A Herzen Reader

With The Telegraph, journals began to dominate Russian literature. They absorbed all intellectual movement. Few books were bought, while the best poetry and stories saw the light of day in journals, and something had to be out of the ordinary—a poem by Pushkin or a novel by Gogol—to otherwise attract the attention of a public as scattered as were the readers of Russia. In no country other than England was the influence of journals so great. This was in fact the best means of spreading enlightenment over such a great expanse. The Telegraph, The Messenger of Moscow, The Telescope, The Library for Reading, Fatherland Notes, and their illegitimate son The Contemporary, in spite of different tendencies, have spread a great deal of information and many concepts and ideas over the past twenty-five years. They gave the inhabitants of the Omsk and Tobolsk provinces the possibility of reading novels by Dickens and George Sand two months after they had appeared in London or Paris. Even the fact that they appeared as installments was use­ful, stimulating lazy readers.

Polevoy managed to keep The Telegraph going until 1834. However, the persecution of ideas was redoubled after the rebellion in Poland. Victori­ous absolutism lost all false modesty, all shame. Schoolboy pranks were punished like armed uprisings, and children of 15-16 were exiled or sent away as soldiers for life. A student of Moscow University, Polezhaev,⁸ al­ready known for his verse, composed several liberal poems. Without having him tried, Nicholas sent for the young man, ordered him to read the verses aloud, kissed him, and sent him away as a simple soldier; the idea of such an absurd punishment could only arise in the mind of a government that had lost its senses, and that saw the Russian army as a reformatory or a prison. Eight years later, the soldier Polezhaev died in a military hospital. A year after that, the Kritsky brothers, also Moscow students, were sent to prison because—if I am not mistaken—they broke a bust of the emperor. Since that time, no one has heard anything about them. In 1832, on the pretext that it was a secret society, a dozen students were arrested and im­mediately sent to the Orenburg garrison, soon to be joined by a Lutheran pastor's son, Jules Kolreif, who was not a Russian citizen, had only occu­pied his time with music, but who dared to say that he did not consider it his duty to denounce his friends. In 1834 my friends and I were thrown into prison and, after eight months, sent away as clerks in the chancelleries of distant provinces. We were accused of intending to form a secret society and wishing to spread Saint-Simon's ideas; as a bad joke, we were read a death sentence, and then were told that the emperor, with the unpardonable be­nevolence so typical of him, had only sentenced us to a corrective term in exile. That punishment lasted more than five years.

The Telegraph was suspended that same year of 1834. Polevoy, having lost his journal, was quite at sea. His literary essays no longer enjoyed suc­cess; embittered and disappointed he quit Moscow to live in St. Petersburg. A sad astonishment greeted the first issues of his new journal (Son of the Fatherland). He became submissive and fawning. It was sad to see this bold fighter, this tireless worker, who was able to get through the most difficult times without deserting his post, come to terms with his enemies as soon as his journal was shut down. It was sad to hear the name of Polevoy coupled with those of Grech and Bulgarin, sad also to be present at the productions of his plays, which were applauded by secret agents and official lackeys.

Polevoy was aware of his own decline, he suffered because of it and was depressed. He wanted to escape his false position, to justify himself, but he lacked the strength and he merely compromised himself with the govern­ment, without gaining anything vis-a-vis the public. His nature was more noble than his conduct and could not sustain this struggle for very long. He died soon afterward, leaving his affairs in complete disarray. All his conces­sions had brought him nothing.

There were two men who continued Polevoy's work—Senkovsky and Belinsky.⁹

Senkovsky, a Russified Pole, an orientalist and academic, was a witty writer, a hard worker without any opinions of his own, unless one calls a profound disdain for people and things, convictions and theories, an opin­ion. Senkovsky was a true representative of the direction which the men­tality of the public had taken since 1825, with a luster that was brilliant but cold, a disdainful smile which often hid remorse, a thirst for pleasure stimulated by the uncertainty which hovered over everyone's fate, a materi­alism that was mocking and therefore melancholy, the constrained jesting of a man in prison.