Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

landlords and divided the land among the peasants. All this, however, he did not imagine all at once, but gradually, going into every detail. In his fancy the Revolutionary parties always triumphed; the power of the Government grew weaker, and it was obliged to call together a Council. The Imperial family and all the oppressors of the people disappeared, and a Republic was established, and he, Mezhenétsky, was chosen President. Sometimes he reached this climax too quickly, and then he began again from the beginning, and attained his end by other means.

So he lived one, two, three years: occasionally discontinuing this rigorous order of life for a time, but always returning to it again. Fits of insomnia and visions of horrible faces rarely troubled him now, and when they did, he looked at the ventilator and pictured to himself how he would fasten a rope to it, make a noose, and hang himself. He managed to master these fits, and they never lasted long.

Thus he spent nearly seven years. When his term of imprisonment came to an end, and he started on his way to penal servitude in Siberia, he was quite healthy, fresh, and in perfect possession of his mental faculties.

XI

As he was a criminal of special importance, he was conveyed separately, and not allowed to communicate with others; and it was only in the prison at Krasnoyársk that he first succeeded in having some intercourse with other political prisoners who were also being sent to penal servitude. There were six of them: two women and four men. They were all young people of a new type unfamiliar to Mezhenétsky. They were Revolutionists of a newer generation⁠—his successors⁠—and therefore of special interest to him. Mezhenétsky expected to find them following in his footsteps, and therefore valuing very highly what had been done by their forerunners, and especially by himself, Mezhenétsky. He was prepared to treat them with kindness and condescension, but he had the unpleasant surprise of discovering that these young people not only did not regard him as a pioneer and teacher, but treated him with something like condescension, evading and excusing his superannuated opinions. According to the views of these new Revolutionists, all that Mezhenétsky and his friends had done⁠—all their attempts to rouse the peasants, and especially their terroristic methods and their assassinations of the Governor Kropótkin, Mezentsóf, and even of Alexander II, had been a series of mistakes. They had all merely contributed to the triumph of the reaction under Alexander III, which put society back almost to the days of serfdom. According to them, the true path was a quite different one.

For two days and the greater part of two nights the disputes between Mezhenétsky and his new acquaintances hardly ceased. Especially one of them, their leader, Román (everybody called him by his Christian name), pained and grieved Mezhenétsky by his unwavering assurance of being right, and by a contemptuous and even sarcastic rejection of all the old methods of Mezhenétsky and his comrades.

According to Román, the peasants were a rough mob, a rabble. And with the peasants in their present stage of development, nothing could be done. All efforts to raise the Russian people were like attempts to set a stone or a piece of ice alight. The people had to be educated and trained for solidarity, and only large industries, and the growth of a Socialistic organization based thereon, could accomplish this.

The land was not only unnecessary to the people, but it was just the land that, both in Russia and in the rest of Europe, made them Conservatives and slaves. And he quoted the opinion of various authorities and gave statistics, which he knew by heart. The people must be liberated from the land, and the sooner this is done the better. The more of them go into factories, and the more land the capitalists get into their hands, and the more they oppress the people, the better. Despotism⁠—and especially capitalism⁠—can only be brought to an end by the solidarity of the workers, and this can be attained only by trade-unions and corporations of working men⁠—i.e., only when the masses cease to own land, and become proletarians.

Mezhenétsky argued, and grew excited. A dark, rather good-looking brunette, with much hair and very brilliant eyes, irritated him particularly, as, sitting on the windowsill and hardly taking any direct part in the conversation, she occasionally put in a few words confirming Román’s arguments, or merely smiled contemptuously at Mezhenétsky’s remarks.

“Is it possible to change all the country labourers into factory hands?” said Mezhenétsky.

“Why not?” retorted Román. “It is a general economic law.”

“How do we know it to be general?” said Mezhenétsky.

“Read Kautsky!” remarked the dark woman, with a contemptuous smile.

“Even granting (though I don’t grant it) that the people will be changed into proletarians,” said Mezhenétsky, “what makes you suppose that they will take the form you have foreordained?”

“Because it is a scientific deduction,” put in the dark woman, turning away from the window.

When the kind of activity necessary to attain their aim came under discussion, their differences became even more accentuated. Román and his friends insisted on the necessity of educating an army of workmen to help in the transformation of the peasants into factory workers, and to preach Socialism among them, and not only to refrain from openly fighting the Government, but to use it for the attainment of their aims. Mezhenétsky, on the contrary, declared that one must fight the Government openly and terrorize it; since the Government was both stronger and more cunning than they. “It is not you that will deceive the Government⁠—but you that will be deceived by it. We carried on propaganda work among the people and resisted the Government as well.”

“And much good you did!” said the dark woman.

“Yes, I do think that open warfare with the Government is a waste of energy,” remarked Román.

“March the First326 a waste of energy!” shouted Mezhenétsky. “We sacrificed ourselves,