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Chapter Two Young Dostoevsky The Road to Siberia Oh, may it come quickly The time when the peasant Will make some distinction Between book and book, Between picture and picture; Will bring from the market, Not the picture of Blücher, Not a stupid “Milord,” But Belinsky and Gogol! Oh, say, Russian people, These names—have you heard them? They’re great. They were borne By your champions, who loved you, Who strove in your cause, ’Tis their little portraits Should be in your houses! Nekrasov, “Who Can Be Happy in Russia?” Farewell Russia, my unwashed land, Land of serfs, land of masters, Farewell, gendarmes in handsome blue, My people, their victims, farewell! Perhaps the steep crags of the Caucasus Will save me from your pashahs, Their ever watchful, ever wakeful eye, And ears that the least sound alerts. ... —Mikhail Lermontov No imperial lightning rods established by Tsar Nicholas I and his agents after the Decembrist uprising of 1825 were sufficiently effective to deflect the flow of new ideas or the mental unrest of a part of the younger generations. The powerful and populous armies of the Tsar, “the gendarme of Europe,” might stand ready on the borders of Poland in anticipation of another uprising, or, at the call of a harassed ally, be prepared to rush to his aid; at home, the censorship, the knout, Siberia, and the everwatchful political police, the “Third Section,” directed by Count Benckendorff, or later 124 by Prince Orlov, might be perpetual monitions to good behavior, right thinking and speaking—still, young brains continued working; ideas knew no customs barriers; books in amazing numbers kept on being imported from abroad, often smuggled into the country. And restless youth kept on thinking, recalling, and reading—even speaking ... Such indeed was the situation that prevailed among the students and some teachers at the universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg during the 1830s. In his vivid Memoirs , Alexander Herzen, himself a member of that generation, has left us a lucid picture of the era: ... In our second year at the university—that is in the autumn of 1831—in the lecture room of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, Ogarev and I met among our new comrades two with whom we became particularly intimate. Our friendships, our sympathies and antipathies, were all derived from the same source. We were young men and we were fanatics: learning, art, connections, home, social position, everything was subordinated to one idea and one religion. Wherever there was an opening to convert, to preach, there we were on the spot with all our heart and mind, persistent, importunate, unsparing of time, work and even blandishments. We went into the lecture-room with the firm purpose of founding in it the nucleus of a society in the image and semblance of the Decembrists , and therefore we sought proselytes and adherents. ... The day on which we sat side by side on a bench in the amphitheatre, looked at each other with the consciousness of our dedication, our league, our secret, our readiness to perish, our faith in the sacredness of our cause—and looked with loving pride at the multitude of handsome young heads about us, as at a band of brothers—was a great day in our lives. We gave each other our hand and à la lettre went out to preach freedom and struggle in all the four quarters of our youthful “universe,” like the four deacons who go on Easter Day with the Four Gospels in their hands. We preached in every place at all times ... exactly what it was we preached it is hard to say. Our ideas were vague: we preached the Decembrists and the French Revolution, then we preached Saint-Simonism and the same Revolution; we preached a constitution and a republic, the reading of political books and the concentration of forces in one society. Most of all we preached hatred for every form of violence , for every sort of arbitrary tyranny practised by governments. Our society in reality was never formed; but our propaganda sent down deep roots in all the faculties, and extended far beyond the walls of the university.1 Herzen and Ogarev were students in Moscow. What he was describing was equally true at the university in St. Petersburg. The memory of the Decembrists the executions , the exiles and their equally heroic wives, remained unobliterated, though it peered, like some dim sunlight, through the murky miasmatic atmosphere of the day. Yet in what...

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