Divine and HumanБожеское и человеческое

It was in the seventies, in Russia, at the very height of the struggle between the revolutionaries and the government.

The governor-general of the southern region, a healthy German with a drooping mustache, a cold gaze and an expressionless face, in a military frock coat with a white cross at his neck, sat one evening in his study at a desk with four candles in green shades, looking through and signing the papers his chief clerk had left for him. “Adjutant General So-and-so,” he traced with a long flourish, and laid each one aside.

Among the papers was the sentence of death by hanging passed on Anatoly Svetlogub, a graduate of Novorossiysk University, for taking part in a conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of the existing government. The general frowned particularly hard, and signed this one too. With white, well-tended fingers, wrinkled by age and soap, he neatly squared the edges of the sheets and laid them aside. The next paper concerned the allocation of funds for transporting provisions. He was reading it attentively, thinking whether the sums had been reckoned correctly or not, when he suddenly remembered his conversation with his deputy about the Svetlogub case. The general held that the dynamite found at Svetlogub’s did not yet prove criminal intent. His deputy, on the other hand, insisted that besides the dynamite there was a great deal of evidence proving that Svetlogub was the leader of a gang. And remembering this, the general fell to thinking, and under his frock coat, with its padded chest and lapels stiff as cardboard, his heart began to beat unevenly, and he began to breathe so heavily that the large white cross, the object of his joy and pride, stirred on his chest. It was still possible to call back the chief clerk and, if not to cancel the sentence, at least to postpone it.

“Call him back? Not call him back?”

His heart beat still more unevenly. He rang. With a quick, noiseless step the messenger came in.

“Has Ivan Matveyevich left?”

“No, Your High Excellency; he was pleased to go to the chancellery.”

The general’s heart now stopped, now gave quick jolts. He remembered the warning of the doctor who had listened to his heart a few days before.

“The main thing,” the doctor had said, “is that as soon as you feel you have a heart, stop working and amuse yourself. Agitation is the worst of all. On no account allow yourself to come to that.”

“Shall I call him, sir?”

“No, there’s no need,” said the general. “Yes,” he said to himself, “indecision is the most agitating thing of all. It is signed and done with. ‘Ein jeder macht sich sein Bett und muss drauf schlafen,’” he said to himself, his favorite proverb. “Besides, it is no concern of mine. I am the executor of a higher will, and I must stand above such considerations,” he added, knitting his brows to call up in himself a cruelty that was not in his heart.

And at once he remembered his last meeting with the sovereign: how the sovereign, putting on a stern face and fixing his glassy gaze on him, had said, “I rely on you: as you did not spare yourself in the war, so you will act as resolutely in the struggle with the Reds — you will let no one deceive or frighten you. Farewell!” And the sovereign, embracing him, had offered him his shoulder to kiss. The general remembered this, and how he had answered the sovereign: “My one desire is to give my life in the service of my sovereign and my fatherland.”

And remembering the feeling of obsequious tenderness he had felt at the consciousness of his self-sacrificing devotion to his sovereign, he drove away the thought that had troubled him for a moment, signed the remaining papers, and rang once more.

“Is tea served?” he asked.

“They are serving it now, Your High Excellency.”

“Good, you may go.”

The general sighed deeply and, rubbing the place where his heart was, went with a heavy step out into the large empty ballroom, and across its freshly polished parquet into the drawing room, from which voices could be heard.

The general’s wife had guests: the governor and his wife, an old princess, a great patriot, and an officer of the Guards, the fiancé of the general’s last unmarried daughter.

The general’s wife, a dry woman with a cold face and thin lips, sitting at a low table on which stood a tea service with a silver teapot over a spirit lamp, was telling the governor’s wife, a fat lady who tried to look young, in a falsely sorrowful tone, of her anxiety about her husband’s health.

“Every day fresh reports, one after another, uncover conspiracies and all sorts of horrors... And it all falls on Basile — he has to decide everything.”

“Oh, don’t speak of it!” said the princess. “Je deviens féroce quand je pense à cette maudite engeance.”

“Yes, yes, it is terrible! Would you believe it, he works twelve hours a day, and with his weak heart. I am simply afraid...”

She did not finish, seeing her husband come in.

“Yes, you really must hear him. Barbini is a marvelous tenor,” she said, smiling pleasantly at the governor’s wife, of a singer newly arrived in town, as naturally as if that were all they had been talking about.

The general’s daughter, a pretty, plump girl, was sitting with her fiancé in a far corner of the drawing room, behind a little Chinese screen. She got up and came over to her father with her fiancé.

“Well now, we haven’t even seen each other today!” said the general, kissing his daughter and shaking her fiancé’s hand.

Having greeted the guests, the general sat down at the little table and fell into conversation with the governor about the latest news.

“No, no, no talk of business — it is forbidden!” the general’s wife broke in on the governor. “And here, by the way, is Kopyev; he will tell us something amusing. Good evening, Kopyev.”

And Kopyev, a well-known wag and wit, did indeed tell the latest anecdote, which made everyone laugh.

“But no, it cannot be, it cannot, it cannot! Let me go!” Svetlogub’s mother was shouting, shrieking, tearing herself from the hands of a gymnasium teacher, her son’s friend, and of the doctor, who were trying to hold her back.

Svetlogub’s mother was a pretty woman, not old, with graying curls and a star of little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. The teacher, Svetlogub’s friend, on learning that the death sentence had been signed, had wanted to prepare her carefully for the terrible news, but he had scarcely begun to speak about her son when she guessed, from the tone of his voice and the timidity of his look, that what she had feared had happened.

This was taking place in a small room in the best hotel in the town.

“Why are you holding me, let me go!” she shouted, tearing herself away from the doctor, an old friend of their family, who with one hand held her by her thin elbow and with the other set a vial of drops on the oval table in front of the sofa. She was glad they were holding her, because she felt that she had to do something, but what, she did not know, and she was afraid of herself.

“Calm yourself. Here, drink some valerian drops,” said the doctor, handing her a cloudy liquid in a small glass.

She suddenly fell quiet and almost doubled over, bowing her head on her sunken breast, and, closing her eyes, sank down on the sofa.

And she remembered how her son, three months before, had taken leave of her with a mysterious and sad face. Then she remembered an eight-year-old boy in a velvet jacket, with bare little legs and long curling ringlets of fair hair.

“And him, him, that very same boy... they will do this to him!”

She leaped up, pushed the table away, and broke free of the doctor’s hands. Reaching the door, she fell into an armchair again.

“And they say there is a God! What kind of God is he, if he allows this! The devil take him, that God!” she shouted, now sobbing, now going off into hysterical laughter. “They will hang, hang the one who gave up everything, his whole career, gave all his fortune to others, to the people, gave everything,” she said, she who had always reproached her son for this before and now held up before herself the merit of his self-renunciation. “And him, him, they will do this to him! And you say there is a God!” she cried.

“But I am not saying anything; I am only asking you to drink the drops.”

“I want nothing. Ha-ha-ha!” she laughed and sobbed, drinking deep of her despair.

By nightfall she was so worn out that she could neither speak nor weep any longer, and only stared before her with a fixed, mad gaze. The doctor gave her an injection of morphine, and she fell asleep.

Her sleep was dreamless, but the awakening was more terrible still. Most terrible of all was that people could be so cruel — not only those terrible generals with shaven cheeks, and the gendarmes, but everyone, everyone: the chambermaid who came in with a calm face to tidy the room, and the neighbors in the next room, who met each other cheerfully and laughed about something, as if nothing had happened.

Svetlogub had been in solitary confinement for over a month, and in that time he had lived through much.

From childhood Svetlogub had unconsciously felt the wrong of his exceptional position as a rich man, and though he tried to stifle this consciousness in himself, often, when he came upon the want of the people, and sometimes simply when he himself was especially happy and glad, he felt ashamed before those people — peasants, old men, women, children — who were born, grew up and died not only without knowing all the joys he enjoyed without valuing them, but without ever escaping from strenuous labor and want. When he finished the university, to free himself from this consciousness of being in the wrong, he started a school on his estate, a model school, a cooperative shop, and an almshouse for homeless old men and women. But, strange to say, while busy with these things he felt still more ashamed before the people than when he dined with his friends or bought an expensive saddle horse. He felt that all this was not it, and worse than not it: there was something bad in it, something morally unclean.

In one of these moods of disillusionment with his work in the country he came to Kiev and met one of his closest friends from the university. Three years after this meeting that friend was shot in the moat of the Kiev fortress.

This friend, an ardent, impetuous man of enormous gifts, drew him into a society whose aim was to enlighten the people, to awaken in them the consciousness of their rights, and to form among them united circles striving to free themselves from the power of the landowners and the government. Talks with this man and his friends seemed to bring into clear consciousness all that Svetlogub had until then felt only dimly. He understood now what he had to do. Without breaking off relations with his new comrades, he went back to the country and began there an entirely new work. He himself became the schoolteacher, set up classes for adults, read books and pamphlets to them, explained to the peasants their situation; besides this, he published illegal books and pamphlets for the people, and gave all he could, without taking from his mother, toward setting up similar centers in other villages.

From the very first steps of this new work Svetlogub met two unexpected obstacles: one was that most of the common people were not only indifferent to his preaching but looked on him almost with contempt. (Only exceptional individuals understood him and sympathized with him, and often people of doubtful morals.) The other obstacle came from the government. His school was forbidden him, and his house and those of people close to him were searched, and books and papers were taken away.

Svetlogub paid little attention to the first obstacle, the indifference of the people, because he was too indignant at the second: the persecution by the government, senseless and insulting. His comrades met the same in their work elsewhere, and the feeling of exasperation against the government, which they fanned in one another, reached such a pitch that the greater part of the circle decided to fight the government by force.

The head of this circle was a certain Mezhenetsky, a man, as everyone considered him, of unshakable strength of will, invincible logic, and entirely devoted to the cause of the revolution.

Svetlogub fell under the influence of this man and, with the same energy with which he had worked among the people before, gave himself up to terrorist activity.

This activity was dangerous, but it was this very danger that attracted Svetlogub most of all.

He told himself, “Victory or martyrdom; and if martyrdom, then martyrdom is the same victory, only in the future.” And the fire kindled in him not only did not go out in the course of his seven years of revolutionary activity, but blazed up more and more, fed by the love and respect of the people among whom he moved.

To the fact that he had given almost all his fortune — the fortune that had come to him from his father — to this cause, he attached no importance, nor to the labors and the want he often endured in this work. One thing only grieved him: the sorrow this work caused his mother and the girl, her ward, who lived with his mother and loved him.

Not long before, a fellow terrorist whom he did not much like and found unpleasant, being hunted by the police, had asked him to hide some dynamite at his place. Svetlogub agreed without hesitation, precisely because he did not like this comrade; and the next day Svetlogub’s lodgings were searched and the dynamite found. To all questions as to how and where he had obtained the dynamite, Svetlogub refused to answer.

And now the martyrdom he had expected began for him. Of late, when so many of his friends had been executed, imprisoned, exiled, when so many women had suffered, Svetlogub had almost desired martyrdom. And in the first moments of his arrest and interrogations he felt a peculiar excitement, almost joy.

He felt this when they undressed him and searched him, and when they led him into the prison and locked the iron door behind him. But when one day passed, a second, a third, when one week passed, a second, a third, in a dirty, damp cell full of vermin, in solitude and enforced idleness, broken only by tapping messages with his fellow prisoners, who passed on nothing but bad and cheerless news, and now and then by the interrogations of cold, hostile people who tried to extract from him accusations against his comrades, his moral strength, together with his physical strength, steadily weakened, and he only pined and longed, as he told himself, for some end to this tormenting situation. His anguish was increased still more by his having come to doubt his own strength. In the second month of his confinement he began to catch himself thinking of telling the whole truth, if only to be set free. He was horrified at his weakness, but no longer found his former strength in himself, and hated and despised himself, and pined all the more.

Most terrible of all was that in confinement he came to feel such pity for the young strength and joys he had sacrificed so easily while he was free, and which now seemed to him so enchanting, that he repented of what he had held to be good, repented at times of all his work. Thoughts came to him of how happily and well he might live in freedom — in the country, at liberty, abroad, among friends he loved and who loved him. Marry her, or perhaps another, and live with her a simple, joyful, bright life.

On one of the tormentingly monotonous days of his second month of confinement, the warden on his usual round handed Svetlogub a small book with a gilt cross on a brown binding, saying that the governor’s wife had visited the prison and left some Gospels, which it was permitted to give to the prisoners. Svetlogub thanked him and smiled slightly, laying the little book on the small table screwed to the wall.

When the warden had gone, Svetlogub exchanged taps with his neighbors, saying that the warden had come and had said nothing new, but had only brought a Gospel; and his neighbor answered that he had got one too.

After dinner Svetlogub opened the wretched little book, whose leaves had stuck together from the damp, and began to read. Svetlogub had never yet read the Gospel as a book. All he knew of it was what the religion teacher had taken them through at the gymnasium and what priests and deacons chanted in church.

“Chapter one. The genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Isaac begat Jacob, Jacob begat Judas...” he read. “Zorobabel begat Abiud,” he read on. It was all just what he had expected: some tangled, utterly useless nonsense. If he had not been in prison he could not have read to the end of one page, but here he went on reading for the sake of the act of reading: “like Gogol’s Petrushka,” he thought to himself. He read the first chapter, about the birth from a virgin and about the prophecy, which consisted in this, that the one born would be named Emmanuel, meaning “God with us.” “And where is the prophecy in that?” he thought, and read on. He read the second chapter too, about the walking star, and the third, about John who fed on dragonflies, and the fourth, about some devil who proposed to Christ a gymnastic exercise from a roof. All this seemed to him so uninteresting that, in spite of the tedium of prison, he was about to close the book and begin his usual evening occupation — catching fleas in his shirt, taken off for the purpose — when he suddenly remembered that at an examination in the fifth class of the gymnasium he had forgotten one of the Beatitudes, and the rosy-faced, curly-haired priest had suddenly lost his temper and given him a two. He could not remember which beatitude it had been, and read the Beatitudes. “Blessed are they which are driven out for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” he read. “That, perhaps, applies to us too,” he thought. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you. Rejoice and be glad: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” “Ye are the salt of the earth. If the salt have lost its strength, wherewith shalt thou make it salt? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men.”

“That applies to us altogether,” he thought, and went on reading. Having read the whole fifth chapter, he fell to thinking. “Be not angry, commit not adultery, endure evil, love your enemies.”

“Yes, if everyone lived like that,” he thought, “there would be no need even of revolution.” Reading further, he entered more and more into the meaning of those places in the book that were wholly clear. And the further he read, the more he came to the thought that something especially important was said in this book. Something important, and simple, and moving, something he had never heard before, but which seemed somehow long familiar to him.

“And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his soul shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his soul for my sake, the same shall save it. For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose or harm himself?”

“Yes, yes, this is it!” he suddenly cried out, with tears in his eyes. “This is just what I wanted to do. Yes, I wanted this very thing: precisely, to give my soul; not to save it, but to give it. In this is joy, in this is life.” “I did a great deal for people, for human glory,” he thought, “not the glory of the crowd, but the glory of the good opinion of those I respected and loved: Natasha, Dmitry Shelomov — and even then there were doubts, there was unease. I was happy only when I acted simply because my soul demanded it, when I wanted to give myself, to give all of myself...”

From that day Svetlogub began to spend most of his time reading and pondering what was said in this book. This reading called up in him not only a state of tender emotion that carried him out of the conditions he was in, but also such a working of thought as he had never before been conscious of in himself. He thought about why people, all people, do not live as this book says. “For to live like this is good not for one alone, but for everyone. Only live like this, and there will be no sorrow, no want; there will be nothing but blessedness. If only this were over, if only I were free again,” he thought at times. “They will let me out someday, or send me to hard labor. It is all the same; one can live like this anywhere. And I will live like this. It is possible, and one must live like this; not to live like this is madness.”

On one of the days when he was in this joyful, exalted state, the warden came into his cell at an unusual hour and asked whether he was well and whether he wanted anything. Svetlogub was surprised, not understanding what this change meant, and asked for cigarettes, expecting a refusal. But the warden said he would send some at once, and indeed the guard brought him a packet of cigarettes and matches.

“Somebody must have put in a word for me,” thought Svetlogub, and, lighting a cigarette, began to walk back and forth in his cell, pondering the meaning of this change.

The next day he was taken to the court. In the courtroom, where he had already been several times, they did not question him. But one of the judges, without looking at him, rose from his chair — the others rose too — and, holding a paper in his hands, began to read in a loud, unnaturally expressionless voice.

Svetlogub listened and looked at the judges’ faces. None of them looked at him, and they listened with grave, doleful faces.

The paper said that Anatoly Svetlogub, for proven participation in revolutionary activity having as its aim the overthrow, in the nearer or more distant future, of the existing government, was sentenced to the deprivation of all rights and to death by hanging.

Svetlogub heard and understood the meaning of the words the officer pronounced. He noticed the absurdity of the words “in the nearer or more distant future,” and of depriving of rights a man condemned to death; but he did not at all understand what the thing that had been read meant for him.

Only long after he had been told he could go, and had come out into the street with a gendarme, did he begin to understand what had been announced to him.

“There’s something wrong here, wrong... This is some kind of nonsense. It cannot be,” he said to himself, sitting in the carriage that was taking him back to the prison.

He felt such a force of life in himself that he could not imagine death: he could not join the consciousness of his “I” with death, with the absence of “I.”

Back in his prison, Svetlogub sat down on his cot and, closing his eyes, tried to picture vividly what awaited him, and could in no way do it. He could in no way imagine that he would not be, nor could he imagine that people could wish to kill him.

“Me, young, kind, happy, loved by so many people,” he thought — he remembered the love for him of his mother, of Natasha, of his friends — “they will kill me, hang me! Who will do this, and why? And then, what will there be when I am not? It cannot be,” he said to himself.

The warden came in. Svetlogub did not hear him enter.

“Who is it? What do you want?” said Svetlogub, not recognizing the warden. “Ah, yes, it’s you! When will it be?” he asked.

“I cannot say, sir,” said the warden, and, after standing silent for a few seconds, suddenly said in an ingratiating, gentle voice, “Our chaplain here would like... to give you the last... would like to see you...”

“I don’t need him, I don’t, I need nothing! Go away!” cried Svetlogub.

“Wouldn’t you like to write to someone? That can be done,” said the warden.

“Yes, yes, send me the things. I will write.”

The warden went out.

“So it will be in the morning,” thought Svetlogub. “They always do it that way. Tomorrow morning I shall not be... No, it cannot be; it is a dream.”

But the guard came, the real guard he knew, and brought two pens, an inkwell, a packet of notepaper and bluish envelopes, and set a stool by the table. All this was real and not a dream.

“I must not think, not think. Yes, yes, write. I will write to Mama,” thought Svetlogub, and sat down on the stool and at once began to write.

“My dear, my own!” he wrote, and wept. “Forgive me, forgive me for all the sorrow I have caused you. Whether I was mistaken or not, I could not do otherwise. I ask one thing: forgive me.” — “But I have written that already,” he thought. “Well, no matter, there is no time now to copy it out.” — “Do not grieve for me,” he wrote on. “A little sooner, a little later... isn’t it all the same? I am not afraid, and I do not repent of what I did. I could not do otherwise. Only forgive me. And do not be angry with them, neither with those I worked with nor with those who are executing me. Neither the one nor the other could do otherwise: forgive them, they know not what they do. I dare not repeat these words of myself, but they are in my soul, and they lift me up and calm me. Forgive me; I kiss your dear, wrinkled, old hands!” — Two tears, one after another, dropped onto the paper and spread on it. — “I am weeping, but not from sorrow or fear; from tender emotion before the most solemn moment of my life, and because I love you. Do not reproach my friends, but love them. Prokhorov especially, precisely because he was the cause of my death. It is such a joy to love one who is, not to say guilty, but someone you could reproach, could hate. To come to love such a man — an enemy — is such happiness. Tell Natasha that her love was my comfort and joy. I did not understand this clearly, but in the depths of my soul I was conscious of it. It was easier for me to live knowing that she exists and loves me. Well, I have said everything. Farewell!”

He reread the letter, and reading Prokhorov’s name at the end of it, suddenly remembered that the letter might be read, would surely be read, and that this would be the ruin of Prokhorov.

“My God, what have I done!” he suddenly cried out, and, tearing the letter into long strips, began carefully to burn them over the lamp.

He had sat down to write in despair, and now he felt calm, almost joyful.

He took another sheet and at once began to write. Thoughts crowded one after another into his head.

“Dear, darling Mama!” he wrote, and again his eyes grew misty with tears, and he had to wipe them with the sleeve of his prison coat to see what he was writing. “How little I knew myself, how little I knew all the strength of the love and gratitude toward you that always lived in my heart! Now I know and feel it, and when I remember our quarrels, the unkind words I said to you, it is painful and shameful to me, and almost incomprehensible. Forgive me, then, and remember only what was good, if there was anything of the kind in me.

“I am not afraid of death. To tell the truth, I do not understand it, I do not believe in it. For if there is death, annihilation, then is it not all the same whether one dies thirty years or thirty minutes sooner or later? And if there is no death, then it is all the more the same, sooner or later.”

“But why am I philosophizing,” he thought. “I must say what was in that letter — something good at the end. Yes.” — “Do not reproach my friends, but love them, and especially the one who was the unwitting cause of my death. Kiss Natasha for me and tell her that I always loved her.”

He folded the letter, sealed it, and sat down on the bed, his hands on his knees, swallowing his tears.

He still did not believe that he must die. Several times, asking himself again whether he was not asleep, he tried in vain to wake up. And this thought led him to another: whether the whole of life in this world is not a dream, the awakening from which will be death. And if that is so, is not the consciousness of life in this world only an awakening from the dream of a previous life, whose details I do not remember either? So that life here is not a beginning, but only a new form of life. I shall die and pass into a new form. He liked this thought; but when he wanted to lean on it, he felt that this thought, and indeed any thought whatever, cannot give fearlessness before death. At last he grew tired of thinking. His brain no longer worked. He closed his eyes and sat like that for a long time, not thinking.

“How, then? What will there be?” he remembered again. “Nothing? No, not nothing. Then what?”

And it suddenly became perfectly clear to him that for a living person there is not, and cannot be, an answer to these questions.

“Then why do I ask myself about it? Why? Yes, why? I must not ask; I must live as I was living just now, when I was writing that letter. For we are all condemned long since, always, and we live. We live well, joyfully, when... we love. Yes, when we love. There, I was writing the letter, I loved, and I was happy. That is how one must live. And one can live so everywhere and always, at liberty and in prison, today and tomorrow, and to the very end.”

He wanted to talk with someone at once, kindly, lovingly. He knocked at the door, and when the sentry looked in, he asked him what time it was and whether he would soon be relieved, but the sentry made no answer. Then he asked for the warden to be called. The warden came, asking what he needed.

“Here, I have written a letter to my mother; please send it on,” he said, and tears came into his eyes at the thought of his mother.

The warden took the letter and, promising to pass it on, was about to go, but Svetlogub stopped him.

“Listen, you are kind. Why do you serve in this hard post?” he said, touching his sleeve affectionately.

The warden smiled an unnaturally pitiful smile and, lowering his eyes, said:

“A man has to live.”

“But leave this post. One can always find something. You are so kind. Perhaps I could...”

The warden suddenly gave a sob, turned quickly and went out, slamming the door.

The warden’s agitation moved Svetlogub still more, and, holding back tears of joy, he began to walk from wall to wall, feeling no fear at all now, but only a state of tender emotion that lifted him above the world.

That very question, what would become of him after death, which he had tried so hard to answer and could not, seemed resolved for him — and not by any positive, reasoned answer, but by the consciousness of the true life that was in him.

And he remembered the words of the Gospel: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” “Here I am, falling into the ground. Yes, verily, verily,” he thought.

“If only I could sleep,” he suddenly thought, “so as not to grow weak later.” He lay down on the cot, closed his eyes, and fell asleep at once.

He woke at six in the morning, still wholly under the spell of a bright, merry dream. He had dreamed that he and some little fair-haired girl were climbing about in spreading trees laden with ripe black cherries, and gathering them into a big copper basin. The cherries do not fall into the basin but scatter on the ground, and some strange animals, like cats, catch the cherries, toss them up, and catch them again. And watching this, the girl goes off into peals of laughter, laughing so infectiously that Svetlogub too laughs merrily in his sleep, without knowing why. Suddenly the copper basin slips from the girl’s hands; Svetlogub tries to catch it but is too late, and the basin, knocking against the branches, falls to the ground with a brassy clatter. And he wakes up, smiling and listening to the basin’s clatter going on. The clatter is the sound of the iron bolts being drawn back in the corridor. Steps can be heard along the corridor, and the clink of rifles. Suddenly he remembers everything. “Oh, if only I could fall asleep again!” thinks Svetlogub, but there is no falling asleep now. The steps have come up to his door. He hears the key feeling for the lock, and the door creaking as it opens.

In came an officer of the gendarmes, the warden, and the escort.

“Death? Well, what of it? I shall go. Yes, it is good. Everything is good,” thinks Svetlogub, feeling the return of that state of tender, solemn emotion he had been in the day before.

In the same prison where Svetlogub was held there was also held an old man, an Old Believer of the priestless sect, who had come to doubt his own leaders and was seeking the true faith. He rejected not only the Nikonian church but also the government since the time of Peter, whom he considered the Antichrist; he called the tsar’s rule “the Tobacco Power,” and boldly spoke out what he thought, denouncing priests and officials, for which he had been tried and kept in jail and sent on from one prison to another. That he was not at liberty but in prison, that the wardens swore at him, that they put him in fetters, that his fellow prisoners mocked him, that all of them, like the authorities too, had renounced God and swore at one another and in every way defiled the image of God in themselves — none of this concerned him; he had seen all this everywhere in the world when he was at liberty. All this, he knew, came from people having lost the true faith and having all wandered off, like blind puppies from their mother. And yet he knew that the true faith exists. He knew it because he felt this faith in his heart. And he sought this faith everywhere. Most of all he hoped to find it in the Revelation of John.

“He that is unjust, let him do injustice still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him do righteousness still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still. Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according to his works.” And he read this mysterious book constantly, and every minute awaited “him that is to come,” who would not only give every man according to his works but would also reveal the whole divine truth to people.

On the morning of Svetlogub’s execution he heard drums and, climbing up to the window, saw through the bars how the cart was brought up and how a youth with bright eyes and curling locks came out of the prison and, smiling, mounted the cart. In the youth’s small white hand was a book. The youth pressed the book to his heart — the Old Believer recognized that it was the Gospel — and, nodding to the prisoners at the windows and smiling, exchanged a glance with him. The horses started, and the cart, with the youth sitting in it, bright as an angel, surrounded by guards, rumbled over the stones and out through the gates.

The Old Believer got down from the window, sat down on his cot and fell to thinking. “This one has come to know the truth,” he thought. “That is why the servants of Antichrist will strangle him with a rope: so that he reveals it to no one.”

It was a gray autumn morning. The sun could not be seen. A damp, warm wind blew from the sea.

The fresh air, the sight of the houses, of the town, of horses, of the people who looked at him — all this diverted Svetlogub. Sitting on the bench of the cart, his back to the driver, he could not help peering into the faces of the soldiers escorting him and of the townspeople he passed.

It was early in the morning; the streets he was driven along were almost empty, and only working people were about. Some bricklayers in aprons, spattered with lime, who were hurrying toward him, stopped and turned back to keep level with the cart. One of them said something and waved his hand, and they all turned around and went back to their work. Carters hauling clanging bars of iron pulled their big horses aside to make way for the cart, stopped, and stared at him with puzzled curiosity. One of them took off his cap and crossed himself. A cook in a white apron and a little cap, with a basket on her arm, came out of a gateway, but seeing the cart she quickly went back into the yard and ran out again with another woman, and both of them, holding their breath, followed the cart with wide-open eyes for as long as they could see it. A disheveled, unshaven, graying man was telling a yard porter something, plainly disapproving, with energetic gestures, pointing at Svetlogub. Two little boys caught up with the cart at a trot and, their heads turned toward it, not looking where they were going, kept pace with it along the sidewalk. The older one walked with quick steps; the other, a little one without a cap, holding on to the older boy and looking at the cart in fright, kept up with him on his short little legs with difficulty, stumbling. Meeting his eyes, Svetlogub nodded to him. This gesture from the terrible man being carried in the cart so frightened the boy that, goggling and opening his mouth, he was about to cry. Then Svetlogub kissed his hand to him and smiled at him kindly. And the boy suddenly, unexpectedly, answered with a sweet, kind smile.

All the way there, the knowledge of what awaited him did not disturb Svetlogub’s calm and solemn mood.

Only when the cart drew up to the gallows and he was led down from it, and he saw the posts with the crossbeam and the rope swaying slightly on it in the wind, did he feel something like a physical blow to the heart. He suddenly felt sick. But it did not last long. Around the scaffold he saw black ranks of soldiers with rifles. Officers walked in front of the soldiers. And the moment they began to lead him down from the cart, an unexpected rattle of drums broke out and made him start. Behind the ranks of soldiers Svetlogub saw the carriages of ladies and gentlemen who had evidently come to watch the spectacle. The sight of all this surprised Svetlogub at first, but at once he remembered himself as he had been before prison, and he felt sorry that these people did not know what he knew now. “But they will come to know it. I shall die, but the truth will not die. They will know. And how all — not I any longer, but all of them — could be happy, and will be.”

He was led up onto the scaffold, and an officer came up after him. The drums fell silent, and the officer read, in an unnatural voice that sounded especially thin in the wide field after the rattle of the drums, the same stupid death sentence that had been read to him in court, about depriving of his rights the one they were killing, and about the nearer or more distant future. “Why, why do they do all this?” thought Svetlogub. “What a pity that they do not know yet, and that I can no longer tell them everything; but they will come to know it. Everyone will.”

A lean priest with long, thin hair, in a lilac cassock, with a small gilt cross on his chest, came up to Svetlogub holding another, large silver cross in a weak, white, sinewy, thin hand that came out of a black velvet cuff.

“The merciful Lord —” he began, shifting the cross from his left hand to his right and holding it out to Svetlogub.

Svetlogub started and drew back. He very nearly said an unkind word to the priest, who was taking part in what was being done to him and was speaking of mercy; but, remembering the words of the Gospel, “they know not what they do,” he made an effort and said timidly:

“Excuse me, I don’t need this. Please, forgive me, but really, I don’t need it! Thank you.”

He held out his hand to the priest. The priest shifted the cross to his left hand again and, pressing Svetlogub’s hand and trying not to look him in the face, went down from the scaffold. The drums rattled again, drowning all other sounds. After the priest, making the boards of the scaffold shake, a middle-aged man with sloping shoulders and muscular arms, in a jacket over a Russian shirt, came up to Svetlogub with quick steps. This man, giving Svetlogub a quick look, came right up close to him and, enveloping him in an unpleasant smell of wine and sweat, seized his arms above the wrists with tenacious fingers and, squeezing them so that it hurt, bent them behind his back and tied them tight. When he had tied the hands, the executioner stopped for a moment as if considering, glancing now at Svetlogub, now at some things he had brought with him and laid on the scaffold, now at the rope hanging from the crossbeam. Having worked out what he needed, he went up to the rope, did something to it, and moved Svetlogub forward, nearer to the rope and the edge of the scaffold.

Just as, when the death sentence was announced, Svetlogub could not understand the full meaning of what was being announced to him, so now he could not take in the full meaning of the moment before him, and he looked in surprise at the executioner, hastily, deftly and intently doing his terrible work. The executioner’s face was the most ordinary face of a Russian laborer, not cruel, but absorbed, as are the faces of people trying to carry out a necessary and complicated task as exactly as possible.

“Move over here a bit more… or, if you would, move over…” said the executioner in a hoarse voice, pushing him toward the gallows. Svetlogub moved.

“Lord, help me, have mercy on me!” he said.

Svetlogub did not believe in God and had often even laughed at people who believed in God. Even now he did not believe in God; he did not believe because he could not express him in words, nor even grasp him in thought. But what he now understood by the one to whom he was turning — he knew this — was the most real of all the things he knew. He knew, too, that turning to him was necessary and important. He knew it because turning to him at once calmed and strengthened him.

He moved up to the gallows and, his glance taking in, despite himself, the ranks of soldiers and the motley spectators, thought once more: “Why, why do they do this?” And he felt sorry both for them and for himself, and tears came into his eyes.

“And don’t you pity me?” he said, catching the glance of the executioner’s lively gray eyes.

The executioner stopped for a moment. His face suddenly turned angry.

“Get away with you! Talking,” he muttered, and quickly bent down to the floor, where his coat and some piece of linen lay, and with a deft movement of both arms, embracing Svetlogub from behind, threw a canvas sack over his head and hastily pulled it down to the middle of his back and chest.

“Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” Svetlogub remembered the words of the Gospel.

His spirit did not resist death, but his strong young body would not accept it, would not submit, and wanted to struggle.

He wanted to cry out, to tear himself free, but at that same instant he felt a jolt, the loss of all footing, the animal terror of suffocation, a roaring in his head, and the vanishing of everything.

Svetlogub’s body hung swaying on the rope. Twice the shoulders rose and fell.

After waiting a couple of minutes, the executioner, frowning darkly, put his hands on the corpse’s shoulders and pulled it down with a strong movement. All movement of the corpse stopped, except the slow swaying of the doll hanging in the sack, its head unnaturally thrust forward and its legs stretched out in convict’s stockings.

Coming down from the scaffold, the executioner told the officer in charge that the corpse could be taken out of the noose and buried.

An hour later the corpse was taken down from the gallows and carted off to an unconsecrated graveyard.

The executioner had done what he wanted to do and had undertaken to do. But doing it had not been easy. Svetlogub’s words, “And don’t you pity me,” would not leave his head. He was a murderer, a convict, and the post of executioner gave him a relative freedom and comfort of life; but from that day he refused to carry out the duty he had taken on any longer, and in that same week he drank away not only all the money he had been paid for the execution but all his relatively fine clothes as well, and came to such a pass that he was put in the punishment cell, and from the punishment cell moved to the hospital.

One of the leaders of the revolutionaries of the terrorist party, Ignaty Mezhenetsky, the very man who had drawn Svetlogub into terrorist activity, was being transferred from the province where he had been taken to Petersburg. In the same prison sat the aged Old Believer who had seen Svetlogub’s execution. He was being sent on to Siberia. He still kept thinking how and where he might learn what the true faith was, and sometimes he remembered the radiant youth who had smiled joyfully as he went to his death.

Learning that a comrade of that youth, a man of the same faith as he, was sitting in the same prison, the Old Believer was glad, and begged the guard to take him to Svetlogub’s friend.

Mezhenetsky, despite all the strictness of prison discipline, had never stopped communicating with the people of his party, and was waiting every day for news of the tunnel he himself had thought up and planned for blowing up the tsar’s train. Now, recalling some details he had overlooked, he was thinking up ways of passing them on to his fellow conspirators. When the guard came into his cell and said to him cautiously, quietly, that a prisoner wanted to see him, he was glad, hoping that the meeting would give him a way of communicating with his party.

“Who is he?” he asked.

“A peasant.”

“What does he want?”

“Wants to talk about faith.”

Mezhenetsky smiled.

“Well then, send him in,” he said. “They hate the government too, the Old Believers. He may come in useful,” he thought.

The guard left and a few minutes later, opening the door, let into the cell a lean, short old man with thick hair and a thin, graying goatee, and kind, tired blue eyes.

“What do you want?” asked Mezhenetsky.

The old man raised his eyes to him and, quickly lowering them, held out a small, energetic, dry hand.

“What do you want?” Mezhenetsky repeated.

“I’ve a word for thee.”

“What word?”

“About the faith.”

“What faith?”

“They say thou’rt of one faith with that young lad the Antichrist’s servants choked with a rope in Odessy.”

“What young man?”

“Why, they choked him in Odessy, in the autumn.”

“Svetlogub, I suppose?”

“That’s him. Is he a friend of thine?” At every question the old man glanced searchingly with his kind eyes into Mezhenetsky’s face and at once lowered them again.

“Yes, he was close to me.”

“And of one faith?”

“Of one faith, I suppose,” said Mezhenetsky, smiling.

“That’s the very word I have for thee.”

“What is it exactly that you want?”

“To come to know your faith.”

“Our faith… Well, sit down,” said Mezhenetsky, shrugging his shoulders. “Our faith is this. We believe that there are people who have seized power and torment and deceive the people, and that we must not spare ourselves but must fight these people in order to free from them the people they exploit,” Mezhenetsky said out of habit — “torment,” he corrected himself. “And so it is they who must be destroyed. They kill, and they must be killed until they come to their senses.”

The old man kept sighing, without raising his eyes.

“Our faith is in not sparing ourselves, in overthrowing the despotic government and setting up a free, elected government of the people.”

The old man sighed heavily, stood up, straightened the skirts of his prison coat, went down on his knees and lay prostrate at Mezhenetsky’s feet, striking his forehead on the dirty floorboards.

“Why are you bowing?”

“Don’t thou deceive me; tell me what your faith is,” said the old man, without getting up or raising his head.

“I have told you what our faith is. Get up, now, or I won’t say anything more.”

The old man rose.

“And that was the young man’s faith?” he said, standing before Mezhenetsky and now and then glancing into his face with his kind eyes and at once lowering them again.

“That very one, and that is why they hanged him. And now they are taking me to the Peter and Paul for the same faith.”

The old man bowed from the waist and went out of the cell without a word.

“No, that wasn’t the lad’s faith,” he thought. “That lad knew the true faith, and this one is either boasting that he’s of one faith with him, or doesn’t want to tell… Well, I’ll keep seeking. Here and in Siberia. God is everywhere, people are everywhere. Standing on the road, ask the way,” the old man thought, and he took up again the New Testament, which fell open of itself at Revelation, and, putting on his spectacles, sat down by the window and began to read it.

Seven more years went by. Mezhenetsky had served his solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress and was being sent on to hard labor.

He had endured a great deal in those seven years, but the direction of his thoughts had not changed, and his energy had not weakened. At his interrogations, before he was confined in the fortress, he had astonished the investigators and judges with his firmness and his contempt for the people in whose power he was. In the depths of his soul he suffered at having been caught and being unable to finish what he had begun, but he did not show it: as soon as he came into contact with people, the energy of anger rose in him. He met the questions put to him with silence, and spoke only when he had a chance to sting his interrogators — the gendarme officer or the prosecutor.

When they said to him the usual phrase, “You can ease your position by a frank confession,” he smiled contemptuously and, after a pause, said:

“If you think you can make me betray my comrades through gain or fear, you are judging by yourselves. Do you really think that in doing the thing you are trying me for I did not prepare myself for the worst? So there is nothing you can do to surprise or frighten me. You can do what you like with me, but I will not talk.”

And it pleased him to see how they exchanged embarrassed glances.

When they put him in the Peter and Paul Fortress, in a small, damp cell with dark glass in a high window, he understood that this was not for months but for years — and horror came over him. Horrible was that orderly, dead silence, and the knowledge that he was not alone, that here behind these impenetrable walls sat other prisoners like him, sentenced to ten, to twenty years, killing themselves, being hanged, going mad, and slowly dying of consumption. Women were here, and men, and friends, perhaps… “The years will go by, and you too will go mad, or hang yourself, or die, and no one will know about you,” he thought.

And anger rose in his soul against all people, and especially against those who were the cause of his imprisonment. This anger demanded the presence of its objects; it demanded movement, noise. And here was dead silence, the soft steps of silent people who did not answer questions, the sounds of doors being unlocked and locked, food at the usual hours, visits from silent people, and through the dim panes the light of the rising sun, darkness, and the same silence, the same soft steps and the same sounds. So today, tomorrow… And the anger, finding no outlet, ate away at his heart.

He tried knocking, but no one answered, and his knocking only brought again the same soft steps and the even voice of a man threatening him with the punishment cell.

The only time of rest and relief was the time of sleep. But the waking was terrible. In his sleep he always saw himself at liberty, and most often taken up with things he considered at odds with revolutionary activity. Now he was playing some strange violin, now courting young ladies, now going boating, now hunting; now, for some strange scientific discovery, he had been proclaimed a doctor of a foreign university and was making a speech of thanks at a dinner. These dreams were so vivid, and reality so dull and monotonous, that his memories differed little from reality.

The only painful thing in the dreams was that most often he woke at the very moment when what he was striving for, what he longed for, was just about to happen. Suddenly a jolt of the heart — and all the joyful scene vanished; there remained a tormenting, unsatisfied desire, and again the gray wall streaked with damp, lit by the little lamp, and under his body the hard cot with the straw mattress squashed down to one side.

Sleep was the best time. But the longer the imprisonment went on, the less he slept. He waited for sleep as for the greatest happiness, longed for it, and the more he longed for it, the wider awake he became. And he had only to ask himself, “Am I falling asleep?” for all his drowsiness to pass.

Running and jumping about his cage did not help. Strenuous exercise only brought weakness and still greater excitement of the nerves, brought a headache at the crown of his head; and he had only to close his eyes for faces to begin to appear on the dark, spangled background — shaggy, bald, big-mouthed, wry-mouthed, each more frightful than the last. The faces made the most horrible grimaces. Then the faces began to appear even with his eyes open, and not only faces but whole figures, and they began to talk and dance. He grew frightened, jumped up, beat his head against the wall and shouted. The little window in the door opened.

“Shouting is not allowed,” said a calm, even voice.

“Call the warden!” shouted Mezhenetsky.

No one answered him, and the little window closed.

And such despair seized Mezhenetsky that he wished for one thing only — death.

Once, in such a state, he decided to take his own life. In the cell there was an air vent to which a rope with a noose could be fastened, and one could stand on the cot and hang oneself. But there was no rope. He began tearing the sheet into narrow strips, but there turned out to be too few of them. Then he decided to starve himself to death, and did not eat for two days; but on the third day he grew weak, and the fit of hallucinations came back on him with particular force. When they brought him his food, he was lying unconscious on the floor with his eyes open.

The doctor came, put him on the cot, gave him bromide and morphine, and he fell asleep.

When he woke the next day, the doctor was standing over him, shaking his head. And suddenly Mezhenetsky was seized by the bracing feeling of anger he had known before, which he had not felt for a long time.

“Aren’t you ashamed,” he said to the doctor while the latter, his head bent, was counting his pulse, “to serve here! Why are you treating me — so they can torment me again? It’s just like being present at a flogging and allowing the operation to be repeated.”

“Kindly lie on your back,” said the doctor imperturbably, not looking at him, and taking his stethoscope out of his side pocket.

“Those ones healed the wounds so as to finish off the other five thousand blows. To hell, to the devil!” he suddenly shouted, throwing his legs off the cot. “Get out; I’ll die without you!”

“That’s not nice, young man; we have our own answers to rudeness.”

“To hell, to hell!”

And Mezhenetsky was so frightening that the doctor hurried away.

Whether it came from the doses of medicine, or he had passed through a crisis, or the anger that had risen against the doctor cured him, from that time on he took himself in hand and began a completely different life.

“They can’t keep me here forever, and they won’t,” he thought. “They will release me sometime. Perhaps — which is most likely — the regime will change (our people are still working), and so I must preserve my life, so as to come out strong and healthy and able to carry on the work.”

He thought for a long time about the best way of life for this purpose, and worked it out like this: he went to bed at nine o’clock and made himself lie there — asleep or not, it made no difference — until five in the morning. At five he got up, tidied up, washed, did gymnastics, and then, as he told himself, went about his business. And in his imagination he walked through Petersburg, from the Nevsky to Nadezhdinskaya Street, trying to picture everything he might meet on the way: signboards, houses, policemen, passing carriages and pedestrians. On Nadezhdinskaya he went into the house of an acquaintance and collaborator, and there they, together with the comrades who had come, talked over the coming undertaking. There were debates and arguments. Mezhenetsky spoke both for himself and for the others. Sometimes he spoke aloud, so that the guard at the little window reproved him, but Mezhenetsky paid him no attention whatever and went on with his imaginary Petersburg day. After spending a couple of hours at his friend’s, he went home and dined, first in imagination and then in reality, on the dinner they brought him, and he always ate moderately. Then, in imagination, he sat at home and studied history, or mathematics, and sometimes, on Sundays, literature. His study of history consisted in choosing some epoch and people and recalling the facts and the chronology. His study of mathematics consisted in doing calculations and geometry problems by heart. (He was especially fond of this.) On Sundays he recalled Pushkin, Gogol, Shakespeare, and composed things himself.

Before bed he made one more little excursion, carrying on in imagination joking, cheerful, sometimes serious conversations with comrades, men and women — sometimes conversations that had really taken place, sometimes newly invented ones. And so it went on until night. Before sleep, for exercise, he actually took 2,000 steps in his cage, and lay down on his cot, and most often fell asleep.

The next day it was the same. Sometimes he went south and stirred up the people, started a rising, and together with the people drove out the landowners and gave the land to the peasants. All this, however, he imagined not all at once but gradually, in every detail. In his imagination the revolutionary party triumphed everywhere; the power of the government weakened and was forced to convene an assembly. The imperial family and all the oppressors of the people disappeared, and a republic was established, and he, Mezhenetsky, was elected president. Sometimes he reached this too quickly, and then he began again from the beginning and reached the goal by another way.

So he lived one year, two, three, sometimes departing from this strict order of life, but most often returning to it. By governing his imagination he freed himself from the involuntary hallucinations. Only now and then fits of sleeplessness came over him, and visions, faces, and then he would look at the air vent and work out how he would fasten the rope, how he would make the noose and hang himself. But these fits did not last long. He overcame them.

So he lived almost seven years. When his term of confinement was over and he was taken off to hard labor, he was perfectly fresh and healthy and in full possession of the powers of his mind.

As an especially important criminal he was transported alone, without being allowed to communicate with others. Only in the Krasnoyarsk prison did he manage for the first time to get into contact with other political prisoners, who were also being sent to hard labor; there were six of them — two women and four men. They were all young people of a new stamp, unfamiliar to Mezhenetsky. These were the revolutionaries of the generation after his, his heirs, and so they interested him especially. Mezhenetsky had expected to find in them people following in his footsteps and therefore bound to value highly all that had been done by their predecessors, and especially by him, Mezhenetsky. He was prepared to treat them kindly and indulgently. But, to his unpleasant surprise, these young people not only did not regard him as their predecessor and teacher but treated him somewhat indulgently themselves, passing over and excusing his outdated views. In the opinion of these new revolutionaries, all that Mezhenetsky and his friends had done, all the attempts to rouse the peasants and, above all, the terror and all the assassinations — of Governor Kropotkin, of Mezentsov, and of Alexander II himself — had all been a series of mistakes. All of it had led only to the reaction that triumphed under Alexander III and set society back almost to serfdom. The way to free the people, in the opinion of the new ones, was quite different.

For two days and nearly two nights the arguments between Mezhenetsky and his new acquaintances never stopped. One in particular, the leader of them all, Roman, as everyone called him, by his first name only, grieved Mezhenetsky painfully with his unshakable confidence that he was right and his indulgent, even mocking dismissal of all the past activity of Mezhenetsky and his comrades.

The people, as Roman understood them, were a coarse mob, “cattle,” and nothing could be done with the people at the stage of development they stood at now. All attempts to raise the Russian rural population were like trying to set fire to stone or ice. The people had to be educated, had to be trained in solidarity, and only large-scale industry and the socialist organization of the people that grows up on it could do that. Not only did the people not need the land; it was the land that made them conservatives and slaves. Not only here, but in Europe too. And he quoted from memory the opinions of authorities and statistical figures. The people must be freed from the land. And the sooner this happened, the better. The more of them went into the factories, and the more the capitalists took the land into their hands and the more they oppressed them, the better. Despotism, and above all capitalism, could be destroyed only by the solidarity of the common people, and that solidarity could be achieved only by unions, by workers’ corporations — that is, only when the masses of the people had ceased to be owners of land and had become proletarians.

Mezhenetsky argued and grew heated. He was especially irritated by one of the women, a good-looking, thick-haired brunette with very bright eyes, who, sitting on the windowsill and as if taking no direct part in the conversation, now and then put in a little word supporting Roman’s arguments, or merely laughed contemptuously at Mezhenetsky’s words.

“How can you turn the whole farming people into factory hands?” Mezhenetsky said.

“Why not?” Roman objected. “It is a general economic law.”

“How do we know that this law is universal?” said Mezhenetsky.

“Read Kautsky,” the brunette put in, smiling contemptuously.

“Even if we grant,” said Mezhenetsky — “I don’t grant it — that the people will turn into proletarians, why do you think they will take the form you have marked out for them in advance?”

“Because it has a scientific basis,” the brunette put in, turning from the window.

But when the talk turned to the form of action needed to reach the goal, the disagreement grew still greater. Roman and his friends held that what was needed was to prepare an army of workers, to help the peasants turn into factory hands, and to propagate socialism among the workers. And not only not to fight the government openly, but to make use of it to reach their own ends. Mezhenetsky, on the other hand, said that they must fight the government directly, terrorize it; that the government was both stronger and cleverer than they were. “It isn’t you who will outwit the government, but the government you. We both propagandized the people and fought the government.”

“And how much you accomplished!” the brunette said ironically.

“Well, I think that direct struggle with the government is a wrong use of our strength,” said Roman.

“The First of March a waste of strength!” shouted Mezhenetsky. “We sacrificed ourselves, our lives, while you sit quietly at home enjoying life and only preach.”

“We’re not enjoying life so very much,” Roman said calmly, looking round at his comrades, and laughed triumphantly with his uninfectious but loud, distinct, self-assured laugh.

The brunette, shaking her head, smiled contemptuously.

“We’re not enjoying life so very much,” said Roman. “And if we are sitting here, we owe it to the reaction, and the reaction is the product of precisely the First of March.”

Mezhenetsky fell silent. He felt he was choking with anger, and went out into the corridor.

Trying to calm himself, Mezhenetsky began walking up and down the corridor. The doors of the cells were open until the evening roll call. A tall, fair-haired prisoner, whose face kept its good nature even with his head half shaved, came up to Mezhenetsky.

“There’s a little old prisoner here in our cell, he’s seen your honor — call him to me, he says.”

“What prisoner?”

“‘Tobacco Power,’ that’s what they call him. A little old man, one of the Old Believers. Call that man to me, he says. Meaning your honor.”

“Where is he?”

“Right here, in our cell. Fetch that gentleman, he says.”

Mezhenetsky went with the prisoner into a small cell with plank bunks, on which prisoners were sitting and lying.

On the bare boards, under a gray prison coat, at the edge of the bunks, lay that same Old Believer, the old man who seven years before had come to Mezhenetsky to ask about Svetlogub. The old man’s face, pale, had all dried up and wrinkled; his hair was just as thick as ever; his thin little beard was quite white and stuck up. His eyes were blue, kind and attentive. He lay on his back and was clearly feverish: on his cheekbones there was a sickly flush.

Mezhenetsky went up to him.

“What do you want?” he asked.

The old man raised himself with difficulty on one elbow and held out a trembling, dry, small hand. Getting ready to speak, as if gathering momentum, he began to breathe heavily and, drawing breath with difficulty, began to speak quietly:

“Thou didst not reveal it to me that time — God be with thee — but I reveal it to all.”

“What do you reveal?”

“About the Lamb… about the Lamb I reveal… That lad was with the Lamb. And it is said: the Lamb shall overcome them, shall overcome all… And they that are with him are the chosen and the faithful.”

“I don’t understand,” said Mezhenetsky.

“But thou must understand in the spirit. The kings shall receive power with the beast. But the Lamb shall overcome them.”

“What kings?” said Mezhenetsky.

“And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one remaineth, and the other is not yet come — hasn’t come, that is. And when he cometh, he hath but a little… that is, his end shall come… Understand?”

Mezhenetsky shook his head, thinking that the old man was raving and his words were meaningless. The prisoners, his cellmates, thought so too. The shaven prisoner who had called Mezhenetsky came up to him and, nudging him slightly with his elbow to draw his attention, winked toward the old man.

“He’s always babbling, always babbling, our Tobacco Power,” he said. “And what about, he doesn’t know himself.”

So thought both Mezhenetsky and the old man’s cellmates, looking at him. But the old man knew well what he was saying, and what he said had for him a clear and deep meaning. The meaning was that evil had not long left to reign, that the Lamb overcomes all by goodness and humility, that the Lamb will wipe away every tear, and there shall be neither weeping, nor sickness, nor death. And he felt that this was already coming to pass, coming to pass in all the world, because it was coming to pass in his soul, enlightened by the nearness of death.

“Yea, come quickly! Amen. Yea, come, Lord Jesus!” he said, and smiled slightly, meaningfully and, as it seemed to Mezhenetsky, madly.

“There he is, the representative of the people,” Mezhenetsky thought as he came away from the old man. “That is the best of them. And what darkness! They” (he meant Roman and his friends) “say that with the people as they are now, nothing can be done.”

Mezhenetsky had at one time done his revolutionary work among the people and knew all the “inertia,” as he put it, of the Russian peasant; he had also got to know soldiers, both in the service and retired, and knew their dull faith in the oath, in the necessity of obedience, and the impossibility of influencing them by reasoning. He knew all this, but had never drawn from this knowledge the conclusion that inevitably followed from it. The conversation with the new revolutionaries had upset and irritated him.

“They say that everything we did, that Khalturin, Kibalchich, Perovskaya did, that all of it was unnecessary, even harmful, that it was just this that called forth the reaction of Alexander III, that thanks to them the people are convinced that all revolutionary activity comes from the landowners, who killed the tsar because he took their serfs away from them. What nonsense! What lack of understanding, and what insolence, to think so!” he thought, continuing to walk along the corridor.

All the cells were shut, except the one where the new revolutionaries were. Coming up to it, Mezhenetsky heard the laugh of the hateful brunette and the crackling, decisive voice of Roman. They were evidently talking about him. Mezhenetsky stopped to listen. Roman was saying:

“Not understanding economic laws, they did not realize what they were doing. And a large part in it was played by…”

Mezhenetsky could not and would not stay to hear what it was that had played a large part in it, but he had no need to know. The mere tone of that man’s voice showed the complete contempt these people felt for him, for Mezhenetsky, a hero of the revolution, who had sacrificed twelve years of his life to this cause.

And in Mezhenetsky’s soul there rose such terrible anger as he had never yet felt. Anger at everyone, at everything, at this whole senseless world, in which there could live only people like animals, like that old man with his Lamb, and the half-animal executioners and jailers just like him, and these insolent, self-assured, stillborn doctrinaires.

The guard on duty came in and took the political women off to the women’s side. Mezhenetsky went off to the far end of the corridor so as not to meet him. When he came back, the guard locked the door of the new politicals and told Mezhenetsky to go into his own cell. Mezhenetsky mechanically obeyed, but asked him not to lock his door.

Back in his cell, Mezhenetsky lay down on his cot with his face to the wall.

“Can it really be that all my powers have been wasted so pointlessly — energy, strength of will, genius” (he had never considered anyone his superior in qualities of mind and spirit) “wasted for nothing!” He remembered a letter he had recently received, already on the road to Siberia, from Svetlogub’s mother, reproaching him in a womanish, stupid way, as he thought, for having ruined her son by drawing him into the terrorist party. When he got the letter he had only smiled contemptuously: what could this stupid woman understand of the aims that stood before him and Svetlogub? But now, remembering the letter and the dear, trusting, ardent nature of Svetlogub, he fell to thinking, first about him and then about himself. Could his whole life have been a mistake? He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but suddenly he felt with horror that the state he had gone through in his first month in the Peter and Paul Fortress had come back. Again the pain at the crown of his head, again the faces, big-mouthed, shaggy, horrible, on the dark background with little stars, and again figures appearing before his open eyes. What was new was that some convict in gray trousers, with a shaven head, was swaying above him. And again, by the association of ideas, he began looking for an air vent to which a rope could be fastened.

An unbearable anger, demanding to be vented, burned Mezhenetsky’s heart. He could not sit still, could not calm himself, could not drive away his thoughts.

“How?” he was already beginning to ask himself. “Cut an artery? I won’t manage it. Hang myself? Of course, that’s simplest.”

He remembered the rope tied round a bundle of firewood lying in the corridor. “Stand on the firewood, or on the stool. The guard is walking in the corridor. But he’ll fall asleep or go out. I must wait, and then carry the rope off to my cell and fasten it to the air vent.”

Standing by his door, Mezhenetsky listened to the guard’s steps in the corridor and now and then, when the guard went off to the far end, peeped out through the opening in the door. The guard still did not go away and still did not fall asleep. Mezhenetsky listened greedily to the sound of his steps and waited.

At that time, in the cell where the sick old man was, amid the darkness faintly lit by a smoking lamp, amid the sleepy night sounds of breathing, grumbling, groaning, snoring and coughing, the greatest thing in the world was taking place. The old man was dying, and to his spiritual sight there opened all that he had so passionately sought and longed for all his life. In a dazzling light he saw the Lamb in the form of a radiant youth, and a great multitude of people of all nations stood before him in white robes, and all were rejoicing, and there was no more evil on the earth. All this had come to pass, the old man knew it, both in his soul and in all the world, and he felt great joy and peace.

For the people who were in the cell, though, what happened was that the old man gave a loud death rattle, and his neighbor woke and woke the others; and when the rattle ended and the old man fell still and grew cold, his cellmates began knocking at the door.

The guard unlocked the door and went in to the prisoners. About ten minutes later two prisoners carried out the dead body and took it downstairs to the mortuary. The guard went out after them and locked the door behind him. The corridor was left empty.

“Lock it, lock it,” thought Mezhenetsky, who had been watching from his doorway everything that went on, “you won’t stop me getting away from all this absurd horror.”

Mezhenetsky no longer felt the inner horror that had tormented him until then. He was wholly absorbed in one thought: that nothing should prevent him from carrying out his intention.

With a trembling heart he went up to the bundle of firewood, untied the rope, pulled it out from under the wood and, glancing back at the door, carried it into his cell. In the cell he climbed onto the stool and threw the rope over the air vent. Tying both ends of the rope together, he pulled the knot tight and made a noose out of the doubled rope. The noose was too low. He tied the rope again, made the noose again, tried it on his neck and, listening anxiously and glancing at the door, climbed onto the stool, put his head into the noose, settled it, and, kicking the stool away, hung…

Only on the morning round did the guard see Mezhenetsky, standing on legs bent at the knees beside the stool lying on its side. He was taken out of the noose. The warden came running and, learning that Roman was a doctor, called him to give help to the strangled man.

All the usual means of reviving him were used, but Mezhenetsky did not come back to life.

Mezhenetsky’s body was carried to the mortuary and laid on the plank bed next to the body of the old man.