This afternoon I went to have tea with two of the peasant deputies. They had asked me because it was the Name-day of one of them. They are living in a new hotel and are most comfortably lodged. They pay a rouble a day for a room. Their rooms are far more comfortable and much cleaner than mine. We had beer, vodka, cucumbers, sardines and cold sausage, and we discussed very many subjects. During the afternoon many other members dropped in, and among them a member of the “Council of Empire.” These peasants, who come from an exceedingly distant government, belong to the more educated category. I believe the education in their particular government is good owing to the energy the Zemstva have displayed there. There are three of these peasants: one of them is a sensible man who does not know much about things outside Russia; but one of the others is quite well acquainted with the main features of European politics and talks of Jaurés, Chamberlain, and Lord Rosebery. “Who would have thought two years ago,” said one of them, “that we should see an Englishman here in the flesh?”
July 8th.
This evening I went to see an electro-technician, whom I know. We went for a walk on the islands. The technician’s brother, who had been a sailor, was with us. The electro-technician had been in Belgium and London. Then we went to the “Norodniu Dom,” the “People’s Palace,” a place where there is a popular theatre, a garden, and a restaurant. Before we went in here, the technician’s brother said he must have some vodka. So we went into a wine shop and he drank a large tumbler of vodka straight off. “This is the eighth glass I have had to-day,” he said. “It is only habit. I don’t feel any effects from it; but if I were to drink a glass of wine now I should be drunk.” We went into the “People’s Palace” and sat in the garden. Some other friends joined us. We ordered beer, and the technician’s brother was unwise enough to drink some. The technician described life in Paris and London. Paris he detested. He spoke French rather well. He said it was a boring city. I said, “Don’t you like the French theatres? You must admit they act well.” He said: “Their plays are so totally different from ours that I cannot bear them. They are always artificial and never the least like life. Our plays are like life.” Talking of London, he said when he arrived there he realised that the Continent was one thing and England a totally different thing. He said he could not understand thousands of poor people paying a shilling to see a football match. He had lived in an English family. He admired the neatness and the cleanliness of everything. He thought the hospitality of the English was great. He said the point of view of moral superiority was extraordinary. The way an Englishwoman he had known had spoken of Indians and Chinese as something so infinitely inferior, too, had surprised and amused him. The sailor brother put in a few remarks and was contradicted. The glass of beer which had followed the eighth tumbler of vodka now took its effect, and he said that a man present had morally spat three times in his face, and that he was not going to stand it any longer. His brother said that if he was not quiet he would go. He refused to be quieted, and so the company broke up.
July 9th.
To-day I went to the Duma with a translation of Herbert Spencer for Nazarenko. I also took him a translation of Shelley’s poems and a translation of “Œdipus Rex.” “There,” I said, “are the poems of a man called Shelley.” “You mean,” he answered, “the man who was drowned.” He took up the “Œdipus Rex,” and read three verses out of it. “Modern poetry depends for its beauty on its outward form,” he said. “It is all words; but if you read two lines of ancient poetry like this you see that it contains a whole philosophy.”
July 11th.
I went to see Nazarenko in his house. He was not at home, but a friend of his was there. He told me to wait. He was a peasant thirty-nine years old, rather bald, with a nice intelligent face. At first he took no notice of me, and read aloud to himself out of a book. Then he suddenly turned to me and asked me who I was. I said I was an English correspondent. He got up, shut the door, and begged me to stay. “Do the English know the condition of the Russian peasantry?” he asked. “They think we are wolves and bears. Do I look like a wolf? Please say I am not a wolf.” Then he ordered some tea and got a bottle of beer. He asked me to tell him how labourers lived in England, what their houses were made of, what the floors and walls were made of, how much wages a labourer received, what was the price of meat, whether they ate meat? Then he suddenly, to my intense astonishment, put the following question to me: “In England do they think that Jesus Christ was a God or only a great man?” I asked him what he thought. He said he thought He was a great man. He said that the Russian people were very religious and superstitious; they were deceived by the priests, who threatened them with damnation. He asked me if I could lend him an English bible. He wanted to see if it was the same as a Russian bible. I said it was exactly the same. He was immensely astonished. “Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that there are all those stories about Jonah and the whale and Joshua and the moon?” I said “Yes.” “I thought,” he said, “those had been put in for us.” I tried to explain to him that we were taught almost exactly the same doctrines, the differences between the Anglican and the Orthodox Church on points of dogma being infinitesimal. We then talked of ghosts. He asked me if I believed in ghosts. I said I did; he asked why. I gave various reasons. He said he could believe in a kind of telepathy, a kind of moral wireless telegraphy; but ghosts were the invention of old women. He suddenly asked me whether the earth was four thousand years old. “Of course it’s older,” he said. “But that’s what we are taught. We are taught nothing about geography and geology. It is, of course, a fact that there is no such thing as God,” he said; “because, if there is a God He must be a just God; and as there is so much injustice in the world it is plain that a just God does not exist.” I said I could conceive there being an unjust God. Such an idea was inconceivable, he said. “But you,” he went on, “an Englishman who has never been deceived by officials, do you believe that God exists?” (He thought that all ideas of religion and God as taught to the Russian people were part of a great official lie.) “I do,” I said. “Why?” he asked. I asked him if he had read the book of Job. He said he had. I said that when Job has everything taken away from him, although he has done no wrong, suddenly in the very depth of his misery he recognises the existence of God in the immensity of nature, and feels that his own soul is a part of a plan too vast for him to conceive or to comprehend; in feeling that he is a part of the scheme he acknowledges the existence of God, and that is enough; he is able to consent, and to console himself, although in dust and ashes. That was, I said, what I thought one could feel. He admitted the point of view, but he did not share it. After we had had tea we went for a walk in some gardens not far off, where there were various theatrical performances going on. The audience amused me, it applauded so rapturously and insisted on an encore, whatever was played, and however it was played, with such thunderous insistence. “Priests,” said my friend, “base everything on the devil. There is no devil. There was no fall of man. There are no ghosts, no spirits, but there are millions and millions of other inhabited worlds.”
I left him late, when the performance was over. This man, who was a member of the Duma for the government of Jula, was called Petruckin. I looked up his name in the list of members and found he had been educated in the local church school of the village of Kologrivo; that he had spent the whole of his life in this village and had been engaged in agriculture. That among the peasants he enjoyed great popularity as being a clever and hard-working man. He belonged to no party. He was not in the least like the men of peasant origin who had assimilated European culture. He was naturally sensible and alert of mind.
July 12th.
The Bill which the Duma passed last week abolishing capital punishment was discussed in the Upper House the day before yesterday and referred to a Committee. As the treatment of this matter has excited no little bewilderment abroad, it will, perhaps, not be useless to go further into the history of capital punishment in Russia, which I have mentioned in a previous letter. Capital punishment was abolished in Russia by the Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, in 1753. But as long as the knout was in use it was rather the name of the thing than the thing itself which was abolished, because a hundred lashes of the knout meant death. During the last years in which the knout was employed the number of lashes was limited to thirty-five. Its use was abolished by the Emperor Nicholas in the first year of his reign (1825). Beating with a birch was abolished by the Emperor Alexander II. in 1863, except for peasants; the beating of peasants was abolished in 1904. “Depuis lors,” writes M. Leroy-Beaulieu in his standard book on Russia, “la législation Russe est probablement la plus douce de l’Europe.... La peine capitale a depuis lors été réellement supprimée; à l’inverse de ce qui se voit en beaucoup d’autres pays, elle n’existe plus que pour les crimes politiques, pour les attentats contre la vie du Souverain ou la sûreté de l’État.” During almost the whole reign of Alexander II, from 1855 to 1876, only one man was executed on the scaffold, namely Karakosof, the perpetrator of the first attempt made on the Emperor’s life. From 1866 to 1903 only 114 men suffered the penalty of death throughout the whole of the Russian Empire.