RECOLLECTIONS OF SIBERIA.

LONDON

PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.

NEW-STREET SQUARE

THE STORY
OF
A SIBERIAN EXILE.

BY

M. RUFIN PIETROWSKI.

FOLLOWED BY

A NARRATIVE OF RECENT EVENTS IN POLAND.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH.

LONDON:
LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, ROBERTS, & GREEN.
1863.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

It has not been thought advisable to give these papers to the public without a few words of explanation to those readers who see them for the first time in an English dress. It may seem that the three parts of which the book is composed have little connection with each other, but this is not the case. Along with the story of a Polish Exile in Siberia will be found two chapters on the political aspects of Poland. The first of these contains an account of those measures and events by which the dismemberment of ancient Poland was effected. But the Poles contend that the wrong done to their country has not stopped there; and that she has been not only dismembered, but denationalised. On referring to the Treaty of Vienna they find that this loss of nationality was not contemplated by the European powers, and that it is contrary both to the letter and to the spirit of the Treaties of 1815. By degrees, however, whether rightly or wrongly, Russian supremacy has asserted itself, and the story of M. Rufin Pietrowski is intended to demonstrate what are the amenities of that régime. The Poles will not submit to a government in which they are not allowed to participate; and they are engaged in ceaseless attempts to elude its vigilance, and to defy its power. They wish to organise themselves; and the executive, obliged to act both on the defensive and the offensive towards them, has recourse to cruel and arbitrary methods of repression. The narrative of the Siberian Exile is a strange one, but there is no reason to believe that his tale is otherwise than authentic. The candour and moderation with which he speaks of the Russian officials is highly creditable, and it deserves to be noticed, that it is the system, rather than the men, which he attacks.

The last paper in this book will be found, without doubt, to be the most interesting. A moment’s reflection will convince its readers that there is no European country in which so great a change is being effected, and of which they hear so little, as Russian Poland. Yet the events which have recently agitated Poland are events of historical interest, and they are not in themselves unimportant to Western Europe. An outline of their nature and extent is given here. This history of ‘twelve months of agitation’ makes us spectators of a struggle which the Poles have maintained against the Czar, and in which they have proved themselves to be still full of that high, haughty, and stubborn spirit of liberty which Edmund Burke discerned in them of yore. Their recent efforts towards civilization and self-improvement will not fail to ensure for them the sympathy of all who can discern in its energy and its self-control the true greatness of a nation. Sketches of some of the leading men of Poland will be found here: and, at this crisis, it has been thought that an account of the career of Count Andrew Zamoyski could hardly fail of being acceptable. If the destiny of Poland, as a nation, be eventful and yet obscure, the destiny of individuals has often proved under the Muscovite rule to be more tragic and even more obscure. The Polish party in emigration, who now welcome Count Zamoyski, have great cause to congratulate themselves that their ‘civic hero’—the best and worthiest of their patriots—has not been sent to expiate a life devoted to his country’s good in the fortress of Akatouïa, or in some of the desolate wastes of the Russian Empire in the East.

The translator is in no wise responsible for any of the sentiments to be found in this book. His task has been simply that of rendering into English the thoughts and words of other men. In the story of M. Rufin Pietrowski he has felt the disadvantages that attend upon the translation of a translation; but he has striven to preserve the integrity of the narrative, even in the smallest particulars. It is with a view to this end that he has adopted all those Russian and Polish phrases, idioms, and words which occur in the text of M. Klackso.

London:
November 1862.

CONTENTS.

THE
STORY OF A SIBERIAN EXILE.

INTRODUCTION.

SIBERIA—ADVENTURES OF BENIOWSKI—MADAME FELINSKA—M. RUFIN PIOTROWSKI.

There is an expression in use in Poland which surpasses all that human eloquence has ever employed to give intensity to despair; it consists of the words ‘we never meet again:’ and thus it is that any political exile, when about to depart for Siberia, takes leave of his family and of his friends; ‘we never meet again!’ for the only way in which an exile could find himself once more among those whom he loves would be for him to meet them in the same place of torment. The conviction is deep that they who are once transported to those regions of pain can quit them no more; that Siberia never relinquishes her prey. For nearly a century she has torn from Poland her most devoted women, her most generous sons. Back to those realms of snow and of blood fly the thoughts of every Pole who inquires into the past fortunes of his family; and when the poet dreams for his country a future which is all liberty and bliss, it is again Siberia which rears herself before his eyes, ready after victory itself still to demand her victims. It is a mysterious and dismal land!—a land ‘from which one returns no more,’ as the Polish peasants say, or, as Hamlet speaks of that other region which Siberia so fatally resembles, it is an ‘undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.’ And yet now and then some one does come back. Sometimes at the accession of a Czar to the throne, an amnesty (which, however incomplete it may be, receives no less the surname of general) sends back to heart-broken families some of those who have not wholly succumbed to pain. At least, this did happen twice in one century; at the accession of Paul I. and of Alexander II.: the Emperor Nicholas never felt a similar weakness. In other cases, very rare ones, and therefore not hard to enumerate, entreaties and prayers backed by some distinguished protection have, after years of persevering efforts, obtained the return of the condemned exile. Finally, we have even seen, reappearing in the light, and among the living, those who, neither waiting nor hoping for an amnesty, whether general or particular, have found, in their own courage and in their own despair, a way of extricating themselves from their horrible fate; but such a phenomenon as this is not to be met with twice in any hundred years. Several of those who have thus returned, like ghosts from the tomb, have afterwards written an account of their sojourn in these desolate places; others again left notes on the spot, which were afterwards to be piously collected; and thus it happens that the literature of Poland possesses a complete collection of the writings of Siberian exiles, a collection already sufficiently large, and which, in spite of the monotony of the subject, certainly is not lacking in interest.

Very strange in truth are the adventures of Beniowski, a soldier of Bar, deported to Kamtschatka, organising there among its indigenous savages a vast conspiracy, administering to them an oath of fidelity to the confederation of Bar, passing Behring’s Straits, conquering Madagascar, and coming to offer the sovereignty of it to the French king. A very different fate awaited General Kopec, who was banished some years later to the same district. Submissive, patient, almost serene, during the time of his exile, his mind became clouded at the moment when he was told that the hour of his deliverance had come. Joy was too great for his soul, and he took back to his native country only the remnants of his reason. He had some sane and lucid intervals, and these he employed in dictating a few pages of a history of his past sufferings, in a style at once sweet and subdued. During thirty years did poor Adolphus Januszkiewicz, for the use of an aged mother, who still lived in Lithuania, note down day by day the events of a life which flowed away among the Kirghis of the Steppes; and a brother’s hand has lately discovered to us how much filial piety and indomitable courage filled that exile’s breast. We omit many other names; but how can we avoid recalling Madame Eva Felinska and her book—that noble lady and noble Christian, whom the severity of Nicholas sent to be a dweller in Bérézov, in the middle of the Yakoutes and the Ostiaks, and whose son has recently (April 1862) been promoted to the archbishopric of Warsaw? What constitutes the sensible charm of Madame Felinska’s work is not only the absence of all recrimination (the annals of the Siberian exiles being in general free from all bitterness), but it is the feminine modesty with which she instinctively conceals her personal misfortunes. One might imagine while reading her pages that they were the remarks of some enquiring person, who sojourned among unreclaimed tribes out of pure eccentricity of mind, did not the cries of a mother who asks for her poor little children undeceive us, and make us only too often aware that the choice rested not in that mother’s will. One day at Bérézov,[1] while digging a well, there was discovered a corpse, which (thanks to the glacial nature of the soil) seemed by its preservation, and the state of the brilliant uniform and orders, to have been but a thing of yesterday. By dint of enquiries and recollections, they succeeded, however, in proving that it was the body of Prince Menstchikov, who more than a century ago had died an exile on this very spot, after having lived the minister and the favourite of Czars. Madame Felinska in recording the event contents herself with exclaiming, ‘What a strange chance!’ She leaves to the mind of the reader the task of filling in the outlines of this touching picture, where a Polish woman, in this same land of banishment, finds herself face to face with the man who first dared with impunity to trample on the Sarmatian soil.

One of the most recent and remarkable publications in this the literature of the deported (for so it is called in Poland to distinguish it from the literature of the emigrated) is that which has just been given to us by M. Rufin Piotrowski.[2] His book recommends itself not only by the richness of its detail and the breadth with which it is composed, but also, and chiefly, because the author of it is an escaped ‘Siberian.’ In him, since the case of Beniowski, we have the only example of a deported person who has attempted such an enterprise, and who has also succeeded in it. It is the more extraordinary because M. Piotrowski was also condemned to hard labour in the public works. Beniowski, as we have seen, had much assistance and many accomplices. A comparatively narrow tract alone separated him from the land of freedom, whereas our contemporary had no one to rely on but himself, and without map or succours, almost without money, he had to traverse Siberia in its entire length, and a great part of Russia in Europe in addition. On foot he made the long and perilous journey from beyond Omsk in Western Siberia, penetrating the Oural mountains to Archangel, Petersburg, Riga, even into Prussia, never imparting to a living soul his fatal secret, in order not to involve any one in his own probable and terrible fate. If the narrative of M. Piotrowski has not all that romantic brilliancy which the story of the confederate of Bar can afford, it reveals to us greater dangers and a perseverance of will far superior in every way. Nor is the marvellous element wanting to this strange Odyssey, albeit its hero is no mythological being; he exists, nay, he lives among us, and we rub shoulders with him every day. This escaped convict and exile from the banks of Irtiche, this former unhappy one (for thus do the natives of Siberia call the deported Poles), is now a modest professor in that excellent Polish school of the Batignolles, for which the emigrated sons of Poland are partly indebted to the generosity of France. M. Rufin Piotrowski was one of those heroic emissaries who, from the extreme limits of Polish emigration, sought to carry back and impart to an oppressed country the hopes, the ideas, and the dreams of exile; and his narrative begins precisely at the point when he started from Paris, on the journey which he undertook to Kaminiec in Podolia. These emissaries brought with them, generally speaking, impossible plans, and calls which could not be answered, because sufficient reflection had not been bestowed upon them. Sometimes, too, they imported ideas which were positively dangerous, and if they almost always half atoned for their errors by a constancy which braved both death and danger; they did not the less draw along with them in their own unhappy fate some generous and innocent victims. M. Piotrowski has at least this consolation, that he never made himself the apostle of perverse doctrines, and that he never sowed the seeds of hatred. His actions as an emissary were always enlightened by sentiments of that religious charity to which mob law in all its meanings is utterly repugnant. The same profoundly religious spirit characterises his book—a book which was written now many years ago, but which, for reasons obvious in a case of Polish publication, it was impracticable to publish before 1861. We have thought that the recollections of M. Piotrowski were likely to find favour with the French public. At a time when nothing else is heard of in Poland but sentences to Siberia pronounced upon the most respectable of her citizens, upon canons, rabbins, provosts, merchants, professors, students, and artisans, it surely cannot be useless or amiss to explain by one striking example all that is contained for Poland and the Poles in the single word ‘deportation.’ Is it necessary now to add that what we are about to read in these pages is in every particular strict matter of fact? The narrative of M. Piotrowski bears the stamp of truth, and of a good faith which pleads for itself, and removes every suspicion of exaggeration. For the rest, as we shall see, the author hardly, if ever, blames persons; as often as not, he expresses himself with regard to them in words marked by a lively sense of gratitude. It is the system only which he accuses; and, shall we confess it, the countrymen of M. Piotrowski, and above all his companions in misfortune, while unanimous as to the perfect authenticity of his tale, have rather reproached him with an excessive indulgence in speaking of the Russian officials. How many Poles, for example, have been surprised to see the portraits which he has sketched of Prince Bibikov and of M. Pissarev, men whose names are so painfully distinguished in the annals of the Poland of to-day? As we do not think it necessary to anticipate or preach a conviction which will soon make itself felt, it remains for us only to point out the method which we have followed in borrowing here from the Polish original of the book. A mere analysis would have effaced its character of individuality, while it spoilt the originality of the book. What is presented here is a faithful abridgement of a more detailed and lengthy narrative—an abridgement of an abyss, if one may borrow Pascal’s energetic phrase—for the ‘Recollections of a Siberian Exile’ reveal to us a perfect abyss of suffering and of misery.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] We use here the Latin v as the best equivalent for the b (viedi) of the Russian alphabet, although the letters f and w in Russian have nearly the same sound. To be consistent, it is necessary to write not only Móskova, Iainbov, Bérézov, but Orlov, Menstchikov, etc.: as for the name of Kiow, we adopt the orthography of the inhabitants of this town (Little Ruthenes); the Russians alone write it Kiew, pronouncing it always as Kiow.

[2] Pamietniki Rufina Piotrowskiego, 3 vols. in 8vo. Posen 1861.

CHAPTER I.
OF A MISSION INTO POLAND.

A PASSPORT—THE JOURNEY—THE RUSSIAN FRONTIER—KAMINIEÇ—A TEACHER OF LANGUAGES—ANNOYANCES OF DISGUISE—M. ABAZA—SUSPICIONS OF THE POLICE.

I had long decided to take my departure for my native land, and was only occupied by the necessary preparations for it, when I fell suddenly sick in Paris. It was in the year 1842. I was received into the hospital of La Pitié, then under the direction of Baron Lisfranc, who had formerly served with Polish troops during the wars of the Empire, and who still preserved towards them a friendly sentiment. A number of my compatriots and companions in exile found themselves along with me in the hospital, a prey to the two forms of disease so common among us emigrants—consumption and madness. More than one of them died in my ward, and at my side—a sight which was well calculated to sadden my spirit, for they died, though without uttering a single complaint, in utter prostration and gloom. One would almost have said that they had felt, in leaving this world, as if, even in the next, for them there might still be no country.

This sojourn in the hospital was nevertheless not without a good result on my projects. I had the fortune to make the acquaintance of another invalid, an American from the United States, who promised to get a passport for me, a thing which was indispensable for my undertaking, and which up to this time I had never been able to procure. Leaving, after a detention of about six weeks, the hospital from which the American had been discharged a few days earlier, I went at once to seek him at the address which he had given me. He then and there handed over to me an English passport, made out in the name of ‘Joseph Catharo, native of La Valette (Malta), aged 36.’ The document was quite regular, delivered at the English embassy in Paris, and signed by the ambassador, Lord Cowley. I could desire nothing better. In my situation an English passport was preferable to any other. I spoke Italian perfectly, whereas I could only speak English very imperfectly; but then my supposed Maltese antecedents would make good any failings on that score. The different visa of Baden, Wurtemberg, Bavaria, Austria, and Turkey, were soon procured; but at the office of the Minister for Foreign Affairs there had been put alongside of the seals two printed lines containing these fatal words—‘Bound to present himself at the Prefecture of the Police.’ Now I had all sorts of reasons for not wishing to announce my departure at the Prefecture of Police, where they might very likely have had more inquisitiveness than I had found in my American friend. After casting about in my mind for a long time how best to dispose of this luckless clause, I selected the not very ingenious plan of spilling some ink over the two lines, thus counterfeiting a big blot, and leaving nothing visible but the seal of the Minister. The method was a rude enough one, but it was not the less serviceable, and at none of the numberless police stations at which the passport had afterwards to be presented was any exception taken to the blot which disfigured it.

Thus accommodated, and furnished with 150 francs, which were to suffice for the wants of a long journey, I left Paris on January 9, 1843. After having traversed without hindrance Strasburg, Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna, I took the road from the last-named place to Pesth. In the interests of my mission I was to make a month’s stay in the capital of Hungary; and I profited by this delay, for I addressed in the meantime to the English ambassador at Vienna the request that he would renew my passport, my intention being to go to Russia instead of to Constantinople, and to make a stay there of considerable length. An answer was soon returned. At the end of a few days I received from Vienna, in exchange for my old passport, a new one, of a recent date, happily free from any ominous blots of ink, and visé for Russia. On February 28th, I quitted Pesth, meaning to reach Kaminieç in Podolia, the term and goal of my voyage. I found that the small sum which I had brought with me from Paris had, in spite of the most frugal way of living, greatly diminished; and I resolved to make the rest of my journey from Hungary to Podolia on foot. The season was favourable, the scenery magnificent, the passage of the Carpathians so splendid as to make me forget any slight fatigue. It was a strange, sometimes almost a diverting, sensation for me thus to traverse Galicia, and to have to ask my way in execrable German of the few Austrian officials, while the peasants gave utterance to the most minute remarks upon me, all in that Polish speech which I declared I did not understand. The pleasantries of our peasants on the subject of ‘the dumb man’ did not, however, miss fire or fail to amuse me greatly. To these jokes there were often added on their part marks of respect to a stranger come from the ends of the earth. ‘I am sure he comes a long way off,’ they would say to each other; ‘from very far, from where even the crow brings no bones.’ At last, on one fine March morning, 1843, I found myself at the boundary which separates the Austrian and Russian territory, near the village of Bojany. The frontier was marked by two barriers, which were distant the one from the other by a few dozen paces. Upon showing my papers the Austrian barrier was opened for me without any difficulty; but when I arrived at the Russian side, it was in vain that I called and looked round in all directions—no one came. Tired of waiting I passed by, stooping under the beam, and directed my steps to a house at a little distance, which seemed to be the Custom House office. The astonishment there was great when I was seen to arrive thus unaccompanied by a soldier.

‘How did you pass the frontier?’

‘At the barrier, down there.’

‘Who opened it for you?’

‘Nobody. I called in vain, and at last determined to slip underneath it.’

‘What! the guard was not there at his post?’ cried the functionary, as much exasperated he rushed out to give orders, of which his menacing tones only too fully explained the nature. Having returned to his room, he emptied out upon me the remains of his ill humour; but the sight of the English passport had a sudden and pacifying effect on his wrath. While my papers were being examined, and they took down the answers which I made to sundry questions relating to my journey, I heard the distant cries of the poor soldier, who was expiating under the bastinado what had been either his negligence or perhaps indeed only my hastiness. At last I was free to leave the office, with a feeling of satisfaction which was not, however, wholly unalloyed. There was indeed something ominous in this incident attending my entrance into the territory of the Emperor Nicholas. From the first step I had defied Russian vigilance, but I had at the same time, albeit involuntarily, caused the punishment of an unhappy creature, and my heart was pained at it.

On March 22nd, I reached Kaminieç, at midday. I had my portmanteau in one hand, while with the other I opened the door of an inn that had been pointed out to me, and I found myself suddenly in the middle of a large assembly of people, and in a room where they were playing billiards. I had purposely kept my hat on my head, and by this sign, so contrary to our national habits, I was immediately recognised to be a stranger or a Frenchman, for the two words are among us considered to be synonymous. The sensation, which was evident in the room, was very curious. ‘A Frenchman, a Frenchman,’ they murmured on all sides, speaking with interest and even with sympathy, but with a manifest fear of compromising themselves by an imprudent of even a friendly word. Two men only ventured to come forward frankly and converse with me—the one was a Pole from Cracow, only passing through Kaminieç, and therefore less obliged to be circumspect; the other was a Russian officer, who left the billiard-table when he heard me utter a few sentences in French, and who immediately showed the greatest readiness to make my acquaintance. ‘You are, then, come to stay here for some time? Oh! pray remain, I beseech you. It is a fine country! beautiful women, too! But it is at Warsaw especially that one finds charming women. Ah! Warsaw! I have been garrisoned there: it is a famous place, and there really are pretty faces!’ And the young man seemed not to be able to stop in pouring forth praises which could not but be disagreeable to me. Strange that this Poland, of which he trod the soil, and of which he had visited all the principal towns, should have given him nothing to see or to appreciate but the beauty of our women! Not one word to say of the government, of the fate of the inhabitants, of the misery of the people! His only subject of preoccupation, of praise, and of conversation, was the female population of Poland. One thing only turned him from this favourite topic. I happened to say something incidentally of Paris; then he began to ask questions about the Parisian womankind, and seemed at once pleased and excited at my replies. On the whole he was not a bad fellow, this officer Rogatchev; and he wound up by sharing with me the national dish of pierogi, laughing all the time at the strong foreign accent with which I pronounced the word: but he did me the justice to say soon after, that in the matter of pierogi my good appetite had made ample amends for my bad pronunciation.

While we walked up and down the room and talked in a loud voice on trifling subjects, the other occupants of it, all Poles and young people, kept themselves apart and whispered together, directing towards me from time to time oblique and curious glances. What a striking contrast there was between their attitude of reserve and the full-blown confidence of the happy Rogatchev! While keeping up my conversation with the Russian officer, I endeavored to catch the words which were passing among my countryman. ‘From France?’ ‘Does he know anything of our people?’ ‘Do the French care about us?’ ‘Perhaps something new is about to happen.’ My emotion was great, but I had to redouble the animation with which I was describing to my new acquaintance the beauty and the glories of Paris.

While so discoursing I did not omit to inform M. Rogatchev as well as the other persons present that I had come to Kaminieç to push my fortune as a teacher of languages, and that I desired nothing better than to settle in the town, though, if my interests required it, I might penetrate even to the interior of Russia. This declaration I repeated next morning at the station of police, for I was anxious to lose no time in establishing my position. The permission to remain was accorded to me without hesitation. As regarded my intention of giving lessons in private houses, I was warned that some formalities must in the first place be attended to, and that I must formally ask and obtain the consent of the military governor, of the director of the Lyceum, &c. It was not long before I obtained the necessary authorisation, and thanks to the recommendations of my officer and of other persons whose acquaintance I made on the first day,—thanks, above all, to those obliging cares of which a stranger is always the object in our country, orders for lessons came to me from all sides, and from the very first. I preferred, I must say, the houses of the different Russian officials; it was the surest way to avoid suspicion for myself, and to prevent compromising my countrymen. The offers made to me by the Abaza family were really precious, and it may be supposed that I did not neglect such connections as these; for Colonel Abaza, President of the Chamber of Finance, was a Russian functionary at once highly placed and very influential. I did not, however, refuse to attend on Polish families; but I selected those which any discovery would have the least affected, such as the houses of widows and elderly gentlemen—those, in short, where there were no young people. After a few weeks I had made good my position, and my relations were well understood. I went into all circles, and all over the town I was well known as the M. Catharo whom they persisted in calling a Frenchman.

Thus it was that, after having been an emigrant for twelve years, I found myself again in my native land, not very far either from my own family (which dwelt in the Ukraine), and in the quality of a Maltese, a British subject, teaching foreign languages, and not understanding a word of either the Russian or the Polish tongues. This last circumstance was one which often put my caution and my sang froid both to some severe trials, trials which my professorial office only aggravated. How many times was I not tempted at some difficult idiom or expression to explain myself to my pupils in a speech quite as familiar to me as it was to themselves! One of my first pupils was a certain Dmitrenko, a clerk in the Chamber of Finance, a cheerful being, who was bitten all of a sudden with a fancy for learning French, of which he did not know a single word. At the end of the pantomime which was necessary to make us mutually understand each other during the lesson, he wound up by proposing to give me some notions about Russian, with which I was perfectly conversant; but he never managed to make me read fluently, and he could not conceal his astonishment at this want of intelligence in one of those Frenchmen whose wits he had heard so much vaunted.

Among my own people, the incognito which I preserved exposed me very often to scenes that made both my inward feelings and my sentiments as a man of probity suffer acutely. I was the involuntary and helpless confidant of the relations, even of the secrets, of families, who thought that they concealed them perfectly from my knowledge by speaking together in Polish. Nor in such conversations did I always hear remarks that were flattering to myself. One day, for example, a visitor who was unknown to me meeting me in a room for the first time, and hearing that I had recently come from Paris, wished to ask me if I knew anything of his brother, who lived in that capital, an emigrant, and a man whom in truth I knew perfectly well; but the master of the house dissuaded him warmly from it. ‘You know very well how strictly we are forbidden to make any enquiries about our emigrated relations; take care what you are about; one is never sure of one’s self with a foreigner.’ I felt as if all the blood in my body were rushing to my head, and I bent down quickly over the book in which I was cutting some leaves.

I must be permitted one other recollection of this sort. I was giving lessons to the two daughters of the good and amiable Madame Piekutowska. One day, while conversing with them, I touched oh the subject of Poland. The beautiful Matilda replied to my careless expression with one of those words which we sometimes utter before a stranger, not witting that we are making some deep wound bleed. The elder sister took her up sharply in Polish, ’ How can you speak of sacred things before a hair-brained Frenchman?’

Such incidents happened nearly every day, and they caused me sometimes pleasure, sometimes annoyance; but that annoyance turned to a concentrated rage when in Russian houses I was obliged to swallow in silence, or discuss with the passionless calmness of a stranger, topics wounding to my country, and such discussions as her oppressors permitted themselves to indulge in. It was in the house of Monsieur Abaza above all that I suffered this torture most frequently; and I should try in vain were I to attempt to give any idea of it.

As my own safety, as well as that of others, would assuredly be compromised were I suspected of knowing the language of the country, I was obliged in this respect to keep a constant watch upon myself. If I may use such an expression, I was forced to watch myself even in sleep; and I always arranged (especially when I happened to be invited to any of the dwellings in the neighbourhood) so as to sleep alone, and in a separate room. I feared that during my slumbers I might chance to mutter some sentences in Polish. But no incident disturbed me in the part which I had assumed; and during nine months I was enabled either to remain in Kaminieç, or to make short excursions into the provinces, without awakening the suspicions of the police. In the eyes of Poles, as well as Russians, I passed always for M. Catharo, an inoffensive man, who liked society, and who was well received in it. As to the true object of my stay, and my real character, some of my countrymen alone became privy to it, and the secret was most rigorously kept. The alarm, as I afterwards learnt, came from St. Petersburg, and Kaminieç was convulsed with astonishment when it discovered all of a sudden that the French teacher of languages whom it had harboured so long within its walls, was a native, an emigrant, and an emissary of emigrants....

They say that men are often warned by a strange inward feeling that danger is approaching. I had no need of such a supernatural gift to be made aware, during the first days of the month of December, that peril was imminent; I had only to keep my eyes about me. By the beginning of December, I perceived that I was watched and spied upon at every turn by emissaries of the police. The counsels which were given me from different quarters, as well as the manner half inquisitive and half constrained with which the Russian officials treated me, could not but confirm my apprehensions. I have since heard that the moment of my arrest was delayed not only from their wish to inform themselves perfectly of my conduct, but from the difficulty which they experienced in completely identifying my person; and their fear was lest, in case of any mistake, they should get themselves into trouble by interfering with a British subject; that is to say, with the subject of a power well known not to stand any practices of that sort, or any joking on such a matter. Very soon, however, I felt both that there was no doubt, but that my arrest was close at hand, and also that it was time for me to arrange my plans. Up to this moment flight had not been altogether impossible, but it was repugnant to me. Why should I shun the dangers to which my accomplices were exposed, who neither could nor ought to choose the path of exile? It was therefore a strict duty which I owed to them, and to hundreds of persons who had nothing whatever to do with me, not to be absent when the day of enquiry came. To tell the truth, the Russian plan, in any political search of the kind, is to arrest all those who, from far or near, intimately or casually, may have known the suspected person. Now, as I was acquainted with everybody, both in the town and in its environs, the disappearance of the guilty principal would only have served to aggravate the case of thousands of suspected persons. The inquiry would have dragged on for years; it would perhaps never have come to an end. My presence alone could prevent countless misfortunes, and, if the worst came to the worst, it could limit the number of the victims. I resolved therefore patiently to abide the fatal hour; and I spent the days of freedom which yet remained to me in concerting with my accomplices the plan of conduct which I ought to follow. The last interview which I had with one of them was in a church on the eve of my arrest. We agreed as much as possible upon all points, and then embraced one another with an emotion which may easily be understood. Remaining to the last, and alone in the church, I prayed with fervour that God would give me strength to come through the trials which might await me.

Like every Pole of my generation, I had imbibed from my mother’s teaching a fervent attachment to the Catholic faith. But those convictions had had their times of eclipse, and I can still recall the moment at which they were for the first time absolutely shaken. It was in 1831, when, after our glorious campaign, I passed into Galicia with the corps under General Dwernicki. One day I was at confession, when the priest, a brother of the order of St Bernard, among other exhortations full of charity and of the spirit of the Gospel, represented our revolution to me as a sin, and as a violation of the oath of fidelity to Nicholas. Respect for the sacred precincts prevented my replying to him, but, as I rose to go away, I said to myself that the priests did not always teach the truth, and that there were a good many tares among their wheat. Some time later, while living in France, I began to take up, like the rest of the world, new ideas in religion, as well as in politics. I neglected all religious exercises and practices, and had come to look on Jesus Christ as an excellent philosopher, or, at the best, as a democratic teacher. But the frivolous pleasure of unbelief are soon exhausted; and long before the period at which my narrative begins, and before my return to my native land, I had reverted to the feelings and the belief which had guided my youth, and in which I was to find the only true support throughout the sad destiny that was in store for me.

CHAPTER II.
OF MY ARREST AND IMPRISONMENT AT BRAÇLAW.

ARREST—EXAMINATION—MAJOR POLOUTKOVSKÏ—JOURNEY TO BRAÇLAW—AN ACCIDENT—THE PRISON AT BRAÇLAW—A RUSSIAN SCENE—KIOW.

On December 31st, 1843, and just at the late dawning of the day, I felt myself shaken by the arm, and I was addressed in a loud voice by my assumed name. Though awake, I was in no hurry to reply; I wished to gain time to compose myself for my part. When at last I opened my eyes, I beheld in my room the Director of Police, Colonel Grunfield; a Commissary; and Major Poloutkovskoï, of the Council of Prince Bibikov, Governor-General of Volhynia, Podolia, and the Ukraine; the Major having come from Kiow to take steps for my arrest. I expressed my surprise at so early a visit, and my astonishment was naturally redoubled at the intelligence that I must be taken, under escort, before the Governor. I did not, of course, fail to represent my rights as a British subject, or to remind them of the grave results that were likely to accrue to themselves for this inconceivable conduct towards me. After having thus gone through all the formalities necessary to keep up my character, I asked permission to go into the next room, to perform my toilet. While I was dressing, the Commissary took possession of my papers and effects, and we were soon on our way to the house of the Governor Radistchev, with whom I had been personally acquainted for some time.

This first interview was both short and indecisive. The Governor entered the room abruptly, and addressed me in Russian. I pretended not to understand what he said, and requested that I might be interrogated in French; above all I begged that he would explain the cause of my being arrested. ‘You will learn that presently;’ and, at a signal given by his hand, I was then hustled out of the room. I was conducted to the house of the Director of Police, and there installed in a room which opened into a saloon. The doors were locked, and the official in uniform left to keep me company strictly observed the rule that he was not to speak to me.

Up to this time I had preserved my presence of mind, and I had even been astonished at my own perfect calmness at the moment of my awakening; but now, when alone or nearly so, I suddenly felt a great sinking of my heart. The thought of the many sufferings in store for me, in store also for so many of my brothers, seemed to set my brain on fire, and tears forced themselves into my eyes. To hide this dangerous emotion, I turned to the wall, and leant my forehead against it; but through the walls I fancied that sighs and moans were audible, the voices of the companions of my unhappy fate. Determined to distract my thoughts as much as I could, I took up a pack of playing cards that lay on the round table. A child of the Ukraine, I was by nature a little superstitious; I began to draw the cards, and they promised ... my deliverance! Shall I say it? This fortunate augury only increased my irritation, and I was almost obliged to the head official who entered the room at this instant, and who, after enquiring into my wants, carried away with him The tempting game.

A few minutes later a distraction of a more important kind took the place of the childish consolation which I had found in the cards. Another officer had been sent to join the one already in charge of me, and between them a conversation soon began which certainly was not devoid of interest for me. I was so well known in Kaminieç, and everyone was so thoroughly convinced of my ignorance of the two languages used in the country, that even now these two officials still thought me a foreigner, and they put no restraint on the remarks which they made to each other in Russian and in a loud tone of voice. I need not say that I lost nothing from want of attention to such a colloquy.

‘It is a serious matter,’ said the one; ‘a political business. They have arrested twenty people in the town already this morning (he gave the names), and orders have been sent out to the country, and all on account of this foreigner, who, they say, is come here to intrigue against the Tzar, and who is accredited by some other power, England or France—the devil knows which! They do not speak very well either of President Abaza; if anything happens to him it will be a pity, for he is an honest man; but I must say that at his age it was an odd idea to wish to learn French! Much he is like to make by his French lessons!’... ‘What a pity! what a pity to be sure!’ answered the other one; ‘when this gentleman came here nine months ago I was ordered to watch him, as we do every new comer. I dogged his steps, I compassed him about on every side; but his conduct was so very open, his relations with both Russians and Poles so frank, and he appeared to me to be so really inoffensive, that at last I lost sight of him; and it seems he was a very pretty fellow after all, and now another man has been down upon him, and will claim the reward! Now I call that having no luck! Scoundrel that he is! bah! what a pity, what a pity to be sure!’... I could not help being amused at the strange way in which this poor wretch condoled with himself for having lost the opportunity of bringing about my ruin; but the rest of the information which I extracted from their talk gave, if possible, a graver turn to my thoughts. I could no longer doubt that many persons had been arrested on my account; but the names which I had just heard repeated belonged to such different classes of my acquaintances that I discerned in them at least one source of hope. They were evidently groping in the dark as yet, and arresting right and left, while suspicions reached as far, or rather were as far astray, as Monsieur Abaza! In another point of view I imitated the naive cynicism of my police official, and was quite ready to rejoice at the trouble in which I had landed the worthy President of the Chamber of Finance. If indeed the Russians whom I knew were to be implicated in the trial, the affair would get into a strange confusion, and who knows then whether my accomplices might not benefit by the perfect innocence of the others, which would certainly soon be made manifest?

At four o’clock in the afternoon I had a visit from the Governor, and from Major Poloutkovskoï. They represented to me that my position was an alarming one, and that it would be best for my own interest if I made the most complete confession. I persisted in my resolution. I declared I did not understand in the least what they wanted with me, and I spoke of writing to the English ambassador in St. Petersburg, and of claiming his protection. ‘You are then in a great hurry to leave Kaminieç?’ replied the Governor, ironically; ‘but keep yourself easy, I will furnish you with all the means for it.’ The same questions were repeated on the following days, either in the house of the Director of Police, where I was still detained, or in that of the Governor, who had me brought to him under an escort; the same arguments were urged, on the one side, to make me confess my real character, and there was, on the other side, the same obstinacy in keeping up the part which I had assumed. The manners of the Governor were generally cold but polite, sometimes however they were ironical, and even vehement. ‘It is in vain to say that you are a Maltese, and to play this comedy,’ cried he, in one of his examinations; ‘we know very well that you belong to the Ukraine, and so-and-so have already confessed that they have talked with you in Polish.’ He named to me two of the co-accused, the least initiated into my sayings and doings, and also the least firm. Twice over I was confronted with them. These interviews were most painful, and in spite of the flat denials which I opposed to those who thus denounced me, I saw the impossibility of persisting any longer in the line which I had hitherto followed. Every day more abundant and more precise information arrived about me, and it became clear that in prolonging a useless game I ran the risk of aggravating the situation of my accomplices; but I determined to collect the greatest possible number of the accused, and to make them witnesses to my confession, so that they might know its limits and follow my suit. I waited to be confronted with them in a body. I had not long to wait, and one evening when summoned to the Governor’s residence, I perceived in the hall a great number of my fellow-prisoners arranged along the two walls, and all standing up—they presented a moving spectacle, I might almost say a fantastic one. Many of them were persons with whom I had but a very slight acquaintance, others had been in my secret, all bore upon their faces the marks of suffering and fatigue. After a certain time spent as usual in pressing questions and in absolute denials, I exclaimed, as if out of patience, in a loud voice, and in my native tongue, ‘Well then, yes, I am not a British subject, I am a Pole; I was born in the Ukraine, I emigrated after the revolution of 1831, and I came back here. I came back into this country because a life of exile was no longer endurable to me, and because I wished to revisit Poland. I came here under a feigned name, because I was perfectly aware that bearing my own name I should not be suffered to remain; I was ready at any price to be quiet and inoffensive, asking nothing but to breathe my native air. I have confided my secret to a few of my fellow-countrymen, I have asked their help and their advice, I have asked them for nothing else, and I have nothing else to say to them.’ In spite of the certainty as to my identity which they must now have possessed for some time, the Governor and Major Poloutkovskoï could not suppress an exclamation of surprise at hearing me thus suddenly speak out in Polish; and while I was speaking I could see the Governor’s face expand; he rubbed his hands, walked up and down the room with long steps, and when I ceased came up to me with a benevolent air, as if he felt obliged to me for having put an end to a situation which was really untenable. After a few insignificant questions, he gave orders to have me removed.

On my return to the house where I was detained, being still under the influence of the late excitement, I took every one strangely by surprise by suddenly beginning to talk in Polish. In this language I addressed the director, the officials, and my keepers. I took a childish and feverish pleasure in making use of a freedom which had been so long denied me; and I behaved in the same way on the following day, though, from an obstinacy which had its root in repugnance, rather than in any calculation whatever, I pretended, as before, that I did not understand Russian. As to my native speech I used it to my heart’s content; it was as if I wished to make amends to myself by the liberty of a few hours for having had to abstain from it during an entire year.

Thus ended the preliminaries of my trial, and on the morrow Major Poloutkovskoï came to desire me to hold myself in readiness to depart on that very evening for Kiow.

It was on a fine but cold winter’s night that I quitted Kaminieç. I took my seat in a roomy open carriage alongside of Major Poloutkovskoï. Opposite us sat two soldiers, with loaded muskets, and we were followed by a second carriage, in which were two officers of the secret Police. Owing to the season, and the lateness of the hour, which was midnight, the town was dark, and the streets were deserted; but as I passed before certain houses which I knew well, and of which the inhabitants were united in the same lot with myself, I looked up, and I saw lights still burning. Was it as a message of farewell? or did they bear witness to vigils full of anguish which were being held within? The plaintive tinkling of bells, fastened, after the Russian fashion, to the shafts of the vehicle, which was drawn by three horses, alone broke the mournful silence of the night, and I sank into a reverie of indulged sadness. I was obliged to my companion for not interrupting the current of my thoughts by words; he did not speak even when we stopped to change horses, and it was not till the day began to break that he commenced a conversation. It turned at first only on France; her administration, her commercial arrangements, her agriculture, her commerce, these were all subjects in which he seemed to take a great interest. By degrees we began to talk of politics, even of emigration, and I had the opportunity of convincing myself how perfect was the knowledge which my interlocutor had been able to collect of our means, our men, and even of our smallest publications. I expressed my astonishment at this to him; he smiled and replied, ‘We are obliged to learn all these things, and the means of learning them are never wanting.’ In general, the Major, whom I had had the opportunity of studying during the examination that had taken place at Kaminieç, and whom I was to meet again later in the Commission of Inquiry at Kiow, showed himself, though cold and almost indifferent, to be a well-educated man. He was polite and courteous in his demeanour to me, and in all my interviews with the Governor of Kaminieç he had never failed to call General Radistchev to reason, whenever he gave vent to any burst of violence. A spring of my calèche having given way on the evening of our arrival at Mohilow, I had to be put into a kibitka with the two soldiers, while the Major in another preceded us, along with the officers of the secret Police; and we were carried along with a rapidity of which no one who has not seen a Russian convoy of this kind can form any idea. There it was that I met with an accident the nature of which I am still far from understanding and which I despair of describing to my readers. At one of those jolts of which the kibitka at its furious pace bestows so many on the traveller, I felt something snap in the tendons which attach the head, and a sharp and terrible pain made me give vent to such a savage cry of distress that I was heard in the accompanying carriage. The Major called a halt, and asked what was the matter with me. I was not able to reply, I was simply sobbing; he ordered them to go at a walk to the post-house, which relieved me much, but at the least jar the same frightful suffering recurred, and I screamed while I tried to steady my head between my hands. Arrived at the station I was not able to leave the carriage, and to my shame and distress I was crying like a child. Then the Major, who was obliged to press on in person to Braçlaw, left me in charge of one of the police officials and of the two soldiers, and desired them to go at a foot’s pace. Thus we continued our journey, but, at the end of some hours, my companion, wearied by the slowness of our march, ordered them to go quicker. Hardly had the horses broken into a gallop when the pain became really insupportable. I felt I was becoming mad, and warned by my piercing cries, my guardian called to the driver to stop. ‘You must go slowly; if you won’t, blow my brains out at once; believe me, if you continue to gallop, I shall not be able to support it more than five minutes; I shall be dead, and what will be your position then?’ I did not exaggerate in any way, and my words gaining force by my strong conviction, made an impression upon those who had the charge of me. We continued all that night walking slowly, and when at daybreak we reached a posting-house, they put me into a sledge, for the road, though not all covered with snow, was deep in mud. Finally, at one o’clock we reached Braçlaw, where Major Poloutkovskoï was in waiting for us. My deplorable condition touched him visibly; he put his hand on my arm, and looking at me with attention, he questioned me on the pain which I felt. It was the first and the only time that he showed me any true compassion. He told me that the wants of the service summoned him imperatively to Kiow, but that I should remain here until I had recovered my strength a little; he soon afterwards took leave of me, and after having pushed on a little longer, my sledge stopped in the town before a vast and sombre building. They bid me get out, the heavy gates grated on their hinges, and after having traversed several dim corridors, I found myself in the middle of a little room, which was tolerably clean, and of which the window was furnished with strong iron bars. I flung myself on the paillasse, which I saw in one corner, and covered myself with my cloak. A few moments afterwards I received a visit from the sous préfet, and from the doctor, a Pole, who examined me with much interest, prescribed repose, and some medicines; and I was again left alone with the two soldiers. Repose was in truth the only remedy for my pain, of which I felt nothing as long as I remained quiet and lying down. Thus long hours passed away, when all of a sudden breaking through the deep silence I heard a strange clinking which I was not able to explain; but I soon distinguished the sound of chains, both behind the wall and in the corridors. I was then in one of those great prisons, called Krepost; but who might my companions be? Simple criminals perhaps; or, it may be political prisoners, countrymen of my own? My doubts were soon cleared up; I heard a song rise, sonorous, choral, and only broken by the sound of fetters; the words were Polish, the melody a familiar one:—

In a cradle sleeping, the Babe Divine, ...

It was then Christmas time, and these poor prisoners, my compatriots, were intoning at midnight, after our ancient custom, the venerable hymn which hails the Saviour’s birth. Then followed other canticles in common use:—

Thus to the shepherds did the angels say, ...

and

To Bethlehem running, &c....

Ah, those Christmas hymns!—songs which had rocked my childhood and pleased me in youth, and which I had not heard for the last twelve years—ever since I had emigrated to another land. How after twelve years was I to hear them again? Chanted by captives, and accompanied by the rattle of their chains!

On both the following days I was visited repeatedly by the sous préfet, and by the doctor. I felt very weak, but quite free from the pain in my head; and upon being asked by the official in charge whether I was ready to continue my journey, I replied in the affirmative, for I was anxious to reach Kiow. As we were stepping into our sledges, I noticed in the courtyard a regiment of soldiers, whose bearing was so fine and so soldierly that I made a remark upon it to the sous préfet as he stood beside me. ‘They are,’ he said, ‘Polish soldiers of 1831, incorporated now into the army of the South.’ Thus did I meet again after such a lapse of years my former companions in arms. I could not help uncovering my head to them, and calling out loudly in Polish, ‘All hail, comrades!’ ‘Forward!’ shouted the sous préfet immediately; and the horses went off like an arrow from a bow. We had hardly gone two or three leagues out of Braçlaw when we met a carriage driving at a fast and furious pace, and which pulled up alongside of us. An officer of the armed Police sprang out of it, who, after conversing for a few minutes with my companion, came up to me, and announced that for the future I should consider myself under his guardianship.

He seemed a young man of about twenty, or a little older; very tall, very slight, very tight in his uniform, with a waist like a wasp, and with a hard haughty manner. He was, as I afterwards learnt, a German by birth, and the sight of him gave me a curious sense of uneasiness, so that I began to regret Major Poloutkovskoï. At one place he made us drive off the high road, and we got out at a solitary house, a guard-house apparently, and there they fitted me with a pair of handcuffs. I was then led down to a hut, which was underground, and to a sort of forge, where a soldier farrier had with some difficulty lit the furnace fires. The officer produced some chains from some corner or another, and he now stood contemplating them with an expression of face which was both curious and fierce. These irons were the most detestable things that can be imagined; red with rust, they were composed of two long bars fastened in the middle by a bit of chain, and having a foot-ring at each end. Having finished all the preparations, the soldier tried the rings on me above each ankle, but they were so tight that I could not help shouting with the pain. The officer simply said, ‘Come, come!’ but when they were to be soldered up I pulled my feet out, and declared that I would lodge a complaint before the Governor-General if they did not let the rings out. This made the officer pause for a moment. He ordered them to attend to my demand, and bolts were at last let into them with hammers and punches; but I suffered a great deal from them still, and they remained always too tight, while the rusty bit of chain hindered the long bars from turning, and left me wholly unable to walk. They lifted me up, and hoisted me, thus trussed, into the carriage. Late in the night, and after we had left Bialocerkiew behind, the sleigh in which I was reached the top of an incline, and, coming upon some stumbling-block, it upset. The soldiers were thrown off, I don’t know what became of the coachman; as for myself, pinioned and unable to move, I was flung out, but my fetters hooked on in some way to the vehicle, and I was dragged along through the snow and the mud by the horses, which continued their maddened course; my knees, elbows, and chest were bruised, and I finally lost consciousness. When I came to myself again, I found that I had been reinstalled into my sledge, and that all was restored to order. The young officer standing alongside of me asked if I was much hurt? I made no answer; and now began a scene which was truly Russian in its character. The officer struck with his fists at the two unhappy soldiers on account of an accident in which no one had had any part but himself, for he had been constantly calling out to go quicker. The soldiers, as soon as we were again under way, paid off on the driver the blows they had received from the officer; and he, in return, revenged himself on his horses by flogging them so brutally that we ran every risk of having a repetition of the adventure. More dead than alive, I saw all that was done; and, such is the weakness of our human nature, I had but one feeling, the fear of a second accident. At each pitch and at the least jolt I shut my eyes and nearly swooned; and yet I was not naturally timid, and my nerves were not precisely of the most delicate order. The following day I arrived before the fortress of Kiow.

CHAPTER III.
OF MY IMPRISONMENT AT KIOW, AND MY DEPARTURE FOR SIBERIA.

THE FORTRESS AT KIOW—PRINCE BIBIKOV—EXAMINATION—A COMMISSION OF INQUIRY—A BIBLE—FELLOW-PRISONERS—THE MANIAC—PREPARATIONS FOR ‘DEPORTATION’—THE SENTENCE.

Carried in the arms of several soldiers, I was first deposited in the business room of the Commandant of the place. Here I was searched, registered, and inscribed on the books; while they plied me with questions, to which I know not what answers I made, for I had no knowledge either of what I was doing or of what I was saying. They set me upright at last, and I walked, supported by soldiers, through an endless number of rooms and corridors. A door was opened, I entered the cell, and I fell exhausted on a mattress. Two jailers and an aide-de-camp entered along with them, and the latter asked me if I wanted anything. I requested to have my fetters changed, or to have the foot-rings opened and made wider. He replied that he had no power to do so, but that he would report the request. I was then left alone, and at the end of a very few minutes I fell asleep. I slept twenty-five hours without turning, and was only awakened at the end of that time by my keepers, whom this prolonged slumber had alarmed. Soon after, the colonel in command was ushered in. He was covered with orders, and addressing me in Polish, he asked how I was, and what might be the cause of my indisposition. I thanked him, but I said nothing of the accidents of my journey; for where was the use of making any complaints? He promised that some broth should be sent to me, and took leave of me with these words, ‘Try to regain your strength, you are much weakened; and here, in our prisons, one has need of health to bear one’s many sufferings.

I was indeed very weak, but I was no longer tormented by that terrible pain in my head, of which I was more afraid than of anything else. There remained the pains in my chest, elbows and knees, which were the consequences of the accident, and from which I was yet to suffer for several months to come. I looked round my cell; it was six feet by five, pretty high in the roof, in very bad repair, very dirty, and lit by a small window placed close to the ceiling, and grated with iron bars both within and without. Over my head I could read several names cut with some difficulty on the wall; among others that of Rabczynski, whom I was to meet hereafter in Siberia. The only furniture was a little table, a wooden chair, and a great stove in earthenware. Some broth and some bread were brought to me, but the difficulty of eating in handcuffs was so great and irritated me so much that I finished my meal before my appetite was appeased. Suddenly, the sight of the bread that remained suggested to me a providential idea. It certainly was not the first time that I had thought of Konarski, whose sufferings were fresh in every memory. I knew that hunger had been one of the engines of torture tried upon him, and I had no security that I might not have to pass through a similar ordeal. So I determined to lay up a fund against this extremity, and I hid the bread in a hole behind the stove, high up in the wall; and this I did on the following days with the bread that was supplied to me. I was quite pleased with the store of biscuit thus prepared against the time of famine.

Somewhat revived by the food and by sleep, I now became sensible of an annoyance which I could not at first account for. Presently I discovered that I was literally covered with vermin, the mattress, and the room were filthy with them, and the handcuffs prevented my even attempting to destroy them. I looked round and caught two eyes fixed upon me; it was the sentry on guard in the corridor, who had orders to watch all my movements through the aperture cut in my door; in vain, however, did I call to him, he paid me not the slightest attention; but happily for me on the following day the Commandant of the fortress caused me to be moved into the opposite cell, and had my room purified. He gave orders at the same time to have me shaved; an officer assisted at the operation, and when I requested that they would leave my whiskers, I received an answer which, all things considered, was rather out of place: ‘No, no; we will leave you nothing but your moustaches, and that will be quite in the Polish fashion; the ancient Poles wore nothing but a moustache.’ I soon returned to my cell, now a little cleaner than it had been; but what most moved my gratitude towards the Commandant was that he had my handcuffs taken off; and with the recovered liberty of my hands I recovered, strange to say, all the freedom and former energy of my mind. I kept constantly stretching out my arms, hardly daring to believe in my happiness, and I felt like a child escaped from its swaddling bands.

A week, or nearly a week, now elapsed without bringing any notable change in my position. My food was wholesome and plentiful, the room was cleansed every day, but the want of air and of exercise had completely enervated me. My chains prevented my walking, or even standing. I remained almost always lying on my paillasse, rising in general only in the morning to kneel and repeat the Lord’s Prayer. The nights were long and without any light, and their quiet was only broken by the sound of the hammers, when they fitted or unfitted the fetters of some of the prisoners. Although it was forbidden to the sentries and keepers to speak to me, I soon managed to learn that all my accused friends from Kaminieç were in the same prison with myself, though lodged in different corridors.

One day, about noon, a great noise was heard at the entrance of my cell, the door opened, and a man appeared before me in the undress of a general officer, surrounded by generals and aides-de-camp, all in full uniform, who stood back respectfully in the corridor. The man had a tall figure, grey hair cut like a brush, an oval face without any moustaches, and very piercing eyes: his left sleeve was fastened up to one of the breast buttons of his coat, and the loss of an arm which this indicated convinced me that I now beheld no less a person than the Governor-General of Volhynia, Podolia, and the Ukraine, Prince Bibikov.[3] He took off his cap, pushed the door close, without however shutting it, sat down on the chair, and made me a sign to reseat myself on the mattress from which I had risen. During the conversation which followed he seemed very much annoyed at the bad air of the cell, and turned mechanically to the high window several times, as if to breathe freely. He addressed me in French.

‘You probably guess who I am?’

‘I believe that I have the honour of speaking to the Governor-General, Prince Bibikov.’

‘Your name is Piotrowski; you are a native of the Ukraine; you took part in the revolt of 1831, you emigrated to France. You afterwards returned to Kaminieç under the name of Catharo.’

‘Yes, your Excellency.’

‘You pretend that your return had no other object than that of revisiting your native land; but when after 1831 the Emperor granted an amnesty, why did you not avail yourself of it?’

‘I do not wish to say anything that might be displeasing to your Excellency, but at the same time the manner in which this amnesty was drawn up was not of the nature to encourage us. Furthermore, the amnesty only applied to subjects of the kingdom, the inhabitants of the detached and outlying provinces were deprived of it; and to conclude, before asking pardon, one must feel that one has been guilty.’

‘Who gave you that English passport?’

‘I found it in the street.’

‘You spent more than a month in Hungary; you see that I am well informed about you. Why did you go there?’

‘To make my traces more difficult to follow, and to shorten the journey.’

‘Oh! but you had some other reasons; you are a member of the Democratic Society.’

‘I once formed a part of it, but I have withdrawn from it a long time ago.’

‘You are an emissary of that society?’

‘No.’

‘Then in coming here you had no political mission?’

‘Certainly, I had none.’

‘Such assertions are not likely to improve your situation; I do not hide from you that it is a very unpleasant one; and only a sincere and complete confession can diminish your troubles, and above all make you worthy of the indulgence of the Emperor. You knew Konarski?’[4]

‘No.’

‘But you have heard of him?’

‘Certainly, above all of the tortures inflicted upon him.’

‘Your case is similar to that of Konarski, and only the sincerity of your confession can lessen its consequences. I do not wish to judge of your sentiments, I only wish to know whom you have known at Kaminieç, and in the provinces; I do not ask you to tell me what were your mutual plans, tell me only with whom were you acquainted.’

‘Why, your Excellency, I knew almost everybody in Kaminieç, and in its neighbourhood.’

‘That is not the question, and you know that it is not; the point is, who were your intimates?’

‘I had none; it is true I was able to reveal my nationality to a few, and to ask their help and counsel; but your Excellency must fully understand why I ought not to name them.’

After some moments of silence, Prince Bibikov replied, ‘I do not understand why the Poles and the Russians should hate and hurt each other for ever; we are all Slaves, brought together by origin, language, and manners, we ought to be united, and to march on together; and he who thinks otherwise does not understand the true interests of the two nations.’

‘I am quite of your Excellency’s way of thinking, and we indeed have no feeling of ill-will towards the Russian nation; but we aspire to be free, and as regards the government....’

‘I have no time to discuss this with you. I repeat it, your situation is a most critical one, but you can improve it sensibly by making a sincere avowal; I do not promise you complete or immediate liberty, for I never promise that which I am not sure of being able to perform, but I can intercede with the Emperor that he would give you permission to serve for the future in the army of the Caucasus. The Poles, like all the Slaves, are brave and courageous; you are still young, you are not wanting in intellect, you would very soon become an officer, and then your career would depend only on yourself.’

He pronounced these words in a loud and firm voice; then rising, he added, with a certain gentleness: ‘For the rest, I do not ask for your secrets; tell me only the names of the persons by whom you were known. I have no wish to know what you said to them—their names are all that is required; and I do not even exact from you that you should give them in immediately. You are weak, and under impressions still too recent and too lively. When you wish to speak to me, send to say so by the orderly of the day; in the meantime, let me have a note from you, and put your biography on paper.’ He made me a slight bow, and, as he went out, stopped at the door, and said, ‘Have his chains taken off.’

Some minutes afterwards, the Commandant of the place came with a farrier to see me delivered from my chains; and this was the first and last benefit which I derived from the visit of the Governor-General; but it was a very great advantage, and I was truly grateful to him for it, for since my departure from Kaminieç I had not been able to take my boots off once. My legs were much bruised, yet I walked up and down my room the whole of that day; and I had almost a pleasure in the pain which the exercise gave me, for it proved that my feet were free.

Some weeks passed; and one evening, at a pretty late hour of the night, I saw a thing which had never yet entered my cell—it was a light. An aide-de-camp, followed by four soldiers, bid me rise, and follow him. Is the moment of execution arrived? I thought, as I threw round my cell a glance which had in it something of a farewell. Supported under my arms by the soldiers, I traversed the great court of the prison. The snow creaked under our feet, the night was very dark; but the keen and pure air, to which I was not accustomed, while it cut my breath, did me an indescribable amount of good; and while I believed that I was on the way to meet my fate, I felt, if I may so express it, a bitter-sweet delight in inhaling the fresh gusts of wind. I was led into a large room, which was feebly illuminated, and where officers of different ranks were seated at a large round table covered with green cloth; they smoked their cigars, talked in a loud voice, and laughed between times. This was the Commission of Inquiry.

Among these gentlemen it was with real joy that I recognised the face of Major Poloutkovskoï, and yet he it was who had arrested me! The person who presided, and who seemed to be chairman of the commission, was dressed in a plain black coat. He was a member of the third division of the Imperial Cabinet (the secret Police) and a Privy Councillor—in short, it was Pissarev, the alter ego of Prince Bibikov, a man of whom the remembrance is too terrible to be soon effaced in the detached provinces. He made a sign to me to approach, allowed me to be seated near him, and began his questions in French, and in a very affable tone. Although with more of detail, they were identical with those which had been put to me by Prince Bibikov. I made the same answers—and such was the character of the many examinations which I underwent before the Commission of Inquiry.

As I was of noble birth, I found, one day, at one of the sittings of the Commission, the Marshal of the nobility of the province. His presence was demanded by the laws; but he seemed to suffer from his office, and evidently only went through a painful formality, while he addressed me in Polish and put a few questions as to my family and connections. On the whole, these gentlemen seldom failed to treat me with consideration, in spite of the silence and the negatives with which I met their demands. One day, the president even said to me, ‘You must find the time in prison pass very slowly; my library is at your disposal, if you wish to have some books. Do you prefer travels or novels?’

‘Will you have the kindness to let me have a Bible?’

‘A Bible!’ he replied, looking at me with an odd expression; ‘upon my word, I have not got such a thing; but I can procure one for you.’ And he did send me a Bible, after which time I no longer felt that I was alone.

Those of my fellow-countrymen to whom the very names of Prince Bibikov and of M. Pissarev recall the sorrows of so many families, the blood and tears of so many noble victims, and of three provinces all outraged and oppressed under the pressure of the most haughty and rapacious of tyrannies, will no doubt be astonished—it may be, shocked—at what I have just related. Yet such undoubtedly was the conduct of these two men towards myself. I ought also here to declare that no attempt was ever made to inflict on me any of the tortures to which so many Poles have been subjected in Russian prisons—more than one of my fellow-accused being, alas! among the number. It is true that I was several times threatened with such measures, but the threat was never put into execution.

The inquest dragged out its length however, and I soon received the blessed permission to walk in the corridors every day for one hour—care being taken to clear them at that time of every living soul, except the two sentries. The corridor was narrow, dark, and damp; but at least I could satisfy the imperious necessity for exercise which I had felt, and I could also talk in secret from time to time with the sentries. If these soldiers chanced to be Poles—which they very often were, being even men who had served with us in our army of 1831—they always showed me more compassion, while they maintained also a far greater show of reserve. The Russian soldiers acted I think more from curiosity; but what surprised me most was the frequency with which I was asked whether I had never met, in foreign countries, with the Grand Duke Constantine, whom they firmly believed to be living in France or in England, and who should one day return to deliver them from Nicholas. I found however that I must renounce the real pleasure which I felt in talking to my sentries. One day the jailer surprised one of them in conversation with me. He was led off to receive sixty blows with the rods, and the cries of the unhappy man under punishment presently reached my ears.

I ought to say something in this place of my neighbours, viz. of those who inhabited the cells opposite my prison. Those who were implicated in my affair were lodged in another part of the fortress, and I never had any communication with them. Once only I caught a glimpse of the judge, Zawadzki, and I hardly recognised him again, for the man formerly so strong and very corpulent was reduced to a perfect skeleton. My neighbours in the corridor were not political criminals. One of them, a soldier named Toumanov, awaited in irons the execution of his sentence of four thousand blows with the rods, which had been passed on him for some insubordination to his superiors. He had no fear, counted on the ‘toughness of his hide,’ as he expressed it, cursed the Tzar, his officers, and his fate, and sang a great deal, especially an air of which the words began, ‘March to the sacking of Poland!’ When the moment of his execution arrived, his jailers made many brutal jests at his expense. ‘Now then, Toumanov, the devil will get your soul to-day; you will never live through the thing.’ The unhappy wretch replied, with coarser oaths, ‘I tell you I mean to live through it, and we will have a glass together yet before I am off to Siberia! I shall be better there than serving the Tzar.’ I heard afterwards from these same jailers that after two of the four thousand blows he fell senseless on the snow, which was red with his blood, and was carried back to prison. If he survived he was liable to receive, at some future day, the other half of his sentence!

The next of my neighbours was a peasant of the district of Poitava, short in stature, but of immense strength. He had deserted from the army, taken to the woods and a wild life among them, where he had killed several men. He also, when led away to punishment (for his sentence was the knout and penal servitude for life), replied to the hideous comments of his keepers, that he was not afraid. The third prisoner, like the two first, was also in chains, a young handsome soldier, who, while on a march with his battalion, had stopped at a village and loitered behind for a whole week, being ‘bewitched by a woman.’ The poor boy had then come of his own accord to give himself up, and he now expected his trial. His character seemed to be both good and gentle, and he was in the habit of singing an air of which the melody, though slightly monotonous, was so sweet and plaintive that I could not listen to him without emotion—such sweet tones could hardly have come from a vicious heart. When he left our prison I never was able to hear what became of him, but I regretted him and that plaintive strain which had so often charmed my ears. His cell was soon occupied again—by a subaltern convicted of having set fire to a magazine of forage which was under his care, the motive being the wish to conceal a certain deficit which had occurred. He had now gone mad, but in general his mania was of the inoffensive and quiet kind. He talked constantly, prepared for death, and exhorted his absent mistress to place over his remains a black cross, of which he described the shape and ornaments with the greatest exactness. Another day he complained that a gnat had stung him—that all the blood had been sucked out of his body, and that only water had been left. A pope was sent for, who recited a great number of prayers by way of exorcising him; but at last one day the prisoner would not permit him to leave the cell. A psalter in one hand and a crucifix in the other, the madman repeated, without ceasing, ‘Little father (batiouchka), I will break your head for you if you do not immediately give me the holy communion.’ The pope manœuvred cleverly so as to reach the door, assuring him that he was going to fetch the pyx; he then saved himself by making a rush, abandoning his crucifix and his psalter. On the following day the governor of the citadel had the maniac’s cell opened, though he took care himself to remain in the corridor. The prisoner, standing at the threshold, made him a sign to enter. ‘Come, your Excellency, I have a secret to whisper in your ear;’ but his Excellency was more prudent than the pope. Some soldiers soon advanced; they garotted and bound the poor fool, and they carried him off to the hospital.

In his place arrived a Circassian—a free lance of the Caucasus, who, having been taken prisoner and employed in the works of the fortress, had tried to make good his escape along with two countrymen of his own, his fellow-sufferers. Pursued by the troops, they defended themselves for a long time with their spades, which were their only weapons. One succeeded in escaping, one was killed by a thrust with a bayonet, the third fell into the hands of the soldiers and became my opposite neighbour. He was called ‘a mountain prince,’ and, with hands and feet in fetters, he was almost always to be seen seated on his couch, gloomy and silent, and with a proud look on his face. I never failed to make him a respectful bow when, in walking up and down the corridor, I passed the loophole in his cell.

In the meantime, weeks grew to months, and as the months succeeded each other, the cold of winter had given place to the heats of July. The stifling air of my prison reduced me to a state of extreme nervous irritability, which broke out over every trifle, and at night I could not sleep. I had forgotten to notice one permanent suffering in my captivity, of which the intensity can never be appreciated, except by those who may have made a personal trial of it: I mean the order given to the sentry to watch all my actions through the window in my door. No one can imagine what an indescribable torture it is to a man to see and to know that a watch is kept upon every movement. That strange eye, impassable and implacable, which meets yours at every moment—that eye which follows you everywhere and at all times—becomes to you a sort of infernal providence; and I abandon the task of making any one understand what it is that the prisoner feels who from the instant that he wakes in the morning sees from his bed those two eyes pointed towards him like two stilettos. Will it be believed, from the earliest dawn I longed for the night, even after a night which had been already very long and rayless; for then at least I was protected from those two eyes. Sometimes, impatient and distracted, I would go up to the loophole and oppose my feverish glare to those two persecuting eyes; and then I laughed like a savage, when I obliged the man to turn away for a moment.

It was in this state of extreme irritation that I received one day a visit from an aide-de-camp, accompanied by another official, by the jailer, and by some soldiers. He desired me to rise, and to undress.

‘But I am already undressed!’

‘No; but you must be stripped.’

‘Why?’

‘I have orders to take a complete description of you, and to note down any marks you may have about your person.’

‘But that is something barbarous and savage! the description of my features ought to suffice!’

‘My orders are precise, and I beg of you to undress.’

So there was no help for it.

If I had been better acquainted with the usages and customs in Russian proceedings of the sort, this notification ought to have enlightened me as to the nature of the punishment to which I was going to be condemned, as well as upon the fact that my sentence was imminent, such examinations being a preliminary to deportation. However, I was so far from having any idea of this, that when some days later I was again summoned before the Commission of Inquiry, I anticipated nothing more than one of those interminable examinations which had already become so familiar to me; but the unaccustomed solemnity of those who were present soon gave me a presentiment that something extraordinary was coming, and before long my sentence was read out. This sentence, which was long and minutely drawn up, finished with ‘the pain of death,’ commuted, however, by Prince Bibikov, for that of penal servitude in Siberia for the term of my natural life. I was, in addition, degraded from the ranks of the nobility, and I was to make the journey in fetters. After having heard this document, I was ordered to write at the bottom of the paper the following words: ‘Rufin Piotrowski heard this sentence on the 29th of July, O. S. 1844.’

I was immediately conducted to the dwelling of the commandant, where I was to take my old travelling clothes, and have my feet put in irons. To my horror, they presented me with the same rusty bars which had caused my torment all the way to Kiow. In vain I besought and implored the commandant to give me another set of chains, he would not consent to do so; and all that I could obtain from him was an order given to the gendarmes who were to be my convoy, that the tight foot-rings were to be enlarged at one of the nearest stations. I was not permitted either to revisit my cell or my companions in the corridor; I was marched down into the courtyard, where a kibitka with three horses was in waiting, and I took my seat there between two gendarmes whose muskets were loaded. The doors of the fortress closed behind the kibitka, and before me opened the way to Siberia.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Prince Bibikov had his arm carried away at the battle of Borodino: all over Poland the answer is current, which he once made to a Polish lady, who on her knees implored a pardon for her son: ‘The hand which signs pardons, madam, I left at Borodino.’

[4] A celebrated emissary, executed at Wilna, in 1841, after a long and cruel detention.

CHAPTER IV.
OF DEPORTATION AND THE LIFE OF AN EXILE IN SIBERIA.

THE KNOUT AND THE PLÈTE—RUNNING THE GAUNTLET—GANGS OF EXILES—GRAND-DUCHESS MARIE—THE JOURNEY—RUSSIAN ALMS—A ‘POPE’—THE RUSSIAN SOLDIER—OMSK—PRINCE GORTCHAKOV—EKATERINSKI-ZAVOD.

To be exempt from corporal chastisement is one of the privileges of a Russian noble; and in cases of deportation a member of the nobility should not be obliged to make the journey on foot, or in a gang of convicts. This does not prevent the torture being applied to political prisoners, even when nobles, during the progress of an examination; yet their sentence is in general in accordance with the laws, and it is seldom that the statutes are set aside, as they were in the case of the Polish prince Roman Sanguszko, to whose sentence the Emperor Nicholas undoubtedly added with his own hand the order that the prince’s journey should be made on foot. Thanks to the accident of my birth, I had never known the ordinary aggravations of such a lot as mine had now become, I mean the knout, the plète, and the march in a gang; but as many of my countrymen have undergone such punishments, and as I also should forfeit (so said the decree against me) my right of being exempt from them when I reached my destination, I shall give some more precise details upon the subject, albeit a sad one.

The knout is a strip of hide, a thong which is steeped in some preparation, and strongly glazed as it were with metal filings. By this process it becomes both heavy and extremely hard, but before it hardens care is taken to double down the edges, which are left thin on purpose, and in this way a groove runs the whole length of the thong, except the upper part, which is supple, and winds round the hand of the executioner; to the other end a small iron hook is fastened. Falling on the bare back of the sufferer the knout comes down on its concave side, of which the edges cut like a knife. The thong thus lies in the flesh, and the operator does not lift it up, but draws it towards himself horizontally, so that the hook tears off long strips. If the executioner has not been bribed, and does his business conscientiously, the person under punishment loses consciousness after the third stroke, and sometimes dies under the fifth. A peculiarity of the Russian law may be also noted here, which orders that the number of blows from the knout shall always be an unequal one! The scaffold on which the sufferer is placed is called in Russ ‘a mare’ (kobyla). It is an inclined plane, to which the man is tied with his back uncovered. The head is firmly fastened to the upper part, the feet to the lower end, and the hands, which are also knotted together, go round below the plank; any movement of the body becoming in this way impossible. After receiving the prescribed number of strokes, the poor wretch is untied, and on his knees undergoes the punishment of being marked. The letters vor (meaning thief, or malefactor) are printed in sharp-pointed letters on a stamp, which the executioner drives into the forehead and into both cheeks, and while the blood runs, a black mixture, of which gunpowder is an ingredient, is rubbed into the wounds; they heal, but the bluish mark left remains for life. In old days, after thus marking a man, they sometimes tore off his nostrils with iron pincers; but a ukase of the last years of Alexander I. definitively abolished this additional piece of barbarity. I have myself encountered in Siberia more than one criminal thus hideously disfigured, but all dating from a time anterior to the publication of the ukase in question. As for those who had the triple inscription of vor, I have seen an incalculable number in Siberia; but I believe women cannot be punished in this way, and I never met with one who wore the triple brand.

The plète, so often and so erroneously confounded with the knout, is a less fearful instrument of punishment. Three stout thongs are weighted at the ends with balls of lead, the other extremity winds up the arm of the executioner, and according to the law it ought to weigh from five to six pounds. When it comes down on the back it strikes like three sticks; it does not tear up the flesh like the knout, but the skin breaks under the blows, which make a lesion of the spinal column, break the ribs, and I have been told detach even the viscera from their places; and those who have suffered under the plète, if they have received any great number of lashes, generally fall into consumption and perish. In order to give himself greater purchase, the person wielding it makes a run and does not strike till close to ‘the mare.’ I have said that it is possible to gain over the operator, and in this case he can manage not to touch the instrument with the little finger of the hand. This lessens the blow, although the attention of the superintending officer is not attracted by the practice, and any reader by experimentalising with a stick may convince himself that it does so. If however the sentence stands for a great number of strokes, the executioner is then bribed to inflict the first with tremendous violence, and as much upon the sides as possible, so that life is sooner extinct, and death puts a speedier end to the sufferings of the victim.

A third species of punishment is running the gauntlet (skvos-stroï, literally ‘through the ranks’); it is generally reserved for soldiers, and yet many of my countrymen have suffered thus for political offences. It is inflicted with long rods newly cut, which have been steeped in water for some days to make them more pliant. Soldiers are arranged in two files, but each man stands at some distance from the other, so that all may strike with a long swing without being in each other’s way. The condemned person, stripped to the waist, passes through the ranks, his hands are tied in front upon a musket of which the bayonet rests on his chest; the butt-end is held by the soldier who leads him. He walks slowly, receiving the rods on his back and shoulders, and if he faints and falls he is picked up again. A ukase of Peter the Great fixes the maximum of blows at twelve thousand, but it is seldom that more than two thousand are given at one time, unless for the sake of ‘setting an example;’ in general, after two thousand the patient is carried off to the hospital, and when healed of his wounds he pays the rest of his penalty.

After such patients as these have recovered a little health and strength in a military hospital, they are hurried off to some one of the head-quarters of the empire, where a large number being assembled, they are classed according to their sentences, whether of simple transportation (possilenié), or of hard labour in the public works (katorga). Thus classified, they are told off into gangs of a hundred at the least, and of two hundred and fifty at the greatest computation. The gangs thus formed then separate for Siberia, and the time which is spent on the road is one of the greatest elements of suffering in their painful lot. For example, to go from Kiow to Tobolsk requires a long year; and if the gang has a farther destination (say the mines of Nertchinsk, in the government of Irkutsk), the journey will take more than two years. Criminals condemned to hard labour are placed under a stronger escort, and under a more severe watch than those who are simply deported, and they generally form a brigade by themselves. I met many of these caravans on my journey, and they travelled in the following order. In front rode a Cossack at a walk, completely armed, and with a lance in his hand; after him came men either singly or chained together by hands and feet; these were followed by twenty, all fastened at the wrists to long iron rods; the next were fettered in the same way, with their feet chained in addition, but the women, as far as I could judge, did not wear any irons. On both sides of the gang marched soldiers with loaded arms, while some Cossacks rode up and down. After the prisoners, and in the first carriage, one might see the officer in charge with his head down, and smoking his pipe; the other carriages brought the baggage and the sick, who wore a collar by which they could be chained to a pole fixed in the vehicle.

My heart felt ready to break every time that I met a company of the sort, and the sight of the women was most trying. A mournful silence reigned in their groups, and it was only broken by the dull noise of their chains. No doubt these men were in general real malefactors, the off-scourings of any society; but who could say that among them there were none that were innocent, no political criminals, no countrymen of my own? Later, and when sojourning on the banks of the Irtiche, I had for my companions two political exiles like myself, Siesieki and Syezewski: these men had done the whole distance on foot and in a gang, and they furnished me with every detail of their march. Thus, they told me that none of these unhappy creatures can stir in his sleep without awaking companions fastened to the same bar, and indeed without causing them sharp pain, if the movement should happen to be a rough one, as often is the case in sleep. At the times for halting and eating the prisoners are huddled together in a circle, while the foot soldiers watch them, and the Cossacks stray round them on horseback. The column walks for two days and rests on the third; and for this purpose, beyond Nijni-Novgorod, where the villages are few and far between, houses have been constructed to shelter the gangs at distances calculated to suit the recurrence of these days of rest. These buildings, long and low (for they are only one story high), extending in the middle of wide and desert plains, and only inhabited at intervals, are calculated to leave a strange impression. Military stations are also established at unequal distances along the route from Kiow to Smolensk, and even to Nertchinsk. In each of these stations is to be found an officer with a number of soldiers sufficient to replace the escort which arrives. The officer is in all cases responsible for the prisoners, and has over them a perfectly discretional power. He may punish them with the bastinado, the rods, and the plète; and abuses are, as may be supposed, inevitable, though, to the honour of humanity, it must be said that very many of these officers, far from making a cruel use of their dictatorship, often show themselves full of care and compassion for the unhappy beings whom they are obliged to conduct. At times of severe cold or of any great flood, the columns are obliged to stop at any station where they may happen to be. These expeditions are sent off in such a way that every week one gang enters Tobolsk as another leaves it to continue its march. At Tobolsk sits what is called the Commission of Deportation, whose business is to assign a definitive destination to each man, according to local convenience, or the necessities of the public works. It has been calculated that the number of transported persons amounts every year to little short of ten thousand.

I must give one more detail, supplied to me by the same Siesieki whom I have already mentioned. The train of which he formed a part was met near Moscow by the Duke of Leuchtenberg and his wife, Grand-Duchess Marie. The daughter of Nicholas, on learning that many Poles, condemned for political offences, were to be found in the column, had them pointed out to her, and remained for an hour in contemplation of the body; no word escaped her lips, but she dried continually the big tears which fell from her eyes. The Duke of Leuchtenberg approached Siesieki, asked him his name, and said that he should seek for his pardon at the hands of the Emperor. Did the Duke forget it, or did he not dare to ask? Nothing can be known; but this I know for certain, that, many a long day afterwards, I found Siesieki in Siberia, and that I was one day to leave him there.

Were not these strange meetings? Carried away in my kibitka towards the land from which no man returns, a convict on his way to work out his bitter sentence, I yet saw many shapes of misfortune worse than my own. I could see faces of men in such gangs as I have described, who, looking into mine, counted me as happy. Nay, I could say to myself, I too had only escaped this, the last and lowest stage of misery and shame, by means of the privilege which attached to my birth—a privilege which my own convictions disallowed, but which the Tzar himself maintained. Compared with the lot of this herd of the lost my state certainly was more endurable. I was sure to arrive soon, only too soon, at the place for which I was bound; I was not rivetted to any parricide, or to a malefactor, and my hands at least were free. The tight rings of my fetters alone caused me any suffering, and now I almost blushed to speak of them; but the pain was really great, and by dint of entreaties I prevailed on the soldiers to have the luckless rings let out at one of the halting places, which after all was only in accordance with the orders they had received at Kiow. At first, these guardians of mine had obstinately refused to meet any of my attempts at conversation with them, replying that they were forbidden to address me. However, I kept up with them, and I ended in humanising them. We soon talked freely, and drank together some glasses of that Russian brandy of which I was learning to appreciate the salutary and strengthening qualities. Neither of the men seemed to be bad-hearted in any way, and they were more distressed than pleased by the business in hand. One day, when, from sufferings of mind and bodily fatigue I fell sick, and was lying down at one of the posting-houses, I overheard the following conversation between them:

‘Well, we are very unlucky: if we do not arrive at Omsk on the day appointed, we shall be beaten with rods; and if we hurry him too much, and he dies of it, we shall be beaten all the same; we are in very bad luck!’

They were continually haunted by the fear of my dying or committing suicide. When we had a river to cross, they sat by me in the boat, and held me by both arms, in case I should leap into the water; and at our meals they gave me meat cut into little squares, from which the bones had been carefully removed, and which I had to eat with a spoon.

Thus, without being positively cruel, these soldiers showed an astonishing indifference to my sad position. In the conversation, for instance, which I have just cited, it will be seen that they made an abstraction of me: I ceased to be a man, a creature of God, suffering in body and in misery of mind; I was only a dangerous charge, to be got rid of as quickly as possible; and the only thing they could find pity for was for themselves. But it was not in them alone that I had to remark a charity so nicely restricted, or such indifference to the pains of other men. At one of the places where we changed horses, the new postilion, a great rough fellow, came up to me and asked me:

‘Are you a Pole? How many kibitkas are following you, then?’

‘None.’

‘What! none? As soon as you see a kibitka with a Pole, one may always bet that there will be no end to them; these Poles must be in swarms, and yet I can’t think how we are not come to the last of them by this time.’

At the same time I should be singularly ungrateful and unjust if I did not declare that such speeches as these were rare and exceptional, and that they stood out in contrast with the general manner of the country people towards me. These showed themselves full of compassion, and even of solicitude; and after entering Russia Proper, as I advanced by degrees into the interior, I never ceased to receive from them unequivocal marks of their sympathy and pity. How often was I not followed by travellers, especially by ladies, who pressed gifts of money on my acceptance! How often have I not seen at our halting places young girls stop and look at me with sadness, even with tearful eyes! One rich merchant, who was returning from the fair at Nijni-Novgorod, pressed upon me with real eagerness the sum of two hundred roubles, saying it was nothing for him to lose, and might be of the greatest use to me. If I always thought it right to refuse such presents, of which, moreover, I should have been doubtless deprived by the Russian authorities, I accepted without hesitation and with much gratitude the articles of food and drink brought to me on all sides by the inhabitants. It was rarely that the master of any posting-house failed to offer me either tea or brandy at the stations where we stopped; his wife or his daughters presented me with cakes, dried fish, or fruits, while the neighbours would hasten to do the same. At one of these stations, not far from Toula, I saw an official in a uniform arrive, and I was timidly offered by him a little parcel wrapped in a silk handkerchief. As he gave it me, he said, ‘Accept this from my patron saint.’ I could not make out his meaning; and as the sight of an uniform did not predispose me in his favour, I made a sign of refusing it.

‘You are a Pole,’ he said, colouring a little; ‘and you are not acquainted with our customs. This is my birthday, and on such a day it is our bounden duty to share our goods with those who are in adversity; accept this then I beseech you, in the name of my saint.’

I could not resist a petition so touching and so Christian in its spirit. The parcel contained bread, salt, and a few coins; the money I gave to the guards, and I broke bread with the official, who asked me:

‘Why are they taking you to Siberia?’

‘Because I have thought and felt as a Pole.’

‘You were right to do so, because you were in Poland; but why do the Poles wish to plant their ways of thinking in Russia? In the garrison of our town, there were about ten Poles incorporated into our army after the revolution of 1831. Will you believe it, Sir, these Poles excited our soldiers, persuaded them that they were very unhappy, that the Tzar was the cause of it, and that his authority was not lawful? Now what was the consequence of all this? They only made their own case worse, and they drew upon themselves all the severities of the Russian law. These Poles never reflected that every nation has, and ought to have, a government suited to its nature. Now the Russian people are rude, ignorant, and uncultivated; why think, when in such a state as this, of any other authority or of any political reforms whatever? However little we were to depart from the severity of our laws, we should see the life and fortunes of our citizens seriously endangered, and that before very long; we should have murders, fires, and rapine of all sorts. I know my nation too well. In time we may proceed to some changes, but it will not be very soon; and it is vain to think of it at the present moment.’

Very different was a scene which was acted not far from Kazan. There, on going into a station, I saw, to my great surprise, that with the character of post-master my landlord combined that of priest (pope). Surrounded by convivial peasants, the batiouchka was delivering a long peroration, while he swallowed great potations from a monstrous bottle of brandy which was on the table by which he was seated. I do not know by what sign he perceived that I was a Pole, but he rose immediately and turned the torrent of his eloquence upon me, deploring the seditious spirit of the Poles, their disobedience to the Tzar, and the misfortunes which they drew upon themselves and upon Russia. All these considerations did not however prevent his offering me a glass. I drank and prudently beat a retreat, while the pope made over my head an infinite number of signs of the cross. I really do not know whether a benediction was intended, or whether he hoped to drive out of me the evil spirit of revolt.

Although thus an object of a general commiseration, which showed itself by the touching offerings of the poor, and even in the enigmatical benedictions of a tipsy priest, I nevertheless could practise charity in my turn, for many begged from me. One day in particular I can recall. It was, if I mistake not, at Saransk, as, with fetters on my feet, I stood waiting for a relay of horses, that I saw a man stretch out his hand towards me and ask for alms. He had on a military cap, and the many medals on his coat showed that he had served in several campaigns. He was, in fact, a soldier discharged from the service, and even I could recognise that he had once been in the Imperial Guard. What a strange contrast was here! A faithful and deserving servant of the Tzar begging his bread from a man who, a rebel to this same Tzar, was condemned by him to labour as a felon among felons! Without doubt, the most hapless being in the universe, more unhappy than even the convicts of Siberia, is the soldier of the Emperor of all the Russias. I do not speak of those twenty or five-and-twenty years of service which try his health and wear out his strength; I speak not either of the thousands of blows which he receives during his long martyrdom; but if, at the end of so many years passed under arms and under the rod, he were in his old age protected from want and misery, it would be well. At the most, however, the Russian government grants to some decrepid and attenuated victim of military discipline permission to settle upon the crown lands at some thousands of verstes from his family, and from the place of his birth, without even giving him what is wanted for reclaiming the fields from which he is to scrape a living. If he marries he is obliged to remit to the Emperor every male child who attains the age of ten years; and thus he has the assurance that there is prepared for his son a life and an old age as miserable as his own. But it must not be supposed that all veterans are provided for even after this fashion. By far the greater number are told off to the fortresses or to the prisons of the government, or else sent back to their old homes, where they survive, old, poor, and unfit for work, as burdens upon families to whom they have become all but strangers; though the government, in giving them their discharge, has taken care to stipulate that there they shall neither be permitted to beg, nor allow their beards to grow. Unfortunately, this last order is more easily carried out than the first.

With the exception of that enforced halt which was occasioned by the illness I have mentioned, we continued our course without stopping anywhere except for our meals and to change horses. Day and night we drove, sleeping as we sat in the kibitka, only that my slumbers there were less profound than those of my keepers, for at each jolt of the carriage (and such jolts were incessant) my chains were shaken and knocked against my feet, so that I was obliged to draw them up and hold them always in my hands. Often in this plight and tormented by sleeplessness I sat alongside of my guardians, who slept so heavily that more than once I caught their caps for them when they were on the point of losing them from the wind; and I could not help smiling as I looked at them, and thought that I might be fairly said to be outwatching my watchers. The journey was monotonous, in spite of its giddy and headlong pace, or rather this very pace made it monotonous by confounding all impressions and preventing any contemplation of the outside world. Going at the rate of about sixty-six verstes or kilometres a day, I had traversed in succession the governments of Tchernigov, Orel, Toula, Riazan, Vladimir, Nijni-Novgorod, Kazan, Viatka and Perm; I had passed the mountain chains of Oural and Tobolsk, and I found myself, at the end of twenty days, transported from the fertile plains of Poland to the very centre of Siberia-West; and that without, so to speak, any remembrance of the people or of the country which I left behind me. At one of the last stations short of Omsk, while a relay was being procured, a soldier passed, and stopping in front of me began to whistle an air which made me quiver—Dombrowski’s air, ‘No, never shall Poland perish!’ The man was a compatriot of Mazovia, a soldier of 1831, an old brother in arms, now incorporated into the army of Siberia. He stole furtively up to me and had only time to say, ‘What are our people about? What do they think of us in France?’

At last, late in the night of August 20, 1844, we stopped before a sort of castle. ‘Who goes there?’ cried the sentry from the top of the bastion. ‘An unhappy one,’ replied the postillion of our kibitka. Immediately the gates swung wide, and we were in Omsk. After the lapse of about twenty minutes, and with all the feverish promptitude which distinguishes the public service of Russia, a report of my arrival reached the commandant of the fortress, and Prince Gortchakov, the Governor-General of Western Siberia. The order was sent back to have me conveyed to the station of the guard, close to the prince’s residence, and there I was installed, having for my companion an officer under arrest in this room, for some infraction of discipline. He was quite a young man of good family, hardly twenty, good looking, pleasant and gay, speaking French, and communicating something of his own good humour to all who came near him. When I said that I was a Pole, he gave me a more than hearty reception, pressing tea on me, and putting himself to inconvenience in order to prepare a bed for me. In spite of the fatigue of the long journey, I spent the greater part of that night in talking with him, for I found much pleasure in his gay and natural conversation. He knew the country well, and could give me information which was at once precise in itself and of the greatest use to me; but what most enchanted me was his unrolling before me a first-rate map of Siberia. This I examined with feverish curiosity; I had all the marks explained to me, I studied and strove to fix in my memory the different routes and watersheds of the country. My heart beat violently, and I could not take my eyes off the map. At last the officer noticed my agitation. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I fear you meditate an evasion! pray, pray do not think of it, it is perfectly impossible. Many of your countrymen have tried it, and those may be said to have been happy who, tracked on every side, tortured by hunger, and maddened by despair, have yet been able to escape the consequences of their crazy undertaking by a timely suicide. The consequences are certain to be the knout and a life of misery such as I have no words to describe to you. For God’s sake, put all such thoughts out of your mind!’

I asked my companion what was the cause of his detention.

‘Far be it from me to know,’ he replied. ‘This is not the first time that I take off my hat to these walls. It is a pleasure that comes my way at least twice a month. We have a colonel of the old school, quite a martinet in discipline; and then, as you see, I have the luck, or the bad luck, to be always in the most giddy spirits, and he puts me very often under arrest, to see if it will make a wise man of me. What makes him more angry is that I never ask him about anything, and he says, that that is insolence, and that I have too much liberty of thought (volnodoumstoo).’

He spoke to me afterwards of his intention to change his regiment, because his colonel had decidedly taken a dislike to him. He expected to be sent among the subjugated tribes of the Kirghis, whose language he was learning, by talking with those of the natives who happened to be prisoners in this castle. The next morning he had one of these sons of the desert, a Khan, to breakfast with me; and thus I had for the first time an opportunity of seeing a representative of those warlike and nomadic races which occupy the steppes beyond Orenbourg.

The next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, I was visited by the commandant, Colonel De Grawe, a worthy old gentleman of alarming corpulence but very obliging manners, and who was of Swedish extraction. ‘What a pity, what a pity,’ he never ceased repeating, ‘that once free, and in a foreign country, you ever took it into your head to come back!’ After him came the prefect of police in Omsk, M. Nalabardine—tall, thin, dry, straight as an arrow, tight as a cord, with a long face and little eyes, which were piercing and sunk. He seemed a mixture of the Cossack, Kirghis and Tartar races. There was something of a vulture in his physiognomy; and, indeed, I learnt afterwards that he really was cruel and rapacious in the extreme. Yet this man had some involuntary feeling. He asked me how it was that I had dared to return to Poland without the permission of the Tzar; and when I replied that I had yielded only to the pangs of home sickness, he cried, with a voice which was unsteady with emotion, ‘Ah! native country, native land, thou art indeed a beloved thing!’

At midday I was desired to wait on Prince Gortchakov, and shown into a large waiting-room, where a number of persons in his employment sat writing. After some minutes, several of them rose, and, holding out their hands to me, addressed me in Polish. They were young Poles, political prisoners, who worked at desks in the government offices. Encouraged by their example, the Russians present also had the courage to approach me, and to ask me about my lot; and from them I learnt that this was a very decisive moment for me. I have stated before that the Commission of Deportation held its permanent sittings at Tobolsk; that it received the gangs, and assigned to each of the condemned his future and final destination; but as I had not made the journey in a gang, it was not the commission at Tobolsk, but the Governor-General of Siberia, residing at Omsk, who was to point out my settlement. Now this was a very important matter to me, because he might, for example, order me to work out my sentence of penal servitude in any of the government works or factories of the neighbourhood; or else he might send me to dig in the mines of Nertchinsk. The hell of a Siberian convict has, alas! many circles; and the question of determining which of them should be my fate was precisely the one which was being discussed in the adjoining room, where the Governor-General’s Council was sitting. They told me I might pin my hopes chiefly on the presence at the board of M. Kapoustine, an official of the highest rank and greatest influence about the Prince—a man of generous instincts, and who always pleaded in favour of deported persons convicted on political grounds. All of a sudden, a sound was heard, everybody looked hard at the page before him, and Prince Gortchakov appeared at the door of the room. He came forward a step or two, fixed his eyes on me for some seconds, then turning his back, he returned to his own apartments, without having addressed me. An hour passed away in waiting in this cruel suspense. At last we saw M. Kapoustine of the Council leave the inner room. He announced to me, with a polite and kindly manner, that I was to be sent to the works at the government distilleries, at Ekaterinski-Zavod (established by the Empress Catherine), in the district of Tara, on the banks of the Irtiche, at the distance of rather more than 300 kilometres from Omsk. Hardly had he ceased speaking and departed, than the clerks began to offer me their congratulations. I bade farewell to them, as well as to the two poor gendarmes who had brought me from Kiow; then, stepping into a kibitka which waited at the gate, I was whirled away to the final term of my travels.

CHAPTER V.
THE KATORGA.

COMPANIONS IN EXILE—THE ‘KATORGA’—A MURDERER—THE FELONS—KANTIER—PAY AND PUNISHMENTS—THE COUNTING-HOUSE.

About ten o’clock of a cold morning, for it was now the 4th of October, I saw before me the outlines of a village composed of two hundred miserable houses, all built of wood, lying near the river Irtiche, and situated in a vast plain. Further back, upon a rising ground, and in the middle of a fir wood, the buildings of a factory were visible. This was Ekaterinski-Zavod. I was introduced into the counting-house (kazionnaia kantora), and the smotritel, that is to say, the inspector of the establishment, soon arrived; for to M. Aramilski the gendarme had already carried all the papers which concerned me. He made me strip to the waist before all the persons present, thus verifying the description drawn up at Kiow, which he had in his hand. He then ordered me to be inscribed in the register of convict labourers, not under my name but under my number. I was then to be taken to the station-house; and he added, as he went out, without even having addressed me, ‘he will work with chains on his feet.’

When he was out of hearing, a young man, who, through all this business, had continued writing like the other clerks in the office, rose and threw himself into my arms. It was Charles Bogdaszewski of Cracow, who, implicated in the affair of Erenberg the poet, had been condemned for three years to hard labour, and to deportation for the term of his natural life. Some moments afterwards, we were joined by John Siesieki of Lublin, another political offender. They spoke quickly, and with an emotion which they did not disguise. They conjured me to show myself patient and submissive in every way, and not to rebel at anything. It was only thus that I could arrive in time at being employed in the office, instead of having to do the hard and severe work of the factory itself; and at this price, above all, I could purchase an immunity from those corporal punishments to which every labouring convict is liable. I cannot describe what was the character of this broken and breathless colloquy, or the shiver which ran through my frame when I heard Polish lips speaking, as of a matter of course, of their fear of blows and of the rods. They left me, but it was to make haste to use their influence with the under-officials of the establishment, with the treasurer and the forester, that they might induce the smotritel to go back from the order, which seemed inconceivable to them, that I should work in irons, such a measure not being in use here even in the case of murderers. I learnt later what was the meaning of this unusual severity. At the bottom of my certificated sentence, Prince Gortchakov had added with his own hand, ‘A special watch must be kept upon Piotrowski;’ and this extraordinary recommendation had made a deep impression on M. Aramilski. ‘Since I have been superintendent,’ he said to the forester, ‘nothing of the sort ever occurred to me; this must be some diplomate’ (eto dolgène byt kakoï diplomat).

The station-house, to which I was immediately directed, was full of soldiers, many of them Poles who had fought in our war of independence. These seized the least excuse to come up to me and ask me in whispers what had become of Poland, what was happening in Europe, and whether there were any hopes? (Son Nadzieje?)

Worn out with fatigue and by many emotions, I stretched myself on a bench, and for two hours I remained plunged in a gloomy reverie. All of a sudden I saw standing in front of me a strong truculent-looking man, whose ignoble expression did not belie in any way the triple mark of vor which was printed on his forehead and on both cheeks. He addressed me thus, ‘Get up, you must go and work.’ This was the overseer of the convicts, a felon of distinction himself! Oh, my God! Thou alone didst hear the cry of my soul, when for the first time I was ordered about by an abject being like this! At these words of his I darted a look at him in return which seemed to express all the desolate indignation of my spirit, I do not know that it was so, but he stepped back, dropped his eyes, and said with a sad air, ‘Well, what can I do? They order me, and I must execute my orders.’ My breast heaved, I pressed my head between my hands, for my brain felt on fire, a cold sweat burst out all over me, and at last I breathed again. ‘Let us go,’ I said, as I rose up, and I went out, following the overseer.

He led me to a large forge close to the refining house, my feet were placed in the anvil and my irons struck off, a deliverance which I owed to the humane offices of my two countrymen; and thus for the first time since I had left Kiow I was able to pull off my own boots! I was then taken to a building which was only in part finished, a kiln for drying the malt. The roof was not completed, and the wood-work had to be cleared of a vast quantity of chips, litter and offensive refuse, with which it was covered. I mounted by a ladder, and was followed by the overseer, and by a soldier, who had orders for the future never to let me out of his sight. On the roof I found another convict, whose labours I was to share. A broom and a shovel were put into my hands by my colleague, and by the overseer I was shown how to use them. The air was cold, the sky clouded and dark, and the task imposed certainly not a severe one; but in order to avoid any remonstrances, and to escape being either spoken to or looked at, I worked away without ever stopping or so much as lifting my eyes, and was soon drenched with perspiration. Alas! I was weak, and what was more, I was weeping!

In his course of daily inspection M. Aramilski also came up upon the roof where I was at work, followed by other officials of the establishment. I continued to sweep without turning round, and I avoided their eyes as much as if I had been a criminal. Some time after they had left, the overseer said, ‘Now rest.’ I seated myself on a heap of sweepings alongside of my companion, a young man, who was tall and well-made, but who had the triple mark on his face, and who seemed of an easy cheerful temper. Overcoming the hesitation which I felt, I spoke first.

‘Have you been long in these works?’

‘Three years.’

‘To how many years’ labour are you sentenced?’

‘For life!’

‘What was your crime?’

‘I killed my master.’

I shuddered, but went on:

‘Without doubt it was an accident, you did not intend to kill him?’

‘Why, for the matter of that I did not plan it,’ he said with a sneering look; ‘I had an axe hanging at my girdle, I took it in both my hands and split his head open for him.’

I was chilled with horror. After a few moments’ silence I said:

‘But why did you kill him so cruelly?’

‘Why? not for fun, you may be sure. No, our master was a bad man, very cruel, who overworked us and beat us incessantly, almost to death; and to deliver the neighbourhood from a ruffian like that I took upon myself to kill him, and I did so. It was God’s providence that I did not die under the knout, and now I am much happier and better off at this katorga (penal labour) than I ever was at home. The only thing that I regret is my young wife, whom I had to leave; she is young and pretty, and will soon find another husband.’

‘But you ought to repent of the sin of having slain a man.’

‘That was not a man! That was a devil!’

We soon after this went to work again, and did not stop till nightfall.

I returned to the guard-house, and there my two countrymen came under an escort to visit me, the smotritel having given leave for this indulgence. We conversed together in a low voice, and in the middle of all the racket made by the soldiers and convicts we related to each other the chief events of our lives. These poor friends did not cease exhorting me to absolute patience and submission. They conjured me to master my temper, to suppress all exhibitions of it, and not to despair of seeing myself soon raised to a position which would be by comparison more happy, and which they themselves now occupied—thanks to their patient and irreproachable conduct. We embraced tenderly, then separated, and I fell asleep. Thus ended my first day of convict labour and of convict life: how many more of the same succeeded it and resembled it!

I rose with the sun to go to the works, at eight I had breakfast, from twelve to one we had an hour in the barracks for dinner and rest, and then we worked till dark. The occupations were often varied according to the wants of the establishment or the inclinations and temper of the inspector. By day and by night I was associated with the other felons, and always under the eye of the overseer and of the soldier in charge of my person. On some days I swept the courtyards; sometimes I carried wood and drew water; sometimes, again, I might be sent to hew wood for fagots, and to stack them in symmetrical piles; and this last employment in the open air, in the autumnal and winter months, in rain and snow, and in the icy temperature of Siberia, was the most trying of any. Long, gloomy, and mournful were the days, and it is needless to dwell on them any further.

The dominant feeling in my mind was the wish to avoid any discussion or wrangle with my superiors or with the overseers. Such an occurrence would have brought about a terrible catastrophe, for I had made a vow that I would not submit to corporal punishment, and that I would resist it, whether at the price of my own life or of that of others; and for this reason I worked beyond what was asked of me, and beyond my own strength. I must do myself the justice to add that I neglected no effort to conquer my feelings and moments of impatience, and I must do my superiors the justice to say of them that they were neither teasing nor gratuitously and wickedly unkind. Severe and hard as they often were, they never treated me with the capricious rudeness of despots, while the convicts who were my colleagues treated me with a deference, I might almost say a kindness, for which I was heartily grateful. They did not annoy me with any of those cruel jests by which the bad even in very different ranks of life often insult any one superior to themselves whom misfortune has brought down to their own level. More than once I have known them offer to help me at some work which they thought was too heavy for me, or they would change with me, taking my task and giving me their own, if it happened to be a lighter one. From a very early stage they ceased to speak to me with ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ and called me ‘Sir;’ and certainly unmerited misfortune ought to command the respect of untutored men, even of savages, where they, in spite of bravado and seared consciences, feel themselves to be really criminals. With the exception of a very few political offenders like myself, all the convicts at Ekaterinski-Zavod (to the number of three hundred souls) were really malefactors. One would have murdered a wayfarer, another had committed a horrible rape, another would be an utterer of false coin, another both a thief and a housebreaker. As a daily intercourse with such men was inevitable, I had neither a false shame nor a misplaced pride in my dealings with them. I often talked to these strange companions, studied their characters, and heard from them their different histories and the events of their lives. I am certainly not about to become the historian of these heroes of the bagnio; but I will give one tale, which is not without interest, and which shows that a false Byronism of deed and thought was not unrepresented among them.

One of our felons, Kantier by name, was sentenced to hard labour for life. He was still young, a man short of stature, but strongly built, of a clear and dark but pale complexion; he had black and burning eyes, and his whole physiognomy bespoke a firm and daring disposition. He had been clerk to a wine merchant at St. Petersburg; and when I asked him one day what was the cause of his sentence and punishment, he replied, ‘It is because I killed the girl with whom I was in love. I suspected her of being unfaithful to me. I had suffered horribly, and I was determined to be revenged upon her. In order to execute my design with greater ease, I pretended to make it up with her; and, by dint of coaxing, got her to promise, on a certain holiday, to go on an excursion into the country with me. She hesitated about it a long time, as if she had had a presentiment of some mischief; but at last she consented, upon the condition that she might bring a female friend along with her. That did not suit my plans very well, but I had to put up with it. On the appointed day we started, all three of us. Armed with a pistol and a dagger, I walked alongside of my mistress and talked to her. She had never seemed to me either so pretty or so loving as she did then; but that only added to my jealousy and my thirst for revenge. More than once I was on the point of dispatching her, but her face disarmed me. At last I stopped; it was in a field; I pointed out something in the view to my sweetheart which made her turn away her head. At that moment I put the pistol to her temple, and pulled the trigger. My hand shook, and I only wounded her; the friend screamed and ran. She, slightly hurt and stunned by the shot, turned round two or three times, then, throwing herself on her knees before me, “Forgive me!” she cried in a voice so touching and heart-rending that I shuddered. But I answered by sinking the dagger into her heart, the weapon going in up to its hilt. She fell down stiff and dead. I stabbed her in the breast with my knife, and then ran to give myself up to the police; and here I am, after the knout, for life....’

‘But are you not sorry for having killed her? Does not your conscience reproach you bitterly for such a crime?’

‘Yes, I am sorry for her. I shall never forget her as long as I live, and I shall never love any one else; but as to my conscience, I thought I was quite right in killing her.’

‘But, if it were possible for her to be alive and come back to you, you surely would not do so by her again?’

‘She made me first the happiest and then the most miserable of men; and, if she could come back, I should certainly kill her again.’

‘Then, you mean to say you think you have committed no crime?’

‘Where is the crime? She took away my peace, and I took away her life; she was the most to blame of the two.’

I must now say something about our village, and about the organisation of the factory. The government distillery at Ekaterinski-Zavod was founded in the reign of Catherine II., whose name it bears; and the population consists of the descendants of former convicts. All the interests of the village were centred in the distillery, which produces annually from two to three million of litres of alcohol, and furnishes brandy to the country over a district of one or two thousand verstes. The distillery was farmed by two rich merchants of the government of Simbirsk, M. Orlov and M. Alexeiev, who must have realised a considerable profit upon it, because, besides the price which they paid as rent, and the augmented charges of pay to the convict labourers, they had contracted for the pay of the commanding officer and the keep of the garrison, viz. of a hundred and one persons; and they were necessarily obliged to give constant and valuable presents to the inspector and other government officials. The inspector generally allowed them about half the force of convict labourers for the distillery; the other half was employed in the public service, as in road-making and mending, in the construction of government buildings, and in sanitary works. Each of us received in money three francs a month, and ninety pounds’ weight of corn, the sale of which in the village was to furnish us with food; but the gentlemen who farmed or rented the distillery from the crown, in order to encourage their workpeople, raised the pay up to five, eight, and even ten francs a month; the men employed in barrelling the spirit being paid by the piece, and thus gaining more than the rest. In this way, it was advantageous for the convicts to be in the employment of the distillery, for they received a better salary, and were less likely to encounter the trying interference of the government officials; but, in any case of insubordination or idleness, the distillers or their representative were obliged to refer to the inspector, who ordered the punishment to be inflicted. This, I mean, was the case when it was a question of the stick and the rods; as for blows and cuffs, the convicts got plenty of them from everybody alike. The greater number of convicts lived in barracks; the more favoured were allowed to lodge in the village: but then they had to pay for the bed and board of the soldier who lived there and watched them. From all this it will be seen that, by those who had any education, the counting-house and office of the factory were the posts especially desired, and that those who occupied them were thought most worthy of envy; but it is needless to add that all were alike in the eye of the law, that these steps or grades could not give any acquired rights, and that at the good pleasure of the inspector, or smotritel, one might be at any moment ‘removed to other functions.’

Thanks to the constant care with which I acquitted myself of the tasks imposed upon me, thanks to the mastery which I had gained over myself, and of which I certainly should not at one time have believed myself capable, I passed, in the following year, not only into the service of the lessees, but also was employed in their office; and in this way I ceased to be in the constant society of persons who were unreclaimed, and who lacked culture both morally and intellectually. I received wages to the extent of ten francs a month, and my occupation was in every way less painful than any former ones had been. I went to my desk at eight in the morning, and I remained in the counting-house till mid-day, where I was again from two in the afternoon to ten or eleven at night; and although work was not pressing, and one was not really wanted, yet it was incumbent on me to be always present. During the long hours of ennui I wrote, took notes, and abandoned myself to meditations, during which plans for the future slowly ripened in my mind. My office, it happened, was the rendezvous of a great number of travellers, who frequented it both for the sale of grain and in order to buy spirituous liquors; they were peasants, townsfolk, merchants, Russians, Tartars, Jews, and Kirghis. If I was very scant of speech, and short in my communication with the official, with the other convicts, and with the custom-house officers, I acquired, on the contrary, with a curiosity that never flagged, from all these passing travellers, all that was to be learnt of the peculiarities of Siberia. I spoke to men some of whom had been to Berezov, others at Nertchinsk, others had penetrated to the frontiers of China, to Kamtschatka, to the steppes of the Kirghis, even into Boukhara; and thus, without passing the threshold of my office, I learnt to know Siberia, its nearest and its furthest details. The knowledge thus acquired was to be of great value to me afterwards, in forming the plan for my evasion.

One of my fellow-countrymen, Wysoçki, was head clerk in the counting-house of the distillery; but my great ally there was the young Russian, Stépan Bazanov, manager of the factory for the lessees, whose relative he was. He was a lad of twenty or upwards, brave and upright, whose only weakness was the most naïve adoration for the Emperor Nicholas. He never would or could admit that Nicholas did wrong; all the wrong, according to him, was owing to the Boyards, and he declared that, were it not for the intervention of the nobility, the Tzar would make his people the happiest in the world; and I am bound to say that, as far as my experience has gone, this opinion is a pretty general one in Russia, among the people, though not among the ‘staroviertsi.’ What most disposed me to like Bazanov was that he confided his love griefs to me. The poor boy, who was lamentably uneducated in every way, had fallen violently in love with a cousin of his own; but the Orlovs put difficulties in the way of the union which he so much desired. Fancy hearing a lover’s confidences in an accursed place like this where convicts worked! though to be sure the man who made them to me knew that he was free, and that he did not awake every morning to fear the stick and the rods!

I must say that the thought of being exposed at any moment, for any trivial cause, and at the beck of any official, to treatment as shameful as it is terrible, created in me a gloomy and fierce temper, and that, in spite of the relative and very appreciable improvement in my case, I was kept in a state of continual tension. I could not forget the subject, there was no way of doing so; the punishments daily inflicted on some one or other of the convicts, all my own equals in the social hierarchy of the place, sent up a cry of cras tibi, enough to drive anyone mad with despair. Moreover, the familiarities to which the superiors often admit their deported labourers have a dangerous side. There is no real trust to be placed in the caprices of a man invested with arbitrary powers. His favours are likely to be capricious also, for these men are generally of low minds and manners; and it amuses them to make a sport of their fellow-creatures, raising them one day only in order to humiliate them more deeply hereafter. This is a snare into which many Poles, who like myself have been carried to Siberia, are apt to fall; into which indeed they have fallen. Their education, their manners, the noble nature of their misfortunes, all attract to them a certain consideration, and sometimes even win for them the good graces of their masters. Thus they rise above the level of the common herd of the lost, and they beguile themselves with the illusion that in this way they are reintegrated into society. But the moment of awakening from this dream soon comes, and the deported man, rudely reminded of his real state, may be called happy if he is reminded of it only by word of mouth! Some years before my arrival at Ekaterinski-Zavod, there was a Russian general, N——, who had been condemned by Nicholas to penal servitude in Siberia. The smotritel, respecting the high position and the advanced age of the prisoner, set him to the lightest and least painful tasks, and admitted him to society and his table. Unluckily, the general sometimes forgot himself (especially if he drank a little too much), and, taking up the tone of a senior and superior officer, showed himself recalcitrant. The inspector then had him chained to the furnace of the distillery, and obliged him for a month or a fortnight, during the extreme cold of winter, to keep up the fires. The general, overheated and covered with sweat and ashes, promised to amend, and recommenced his familiarities with the smotritel and other functionaries, only to find himself again another time by the furnace. Having spent several years in this way at the katorga, he was pardoned by the Tzar, and restored to his old rank as a general officer.

One other amelioration took place in my lot, and that even before I was told off for a clerkship in the counting-house, and it was, in my estimation, a benefit as great as even that great improvement on my former labours. The inspector gave me leave to live out of barracks; and thus I was able to leave behind me that habitation which was the ordinary dwelling of felons, and which was the scene of their drinking and of their infamous debaucheries. I dwelt henceforth, along with my two fellow-clerks and fellow-countrymen, in Siesieki’s house. Thanks to the length of his long sojourn at Ekaterinski-Zavod, this exile had scraped together, out of his slender salary, enough money to construct a small wooden house, which was not complete as yet, and indeed was not even roofed in; but thither notwithstanding we carried our household goods. The wind whistled through numberless chinks, but as wood cost next to nothing, we piled up a great fire on the earth every night; and there we could feel not only that we were at home, but that we were delivered from the horrible company of the common criminals; although it must not be forgotten that we were watched, and that we had to pay for the soldiers who mounted a ceaseless guard upon our persons. Ah! if that little house is still standing, and shelters perhaps at this moment some unhappy and deported brother, let him know that he is not the first or the only one who within its modest walls has wept as he invoked a distant and a beloved land! My friend Siesieki had been, he told me, a prisoner in the citadel of Warsaw along with the hapless Lévitoux, and had thus been, so to speak, an eyewitness of his horrible death. Their cells opened into the same corridor; and more than once Lévitoux, when returning covered with blood from the inquest and the torture, would call to him, ‘I cannot bear it any longer, I know that I shall go mad, and then I shall speak in spite of myself!’ This fear haunted him continually; but one day, on his return from one of these blood-baths, as he called them, he said to his companion through the window in his door, that he begged he would keep awake till about eleven that evening. Siesieki, without, however, attaching much importance to this request, complied with it, and did not go to bed or lie down: about ten at night he saw a great light in Lévitoux’s cell. The sentry called, ‘Fire! fire!’ but before the jailer could be fetched, or the keys of the cell found, some time was of course allowed to elapse. The door was opened, a dense smoke filled the corridor, and the poor fellow had just expired upon the straw mattress, to which he had set fire with his own hands by means of his night-light. Through his cell window my friend beheld the burnt corpse, and saw the soldiers drag it along the corridor by the feet, a horrible spectacle, with the head knocking upon the flags. It is said that at the news of such a finale even Nicholas was moved, and gave orders that in future political offenders should not be proceeded against with so much severity; also, ever since this event, no person detained for a political cause, and supposed to be gravely implicated in one, is ever allowed a light in his room.

Siesieki had made, as I related before, the whole of the journey to Siberia on foot, and had formed one of a gang. When he first arrived at our factory, he had been put to the hardest labour, in company with the other convicts; but some years later the forester required the services of a clever and safe servant, and Siesieki was attached to his department, the more readily because he added the qualifications of a good sportsman and a good shot to those of being a clever and an honest man. It may easily be guessed that the inspector and other functionaries profited by the first-fruits of his chase, and that at that price he gained permission to carry a gun. Indeed he was often absent on leave for a week at a time, a proceeding of which we once felt the inconvenience, for as Bogdaszewski and I were obliged to be all day at the office, he ought to have been there to watch our house; but profiting by one of his long absences some one robbed us! Our door was broken in and our provisions of tea and corn stolen, a loss which to us was no slight one.

In the neighbourhood lived several deported Poles, dwelling in Siberia as simple exiles. They used to avail themselves of some saint’s day or holiday to visit us, for, with permission of the authorities, they were able to make excursions to Ekaterinski-Zavod. From them we learnt the fate of many other exiles, and we would invoke together the names of the thousands of our dead who had laid down their lives in this land of expiation. The great event, however, of our monotonous existence was the arrival among us of a Polish and Roman Catholic priest. Four of our clergy are permitted by the Russian government to traverse every part of Siberia. Once a year in this way they visit the different establishments where the political offenders dwell, and offer to them the rites and the consolations of their faith. The arrival of one of these servants of God is made known in each district a few days beforehand, and the faithful collect from different points. The priest during his stay celebrates a mass, gives the Holy Communion, and consecrates the graves of those who during the year have passed into their rest. No honest, and above all no Christian mind, can fail to appreciate the devotion of these four poor priests. It cannot be too much admired, for it carries them along their ceaseless travels, and supports them as, in their sledges, they journey through the intense cold of Siberia, from Tobolsk to Kamtschatka, and from Nertchinsk to the Polar Sea. The father who visited us in 1845 was a Dominican from Samogitia; but he forbore to wear the gown of his order for fear of outraging the Greek orthodoxy of the natives of Siberia. The inspector had the kindness to allow us to hold service in his room, which was the most spacious one in the village. We all went to confession, and then approached the Lord’s Table. The crowd was great, for exiles and Polish soldiers arrived from very great distances—even those Poles who were not Roman Catholics did not fail to come with joy to the sacred service, for, whether Catholics or not, to them the mass spoke of the native land so hallowed by them and by all her children.

CHAPTER VI.
SIBERIA.

SIBERIA—HARDSHIPS OF DEPORTATION—BREAKING THE BAN—THE ABBÉ SIEROCINSKI—HIS CONSPIRACY—HIS EXECUTION.

In this way I had mounted quickly from the lowest to the highest status to which a convict can rise in this establishment of ours on the banks of the Irtiche; and by the beginning of the year 1846 I might almost have fancied myself merely as a recruit of the omnipotent bureaucracy of Russia, sadly banished to these distant realms beneath an inhospitable sky. Very different was this time from the terrible winter of 1844, when I swept the gutters, hewed or carried wood, and lived under one roof with all the offscourings of the human race! And, alas! how many of my brothers, groaning at this moment in the mines of Nertchinsk or in gangs under the lash—how many indeed of those who had been condemned to a punishment less severe than my own, would have thought themselves happy in the position which I had gained at Ekaterinski-Zavod as early as 1846; and from which, however, I was perfectly determined to slip away, at the risk even of encountering the knout and the mysterious dungeons of Akatouia!

The word Siberia embraces a variety of miseries and of trials which the nomenclature (already very rich) of the Russian penal code is yet far from being able to define or even to specify. The two principal categories, deportation (possilenié) and penal labour (katorga), only indicate, so to speak, the two great exterior lines of an immense vagueness, which can be filled up at will. Everything is arbitrary in a sentence which is applied and interpreted by a host of dictators, by a commission at Tobolsk, by a Governor-General in Siberia by the first and the last comer, by an inspector and by an overseer.

It is one thing to be deported to Viatka, to Tobolsk, or even to Omsk; it is another thing to be sent to Bérézov, as was our warm-hearted Madame Felinska, or to Kamtschatka, like Beniowski or General Kopec, and so many illustrious compatriots; it is another thing, again, to serve in the army of the Caucasus, with the right of promotion, that is to say, with the possibility and the hope of being one day protected from corporal punishments, or of being placed in a Cossack regiment, and sent to the Kirghis frontier. One may get off with the katorga in some of the factories or government distilleries, as I did at Ekaterinski-Zavod; but how many miserable beings labour in the horrible mines at Nertchinsk, with irons on their feet, and only hoping for some falling in of the mine to put an end quickly to a life which has nothing more to hope or to expect in this world. The verdigris mines are those which are the most dreaded. The disciplined gangs of Orenbourg, and other places, have the reputation of leading a life yet more awful than that at Nertchinsk. There the rod and the bastinado are the daily bread of our poor students and artisans, who are in general banished thither. There remains the fortress of Akatouia, not far from Nertchinsk, the last punishment reserved for the greatest criminals, and for convicts who revolt, or are taken in the attempt to break their ban. Here it was that Peter Wysoçki, after the bad success of his conspiracy in Siberia, was at last shut up. I know nothing of this mysterious place, and I can say nothing about it, for I have never seen any one who had penetrated its mystery; but I only know that, throughout Siberia, the very name is pronounced with an indescribable terror.

The contempt which the inhabitants of the country very naturally have for the felon, falls back also upon the man who is simply deported; and the exile may often hear himself insulted with the name of varnak, an indigenous expression which conveys a concentrated notion of abjectness and infamy. He who is deported has no civil rights, his deposition cannot be taken in any court of justice, and his wife, if he has left one in his native country, may contract a second marriage, because he is counted among the dead. But the legislator who laid down this last law with regard to the exile defeated his own object, which is to increase, by any means, the population of Siberia. The convict or the exiles in its regions can only marry into the worst class, and among the least respectable of its inhabitants; and what is more, his children, if any are born to him, must always remain serfs of the crown. It is true that it is permitted to a wife to follow her husband into Siberia, and that the most pitiless measures have not prevented our seeing such instances of devotion as those of Princess Troubetskoï and Madame Koszakiewicz, with many other Polish ladies; but then the law forbids her again to leave the country, and her children born in this land of exile become, in like manner, royal serfs; and we must point out that there is a peculiarity in amnesties which, even when granted, only apply to the parents. Any children of theirs that have seen the light in Siberia cannot profit by the pardon, but require a special decree. To the Emperor Nicholas, however, these many and sad restrictions did not seem sufficient. In the month of December 1845, he issued a general order for Siberia, which, among many other aggravating clauses, declared all deported persons to be incapable of possessing any property whatever, even chattels and personalty; and ordered that all who were sentenced to penal servitude should, without any exceptions whatever, live in barracks. This command caused a general consternation throughout the country, and the very officials themselves were heard to declare that it was as cruel as it was inopportune, inconvenient, and all but impracticable. I do not know if it ever was rigorously carried into effect; but I may say that these new measures went for a great deal in determining my resolution to fly from Siberia; for I preferred exposing myself to every danger rather than consent voluntarily to return, and be reinstalled in the barracks of the felons.

However hard life in Siberia must of necessity appear to persons under political sentences, I must confess that ordinary criminals do not complain of their lot, and that they sometimes appear to prefer it to their former condition. Serfs and soldiers especially, even when at hard labour, have often said to us, ‘What have we to regret? we worked just as hard where we were before, and we were beaten much oftener.’ And yet these very men are, in many instances, not less ready to brave the knout and the most terrible punishments, by breaking their ban—so powerful in man is the love of liberty and the love of his own hearth. During my journey in Siberia I had already remarked, and was struck by the fact, that numberless fields of turnips edged the roads on both sides, and that in more than one place these turnips seemed to have been torn up, while the plantations bore the marks of footsteps. I learnt afterwards that the natives keep up the supply of roots on purpose; and that they are intended for the use of fugitives, and to serve them as food during their nocturnal flights. In villages and hamlets along the high roads the inhabitants take pains to place over night, on their window-ledges, bread, salt, and jars of milk, supplies which are destined for the same persons; and the natives do all this quite as much from self-interest as from charity, for the great trunk roads of Siberia are marauded by runaway convicts, and no man can imagine or describe what perils, what sufferings, and what privations these desperate wretches undergo in order to escape detection. Those who have been branded generally use vitriol or cantharides to get rid of the obnoxious letters; but they seldom fail of being apprehended, and the best fate that can await them is that they should henceforth lead a savage life in the woods, where they become, or rather are again, robbers.

If among the ordinary felons in Siberia the temptation to flight is so strong, among the political exiles and among my fellow-countrymen that temptation is very seldom yielded to. The fear of the knout, and of all corporal punishments, is naturally far stronger among educated persons, or those whose lot is comparatively easy; then, too, the very imperfect knowledge of the language, the routes, and the manners of the country, all unite to dissuade the Poles from so desperate an attempt. The resource which remains for the Russian peasant in his flight does not apply or offer itself to the Pole; for him it is no object to be lost in the boundless woods, or to hide in some obscure community for life. To obtain his ends, the Pole must reach and cross the confines of another country; and the immensity of the distances to be traversed before this can be achieved is well calculated to make him lose all hope. At the same time, attempts to rise in a body and thus effect their joint deliverance are not at all rare among political exiles. The exploits of Beniowski are remembered by all, and they appeal to many spirits; so that we hear sometimes of a conspiracy, of which the object is to force its way, by dint of arms and numbers, to Persia, China, or simply across the Steppes. Sometimes we have even had the wish to make Siberia itself rise in revolt against the rule of the Tzar. Peter Wysoçki, who first gave the signal of our revolution in 1831, and who, being taken in battle by the Russians, was deported to Nertchinsk, formed such a plan as this; and he expiated his temerity in the fortress of Akatouia. Something similar to his was the conspiracy of the Abbé Sierocinski, so celebrated ever since in Siberian annals. I arrived at Ekaterinski-Zavod some years after that bloody tragedy had been played out; but I have been near Omsk, the stage on which it was acted; I have seen both the eye-witnesses and many of the actors in it, and I have collected from their lips the following details of the dismal story, and I can vouch for their perfect truthfulness.

Previous to the opening scene of our revolution, the Abbé Sierocinski had been superior of the convent of St. Basil, at Owrucz, in Volhynia, and at the same time director of the schools in that place. He took an active part in the movements and political agitation of 1831, and finally fell into the hands of the Russians, when the Emperor Nicholas despatched him to Siberia to serve as a private in one of the regiments of Cossacks; and thus for several years did the former superior of a convent, mounted and in a Cossack dress, pursue the Kirghis of the Steppes with a lance in his hand and with a sabre at his side. Now there existed at Omsk a military college, and one day, being in want of a professor, the authorities bethought themselves of the ex-Basilian, whose capabilities were well known, and who was therefore, especially on account of his knowledge of French and German, recalled from his life on the Steppes. Thus the old head of a convent and the old Cossack became by order of the government a professor in the military school of Omsk, although he did not cease to be a private and to belong to his former regiment. In his new position Sierocinski soon gained all hearts and obtained a large number of acquaintances and friends. His physical constitution was delicate and nervous, but he was gifted by nature with a spirit of rare enterprise and with great courage. He conceived the idea of a vast Siberian conspiracy, into which should be drawn all the exiles, all the soldiers in garrison, and many of those officers in whose minds the ideas and the sufferings of Pestel still survived, while he wished the natives of the country, the Russians, and even the Tatars to take a part in it. There is no doubt that the elements of revolution and revolt are not wanting in Siberia; how and why it is so would take me too long to explain in this place, but those who know the country well are fully aware of this feature in it. Discontent is very general, although the causes and the degrees of it are sundry and manifold, and differ so widely as to be almost contradictory. It is only by the presence of the garrisons that the country is kept safe within the iron-bound circle of the empire. Yet it was precisely in the garrisons themselves that Sierocinski sought and found the great number of sympathisers. His plan was to seize, by means of the conspirators and old deported soldiers, upon the fortresses and principal strongholds; this they were to do at a given signal, and then they were to await the progress of events; while in case of check or defeat they were to retire under arms into the Kirghis Steppes of the Khanat of Tachken, where there were many Catholics, or into Boukhara, and from thence press on into the English territories in the East Indian peninsula. The centre of the conspiracy was at Omsk, where they had all the artillery of the place at their disposal. The signal for a general rising was given; but on the very eve of the day on which it was to take place, three of the conspirators revealed everything to the commandant of the place, the same Colonel Degrawe whom I mentioned on my way through Omsk. Sierocinski and his accomplices were seized that same night, and couriers started off in all directions to give orders for arresting an endless number of persons. Thus was the plot discovered at the very moment when it was to have taken effect, and an enquiry began which lasted for a long time. Two commissions, selected and sent down the one after the other, were dissolved without coming to any decision, so obscure and so complicated was the whole affair; and it was only a third board, composed of persons chosen and despatched expressly from St. Petersburg, which succeeded in bringing the trial to an end. By order of the Emperor Nicholas, the Abbé Sierocinski and five of his principal accomplices, among whom was an officer of the wars of the empire more than sixty years of age, by name Gorski, and another Russian, Mélédine, were sentenced to receive each seven thousand lashes (with the rods) and ‘without mercy;’ in fact, the sentence consisted exactly of these five words, ‘Seven thousand lashes without mercy’ (bez postchadi). The other persons under arrest, about one thousand in all, were condemned some to three thousand, some to two thousand, some to one thousand five hundred lashes and to hard labour for life, while others were simply sent to work in the penal settlements.

The day of execution arrived; it was at Omsk, in the month of March 1837. General Galafeïev, who was celebrated for his cruelty, and who had been sent down from the capital by reason of this shining quality, was at the head of the dismal procession. By daybreak two whole battalions were drawn up in a great open space near the town; one of these was destined to officiate on the principal culprits, the other on those condemned to a smaller number of lashes. I do not intend to detail in all its minutiæ the butchery of that terrible day; I shall but notice the fate of Sierocinski and his five companions. They were led upon the ground, their sentence read out, and they began to run the gauntlet (skvosstroï): the blows fell, as the imperial order directed, without mercy, and the cries of the sufferers went up to heaven. None of them lived to receive the prescribed number of lashes. All (and they were executed one after the other) after passing through the ranks twice or thrice fell upon the snow, which was crimson with their blood, and then expired. The Abbé Sierocinski had been purposely reserved to the last, in order that he might witness the sufferings of all his friends. When his turn came, and they had stripped him and tied his hands to the bayonet, the surgeon of the battalion came up to him and offered him a flask containing some strengthening drops, but he refused them, saying, ‘You may drink my blood, but I will not drink your drops, and I do not want them!’ The signal was given, the fatal march began, and the old superior of the Basilican convent chaunted in a loud clear voice, ‘Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.’ General Galafeïev called to those who struck, ‘Harder! harder!’ (pok repché), and for several minutes the priest’s chaunt rose above the whistling of the rods and the pok repché cries of the commanding officer.... Sierocinski had only passed once through the ranks, that is to say, he had only received one thousand blows, when he fell upon the snow bathed in his own blood, and senseless. In vain they attempted to place him on his feet. He was then laid on a tumbril prepared beforehand for the purpose, and fastened to a support in such a way as to let the blows fall on his back and shoulders, and thus a second time he passed along. When this second passage was gone through, his groans and screams were still audible; but they got gradually weaker, though he did not expire till after the fourth turn; the last three thousand lashes were only laid upon a corpse.

A common grave soon received those who were either killed that day or whose deaths followed soon after their punishments; both Russians and Poles perished, and were buried thus. The friends and relations of those who lie there were permitted to place the symbol of our faith over that memorable tomb; and as late as 1846 one might still behold a great wooden crucifix that stretched its black arms across the steppes, sharply defined against the sparkling and spotless whiteness of their snows.

CHAPTER VII.
THE FLIGHT.

AN ATTEMPTED FLIGHT—MY ROUTE—MY FUNDS—MY DRESS—THE SLEDGE—A RUSSIAN THEFT—THE JOURNEY—IRBITE—ON FOOT—A NIGHT’S LODGING—DANGER—COLD AND FAMINE—PAOUDA—THE IZBOUCHKA—THE CREST OF THE OURALS—LOST IN THE FOREST—SLEEP—ALMS—VÉLIKI-OUSTIONG.

There had been passed by the Emperor Nicholas, in the autumn of the year 1845, a decree, which I have already referred to, and of which the object was to aggravate the condition of the exiles in Siberia, by tightening round them the fetters which time and custom had slackened, and which become loose through the sheer impossibility of enforcing in all its strictness the severe law of the katorga. Commissions nominated for the purpose now visited all the penal settlements, and proposed new measures of severity in these places; and the enforced cohabitation in the barracks of all convicts, without any exceptions whatever, was the first point in which it was thought possible and desirable to yield to the present savage disposition of the Tzar. All this induced me to persist in the project which I had already conceived, and which had been long fructifying in my mind. At the very moment in which I had signed at Kiow the formula of the sentence which condemned me to convict labour for the rest of my natural life, I had formed the determination of flying from such an accursed sojourn and lot; and a vague hope of being again seen in the land of the living and among free men had entered my mind. The hard work to which I was set, during the first period of my katorga, was not calculated to encourage me; but my hopes rose as soon as I was able to have more relations with men and things, that is, as soon as I became a clerk in the counting-house of the establishment at Ekaterinski-Zavod; and, as early as the summer of 1845, I made two attempts, both of which were frustrated at the very outset, without, however, awakening any suspicion as to my intentions.

It was in the month of June that I noticed a little boat, which lay on the banks of the Irtiche, or floated on its waters, and which was very often forgotten, and not drawn up at night. I thought that I might take advantage of this skiff, and let the stream carry me to Tobolsk; but hardly had I, on one dark night, untied the boat, and given due or two strokes with the oars, than the moon broke through the clouds, flooding the landscape with a dangerous light; and at the same time I heard the sound of the inspector’s (smotritel) voice, as he walked on the banks, with one or two of the other officials. It was all over with me for that time, and I gently crept back to land. In the following month I espied the same skiff, and in a much more favourable situation—upon a lake, at some distance from our factory, which, through a canal, communicated with the Irtiche. But this second attempt miscarried also, and that by reason of an unsurmountable and natural obstacle; for, at nightfall, the air at this time of year becomes so suddenly cooled that dense columns of vapour are caught up, and they are so thick and so close that one cannot see or distinguish anything at the distance of two feet—a phenomenon which is not uncommon in summer on the waters of Siberia. In vain now did I push my boat to every side and in every direction. The fog prevented my finding the opening of the canal into the Irtiche, and only as the day began to dawn did I discover the issue so long and so vainly sought. It was then too late, and I thought myself lucky in being able to get back to my lodging without let or hindrance; and from that time I abandoned every thought of confiding myself to the inclement waters of the Irtiche, but I set myself not the less persistently to ripen and consolidate the plans for my intended flight.

The first point to be considered, and upon which I had first to fix my attention, was the direction I ought to select for my perilous journey. The trunk road, which was the most natural, and presented itself before all the others, and which, from the heart of Siberia, would have taken me into the centre of Russia Proper, was, as I saw at once, the one least fitted for my purpose. The law there maintains a constant and active watch, and is assisted very often both by the zeal and by the rapacity of the natives, who sometimes find it profitable to take a shot from behind a hedge at some convict breaking through his ban. Indeed, among the people, especially among the Tatars, there is a popular saying, ‘He who kills a squirrel only gets one skin, but he who kills a varnak gets three—his coat, his shirt, and his skin.’ Many other routes, of course, were to be found, and in very different directions. I could traverse Eastern Siberia, by Irkutsk and Nertchinsk, as far as the Sea of Okhotsk, and there seek some vessel, which would have carried me to the ports of the United States or to California. I might turn towards the south, crossing the steppes of the Kirghis, and arriving in Boukhara, whence I could reach the confines of British India. On the other side, the Oural River, if I had the good fortune to touch its source, might have carried me on its waters into the Caspian Sea, and allowed me to take refuge in Daghestan, among the Circassians. Finally, a fourth route remained to me, by which, after crossing the Oural chain, and reaching Oufa, in the government of Orenbourg, I might find the Volga, at a point somewhat lower than that at which a canal unites it with the Don, and the latter river would have led me to the Sea of Azov; and then, according to my wish, I might have repaired either to Turkey in Europe or to Turkey in Asia, or even into the western parts of Circassia. For reasons which it would take me too long to set down here, I found that I ought to give up all and each of these four tracks; and I resolved to seek for my liberty by way of the north, and across the Oural Mountains, and to press on over the steppes of Petchora and Archangel. This path was the least frequented, and for this reason only it was the safest. Moreover, it had the immense advantage of being the shortest; for, if I once touched at Archangel, it appeared to me an impossibility that, among the four or five thousand ships in the port, mostly all foreign ones, not one should be found willing to take on board a political refugee, flying from the katorga. It was then to these districts of the far north, and to the shores and borders of the White Sea, that I now directed my most minute investigations, although I also lost no opportunity of acquiring information as to any of the other directions, in case chance or fate should impel me in their way. Our bagnio was cosmopolitan enough in its character, and soon, from convicts gathered from all parts of the empire, I acquired a very exact knowledge of the manners and customs of all the Russias; but my conversations with the merchants and travellers, who, from north and south, from east and from west, passed through or frequented Ekaterinski-Zavod, chiefly helped to complete the education of a scholar who appeared to be careless and apathetic, but who was really greedy for every bit of information he could extract.

The exile who combines in his mind different plans of escape is absorbed in an amazing variety of calculations about very small matters, and it is only the sum total of his thoughts and designs which can present any objects of interest to the reader. Slowly and with difficulty I succeeded in gathering together the articles which I knew to be indispensable to my journey. Among these, and in the first rank, figured a passport. Of these documents there are two kinds in use among the Siberians, for these people have the taste, which is common among all the Russians, for making long peregrinations in the empire. There is first a pass, which is good only for distances comparatively short, and which has only a short time to run; there is also the passport of great importance, which is a very different matter, being issued by the higher powers and on stamped paper—it is known as the plakatny. I succeeded in forging both the one and the other, for, by men who have once learnt to like and to cultivate them, certain arts are carried on and plied even in the convicts’ barrack; and thus it was that I obtained from a friend, a clever coiner of false money, and in return for a few roubles, a capital seal with the arms of his imperial majesty. Then as to the sheet of stamped paper, it was easy for me to appropriate one from the mass which I blackened every day in the office for the public use, and thus I had a plakatny at my service. Slowly and with difficulty too I procured the dress and the accessories needful for my disguise, which was to be effected both morally and physically, for I had to transform myself into a native, a ‘man of Siberia’ (sbirski tcheloviék), as they say in Russia. Ever since my arrival at Ekaterinski-Zavod, or rather even before that time, and from the time I left Kiow, I had purposely allowed my beard to grow, and it had now got to a respectable and perfectly orthodox length. After many attempts I furthermore became possessed of a wig, a Siberian one, be it understood—one of those sheepskins with the curls inside, which are worn in this country to keep out the intense cold; and, thanks to these means, I trusted to make my personal appearance such as was most unlikely to be recognised. In the last place, I may mention that, after deducting the cost of these articles, there remained to me the sum of 180 roubles (in assignats[5]), that is, about 200 francs—a very slender sum for so long a journey, and one which, through a sad accident, was yet to be greatly diminished.

I had not disguised from myself in any way the difficulties of my undertaking, nor yet the dangers to which at every step I was to be exposed. I also knew that I could not even reckon on the poignard which I carried as a last and perfectly reliable means of safety, for, in spite of much that one hears, it is not always in one’s power to put an end to one’s life. I might be arrested in my sleep, or in some one of those times of moral prostration which follow on very prolonged effort and tension of body or of mind, and when a man, by loss of nervous power, is prevented from disposing of his existence. One thought, however, sustained me, and while it added greatly to the difficulties of my situation, it much lightened my conscience—it was the vow I had made not to reveal my secret to a single human being until, standing on a free soil, I could do so with safety to them. I determined not to ask for help, protection, or advice from any living soul until I had passed the limits of the Tzar’s dominions, and rather to give up my own hoped-for salvation than to become the cause of peril and suffering to one of my fellow-men. During my stay at Kaminieç I had implicated more than one of my poor compatriots in my own bitter lot, but then I believed myself to be on a mission for the general weal: now, the only object I had in view was my personal safety at the time, and my freedom hereafter; and I resolved that, for their accomplishment, I would rely on no one but on myself. God has vouchsafed to me the strength to persevere in this resolution to the end. It seemed to me to be the only honest and justifiable course; and it has perhaps been on account of this vow, made from the very starting point, that He has extended over me His protecting Arm.

By the last days of January my preparations were finished, and the time seemed peculiarly favourable for my start, because there was soon to be held at Terbite, at the foot of the Oural range, one of those great fairs which are peculiar to Eastern Russia, where centres of trade are few and far between. The immense distances which have to be crossed, and the difficulties in the way of even the most ordinary communications between one place and another, make fairs of this sort a real colluvies gentium, and the roads are covered with innumerable trains of merchandise, and with a great concourse of travellers. Flattering myself with the hope that I might be lost in such a movement of people and tribes, I lost no time in profiting by the circumstance, and on February 8th, 1846, I set out.

I had on three shirts, the coloured one being, after the Russian fashion, pulled over the trowsers: I had a waistcoat and trowsers of thick cloth, and over all a little burnous (armiak) of sheepskin, well tallowed, which hung down to my knees, while great boots with tops strongly tarred completed my costume. A girdle of red, white, and black worsted was tied round my waist, and over my wig I had one of those red velvet caps, edged with fur, which are worn on holiday time by Siberian peasants of any affluence, and by commercial travellers. Besides all this, I was wrapped in a wide pelisse, of which the collar, turned up and tied by a red handkerchief round the neck, served less to keep out the cold than to hide my face. I carried a bag in my hand, and in it I had put a second pair of boots, a fourth shirt, a pair of blue trowsers, such as are worn in the country in summer, some bread, and some dried fish. A large dagger was slipped into the sheath of my right boot; my money was under my waistcoat in assignats of five or ten roubles; and, to conclude, in my hands, which were covered with stout gloves of skin, with the hair inside, I held a strong knotted stick.

Thus equipped I stole away at eventide from the settlement of Ekaterinski-Zavod by a cross-road. It was freezing very hard, and the rime which hung in the air sparkled in the moonlight. I soon passed my Rubicon, the Irtiche, whose frozen shield I crunched under my feet, and with hasty steps, which the weight of my dress alone checked, I took the road to Tara, a small market town at about twelve kilometres from the place where I had been kept. The winter nights, I said to myself, are very long in Siberia; how many miles shall I be able to make before daylight appears to make them aware of my flight? and what shall I do when it dawns?

I had hardly crossed the Irtiche when I heard the sound of a sledge coming up behind me. I shuddered, but determined to await the nocturnal traveller, and, as happened more than once during my hazardous wanderings, that which I dreaded as a danger became the unexpected means of saving myself. ‘Where are you going?’ asked the peasant who drove the sledge, and who had drawn up beside me.

‘To Tara. Where do you come from?’

‘From the hamlet of Zalivina. Give me sixty kopeks (tenpence) and I will take you to Tara, for I am going there myself.’

‘No; that is too dear, but I will give you fifty kopeks if you like to take me for that.’

‘Well, so be it; look sharp, my friend!’

I seated myself beside him, and we started at a gallop. My companion was in a hurry to get home; the road covered by snow, which the frost had hardened, was as smooth as a mirror, and the piercing cold seemed to give wings to the horses. At the end of half an hour we were at Tara, where my peasant put me down in one of the streets of the town and went his way. Now alone, I went up to the first posting-house, and called in Russian fashion through the window, as loud as I could:

‘Have you any horses?’

‘Where are they to go?’

‘To the fair at Irbite.’

‘Yes, we have some.’

‘A pair?’

‘Yes, a pair.’

‘How much a verste?’

‘Eight kopeks.’

‘I won’t give so much; say six kopeks.’

‘What can we say? Done! Presently.’

In a few minutes the horses were ready and put to a sledge. ‘Where do you come from?’ they asked me.

‘From Tomsk: I am a clerk of N——’ (I named somebody), my principal has gone on before me to Irbite; but, you see, I had to stay behind for some little affairs of my own, and now I am horribly late, and I am afraid my chief will be angry; if you will drive quickly you shall have something for yourself.’

The peasant whistled, and the horses went off like an arrow. Suddenly the sky became overcast, and a heavy snow falling, the peasant not only lost his way but could not find it again. After having wandered about in many wrong directions, we were obliged to halt and pass the rest of the night in the forest. I pretended to be furiously angry, and my driver, full of excuses, began to ask my pardon. I shall not attempt to describe the agony of that night, passed as it was sitting in a sledge, in the middle of a snow storm, and at the distance of at most four leagues from Ekaterinski-Zavod: at every moment I seemed to hear the bells of the kibitkas that were in full pursuit of me. At last the day began to redden in the east. ‘Now, go back to Tara,’ I said to the peasant; ‘I will take another sledge there, and you, you fool! shall not have a farthing, and I will hand you over to the police for having made me lose my time in this way.’ The countryman, much abashed, turned to go back to Tara, but hardly had we gone a verste when he stopped, looked all round, and pointing out some traces of a road under the heap of snow, he cried:

‘There is the road we ought to have taken!’

‘Get on, then,’ I said, ‘and thank God!’

From this moment my man did his best to make up for the lost time; but a horrible idea crossed my mind, I remembered our hapless Colonel Wysoçki, who, after having been detained as I was the whole night in a wood, was given up to the gendarmes by his driver. Perhaps my peasant, I said to myself, meditates to betray me in like manner, and my hand mechanically sought my dagger; but it was a vain terror and an unjust suspicion. He soon stopped at a friend’s house, where I had some tea, and where I was provided at the same rate with horses to continue my journey. Thus I went on my way, changing horses at very reasonable sums, until I arrived late at night at a village called Soldatskaïa, where I became the victim of a theft as audacious on the part of the thief as it was painful to me. I happened to have no change to pay the driver, and along with him I squeezed my way into a pot-house where there were a number of tipsy people, for it was near the end of the carnival. I pulled two or three bank notes from under my waistcoat, and I was going to give them to the landlord to get them changed, when a sudden move in the crowd, whether purposely or not I cannot say, shoved me back from the table on which I had laid down the papers, and they were carried off in a second. In vain I called out, the thief was not to be discovered, and as I did not dare really to summon the police to my assistance, I was obliged to resign myself to my fate, although I had lost some forty roubles in notes, and (what added much more to my regrets, I might almost say to my terror) two papers had disappeared with them, which were of inestimable value to me, the one a memorandum on which I had marked with the greatest minuteness all the towns and villages through which I had to pass on my way to Archangel, the other that passport on stamped paper which it had cost me so much trouble to fabricate....

Thus, at the commencement, and in the first day of my flight, I had lost a quarter of the small sum which I had saved for my travels, the note which was to have been the map and guide of my wanderings, and the plakatny, the only document which I could show to disarm the first suspicions of any curious persons. I was in despair!

One thing above all others was I believe the main cause of the success of the perilous task of my evasion, compelling me to persevere in spite of all obstacles and mistakes, and obliging me to take courage in spite of myself—this was the manifest impossibility of abandoning my undertaking. Having once fled from Ekaterinski-Zavod, I should certainly incur the same fate, whether captured at Tara or among the Oural Mountains, among the steppes of Petchora or in the port of Archangel, while every step I took brought me nearer to safety and deliverance. Thus no room was left for hesitation or regret, and, in spite of the irreparable loss which I had just sustained, I held on my way, and soon, striking into the high road to Irbite, I found, in the sudden animation of the landscape, a sight calculated to distract my eyes, and to inspire my mind with a certain degree of confidence. All over that vast and snow-covered plain, to the left of which ever since I passed Tioumen the wooded slopes of the Oural chain began to be defined, swarmed an innumerable mass of sledges, either going or returning from the fair. They were full of goods and yamstchiks (or peasants who undertake to carry merchandise), and were whirled along by those Siberian horses whose pace is only to be equalled by the skill of their drivers. The month of February is a harvest time for the dwellers in these districts, who make, by the hire of their horses and sledges at the time of the fair at Irbite, the largest of their yearly gains. They display then all the good humour and the noisy gaiety which can animate an active population at the end of the dead season of the year. I mingled my voice with the sharp cries and piercing calls of the yamstchiks; I greeted every passenger, regarding each in the bottom of my heart as an involuntary auxiliary of my flight, for the more the number of men, horses, and sledges increased, the more I took courage. How, I asked myself, could they distinguish in this vast crowd of merchants, bagmen, clerks and peasants one solitary political criminal who seeks his liberty by flight? how pursue me through this moving and ever-changing Babel? It would be about as likely and as useful to try (as we say in our proverb of the Ukraine) ‘to follow and catch the wind upon the steppes.’

In order to make the reader understand how rapid was my flight, which differed in no way from the pace of the other Siberians on the road, it will suffice to say that, on the third day of my evasion, and in spite of having spent a night in the forest of Tara, I found myself, late in the evening, at the gates of Irbite, 4,000 kilometres distant from Ekaterinski-Zavod. ‘Stop, and show your passport!’ called the sentry; luckily, he added immediately, ‘Give me twenty kopeks, and through with you.’ It may be imagined with what alacrity I satisfied the demands of a law so opportunely modified, and I soon reached an inn, where at first I was refused admittance, because there was no room. After some time, however, I was received, on declaring that I only wished to pass one night on the premises, being sure, I said, of finding out next day where my master was, with whom I was to lodge for the rest of the time. I went out soon after, pretending to go to the police station, and, when I reappeared, said I had left my papers there, and would have them returned to me next day. The izba, or large room in which we all sat, was as full of yamstchiks as it could hold, and the smell of tar was enough to stifle one. I talked much of my principal, of our affairs, and did my best to share in a noisy meal of Siberian dishes; that is to say, of turnip soup, dried fish, oatmeal gruel mixed with oil, and pickled cabbages. When the repast was over, each man paid his share of the reckoning to the landlord, and then prepared a bed for himself as best he could in the izba. Some stretched themselves upon the stove, some on straw, some on the ground, some on benches, and some under them. I did as I saw the others do, but sleep never came near my eyes; so many hopes and so many fears chased each other through my mind, that rest was impossible.

Very early in the morning I rose, and, like all my companions, performed, in the most orthodox fashion, the three bows which every one is expected to make to the holy images that never fail to occupy the corners of a Russian dwelling; then, taking my bag on my back, I went out under pretence of seeking my principal. In spite of the earliness of the hour, the square was already very animated. Irbite is a town of a tolerably pleasing appearance, in spite of its houses being built entirely of wood. The streets are wide, the squares and market-places spacious. On every side stood booths constructed after the national fashion of thin planks, and intended to last only during the fair. Sledges, drawn up like regiments, contained bales of goods; and those which had been already emptied were now piled up in heaps, one on the top of the other. I am sure that there were several thousands of these vehicles. For my part, I did little more than go across the town, as many reasons weighed with me, and prevented my stopping there for any length of time—the chief reason being my fear of meeting some one of the many acquaintances I had made at Ekaterinski-Zavod. I had no wish to put my disguise to the proof, unless there was an absolute necessity for so doing. I therefore bought some loaves of bread and some salt in a shop, put them into my bag, and left the town by an opposite gate from the one by which I had entered it, and where the sentry did not, luckily, think it right to ask me any questions whatever. The expenses which I had incurred in hiring horses to Irbite, as well as the theft of which I had been the victim, had seriously diminished my slender finances; and at this moment I stood possessed of no more than 75 roubles in assignats, and how was I to reach France by means of so small a sum? It was clear that for the future I must trust to my own legs, not to say to my own hands also, if I chanced to come in the way of earning anything in my travels.

The winter of this year, 1846, was one of great severity, and the snow fell in such quantities that I saw more than one pretty solidly built house fall in from its weight; indeed, within the memory of the Siberians, there had not been so hard a winter. On the morning, however, of the day on which I left Irbite, the air appeared to me to be rather milder; but then the snow began to fall, and it came down in such style, so thick and so heavy, that I could not see where I was going. It was a strange sensation to stand thus alone in the middle of these wastes, of which the silence is almost always unbroken, and to be covered with snow flakes, from which I vainly tried to shake myself free, while walking became very fatiguing in the soft heaps which got bigger at every moment. I managed, however, not to lose my way, and every now and then a yamstchik or two, driving past in his sledge, helped to clear it before me again, till, about mid-day, the snow began to cease, and my march became less impeded. As a general rule, I avoided the villages, but when it was necessary to pass one, I walked straight along the street, as if I belonged to the country, and did not require to ask my way; and if grave doubts arose in my mind as to which road to take, it was only at the last house of the hamlet that I ventured to ask any questions. When I felt hungry, I pulled a piece of frozen bread out of my bag, and ate it as I walked along, or sat resting at the foot of a tree, in the most remote part of a wood. When I was thirsty, I sought to slake my thirst at the holes in the ice on pools and ponds, which the Siberians constantly make in order to water their cattle; or, sometimes I had to content myself with letting snow dissolve in my mouth, although that plan was far from being a satisfactory one. My first day on foot out of Irbite was very trying, and the evening found me completely exhausted. My heavy dress had added greatly to my distress in walking, and yet I knew that I dared not part with it. When night fell, I sought the heart of the forest, and there prepared a sleeping-place for myself. I knew how the Ostiaks cover themselves when asleep in their frozen deserts. They simply scoop out a deep hole in a big snow wreath, and there find a bed, which, though certainly hard, is not the less a perfectly warm one. I did in like fashion, and soon found the repose of which I stood greatly in need.

On waking next morning, I felt extremely uncomfortable, and found that my feet were frozen. Not quite familiar with the niceties of Ostiak bed making, I had been imprudent enough, in covering myself with my pelisse, to keep the furry side next to my body, and the heat thus developed had completely melted the snow, and exposed my feet to the low temperature of the dawn. I resolved to profit by this lesson for the future, and, in the meantime, tried to bring the circulation back by walking and running, in which I was, fortunately, successful. By mid-day, to my sorrow, the wind rose very high—a truly Siberian wind, dry and icy, seeming to blind one as it cuts one’s eyes, and sweeping the heaps of snow before it, so as to obliterate in a few minutes every trace of the best beaten road. The natives are accustomed, as soon as winter sets in, to mark their tracks on each side by pines and pine branches stuck into the snow at short distances from one another; but this season the avalanches had been so numerous that, in most places, they more than hid the signal branches. I presently perceived that I had completely lost my way. Plunging about in the snow up to my waist, sometimes up to my neck, I began to think I must perish there from hunger and from cold; but by evening I came on a road again, and, mercifully for me, it was the very one I ought to take, and for which I was in search. It was quite late, when I saw a small detached cottage, near a village, with a young woman standing on its doorstep. The hope of finding a resting-place got the better of all my hesitation; I went up to the woman, and asked her if she would give me a night’s lodging. She made no difficulty about it, and took me into the izba, where her old mother sat. I made her the usual greeting, and, in reply to the usual questions ‘where I came from,’ and ‘whether the Lord God was leading me?’ I replied that I came from the government of Tobolsk, and that I was on my way to Bohotole, to look for work. The establishment at Bohotole is an iron foundry belonging to the Russian government, and situated far north of Verkhouterie, among the Oural Mountains; it attracts great numbers of workpeople from the provinces of Perm and of Tobolsk. While the women prepared some food for me, I spread my clothes and my linen before the fire, and, having dried them, and appeased my hunger, I stretched myself on a bench with an indescribable sense of comfort and happiness. I believed that I had neglected no precautions, for, after repeating to myself my Catholic prayers, I had made the orthodox triple salutation, or poklony, to the holy images; and yet some suspicions had been awakened in the minds of these women. I learnt afterwards that the sight of the linen I had tried to dry was the exciting cause; they thought me too well provided to be a Russian artisan, for I had no less than four shirts!

Sleep was just stealing upon me, when I heard some whisperings that disturbed me; and, all of a sudden, in came three peasants, one of whom said in a low voice:

‘Where is he?’

The younger of the women pointed to where I lay. Presently, I was first called, and then roughly shaken up by these men, who asked if I had a passport. I was obliged to make some answer, so, sitting up, I retorted:

‘And what right have you to ask for my passport? Are any of you golova (an official)?’

‘It is true that we are not; we are only the inhabitants of the place.’

‘And, as inhabitants of the place, what right have you to attack houses, and to walk in to ask for passports? How am I to know who you are, and whether you are not likely enough to steal my papers? But, keep yourselves easy, you will find presently with whom you have to do.’

‘But I tell you we are neighbours, country folks here.’

‘Is that true?’ said I, turning to the mistress of the house; and on getting a sign from her in the affirmative, I went on, ‘Well then, in that case, I will answer you. My name is Lavrenti Kouzmine, of the government of Tobolsk, and I am going to the iron foundries at Bohotole to look for work; and this is not the first time, by any means, that I have been this way.’

I then went into more circumstantial details, and concluded by exhibiting my passport. It was a mere pass, since, alas! my plakatny no longer existed, and it never could have imposed upon any official; but as it had a seal, the sight of that essential convinced this portion of the public, who then began to ask me a hundred questions about the fair at Irbite, and many other things. At last they departed, having wished me a good night’s rest, and excusing themselves for having troubled me by saying, ‘You see it was very excusable, because we thought it was a case of a runaway convict: they sometimes pass this way.’ The remainder of the night passed tranquilly away; and on the following morning, I took leave of the two women whose hospitality had so nearly proved fatal to me.

The incident which I have just related carried with it one sad conviction, which was, that I could not reckon on a shelter for any future nights without clearly exposing myself to very serious dangers, and that, until things should take a new turn, the Ostiak couch must be my only bed; and so with the Ostiak couch I contented myself, during the whole of my journey across the Oural Mountains, and until my arrival at Véliki-Oustiong—that is to say, from the middle of February to the first days of the month of April 1846. Three or four times only did I venture to crave hospitality for the night in some lonely hut; and that was only because I was exhausted by some fifteen or twenty days passed in the forest, and my strength was so far gone that I was hardly conscious of what I was, what I said, or what I did. All the other nights I contented myself with digging an earth for sleeping in—only I had become more cunning, and I had also acquired a greater dexterity in preparing my nocturnal refuge. I had noticed that, in the depths of the forests, the snow hardly reaches to the foot of the great trees; and that, as it accumulates, it still leaves an empty space round the trunk, which soon becomes a pretty deep cavity. I let myself slip down the stem of the tree into the hollow thus formed, which was not unlike a well. Having arrived at the bottom, I tried with my stick to throw some of the snow out of the aperture at the top, and thus made a vault, which covered and sheltered me perfectly. But very often I could not manage these nightly buildings; the snow would be too light and dry, or, at another time, the roof thus laboriously contrived would fall in with a crash. I had then to seat myself close to the tree; and leaning my back against its trunk, thus slept, or rather dozed, for the night. When the cold became so great that I felt my limbs growing numbed, I had to get up, and run hither, and thither. It was too dark either to follow or to find the road; but exercise, at all risks, I must have, to revive my animal heat. On more than one occasion, I have lain down tired, and simply let myself be covered by the falling snow; this was, perhaps, the warmest cover of any; but I always found it difficult, in the morning, to shake myself loose of this white winding-sheet. By degrees, I got accustomed to this way of sleeping; and sometimes, when night fell, I would find myself turning into the thickest part of the woods, as to some familiar resting-place; though at other times, I must confess, this savage life seemed to me all but unbearable. The absence of any human dwellings, the want of warm victuals—sometimes even of frozen bread (my only food, for days together)—would make me feel that, not very far from my side, there lay in wait for me those two hideous spectres—Cold and Famine—whose names we are so apt to take in vain at every little trifle which makes us uncomfortable! In such moments, what I most dreaded were the sudden attacks of sleep, which would come on me unawares. These I knew full well to be the forerunners of death, and against them I struggled with all the little strength that remained to me. The craving for something warm to eat or drink was very great; and it was often with the utmost difficulty that I refrained from going into some hut, to beg a little of the turnip broth which they make so much in Siberia.

After leaving behind me Verkhouterie—the last town (it is a wooden one) which I was to pass on my way to the eastern slopes of the Ourals, and where I took good care not to stop, I fell in with six young Russians—a meeting which was very fortunate for me, as from them I obtained various pieces of useful information. By their dress, and indeed by their speech, I saw that they did not belong to this part of the country, and that they were not even Siberians. When I asked them, they told me that they came from the government of Archangel, from the district of Mezen, on the very borders of the Frozen Sea; and that they were on their way to the province of Tobolsk, to push their fortunes as veterinary surgeons. These young men had pleasant faces, very fair complexions, and hair so light as to have a silvery tinge, like well-dressed flax. Indeed, had they not had clear blue eyes, they might have passed for Albinos. They told me that the country from which they came was very poor—miserably poor. In short, nothing grew there, either wheat, oats, or barley; and the inhabitants lived on fish, getting bread only from Archangel. The sight of men who had come so far, and come on foot, gave me fresh courage and hope. I, in my turn, could give them many details about Siberia (though not about the districts in which I had dwelt), and I told them where they were likely to find the greatest number of horses. Nature seems often to play strange games in distributing men as she does over this globe. To these miserable dwellers on the most remote shores of the Frozen Sea, Siberia appears as a land of promise—the Eldorado of their dreams of happiness; and thither they emigrate in bands, and in whole families, to look for more lucrative labour and in search of a more clement sky.

I do not know how many days I may have spent in thus climbing the woody but snow-clad heights of the Oural chain. The uniformity of the way, and the repetition of the same accidents of travel made me at last lose all count of time. I only know that at Paouda, far set in the heart of the mountains, I dared for the second time since I had left Irbite to sleep in a human dwelling, and that then for the third time since that date I tasted some warm food. Even this little good fortune I owed to a happy chance. I passed through the village very late in the evening, and as I went by a house in which the lights still burnt, I suddenly heard a voice call, ‘Who goes there?’

‘A traveller.’

‘Have you far to go?’

‘Oh, very very far.’

‘Well, if you like, you may turn in and sleep with us for the night.’

‘The good God reward you! But shall I not trouble you?’

‘How trouble us? No one is gone to bed yet.’

I crossed the hospitable threshold, and found in the house two kind worthy beings, a husband and his wife. They gave me a modest Siberian meal, which to me seemed a feast fit for Lucullus; but what I enjoyed most was the being able to take off my clothes, which I had not been able to do for so many nights, while I camped under the stars. They asked me a good many questions, and I was ready to reply to them, saying that I belonged to the district of Tobolsk, and that I was on my way to Solikamsk, on the other side of the Ourals, that I had a relation there, and that the times being hard, he had written to me that I might find work in the salt works there. These good folks then began to talk of their own lot, and to complain of it heartily. It appeared that they were ‘peasants of the works’ (pozavodskoïe krestyany), or serfs, liable from generation to generation to be impressed for statute labour in the different government factories, of which there are a great many in the Oural districts. Formerly there were works at Paouda itself, but since they had been done away with, the serfs were now obliged to go to labour as far as Bohotole; from this liability neither women nor persons above the age of fourteen years are exempt, and it may be supposed that such conditions were severely felt. On the next day my hosts would not let me depart till I had breakfasted with them, and they steadily refused to accept of the money which I pressed upon them. What a warm and hearty farewell did we take of each other! but my ease of mind vanished when the good man of the house, just as he parted from me, and was giving me some final instructions as to my road, added, ‘at any rate, a little beyond Paouda you will come to the military station; they will ask for your papers there, and they will not fail to give you all the information you can require.’

It may be believed that I neglected no efforts not to come in the way of any such sources of knowledge. I struck aside and went by hill and by dale, now and then up to my neck in snow, and did not regain the high road till I had left the tutelary guard station far behind me. Thus I went on for several days, only buying bread at rare intervals at the izbouchka, which at great distances from one another and from time to time I met with on my way.

Izbouchka are little houses built at great intervals for the accommodation of travellers, and are to be found from the Oural Mountains to Véliki-Oustiong; you find there bread, salt fish, turnips, radishes, cabbages and kvass (a liquor made from cider), and sometimes, though rarely, brandy. In some of these inns, that is to say, in the more spacious ones, there is to be found hay and corn for the horses. Their owners buy in the provisions, and it is said make a good profit on these strange hotels, which in general are kept by one old man, or by a couple as miserable as they are decrepid. One evening I met a train of yamstchiks who were on their way back from the fair at Irbite, and were halting to rest their horses; but I did not remain with them. I knew that I was nearing the summit of the Oural range, and a superstitious feeling impelled me towards it as to the culminating point of my fate. At last I reached the top of the pass. It was a fine night; the moon illuminated with its full splendour a glorious but fantastic scene, where the gnarled shadows of the trees, and of gigantic masses of rocks, were filing far upon the immense expanse of snow. A silence so solemn as to be almost religious in its unbroken stillness reigned around, except when at times a dry metallic sound struck upon the ear as the stones cracked and split from the intensity of the frost; and yet nature, rude and wild as she appeared to me at this time, and under this dress, was to me, alas! a friend more pitiful than any of the civilised beings around; she, at least, never asked me for my passport! It was with difficulty that I kept my mind from dwelling on spirits from another world, from recurring to the fairy sprites and other tales to which I had been accustomed during my childhood in the Ukraine, so much were they recalled by the strange and sinister-looking forms which the moon revealed, while in her rays their outlines assumed monstrous proportions. Indeed, in the eyes of any Ukraine child might not I myself have easily passed for no less a person than the ‘great demon of the night,’ as I stood there in my strange dress, beard, eyebrows, and moustaches, all crusted with frosty rime, wandering thus among the shadows of the forest, myself but another shade?

From any more prolonged contemplation of the landscape cold obliged me to abstain, and I soon began to descend the western slopes of that immense barrier which nature has interposed between Siberia and Russia in Europe. During the course of next day the yamstchiks came up with me again, and I had an opportunity of seeing with what marvellous skill they drive their horses along roads which are all but impracticable. They had thirty sledges, to each of which a solitary horse was harnessed, and the whole string was driven by seven yamstchiks. The way was narrow and hedged on each side by walls of snow as high as a man, and in these both men and horses would occasionally disappear. When one train met another coming in the opposite direction, the train which was the smaller, or the least heavily laden, would then plunge into the snowy wall; and I do not exaggerate when I say that sometimes after a plunge the horses’ ears alone remained visible. Having completed this peculiar evolution, the drivers of both trains would then apply themselves to pulling both sledges and horses out of the wreath. But even these occurrences were as nothing compared to the accidents caused by the bogs and quagmires which are so frequent on these routes. The horses, however, are perfectly accustomed to all obstacles, and they throw themselves into the ravines, and then allow themselves to be extricated by their drivers. The difficulties of the passage of the Oural chain are so great that these intrepid men cannot make more than twenty verstes a day, and as far as Véliki-Oustiong I found all along the wayside the corpses of horses that had given in from fatigue. What the yamstchiks themselves seem capable of enduring in the way of privations and fatigues is something truly incredible.

I reached Solikamsk in the beginning of March. It lies at the foot of the western declivity of the mountains. Without making any stay there I pursued my way by the steppe of Petchora, tending towards Véliki-Oustiong, by way of Tcherdine, Kaï, Lalsk and Nochel. The country was no longer hilly, but there was now as before the same immensity of snow, the same thick woods, the same winds and storms of ice; for me also there were the same weary marches and the same furtive purchases of bread at the unfrequent izbouchka, and the same earths toilsomely constructed for each night’s repose. One discovery, however, was an unspeakable boon to me. I had remarked that in these depopulated regions the foot travellers, who were so few and far between, were in the habit, when overtaken by night in the woods, of lighting a large fire, and of keeping it blazing till daybreak. I did this several times, and the flaming logs in the middle of a frozen desert not only warmed but cheered me; but this would not do for a roadside diversion, and I only ventured on it when deep in the forest.

I always steered clear of the towns which lay in my way; but one day, when, to avoid Tcherdine, I had wandered long in the woods, I completely lost my way, and had not a notion to which side to direct my steps. A hurricane of snow made me literally pirouette, and covered me all over with its flakes, while, as a climax to my misfortunes, I had no more bread in my bag. I rolled in the snow with convulsive movements; I could not sleep, but I prayed for death. When day again dawned, the sky cleared, the weather was fair, my pains had abated, but my strength was utterly exhausted. I strove to guide my course by the sun, or by noticing the moss which grew on the north sides of the trees, and dragged myself on for a while by help of my stick, till the pangs of hunger again attacked me. Wearied with the strife, and with a face bathed in tears of weakness, hunger, and despair, I let myself drop at the root of a tree. By degrees sleep stole upon me, and it was accompanied by a humming noise in my head, which threw all my ideas into the wildest confusion. Strange to say, I became totally insensible, and only the tearing pains inside gave me any sense of life. How long I lay in this state I know not; I was suddenly roused from it by a strong man’s voice. I opened my eyes, a stranger stood before me.

‘What are you doing there?’

‘I have lost my way.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘From Tcherdine; I am on a pilgrimage to Solovetsk; but the storm made me lose my way, and I have had nothing to eat for several days.’

‘I am not surprised at it; we belong to this part of the country, and yet we often lose our way; you should never have set out in such weather: drink a little of this.’

He put a wooden bottle to my lips; I drank a mouthful of brandy, which revived me instantly, but so burned the stomach that it made me start with pain till I executed a perfect tarentelle.

‘Come, be quiet, can’t you!’ cried the stranger, and he offered me some bread and dried fish, which I devoured with a sort of frenzy; I then sat down again at the foot of my tree, and my companion seated himself alongside of me. He was a trapper by profession (promychlennik), and after having secured his prey, he was returning home, with his gun slung over his shoulder, and with pattens on his feet. When I got a little calmer, he offered to conduct me to the neighbouring izbouchka. ‘I thank you with all my heart; may the good Lord reward you for all you have done!’

‘So we are a Christian, are we? Well, step on now, and never give in!’

I got up with great difficulty, for my head was swimming round; but summoning all my strength I followed my leader, and I steadied myself from time to time on his arm, till at length we stood once more on the road from which I had wandered, and there the trapper, having commended me to God, left me, disappearing into the thickets. I could see the izbouchka at some distance, and so great was my joy at the sight of it, that I believe I should have walked up to it, had I known that gendarmes were waiting at the door to arrest me. I managed to get as far as the said door, but when I had crossed the threshold, my strength failed me, I fell on the ground, and rolled under a bench. Then, after a dead faint of some minutes, I came to myself again, and asked to have something warm to eat or drink. Some turnip soup was given to me, but this, although tormented by hunger, I was hardly able to swallow, and towards midday I fell asleep on a bench, where I slept till about the same hour on the following day, when my landlord in alarm shook me up. He was a kind honest man, and his affability towards me was redoubled when he heard that I was on a pious pilgrimage, as far as the Holy Isle in the White Sea. I was still quite wet, and my garments had to be dried at the stove; but sleep, rest and warmth had already cured me. I was able to eat something, and start again on my travels, sorely against the wishes of mine host, who begged me to rest one day longer in his house. I had to give some reasons to account for persisting in my resolution, and I promised him solemnly that on my return from the goal of my pilgrimage I would pay him a second visit.