“All right. I’ll get you something.”
She lent him a volume of the “underground” magazine Forward! and some other prints. The tales of valour and martyrdom which he found in these publications, added to the editorials they contained calling upon the nobility to pay the debt they owed to the peasantry by sacrificing themselves for their welfare, literally intoxicated him.
“Dear Mother and Comrade,” he wrote in a letter home, “I have come to the conclusion that the so-called nobility to which I belong has never done anything useful. For centuries and centuries and centuries we have been living at the expense of those good, honest, overworked people, the peasantry. It is enough to drive one to suicide. Yes, mamma darling, we are a race of drones and robbers. The ignorant, unkempt moujiks that we treat like beasts are in reality angels compared to us. There is something in them—in their traditions and in the inherent purity of their souls—which should inspire us with reverence. Yet they are literally starved and three-fourths of their toil goes to maintain the army and the titled classes.”
Further down in the same letter he said: “Every great writer in the history of our literature has been in prison or exiled. Our noblest thinker and critic, Chernyshevsky, is languishing in Siberia. Why? Why? My hair stands erect when I think of these things.”
When it came to posting the letter, it dawned upon him that such sentiments were not to be trusted to the mails, and, feeling himself a conspirator, he committed the epistle to the flames.
He was touched by the spirit of that peasant worship—the religion of the “penitent nobility”—which was the spirit of the best unproscribed literature of the day as well as of the “underground” movement. Turgeneff owed the origin of his fame to the peasant portraits of his Notes of a Huntsman. Nekrasoff, the leading poet of the period, and a score of other writers were perpetually glorifying the peasant, going into ecstasies over him, bewailing him. The peasant they drew was a creature of flesh-and-blood reality, but shed over him was the golden halo of idealism. The central doctrine of the movement was a theory that the survival of the communistic element in the Russian village, was destined to become the basis of the country’s economic and political salvation; that Russia would leap into an ideal social arrangement without having to pass through capitalism; that her semi-barbaric peasant, kindly and innocent as a dove and the martyr of centuries, carried in his person the future glory, moral as well as material, of his unhappy country. As to the living peasant, he had no more knowledge of this adoration of himself (nor capacity to grasp the meaning of the movement, if an attempt had been made to explain it to him) than a squirrel has of the presence of a “q” in the spelling of its name.
Sophia disappeared from St. Petersburg, and Pavel found himself cut off from the “underground” world once more. The prints she had left him only served to excite his craving for others of the same character. The preoccupied, mysterious air of the “radicals” at the university tantalised him. He was in a veritable fever of envy, resentment, intellectual and spiritual thirst. He subscribed liberally to the various revolutionary funds that were continually being raised under the guise of charity, and otherwise tried to manifest his sympathy with the movement, all to no purpose. His contributions were accepted, but his advances were repulsed. One day he approached a student whom he had once given ten rubles “for a needy family”—a thin fellow with a very long neck and the face of a chicken.
“I should like to get something to read,” he said, trying to copy the tone of familiar simplicity which he had used with Sophia. “I have read one number of Forward! and another thing or two, but that’s all I have been able to get.”
“Pardon me,” the chicken-face answered, colouring, “I really don’t know what you mean. Can’t you get those books in the book-stores or in the public library?”