Step by step the women thus widened their rights. As soon as it became known that at some German university a certain professor might open his lecture-room to a few women, they knocked at his door and were admitted. They studied law and history at Heidelberg, and mathematics at Berlin; at Zürich more than a hundred girls and women worked at the University and the Polytechnicum. There they won something more valuable than the degree of Doctor of Medicine; they won the esteem of the most learned professors, who expressed it publicly several times. When I came to Zürich in 1872, and became acquainted with some of the students, I was astonished to see quite young girls, who were studying at the Polytechnicum, solving intricate problems of the theory of heat, with the aid of the differential calculus, as easily as if they had had years of mathematical training. One of the Russian girls who studied mathematics under Weierstrass at Berlin, Sophie Kovalévsky, became a mathematician of high repute, and was invited to a professorship at Stockholm; she was, I believe, the first woman in our century to hold a professorship in a university for men. She was so young that in Sweden no one wanted to call her anything but by her diminutive name of Sónya.

In spite of the open hatred of Alexander II. for educated women—when he met in his walks a girl wearing spectacles and a round Garibaldian cap he began to tremble, thinking that she must be a Nihilist bent on shooting him—in spite of the bitter opposition of the State police, who represented every woman student as a revolutionist; in spite of the thunders and the vile accusations which Katkóff directed against the whole of the movement in almost every number of his venomous gazette, the women succeeded, in the teeth of the Government, in opening a series of educational institutions. When several of them had obtained medical degrees abroad they forced the Government, in 1872, to let them open a medical academy with their own private means. And when the Russian women were recalled by their Government from Zürich, to prevent their intercourse with the revolutionist refugees, they forced the Government to let them open in Russia four universities of their own, which soon had nearly a thousand pupils. It seems almost incredible, but it is a fact that notwithstanding all the prosecutions which the Women’s Medical Academy had to live through, and its temporary closure, there are now in Russia more than six hundred and seventy women practising as doctors.

It was certainly a grand movement, astounding in its success and instructive in a high degree. Above all it was through the unlimited devotion of a mass of women in all possible capacities that they gained their successes. They had already worked as sisters of charity during the Crimean war, as organizers of schools later on, as the most devoted schoolmistresses in the villages, as educated midwives and doctors’ assistants amongst the peasants. They went afterward as nurses and doctors in the fever-stricken hospitals during the Turkish war of 1878, and won the admiration of the military commanders and of Alexander II. himself. I know two ladies, both very eagerly ‘wanted’ by the State police, who served as nurses during the war, under assumed names which were guaranteed by false passports; one of them, the greater ‘criminal’ of the two, who had taken a prominent part in my escape, was even appointed head nurse of a large hospital for wounded soldiers, while her friend nearly died from typhoid fever. In short, women took any position, no matter how low in the social scale, and no matter what privations it involved, if only they could be in any way useful to the people; not a few of them, but hundreds and thousands. They have conquered their rights in the true sense of the word.

Another feature of this movement was that in it the chasm between the two generations—the older and the younger sisters—did not exist; or, at least, it was bridged over to a great extent. Those who were the leaders of the movement from its origin never broke the link which connected them with their younger sisters, even though the latter were far more advanced in their ideals than the older women were.

They pursued their aims in the higher spheres; they kept strictly aloof from any political agitation; but they never committed the fault of forgetting that their true force was in the masses of younger women, of whom a great number finally joined the radical or revolutionary circles. These leaders were correctness itself—I considered them too correct—but they did not break with those younger students who went about as typical Nihilists, with short-cropped hair, disdaining crinoline, and betraying their democratic spirit in all their behaviour. The leaders did not mix with them, and occasionally there was friction, but they never repudiated them—a great thing, I believe, in those times of madly raging prosecutions.

They seemed to say to the younger and more democratic people, ‘We shall wear our velvet dresses and chignons, because we have to deal with fools who see in a velvet dress and a chignon the tokens of “political reliability;” but you, girls, remain free in your tastes and inclinations.’ When the women who studied at Zürich were ordered by the Russian Government to return, these correct ladies did not turn against the rebels. They simply said to the Government, ‘You don’t like it? Well, then, open women’s universities at home; otherwise our girls will go abroad in still greater numbers, and of course will enter into relations with the political refugees.’ When they were reproached with breeding revolutionists, and were menaced with the closing of their academy and universities, they retorted, ‘Yes, many students become revolutionists; but is that a reason for closing all universities?’ How few political leaders have the moral courage not to turn against the more advanced wing of their own party!

The real secret of their wise and fully successful attitude was that none of the women who were the soul of that movement were mere ‘feminists,’ desirous to get their share of the privileged positions in society and the State. Far from that. The sympathies of most of them went with the masses. I remember the lively part which Miss Stásova, the veteran leader of the agitation, took in the Sunday schools in 1861, the friendships she and her friends made among the factory girls, the interest they manifested in the hard life of those girls outside the school, the fights they fought against their greedy employers. I recall the keen interest which the women showed, at their pedagogical courses, in the village schools and in the work of those few who, like Baron Korff, were permitted for some time to do something in that direction, and the social spirit which permeated their courses. The rights they strove for—both the leaders and the great bulk of the women—were not only the individual right to higher instruction, but much more, far more, the right to be useful workers among the people, the masses. This was why they succeeded to such an extent.

VII

For the last few years the health of my father had been going from bad to worse, and when my brother Alexander and I came to see him, in the spring of 1871, we were told by the doctors that with the first frosts of autumn he would be gone. He had continued to live in the old style, in the Stáraya Konúshennaya, but around him everything in this aristocratic quarter had changed. The rich serf-owners, who once were so prominent there, had gone. After having spent in a reckless way the redemption money which they had received at the emancipation of the serfs, and after having mortgaged and re-mortgaged their estates in the new land banks which preyed upon their helplessness, they had withdrawn at last to the country or to provincial towns, there to sink into oblivion. Their houses had been taken by ‘the intruders’—rich merchants, railway contractors, and the like—while in nearly every one of the old families which remained in the Old Equerries’ Quarters a young life struggled to assert its rights upon the ruins of the old one. A couple of retired generals, who cursed the new ways, and relieved their griefs by predicting for Russia a certain and speedy ruin under the new order, or some relative occasionally dropping in, were all the company my father had now. Out of our many relatives, numbering nearly a score of families at Moscow alone in my childhood, two families only had remained in the capital, and these had joined the current of the new life, the mothers discussing with their girls and boys such matters as schools for the people and women’s universities. My father looked upon them with contempt. My stepmother and my younger stepsister, Pauline, who had not changed, did their best to comfort him; but they themselves felt strange in their unwonted surroundings.

My father had always been unkind and most unjust toward my brother Alexander, but Alexander was utterly incapable of holding a grudge against anyone. When he entered our father’s sick-room, with the deep, kind look of his dark blue eyes and with a smile revealing his infinite kindness, and when he immediately found out what could be done to render the sufferer more comfortable in his sick-chair, and did it as naturally as if he had left the sick-room only an hour before, my father was simply bewildered; he stared at him without being able to understand. Our visit brought life into the dull, gloomy house; nursing became more bright; my stepmother, Pauline, the servants themselves, grew more animated, and my father felt the change.