§10
When I recall those days, I cannot remember a single incident among our set such as might weigh upon a man’s conscience and cause shame in recollection; and this is true of every one of the group without a single exception.
Of course, there were Platonic lovers among us, and disenchanted youths of sixteen. Vadim even wrote a play, in order to set forth the “terrible experience of a broken heart.” The play began thus—A garden, with a house in the distance; there are lights in the windows. The stage is empty. A storm is blowing. The garden gate clinks and bangs in the wind.
“Are the garden and the gate your only dramatis personae?” I asked him. He was rather offended. “What nonsense you talk!” he said; “it is no joking matter but an actual experience. But if you take it so, I won’t read any more.” But he did, none the less.
There were also love affairs which were by no means Platonic, but there were none of those low intrigues which ruin the woman concerned and debase the man; there were no “kept mistresses”; that disgusting phrase did not even exist. Cool, safe, prosaic profligacy of the bourgeois fashion, profligacy by contract, was unknown to our group.
If it is said that I approve of the worst form of profligacy, in which a woman sells herself for the occasion, I say that it is you, not I, who approve of it—not you in particular but people in general. That custom rests so securely on the present constitution of society that it needs no patronage of mine.
Our interest in general questions and our social ideals saved us; and a keen interest in scientific and artistic matters helped us too. These preoccupations had a purifying effect, just as lighted paper makes grease-spots vanish. I have kept some of Ogaryóv’s letters written at that time; and they give a good idea of what was mostly in our minds. For example, he writes to me on June 7, 1833:
“I think we know one another well enough to speak frankly. You won’t show my letter to anyone. Well, for some time past I have been so filled—crushed, I might say—with feelings and ideas, that I think—but ‘think’ is too weak: I have an indelible impression—that I was born to be a poet, whether writer of verse or composer of music, never mind which. I feel it impossible to part from this belief; I have a kind of intuition that I am a poet. Granting that I still write badly, still this inward fire and this abundance of feeling make me hope that some day I shall write decently—please excuse the triviality of the phrase. Tell me, my dear friend, whether I can believe in my vocation. Perhaps you know better than I do myself, and you will not be misled.”
He writes again on August 18:
“So you answer that I am a poet, a true poet. Is it possible that you understand the full significance of your words? If you are right, my feelings do not deceive me, and the object and aspiration of my whole life is not a mere dream. Are you right, I wonder? I feel sure that I am not merely raving. No one knows me better than you do—of that I am sure. Yes! that high vocation is not mere raving, no mere illusion; it is too high for deception, it is real, I live by virtue of it and cannot imagine a different life for myself. If only I could compose, what a symphony would take wing from my brain just now! First a majestic adagio; but it has not power to express all; I need a presto, a wild stormy presto. Adagio and presto are the two extremes. A fig for your andante and allegro moderato! They are mere mediocrities who can only lisp, incapable alike of strong speech or strong feeling.”
To us this strain of youthful enthusiasm sounds strange, from long disuse; but these few lines of a youth under twenty show clearly enough that the writer is insured against commonplace vice and commonplace virtue, and that, though he may stumble into the mire, he will come out of it undefiled.
There is no want of self-confidence in the letter; but the believer has doubts and a passionate desire for confirmation and a word of sympathy, though that hardly needed to be spoken. It is the restlessness of creative activity, the uneasy looking about of a pregnant soul.
“As yet,” he writes in the same letter, “I can’t catch the sounds that my brain hears; a physical incapacity limits my fancy. But never mind! A poet I am, and poetry whispers to me truth which I could never have discovered by cold logic. Such is my theory of revelation.”
Thus ends the first part of our youth, and the second begins with prison. But before starting on that episode, I must record the ideas towards which we were tending when the prison-doors closed on us.