It was our peasant Marey. I don’t know if there is such a name, but everyone called him Marey. He was a man of about fifty, heavy-set, rather tall, with heavy streaks of gray in his bushy, dark-brown beard. I knew him but had scarcely ever had occasion to speak to him before. He even stopped his little filly when he heard my cry, and when I rushed up to him and seized his plow with one hand and his sleeve with the other, he saw how terrified I was.
‘It’s a wolf!’ I cried, completely out of breath.
Instinctively he jerked his head to look around, for an instant almost believing me.
‘Where’s the wolf?’
‘I heard a shout . . . Someone just shouted, “Wolf”’ . . . I babbled.
‘What do you mean, lad? There’s no wolf; you’re just hearing reassuring me. But I was all a-tremble and clung to his coat even more tightly; I suppose I was very pale as well. He looked at me with an uneasy smile, evidently concerned and alarmed for me.
‘Why you took a real fright, you did!’ he said, wagging his head. ‘Never mind, now, my dear. What a fine lad you are!’
He stretched out his hand and suddenly stroked my cheek.
‘Never mind, now, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Christ be with you. Cross yourself, lad.’ But I couldn’t cross myself; the corners of my mouth were trembling, and I think this particularly struck him. He quietly stretched out a thick, earth-soiled finger with a black nail and gently touched it to my trembling lips.
‘Now, now,’ he smiled at me with a broad, almost maternal smile. ‘Lord, what a dreadful fuss. Dear, dear, dear!’
At last I realized that there was no wolf and that I must have imagined hearing the cry of ‘Wolf.’ Still, it had been such a clear and distinct shout; two or three times before, however, I had imagined such cries (not only about wolves), and I was aware of that. (Later, when childhood passed, these hallucinations did as well.)
‘Well, I’ll be off now,’ I said, making it seem like a question and looking at him shyly.
‘Off with you, then, and I’ll keep an eye on you as you go. Can’t let the wolf get you!’ he added, still giving me a maternal smile. ‘Well, Christ be with you, off you go.’ He made the sign of the cross over me, and crossed himself. I set off, looking over my shoulder almost every ten steps. Marey continued to stand with his little filly, looking after me and nodding every time I looked around. I confess I felt a little ashamed at taking such a fright. But I went on, still with a good deal of fear of the wolf, until I had gone up the slope of the gully to the first threshing barn; and here the fear vanished entirely, and suddenly our dog Volchok came dashing out to meet me. With Volchok I felt totally reassured, and I turned toward Marey for the last time; I could no longer make out his face clearly, but I felt that he was still smiling kindly at me and nodding. I waved to him, and he returned my wave and urged on his little filly.
‘Gee-up,’ came his distant shout once more, and his little filly once more started drawing the wooden plow.
This memory came to me all at once – I don’t know why – but with amazing clarity of detail. Suddenly I roused myself and sat on the bunk; I recall that a quiet smile of reminiscence still played on my face. I kept on recollecting for yet another minute.
I remembered that when I had come home from Marey I told no one about my ‘adventure.’ And what kind of adventure was it anyway? I forgot about Marey very quickly as well. On the rare occasions when I met him later, I never struck up a conversation with him, either about the wolf or anything else, and now, suddenly, twenty years later, in Siberia, I remembered that encounter so vividly, right down to the last detail. That means it had settled unnoticed in my heart, all by itself with no will of mine, and had suddenly come back to me at a time when it was needed; I recalled the tender, maternal smile of a poor serf, the way he crossed me and shook his head: ‘Well you did take a fright now, didn’t you, lad!’
And I especially remember his thick finger, soiled with dirt, that he touched quietly and with shy tenderness to my trembling lips. Of course, anyone would try to reassure a child, but here in this solitary encounter something quite different had happened, and had I been his very own son he could not have looked at me with a glance that radiated more pure love, and who had prompted him to do that?
He was our own serf, and I was his master’s little boy; no one would learn of his kindness to me and reward him for it. Was he, maybe, especially fond of small children? There are such people. Our encounter was solitary, in an open field, and only God, perhaps, looking down saw what deep and enlightened human feeling and what delicate, almost feminine tenderness could fill the heart of a coarse, bestially ignorant Russian serf who at the time did not expect or even dream of his freedom. Now tell me, is this not what Konstantin Aksakov had in mind when he spoke of the advanced level of development of our Russian People?
And so when I climbed down from my bunk and looked around, I remember I suddenly felt I could regard these unfortunates in an entirely different way and that suddenly, through some sort of miracle, the former hatred and anger in my heart had vanished. I went off, peering intently into the faces of those I met. This disgraced peasant, with shaven head and brands on his cheek, drunk and roaring out his hoarse, drunken song – why he might also be that very same Marey; I cannot peer into his heart, after all. That same evening I met M—cki once again. The unfortunate man! He had no recollections of any Mareys and no other view of these people but ‘Je hais ces brigands!’ No, the Poles had to bear more than we did in those days!
1 Declarations of principles.
2 ‘I hate these bandits!’
The Death of George Sand
(June 1876)
The type for the May issue of the Diary had already been set, and it was being printed when I read in the newspapers of the death of George Sand. She died on May 27 (June 8 by the European calendar), and so I was not able to say a word about her passing. And yet merely reading about her made me realize what her name had meant in my life, how enraptured I had been with this poet at one time, how devoted I was to her, and how much delight and happiness she once gave me! I write each of these words without hesitation because they express quite literally the way things were.
She was entirely one of our (I mean our) contemporaries – an idealist of the 1830s and 1840s. In our mighty, self-important, yet unhealthy century, filled with foggy ideals and impossible hopes, hers is one of those names that emerged in Europe, ‘the land of sacred miracles,’ and drew from us, from our Russia which is forever creating itself, so many of our thoughts, so much of our love, so much of the sacred and noble force of our aspirations, our ‘living life,’ and our cherished convictions.
But we must not complain about that: in exalting such names and paying them homage, we Russians served and now serve our proper mission. Do not be surprised at these words of mine, particularly when said about George Sand, who is still, perhaps, a controversial figure and whom half, if not nine-tenths of us, have already managed to forget; yet she still accomplished her task among us in days gone by. Who, then, should assemble around her grave to say a word in remembrance if not we, her contemporaries from all over the world?
We Russians have two homelands: our own Russia and Europe, even if we call ourselves Slavophiles (and I hope the Slavophiles won’t be angry at me for saying so). We need not dispute this point. The greatest of all the great missions that the Russians realize lies ahead of them is the common human mission; it is service to humanity as a whole, not merely to Russia, not merely to the Slavs, but to humanity as a whole. Think about it and you will agree that the Slavophiles recognized that very thing, and that is why they called on us to be more rigorous, more firm, and more responsible as Russians: they clearly understood that universality is the most important personal characteristic and purpose of the Russian.
However, all this needs to be explained much more clearly: the fact is that service to the idea of universality is
