Greeted with massive applause (the youth of those days had a way of keeping their palms hollowed while they clapped, so that the result resembled a cannon salvo), he stood for a while, blinking and smiling. Alas, his appearance did not please the ladies eagerly awaiting the tribune—whose portrait was unobtainable. An uninteresting, they said, face, haircut à la moujik, and for some reason wearing not tails but a short coat with braid and a horrible tie—“a color catastrophe” (Olga Ryzhkov, A Woman of the Sixties: Memoirs).
Besides that he came somehow unprepared, oratory was new to him, and trying to conceal his agitation he adopted a conversational tone which seemed too modest to his friends and too familiar to his ill-wishers. He began by talking about his briefcase (from which he took a notebook), explaining that the most remarkable part of it was the lock with a small cogwheel: “Look, you give it a turn and the briefcase is locked, and if you want to lock it even more positively, it turns a different way and then comes off and goes in your pocket, and on the spot where it was, here on this plaque, there are carved arabesques: very, very nice.”
Then in a high, edifying voice he started to read an article by Dobrolyubov that everybody knew, but suddenly broke off and (as in the authorial digressions in What to Do?) chummily taking the audience into his confidence, began to explain in great detail that he had not been Dobrolyubov’s guide; while speaking, he played ceaselessly with his watch chain—something that stuck in the minds of all the memoirists and was to provide a theme for scoffing journalists; but, when you come to think of it, he might have been fiddling with his watch because there was indeed very little free time left to him (four months in all!).
His tone of voice, “négligé with spirit” as they used to say in the seminary, and the complete absence of revolutionary insinuations annoyed his audience; he had no success whatsoever, while Pavlov was almost chaired. The memoirist Nikoladze remarks that as soon as Pavlov had been banished from St. Petersburg, people understood and appreciated Chernyshevski’s caution; he himself—subsequently, in his Siberian wilderness, where a live and avid auditorium appeared to him sometimes only in febrile dreams—keenly regretted that lame speech, that fiasco, repining at himself for not having seized that unique opportunity (since he was in any case doomed to ruin!) and not delivering from that lectern in the Ruadze Hall a speech of iron and fire, that very speech which the hero of his novel was about to give, very likely, when upon returning to freedom he took a droshky and cried to the driver: “The Galleries!”
Events went very fast that windy spring. Fires broke out here and there. And suddenly—against this orange-and-black background—a vision. Running and holding on to his hat, Dostoevski sweeps by: where to?
Whit Monday (May 28, 1862), a strong wind is blowing; a conflagration has begun on the Ligovka and then the desperadoes set fire to the Apraxin Market. Dostoevski is running, firemen are galloping “and in pharmacy windows, in gaudy glass globes, upside down are in passing reflected” (as seen by Nekrasov). And over there, thick smoke billows over the Fontanka canal in the direction of Chernyshyov Street, where presently a new, black column arises.… Meanwhile Dostoevski has arrived. He has arrived at the heart of the blackness, at Chernyshevski’s place, and starts to beg him hysterically to put a stop to all this. Two aspects are interesting here: the belief in Nikolay Gavrilovich’s satanic powers, and the rumors that the arson was being carried out according to the same plan which the Petrashevskians had drawn up as early as 1849.
Secret agents, in tones also not void of mystic horror, reported that during the night at the height of the disaster “laughter was heard coming from Chernyshevski’s window.” The police endowed him with a devilish resourcefulness and smelled a trick in his every move. Nikolay Gavrilovich’s family went to spend the summer at Pavlovsk, a few miles from St. Petersburg, and there, a few days after the fires, on June 10th to be precise (dusk, mosquitoes, music), a certain Lyubetski, adjutant major of the Uhlan regiment of the Guards, a dashing fellow, with a name like a kiss, noticed as he was leaving the “vauxhall” two ladies capering about like mad things, and in the simpleness of his heart taking them for young Camelias (loose women), he “made an attempt to grasp them both by the waist.” The four students who were with them surrounded him and threatened him with retribution, announcing that one of the ladies was the wife of the writer Chernyshevski and the other her sister.
What, in the opinion of the police, is the husband’s design? He tries to get the case to be submitted to the court of the officers’ association—not out of considerations of honor but merely for the clandestine purpose of bringing military men and university students together. On July 5th he had to visit the Secret Police Department in connection with his complaint. Potapov, its chief, refused his petition, saying that according to his information the Uhlan was prepared to apologize. Chernyshevski curtly renounced any claims and changing the subject asked: “Tell me, the other day I sent my family off to Saratov and am preparing myself to go there for a rest [The Contemporary had already been closed]; but if I should need to take my wife abroad, to a spa—you see she suffers from nervous pains—could I leave without hindrance?” “Of course you could,” replied Potapov good-naturedly; and two days later the arrest took place.
All this was preceded by the following event: a “universal exhibition” has just opened in London (the nineteenth century was unusually fond of exhibiting its wealth—a plentiful and tasteless dowry, which the present one has squandered); gathered there were tourists and merchants, correspondents and spies; one day at an enormous banquet Herzen, in a fit of carelessness, in view of everyone handed a certain Vetoshnikov, who was preparing to leave for Russia, a letter to the radical journalist Serno-Solovievich, who was asked to direct Chernyshevski’s attention to the announcement made in The Bell concerning its willingness to publish The Contemporary abroad. The nimble foot of the messenger had hardly had time to touch Russia’s sands when he was seized.
Chernyshevski was then living near the church of St. Vladimir (later his Astrakhan addresses were also defined by their proximity to this or that holy building) in a house where, before him, had lived Muravyov (later a cabinet minister), whom he was to depict with such helpless loathing in The Prologue. On July 7th two friends had come to see him: Doctor Bokov (who subsequently used to send medical advice to the exile) and Antonovich (a member of “Land and Freedom,” who in spite of his close friendship with Chernyshevski did not suspect that the latter was connected with that society). They were sitting in the drawing room, where they were presently joined by Colonel Rakeev, a thickset black-uniformed police officer with an unpleasant, wolfish profile. He sat down with the air of a guest; actually, he had come to arrest Chernyshevski.
Again historical patterns come into that odd contact “which thrills the gamester in a historian” (Strannolyubski): this was the same Rakeev who as an embodiment of the government’s contemptible scurry had whisked Pushkin’s coffin out of the capital into posthumous exile. Having chatted a few minutes for the sake of decorum, Rakeev informed Chernyshevski with a polite smile (which caused Doctor Bokov to “turn chill inside”) that he would like to have a word with him alone. “Then let’s go to my study,” replied the latter and headed for it so precipitately that Rakeev, though not exactly disconcerted—he was too experienced for that—did not consider it possible in his role of guest to follow him with equal speed.
But Chernyshevski immediately returned, his Adam’s apple convulsively bobbing as he washed something down with cold tea (swallowed papers according to Antonovich’s sinister guess), and looking over his spectacles, he let his guest enter first. His friends, having nothing better to do (waiting in the drawing room where most of the furniture was shrouded in dust-covers seemed uncommonly bleak), went out for a stroll (“It can’t be … I can’t believe it,” Bokov kept repeating), and when they returned to the house, the fourth in Bolshoy Moskovski street, they were alarmed to see that there now stood at the door—in a kind of meek and thus all the more loathsome expectation—a prison carriage. First Bokov went in to say good-by to Chernyshevski, then—Antonovich. Nikolay Gavrilovich was sitting at his desk, playing with a pair of scissors, while the colonel sat next to it, one leg folded over the other; they were chatting—still for the sake of decorum—about the advantages of Pavlovsk over other holiday areas. “And then the company there is so excellent,” the colonel was saying with a slight cough.
“What, you too are going without waiting for me?” said Chernyshevski, turning to his apostle. “Unfortunately I have to …” replied Antonovich, in deep confusion. “Well, good-by then,” said Nikolay Gavrilovich in a joking tone of voice, and lifting his hand high, he lowered it with a swoop into Antonovich’s: a type of comradely farewell which subsequently became very widespread among Russian revolutionaries.
“And so,” exclaims Strannolyubski at the beginning of the greatest chapter in his incomparable monograph, “Chernyshevski has been
