Chernyshevski would have been transferred to a private domicile much sooner if it had not been for the affair of the Karakozovites (adherents of Karakozov, who attempted to assassinate Alexander the Second in 1866): it was made clear at their trial that they had wanted to give Chernyshevski the opportunity of escaping from Siberia and heading a revolutionary movement—or at least publishing a political review in Geneva; and checking the dates, the judges found in What to Do? a forecast of the date of the attempt on the Tsar’s life. The protagonist Rakhmetov, on his way abroad, “said among other things that three years later he would return to Russia, because, it seemed, not then, but three years later [a highly significant repetition typical of our author], he would be needed in Russia.” Meanwhile the last part of the novel was signed on April 4, 1863, and exactly three years later to the day the attempt took place. Thus even figures, Chernyshevski’s goldfish, let him down.
Rakhmetov is forgotten today; but in those years he created a whole school of life. With what piety its readers imbibed the sporty, revolutionary element in the novel: Rakhmetov, who “adopted a boxer’s diet,” followed also a dialectical regime: “Therefore if fruit was served he absolutely ate apples and absolutely did not eat apricots (since the poor did not); oranges he ate in St. Petersburg, but did not eat in the provinces, because you see in St. Petersburg the common people eat them, while in the provinces they do not.”
Where did that young, round little face suddenly flit from, with its large, childishly prominent forehead and cheeks like two cups? Who is this girl resembling a hospital nurse, wearing a black dress with a white turn-down collar and a little watch on a cord? It is Sophia Perovski, who is to hang for the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. Coming to Sebastopol in 1872, she toured the surrounding villages on foot in order to become acquainted with the life of the peasants: she was in her period of Rakhmetovism—sleeping on straw, living on milk and gruels. And returning to our initial position we repeat: Sophia Perovski’s instantaneous fate is a hundred times more to be envied than the fading glory of a reformer!
For as copies of The Contemporary with the novel, passing from hand to hand, became more and more tattered, so did Chernyshevski’s enchantments fade; and the esteem for him, which had long since turned into a sentimental convention, was no longer able to make hearts glow when he died in 1889. The funeral passed quietly. There were few comments in the newspapers. At the requiem held for him in St. Petersburg the workmen in town clothes, whom the dead man’s friends had brought for the sake of atmosphere, were taken by a group of students for plainclothesmen and insulted—which restored a certain equilibrium: was it not the fathers of these workmen who had abused the kneeling Chernyshevski from over the fence?
On the day following that mock execution, at dusk, “with shackles on my feet and a head full of thoughts,” Chernyshevski left St. Petersburg forever. He traveled in a tarantass, and since “to read books on the way” was permitted only beyond Irkutsk, he was extremely bored for the first month and a half of the journey. On July 23rd they brought him at last to the mines of the Nerchin mountain district at Kadaya: ten miles from China, four thousand six hundred from St. Petersburg. He was not made to work much. He lived in a badly caulked cottage and suffered from rheumatism. Two years passed. Suddenly a miracle happened: Olga Sokratovna prepared to join him in Siberia.
During most of his imprisonment in the fortress she, it is said, had been coursing about in the provinces and caring so little about her husband’s fate that her relatives even wondered whether she was not deranged. On the eve of the public disgrace she had sped back to St. Petersburg, and on the morning of the 20th had sped off again. We would never have believed her capable of making the trip to Kadaya if we had not known her ability to move easily and hectically from one place to another.
How he awaited her! Starting at the beginning of summer in 1866, together with seven-year-old Misha and a Dr. Pavlinov (Dr. Peacock—we are again entering the sphere of beautiful names), she got as far as Irkutsk, where she was held up for two months; there they stayed in a hotel with the enchantingly idiotic name (possibly distorted by biographers but most probably selected with particular care by sly fate) of Hotel de Amour et Co. Dr. Pavlinov was not permitted to go any further: he was replaced by a captain in the gendarmes, Hmelevski (a perfected edition of the dashing Pavlovsk hero), passionate, drunken, and brazen.
They arrived on August 23rd. In order to celebrate the meeting of man and wife, one of the exiled Poles, a former cook of Count di Cavour, the Italian statesman of whom Chernyshevski had once written so much and so caustically, baked one of those pastries on which his late master had been wont to stuff himself. But the meeting was not a success: it is amazing how everything bitter and heroic which life manufactured for Chernyshevski was invariably accompanied by a flavoring of vile farce.
Hmelevski hovered about and would not leave Olga Sokratovna alone; in her gypsy eyes there lurked something hunted but also enticing—against her will, perhaps. In return for her favors he is even alleged to have offered to arrange her husband’s escape, but the latter resolutely refused. In short, the constant presence of this shameless man made things so difficult (and what plans we had made!) that Chernyshevski himself persuaded his wife to set out on the return journey, and this she did on August 27th, having stayed thus, after a three-month journey, only four days—four days, reader!—with the husband whom she was now leaving for seventeen odd years. Nekrasov dedicated Peasant Children to her. It is a pity he did not dedicate to her his Russian Women.
During the last days of September, Chernyshevski was transferred to Aleksandrovski Zavod, a settlement twenty miles from Kadaya. He spent the winter there in prison, together with some Karakozovites and rebellious Poles. The dungeon was equipped with a Mongolian specialty—“stakes”: posts dug vertically into the ground and surrounding the prison in a solid ring. In June of the following year, having completed his probationery term, Chernyshevski was released on parole and took a room in the house of a sexton, a man who looked very much like him: gray purblind eyes, a sparse beard, long, tangled hair.…
Always a little drunk, always sighing, he would sorrowfully answer the questions of the curious with “The dear fellow keeps writing and writing!” But Chernyshevski stayed there no more than two months. His name was taken in vain at political trials. The half-witted artisan Rozanov testified that the revolutionaries wanted to catch and cage “a bird with royal blood in order to ransom Chernyshevski.”
Count Shuvalov sent the Irkutsk Governor-General a telegram: THE AIM OF THE EMIGRES IS TO FREE CHERNYSHEVSKI (STOP) PLEASE TAKE ALL POSSIBLE MEASURES IN REGARD TO HIM. Meanwhile the exile Krasovski, who had been transferred at the same time as he, had fled (and perished in the taiga, after having been robbed), so that there was every reason to jail dangerous Chernyshevski once again and to deprive him for a month of the right to correspondence.
Suffering intolerably from drafts, he never removed either his fur-lined dressing gown or his lambskin shapka. He moved about like a leaf blown by the wind, with a nervous stumbling gait, and his shrill voice could be heard now here and now there. His trick of logical reasoning was intensified—“in the manner of his father-in-law’s namesake,” as Strannolyubski so whimsically puts it. He lived in the “office”: a spacious room divided by a partition; along the entire wall in the larger part there ran a low “sleeping shelf,” in the nature of a platform; there, as if on a stage (or the way in zoos they exhibit a melancholy beast of prey among its native rocks) stood a bed and a table, which were essentially the natural furnishings of his whole life.
He used to get up after midday, would drink tea all day and lie reading the whole time; he would sit down to do some real writing only at midnight, since during the day his immediate neighbors, some nationalist Poles who were completely indifferent to him, would indulge in fiddling and torture him with their unlubricated music: by profession they were wheelwrights. To the other exiles he used to read on winter evenings. They noticed once that although he was calmly and smoothly reading a tangled tale, with lots of “scientific” digressions, he was looking at a blank notebook. A gruesome symbol!
It was then that he wrote a new novel. Still full of the success of What to Do? he expected much from it—most of all he expected the money which, printed abroad, the novel was supposed one way or another to bring in for his family. The Prologue is extremely autobiographical. When referring to it once, we spoke of its peculiar attempt to rehabilitate Olga Sokratovna; it conceals a similar attempt, in Strannolyubski’s opinion, to rehabilitate the author’s own person, for, underlining on the one hand Volgin’s influence, which reaches the point where “high dignitaries sought his
