complicated bridge head, nailing battens and poles together in exactly the same way as railway engineers do in tracing a railway. When it came to embrasures and barbettes, we had to calculate a great deal in order to obtain the inclinations of the different planes, and after that geometry ceased to be difficult to understand.
We delighted in such work, and once, in town, finding in our garden a heap of clay and gravel, we began to build a real fortification on a reduced scale, with well calculated straight and oblique embrasures and barbettes. All was done very neatly, and our ambition now was to obtain some planks for making the platforms for the guns, and to place upon them the model guns which we had in our class- rooms. But, alas! our trousers wore an alarming aspect.
Sito: ae A HINT TO EDUCATORS 125 “What are you doing there?” our captain exclaimed. “ Look at yourselves! You look like navvies” (that was exactly what we were proud of). ‘‘ What if the grand duke comes and finds you in such a state!”
“We will show him our fortification and ask him to get us tools and boards for the platforms.”
All protests were vain. A dozen workmen were sent next day to cart away our beautiful structure as if it were a mere heap of mud!
I mention this to show how children and youths long for the application of what they learn at school in the abstract, and how stupid are the educators who are unable to see what a powerful aid they could find in this direction for helping their pupils to grasp the real sense of the things they learn. In our school, all was directed towards train- ‘ing us for warfare; we should have worked with the same enthusiasm, however, at laying out a railway, at building ‘a log house, or at cultivating a garden ora field. But all this longing of children and youths for real work is wasted ‘simply because our idea of the school is still the medieval ‘scholasticism, the medizval monastery!
Vill Vill Tur years 1857-61 were years of rich growth in the intellectual forces of Russia. All that had been whispered for the last decade, in the secrecy of friendly meetings, by the generation represented in Russian literature by Tur- cucneff, Tolstéy, Hérzen, Bakunin, Ogaryéff, Kavélin, Dos- toévsky, Grigordvich, Ostrévsky, and Nekrasoff, began now to leak out in the press. Censorship was still very rigor- ous; but what could not be said openly in political articles was smuggled in under the form of novels, humorous sketches, or veiled comments on west European events, and every one read between the lines and understood.
Having no acquaintances at St. Petersburg apart from the school and a narrow circle of relatives, I stood outside the radical movement of those years, — miles, in fact, away from it. And yet, this was, perhaps, the main feature of the movement, —that it had the power to penetrate into so “<< well meaning” a school as our corps was, and to find an echo in such a circle as that of my Moscow relatives.
I used at that time to spend my Sundays and holidays at the house of my aunt, mentioned in a previous chapter under the name of Princess Mirski. Prince Mirski thought only of extraordinary lunches and dinners, while his wife and their young daughter led a very gay life. My cousin was a beautiful girl of nineteen, of a most amiable dispost tion, and nearly all her male cousins were madly in love with her. She, in turn, fell in love with one of them, and wanted to marry him. But to marry a cousin I considered a great sin by the Russian Church, and the old princess tried in vain to obtain a special permission from SPREAD OF REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS 127 the high ecclesiastical dignitaries. Now she brought her daughter to St. Petersburg, hoping that she might choose among her many admirers a more suitable husband than her own cousin. It was labor lost, I must add; but their fash- lonable apartment was full of brilliant young men from the Guards and from the diplomatic service.