Part 31

Step by step the women thus widened their rights. As soon as it became known that at some German university a certain professor might open his lecture-room to a few women, they knocked at his door and were admitted. They studied law and history at Heidelberg, and mathematics at Berlin; at Zürich more than a hundred girls and women worked at the University and the Polytechnicum. There they won something more valuable than the degree of Doctor of Medicine; they won the esteem of the most learned professors, who expressed it publicly several times. When I came to Zürich in 1872, and became acquainted with some of the students, I was astonished to see quite young girls, who were studying at the Polytechnicum, solving intricate problems of the theory of heat, with the aid of the differential calculus, as easily as if they had had years of mathematical training. One of the Russian girls who studied mathematics under Weierstrass at Berlin, Sophie Kovalévsky, became a mathematician of high repute, and was invited to a professorship at Stockholm; she was, I believe, the first woman in our century to hold a professorship in a university for men. She was so young that in Sweden no one wanted to call her anything but by her diminutive name of Sónya.

In spite of the open hatred of Alexander II. for educated women--when he met in his walks a girl wearing spectacles and a round Garibaldian cap he began to tremble, thinking that she must be a Nihilist bent on shooting him--in spite of the bitter opposition of the State police, who represented every woman student as a revolutionist; in spite of the thunders and the vile accusations which Katkóff directed against the whole of the movement in almost every number of his venomous gazette, the women succeeded, in the teeth of the Government, in opening a series of educational institutions. When several of them had obtained medical degrees abroad they forced the Government, in 1872, to let them open a medical academy with their own private means. And when the Russian women were recalled by their Government from Zürich, to prevent their intercourse with the revolutionist refugees, they forced the Government to let them open in Russia four universities of their own, which soon had nearly a thousand pupils. It seems almost incredible, but it is a fact that notwithstanding all the prosecutions which the Women’s Medical Academy had to live through, and its temporary closure, there are now in Russia more than six hundred and seventy women practising as doctors.

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It was certainly a grand movement, astounding in its success and instructive in a high degree. Above all it was through the unlimited devotion of a mass of women in all possible capacities that they gained their successes. They had already worked as sisters of charity during the Crimean war, as organizers of schools later on, as the most devoted schoolmistresses in the villages, as educated midwives and doctors’ assistants amongst the peasants. They went afterward as nurses and doctors in the fever-stricken hospitals during the Turkish war of 1878, and won the admiration of the military commanders and of Alexander II. himself. I know two ladies, both very eagerly ‘wanted’ by the State police, who served as nurses during the war, under assumed names which were guaranteed by false passports; one of them, the greater ‘criminal’ of the two, who had taken a prominent part in my escape, was even appointed head nurse of a large hospital for wounded soldiers, while her friend nearly died from typhoid fever. In short, women took any position, no matter how low in the social scale, and no matter what privations it involved, if only they could be in any way useful to the people; not a few of them, but hundreds and thousands. They have conquered their rights in the true sense of the word.

Another feature of this movement was that in it the chasm between the two generations--the older and the younger sisters--did not exist; or, at least, it was bridged over to a great extent. Those who were the leaders of the movement from its origin never broke the link which connected them with their younger sisters, even though the latter were far more advanced in their ideals than the older women were.

They pursued their aims in the higher spheres; they kept strictly aloof from any political agitation; but they never committed the fault of forgetting that their true force was in the masses of younger women, of whom a great number finally joined the radical or revolutionary circles. These leaders were correctness itself--I considered them too correct--but they did not break with those younger students who went about as typical Nihilists, with short-cropped hair, disdaining crinoline, and betraying their democratic spirit in all their behaviour. The leaders did not mix with them, and occasionally there was friction, but they never repudiated them--a great thing, I believe, in those times of madly raging prosecutions.

They seemed to say to the younger and more democratic people, ‘We shall wear our velvet dresses and chignons, because we have to deal with fools who see in a velvet dress and a chignon the tokens of “political reliability;” but you, girls, remain free in your tastes and inclinations.’ When the women who studied at Zürich were ordered by the Russian Government to return, these correct ladies did not turn against the rebels. They simply said to the Government, ‘You don’t like it? Well, then, open women’s universities at home; otherwise our girls will go abroad in still greater numbers, and of course will enter into relations with the political refugees.’ When they were reproached with breeding revolutionists, and were menaced with the closing of their academy and universities, they retorted, ‘Yes, many students become revolutionists; but is that a reason for closing all universities?’ How few political leaders have the moral courage not to turn against the more advanced wing of their own party!

The real secret of their wise and fully successful attitude was that none of the women who were the soul of that movement were mere ‘feminists,’ desirous to get their share of the privileged positions in society and the State. Far from that. The sympathies of most of them went with the masses. I remember the lively part which Miss Stásova, the veteran leader of the agitation, took in the Sunday schools in 1861, the friendships she and her friends made among the factory girls, the interest they manifested in the hard life of those girls outside the school, the fights they fought against their greedy employers. I recall the keen interest which the women showed, at their pedagogical courses, in the village schools and in the work of those few who, like Baron Korff, were permitted for some time to do something in that direction, and the social spirit which permeated their courses. The rights they strove for--both the leaders and the great bulk of the women--were not only the individual right to higher instruction, but much more, far more, the right to be useful workers among the people, the masses. This was why they succeeded to such an extent.

VII

For the last few years the health of my father had been going from bad to worse, and when my brother Alexander and I came to see him, in the spring of 1871, we were told by the doctors that with the first frosts of autumn he would be gone. He had continued to live in the old style, in the Stáraya Konúshennaya, but around him everything in this aristocratic quarter had changed. The rich serf-owners, who once were so prominent there, had gone. After having spent in a reckless way the redemption money which they had received at the emancipation of the serfs, and after having mortgaged and re-mortgaged their estates in the new land banks which preyed upon their helplessness, they had withdrawn at last to the country or to provincial towns, there to sink into oblivion. Their houses had been taken by ‘the intruders’--rich merchants, railway contractors, and the like--while in nearly every one of the old families which remained in the Old Equerries’ Quarters a young life struggled to assert its rights upon the ruins of the old one. A couple of retired generals, who cursed the new ways, and relieved their griefs by predicting for Russia a certain and speedy ruin under the new order, or some relative occasionally dropping in, were all the company my father had now. Out of our many relatives, numbering nearly a score of families at Moscow alone in my childhood, two families only had remained in the capital, and these had joined the current of the new life, the mothers discussing with their girls and boys such matters as schools for the people and women’s universities. My father looked upon them with contempt. My stepmother and my younger stepsister, Pauline, who had not changed, did their best to comfort him; but they themselves felt strange in their unwonted surroundings.

My father had always been unkind and most unjust toward my brother Alexander, but Alexander was utterly incapable of holding a grudge against anyone. When he entered our father’s sick-room, with the deep, kind look of his dark blue eyes and with a smile revealing his infinite kindness, and when he immediately found out what could be done to render the sufferer more comfortable in his sick-chair, and did it as naturally as if he had left the sick-room only an hour before, my father was simply bewildered; he stared at him without being able to understand. Our visit brought life into the dull, gloomy house; nursing became more bright; my stepmother, Pauline, the servants themselves, grew more animated, and my father felt the change.

One thing worried him, however. He had expected to see us come as repentant sons, imploring his support. But when he tried to direct conversation into that channel we stopped him with such a cheerful ‘Don’t bother about that; we get on very nicely,’ that he was still more bewildered. He looked for a scene in the old style--his sons begging pardon, and money--perhaps he even regretted for a moment that this did not happen; but he regarded us with a greater esteem. We were all three affected at parting. He seemed almost to dread returning to his gloomy loneliness amidst the wreckage of a system he had lived to maintain. But Alexander had to go back to his service, and I was leaving for Finland.

When I was called home again, from Finland, I hurried to Moscow, to find the burial ceremony just beginning, in that same old red church where my father had been baptized, and where the last prayers had been said over his mother. As the funeral procession passed along the streets, of which every house was familiar to me in my childhood, I noticed that the houses had changed little, but I knew that in all of them a new life had begun.

In the house which had formerly belonged to our father’s mother and then to Princess Mírski, and which now was bought by General N----, an old inhabitant of the Quarter, the only daughter of the family maintained for a couple of years a painful struggle against her good-natured but obstinate parents, who worshipped her but would not allow her to study at the university courses which had been opened for ladies at Moscow. At last she was allowed to join these courses, but was taken to them in an elegant carriage, under the close supervision of her mother, who courageously sat for hours on the benches amongst the students, by the side of her beloved daughter; and yet, notwithstanding all this care and watchfulness, a couple of years later the daughter joined the revolutionary party, was arrested, and spent one year in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.

In the house opposite, the despotic heads of the family, Count and Countess Z----, were in a bitter struggle against their two daughters, who were sick of the idle and useless existence their parents forced them to lead, and who wanted to join those other girls who, free and happy, flocked to the university courses. The struggle lasted for years; the parents did not yield in this case, and the result of it was that the elder girl ended her life by poisoning herself, when her younger sister was allowed to follow her own inclinations.

In the house next door, which had been our family residence for a year, when I entered it with Tchaykóvsky to hold in it the first secret meeting of a circle which we founded at Moscow, I at once recognized the rooms which had been so familiar to me, in such a different atmosphere, in my childhood. It now belonged to the family of Nathalie Armfeld, that highly sympathetic Kará ‘convict’ whom George Kennan has so touchingly described in his book on Siberia.

And in a house within a stone’s throw of that where my father had died, and within a few months after his death, I received Stepniák, clothed as a peasant, he having escaped from a country village where he had been arrested for socialist propaganda amongst the peasants.

Such was the change which had been accomplished in the Old Equerries’ Quarter within the last fifteen years. The last stronghold of the old nobility was now invaded by the new spirit.

VIII

The next year, early in the spring, I made my first journey to Western Europe. In crossing the Russian frontier I experienced, even more intensely than I was prepared to do, what every Russian feels on leaving his mother country. So long as the train runs on Russian ground, through the thinly populated north-western provinces, one has the feeling of crossing a desert. Hundreds of miles are covered with low growths which hardly deserve the name of forests. Here and there the eye discovers a small, miserably poor village buried in the snow, or an impracticable, muddy, narrow, and winding village road. But everything--scenery and surroundings--changes all of a sudden as soon as the train enters Prussia, with its clean-looking villages and farms, its gardens, and its paved roads; and the sense of contrast grows stronger and stronger as one penetrates further into Germany. Even dull Berlin seemed animated after our Russian towns.

And the contrast of climate! Two days before I had left St. Petersburg thickly covered with snow, and now, in Middle Germany, I walked without an overcoat along the railway platform, in warm sunshine, admiring the budding flowers. Then came the Rhine, and further on Switzerland, bathed in the rays of a bright sun, with its small, clean hotels, where breakfast was served out of doors, in view of the snow-clad mountains. I never before had realized so vividly what Russia’s northern position meant, and how the history of the Russian nation had been influenced by the fact that the main centres of its life had to develop in high latitudes, as far north as the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Only then I fully understood the uncontrollable attraction which southern lands have exercised on the Russians, the colossal efforts which they have made to reach the Black Sea, and the steady pressure of the Siberian colonists southward, further into Manchuria.

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At that time Zürich was full of Russian students, both women and men. The famous Oberstrass, near the Polytechnicum, was a corner of Russia, where the Russian language prevailed over all others. The students lived as most Russian students do, especially the women--that is, upon very little. Tea and bread, some milk, and a thin slice of meat cooked over a spirit lamp, amidst animated discussions about the latest news of the socialistic world or the last book read, that was their regular fare. Those who had more money than was needed for such a mode of living gave it for the ‘common cause’--the library, the Russian review which was going to be published, the support of the Swiss labour papers. As to their dress, the most parsimonious economy reigned in that direction. Pushkin has written in a well-known verse, ‘What hat may not suit a girl of sixteen?’ Our girls at Zürich seemed defiantly to throw this question at the population of the old Zwinglian city: ‘Can there be a simplicity in dress which does not become a girl, when she is young, intelligent, and full of energy?’

With all this the busy little community worked harder than any other students have ever worked since there were universities in existence, and the Zürich professors were never tired of showing the progress accomplished by the women at the university as an example to the male students.

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For many years I had longed to learn all about the International Workingmen’s Association. Russian papers mentioned it pretty frequently in their columns, but they were not allowed to speak of its principles or what it was doing, I felt that it must be a great movement, full of consequences, but I could not grasp its aims and tendencies. Now that I was in Switzerland I determined to satisfy my longings.

The Association was then at the height of its development. Great hopes had been awakened in the years 1840-48 in the hearts of European workers. Only now we begin to realize what a formidable amount of socialist literature was circulated in those years by socialists of all denominations, Christian socialists, State socialists, Fourierists, Saint-Simonists, Owenites, and so on; and only now we begin to understand the depth of that movement, and to discover how much of what our generation has considered the product of contemporary thought was already developed and said--often with great penetration--during those years. The republicans understood then under the name of ‘republic’ a quite different thing from the democratic organization of capitalist rule which now goes under that name. When they spoke of the United States of Europe they understood the brotherhood of workers, the weapons of war transformed into tools, and these tools used by all members of society for the benefit of all--‘the iron returned to the labourer,’ as Pierre Dupont said in one of his songs. They meant not only the reign of equality as regards criminal law and political rights, but particularly economic equality. The nationalists themselves saw in their dreams Young Italy, Young Germany, and Young Hungary taking the lead in far-reaching agrarian and economic reforms.

The defeat of the June insurrection at Paris, of Hungary by the armies of Nicholas I., and of Italy by the French and the Austrians, and the fearful reaction, political and intellectual, which followed everywhere in Europe, totally destroyed that movement. Its literature, its achievements, its very principles of economic revolution and universal brotherhood were simply forgotten, lost, during the next twenty years.