Weep ye, O! for Lilybaeum;
We with you together weep.
Weep ye, O! for Agrigentum;
Reinforcements we await.
“What is [this] hymn to the Maid of the Skies? An episode from the prose story of Empedocles’ grandson … And what is the story of Empedocles’ grandson? One of the innumerable stories in The Academy of Azure Mountains. The Duchess of Cantershire has set off with a company of fashionable friends on a yacht through the Suez Canal to the East Indies in order to visit her tiny kingdom at the foot of the Azure Mountains, near Golconda. There they do what intelligent and good people of fashion do: They tell stories—stories that will follow in the next packages from Denzil Elliot to the editor of The Messenger of Europe” (Stasyulevich—who did not print any of this).
One feels dizzy, the letters swim and fade in one’s eyes—and here we again pick up the theme of Chernyshevski’s spectacles. He asked his relatives to send him new ones, but in spite of his efforts to explain it particularly graphically, he nonetheless made a mess of it, and six months later he received from them number “four and a half instead of five or five and a quarter.”
He gave an outlet to his passion for instruction by writing to Sasha about the mathematician Fermat, to Misha about the struggle between Popes and Emperors, and to his wife about medicine, Carlsbad, and Italy.… It ended the way it was bound to end: the authorities requested him to stop writing “learned letters.” This so offended and shook him that for over six months he did not write any letters at all (the authorities never saw the day when they would get from him those humble petitions which, for instance, Dostoevski used to dispatch from Semipalatinsk to the strong of this world). “There is no news from Papa,” wrote Olga Sokratovna to her son in 1879. “I wonder if he, my dear one, is still alive,” and she can be forgiven much for this intonation.
Yet one more jackanapes with a name ending in “ski” suddenly pops up as an extra: on March 15, 1881, “your unknown pupil Vitevski,” as he recommends himself, but according to police information a tippling doctor at the Stavropol district hospital, sends him a wire to Vilyuisk protesting with completely superfluous heat against an anonymous opinion that Chernyshevski was responsible for the assassination of the Tsar: “Your works are filled with peace and love. You never desired this (i.e., the assassination).” Whether because of these artless words or because of something else, the government softened and in the middle of June it showed its jail tenant a bit of thoughtful kindness: it had the walls of his domicile papered in “gris perle with a border,” and the ceiling covered with calico, which in toto cost the exchequer 40 rubles and 88 kopecks; i.e., somewhat more than Yakovlev’s overcoat and Musa’s coffee.
And already the following year the haggling over Chernyshevski’s ghost was concluded, after negotiations between the Volunteer Security Guards (the secret police) and the executive committee of the underground People’s Freedom concerning the preservation of law and order during Alexander the Third’s coronation, with the decision that if the latter went off smoothly, Chernyshevski would be freed: thus he was bartered in exchange for tsars—and vice versa (a process that subsequently found its material expression when the Soviet authorities substituted in Saratov his statue for that of Alexander the Second). A year later, in May, a petition was submitted in his sons’ names (he, of course, knew nothing of this), in the most florid and tear-jerking style imaginable. The Minister of Justice, Nabokov, made the appropriate report and “His Majesty deigned to permit the transfer of Chernyshevski to Astrakhan.”
At the end of February, 1883 (overburdened time was already having difficulty in dragging his destiny), the gendarmes, without a word of the resolution, suddenly took him to Irkutsk. No matter—leaving Vilyuisk was in itself a happy event, and more than once during the summer voyage up the long Lena (revealing such kinship with the Volga in its meanders) the old man broke into a dance, chanting dactylic hexameters.
But in September the voyage ended and with it the sensation of freedom. On the very first night Irkutsk appeared as the same kind of casemate in the deepest of provincial backwoods. In the morning he was visited by the chief of the gendarmerie, Keller.
Nikolay Gavrilovich sat leaning his elbow on the table and did not respond at once. “The Emperor has pardoned you,” said Keller, and repeated it even louder, seeing that the other was apparently half-asleep or beclouded. “Me?” said the old man suddenly, then stood up, placed his hands on the herald’s shoulders and, shaking his head, burst into tears. In the evening, feeling as if convalescent after a long illness, but still weak, with a delicious mist permeating his being, he had tea at the Kellers’, talking incessantly and telling the latters’ children “more or less Persian fairy tales—about asses, roses, robbers …” as one of his hearers recalled.
Five days later he was taken to Krasnoyarsk, from there to Orenburg—and in the late autumn at between six and seven in the evening he drove with post-horses through Saratov; there, in the yard of an inn by the gendarmery, in the mobile darkness, a wretched little lamp swayed so much in the wind that one simply could not distinguish properly Olga Sokratovna’s changeable, young, old, young face wrapped in a woolen kerchief—she had rushed headlong to this unhoped-for meeting; and that same night Chernyshevski (who could tell his thoughts?) was dispatched further.
With great mastery and with the utmost vividness of exposition (it might almost be taken for compassion) Strannolyubski describes his installation in his Astrakhan residence. No one met him with open arms, he was invited by no one, and very soon he understood that all the grandiose plans which had been his only support in exile must now melt away in an inanely lucid and quite imperturbable stillness.
To his Siberian illnesses Astrakhan added yellow fever. He frequently caught cold. He suffered acute palpitations of the heart. He smoked heavily and untidily. But worst of all, he was extremely nervous. He had an odd way of jumping up in the middle of a conversation—an abrupt movement stemming as it were from the day of his arrest, when he had dashed into his study, forestalling the funest Rakeyev.
On the street he could be mistaken for a little old artisan: stoop-shouldered, wearing a cheap summer suit and a crumpled cap. “But tell me …” “But don’t you think …” “But …”: casual busybodies used to bother him with absurd questions. The actor Syroboyarski kept on asking him “Shall I marry or no?” There were two or three last little denunciations which fizzed like damp fireworks. The company he kept consisted of some local Armenians—grocers and haberdashers. Educated people were surprised by the fact that somehow he did not take much interest in public affairs. “Well, what do you want,” he would reply cheerlessly, “what can I make of it all? Why, I haven’t even once attended a trial by jury, not once been to a meeting of the zemstvo …”
Hair smoothly parted, with uncovered ears too big for her, and with a “bird’s nest” just below the crown of her head—here she is again with us (she has brought candy and kittens from Saratov); there is on her long lips that same mocking half-smile, the martyred line of her brows is still sharper, and the sleeves of her dress are now puffed out above the shoulders. She is already past fifty (1833-1918) but her character is still the same, neurotically naughty; her hysterical fits culminate sometimes into convulsions.
During these last six years of his life, poor, old, unwanted Nikolay Gavrilovich translates with machine-like steadiness volume after volume of Georg Weber’s Universal History for the publisher Soldatenkov—and at the same time, moved by his ancient, irrepressible need to air his opinions, he tries gradually to smuggle through Weber some of his own ideas.
He signs his translation “Andreyev”; and in his review of the first volume (in The Examiner, February 1884) a critic remarks that this “is a kind of pseudonym, since in Russia there are as many Andreyevs as there are Ivanovs and Petrovs”; this is followed by stinging allusions to the heaviness of the style and by a small reprimand: “There was no need for Mr. Andreyev to dilate in his Foreword on the merits and demerits of Weber, who has long been known to the Russian reader. His textbook came out as early as the fifties and simultaneously three volumes of his Course of Universal History in the translation of E. and V. Korsh.… He would be well advised not to ignore the works of his predecessors.”
E. Korsh, a lover of arch-Russian terminology instead of that accepted by German philosophers, was by now an eighty-year-old man, an assistant of Soldatenkov’s, and in this capacity he proofread the “Astrakhan translator,” introducing corrections which enraged Chernyshevski, who in letters to the publisher set
