In Kirensk there are over a thousand exiles forced to live on their earnings and the small stipend received from the government. There is little work to be had, and that little is rendered more uncertain by the fact that the police shift the exiles about, seldom allowing them to remain in one place for more than six months. Most of them are thus kept in a state of semi-starvation. The magazines, books, and picture post cards which Madame Breshkovsky received were used by her to extraordinary advantage. Of some periodicals that I had caused to be sent her she wrote: “They make a great parade in Siberia, going as far as Irkutsk and Yakutsk, and some of them find resting-place in the libraries and museums.” She taught English to the young “politicals” and reading and writing to the illiterate native Siberians. “You understand my situation,” she wrote: “an old mother who would serve every one of them. I aid, I grumble, I sustain, I hear confessions like a priest, I give counsel and admonition, but this is a drop in the ocean of misery.” And of herself again: “How happy I am; persecuted, banished, and yet beloved.”
From the letters that have come to America and are shared by the circle of her friends here I select one, written in answer to a request that she send a message of her philosophy to the students of a women’s college who had asked me to tell the story of the Russian revolution as personified in her:
“October 20, 1913, Kirensk.
“Very dear and well-beloved Lillian:—
“Your letter, as well as the postal cards which you were good enough to send me, were received by me several days ago, and perhaps it is with the last mail that I send you this reply. Snow already covers the mountainous borders of the superb Lena, and frost will soon fill the waters with masses of ice, which will interrupt all communications for two or three weeks, leaving us isolated on our little island, entirely engulfed by cold, badly treated by the north wind. I hasten, therefore, to thank you for your indefatigable attention towards the old recluse who, habituated as she is to pass her days now and again imprisoned or exiled, rejoices, nevertheless, to find herself loved—to feel that the most noble hearts beat in unison with hers.
“It is strange! Every time that I am asked to speak about myself I am always confused and find nothing to say. It is very likely that if I paid more attention to the exterior circumstances of my life there would be enough to talk about that would fill more than a book. But ever since my childhood I have had the habit of creating a spiritual life, an interior world, which responded better to my spiritual taste. This imaginary world has had the upper hand over the real world in its details, over all that is transient.
“The aim of our existence, the perfecting of human nature, was always present to my vision, in my mind. The route, the direction that we ought to take in order to approach our ideal, was for me a problem, the solution of which absorbed the efforts of my entire life. I was implacable for myself, for my weaknesses, knowing that to serve a divine cause we must sincerely love the object of our devotion, that is to say, in this case, humanity.
“These meditations, and a vigorous imagination, which always carried me far beyond the present, permitting me to inhabit the most longed-for regions, combined to attract very little of my attention to daily circumstances.
“Without doubt, I have had suffering in my life, as I have had moments of joy, of happiness even. It is also true that the struggle with my failings, with the habits engrafted by a worldly education, have cost me more or less dearly. The misery of those near to me tore my heart to the extreme. In a word, life has passed in the same way as a bark thrown upon the mercy of a sea often stormy. But as the ideal was always there, present in my heart and in my mind, it guided me in my course, it absorbed me to such a degree that I did not feel in all their integrity the influences of passing events. The duty to serve the divine cause of humanity in its entirety, that of my people in particular, was the law of my life,—the supreme law, whose voice stilled my passions, my desires, in short, my weaknesses....
“Since I live in my thoughts more than by emotion, it is my thoughts that I have to confess more than the facts of my life. These facts, to tell the truth, are sufficiently confused in my memory, and often I would not be able to relate them in all their details. Also, in conversing with those who care to listen to me, I feel that I am monotonous, for it is always my ideas and my abstract observations that I want to communicate to my listeners. I have studied a great deal in order to understand even ever so little of the origin of the human soul, in order to understand more or less its complexity of to-day. There lies my only strength, so to speak, and I continue my study, knowing how complex my object of study is, and what an innumerable quantity of different combinations, of types, of low types, have been formed during the long history of the laboratory where is prepared the supreme fusion called the human soul.