Adrian Mihaïlov was another very talented member of our company. He had a thirst for knowledge, and a really remarkable memory. He had been a medical student, knew a great deal of natural science, and had dipped into various other branches of learning. We called him “the living encyclopædia,” and it was popularly supposed that there was hardly a question he could not answer. He could always give the date of any historical event, seemed to remember everything he read, and easily made himself at home in the most difficult subjects. He was resolute, inflexible, and energetic; and his mental superiority gave him an immense influence over his companions.

Finally, I must mention Yemelyànov,[[99]] one of those concerned in the assassination of Alexander II. As is well known, the Tsar was killed by a bomb thrown under his carriage by Grỳnevitsky.[[100]] Besides that youth and Russakov, who was brought to the scaffold, Yemelyànov was also directly accessory to the deed. He was standing close by when the explosion took place, with another bomb in readiness, but did not need to make use of it, seeing that the Tsar had already met his fate. He was arrested soon after, and with ten others was condemned to death in the “Trial of the Twenty.” The death-sentence was, however, only carried out in the case of Suhànov, an officer of marines, that of the others being commuted to penal servitude for life. Yemelyànov and his companions were imprisoned in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. He was to have been sent to Schlüsselburg when the new fortress there was completed, but owing to his being seized by serious illness this was not done, and instead he was sent to Kara in 1884. He was the son of a sacristan of the Orthodox Church, had attended a school of handicraft, and had later been sent at the State’s expense to Paris, where he sang as a chorister in the chapel of the Russian Embassy. When a youth of twenty he had returned to Russia, and associated himself with the Terrorists. He possessed considerable intelligence, and had gradually acquired a fair amount of information, self-taught. When I became acquainted with him he was a disillusioned sceptic, and spoke ironically of revolutionary ideas. Like Fomitchov and one or two others, he had become an admirer of Russian imperialism, and he reaped the reward of his opinions; but of that later.

CHAPTER XXVI
THE WOMEN’S PRISON

I come now to the most tragic time of my imprisonment and the saddest of my recollections, a series of events in connection with our unhappy fellow-sufferers in the women’s prison. We were always well instructed as to how our ladies were faring, for in spite of all the measures taken to prevent it, letters continually passed between us. Concerning the subject of the following narrative I also learned many additional details later from some of our women comrades.

When I first came to Kara ten women “politicals” were imprisoned there, one of whom—Lèbedieva—died soon after my arrival. The most remarkable among those remaining was Sophia Löschern von Herzfeld. She was the daughter of a general, and her relations belonged to the Court circles in Petersburg. She joined the Propagandist movement in the early sixties, and lived among the peasants, dressed like one of themselves, trying to diffuse the ideas of “peaceful” Socialism, if I may so call it. She was arrested, endured four years’ imprisonment while still under examination, and was at last banished to Siberia in the “Case of the 193.” The efforts of one of her relatives, a lady in the Tsaritsa’s household, procured her pardon, and in 1878 she was released from prison, at which time I made her acquaintance in Petersburg. But she was not allowed to enjoy her liberty for long; a year later she was arrested in Kiëv, and resisted capture “with weapons in her hand.” She was brought before a court-martial, together with Ossìnsky and Voloshenko; she and Ossìnsky were condemned to death, and he paid the full penalty of the law, but in her case “by favour” the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, and she was deported to Kara in 1879. Sophia Löschern von Herzfeld was modest and even shy in manner, giving the impression of an extremely reserved character. She suffered a longer term of imprisonment than any other participant in the revolutionary movement of the early seventies.

ANNA KORBA

ELIZABETH KOVALSKAYA