Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Irina Reyfman (top 10 novels of all time .txt) 📕

tired of its cruelties especially during war when great acts of violence are covered up as legitimate acts of war, moved into the civil service. To his misfortune even in the civil service he could not avoid the very thing he sought to distance himself from in quitting the military. The soul he possessed was very sensitive, and his heart was philanthropic. These excellent qualities, already recognized, gained him a position as a presiding judge in the criminal court. Initially, he was reluctant to assume this title. Having given it some thought, however, he told me: “My friend, what a broad field of action opens before me for the satisfaction of the fondest inclination of my soul! What an activity for tenderheartedness! Let us break the cruel scepter that so often weighs upon the shoulders of innocence. Let the prisons go empty, so that distracted weakness, careless inexperience may never see them; and bad luck never be treated as criminality. O my friend! My duty fulfilled, I shall shed parents’ tears for their children, the sighs of spouses for each other. But these tears shall be tears of renewal for the sake of good, while the tears of suffering innocence and simpleheartedness will dry up. How very much this thought delights me. Let us go and hasten my departure. It may be that my arrival there is needed and that any delay might turn me into a murderer should I fail to head off incarceration or accusations, by granting pardon or by freeing someone from their bondage.”

It was with these thoughts that my friend departed to his place of service. How very surprised I was to learn that he had quit his position and intended to spend his life in retirement.

“I thought, my friend,” said Mr. Krestyankin to me, “that I would find an abundant harvest, one rewarding to reason, in performing my job. Instead all I found was gall and thorns. Wearied of this, no longer strong enough to do any good, I have ceded my post to a truly predatory beast. In a short period, he has garnered praise by the prompt resolution of cases that have piled up, whereas I had the reputation of being on the slow side. Others considered me to be venal because I was in no rush to aggravate the lot of the miserable who had fallen into criminality often through no choice of their own. Before entering state service, I had acquired the reputation, flattering to me, of a philanthropic commander. Now, the very same quality that gladdened my heart so greatly—now it is regarded as a sign of lenience or unforgivable indulgence. I saw my decisions mocked for the very thing that made them perfect; I saw them left unimplemented. While my superior did not have the power to compel me to free a genuine villain and a dangerous member of society or to punish alleged crimes with the confiscation of property, honor, and forfeiture of life; or to encourage me to undertake illegal covering up of a crime or to prosecute innocence, I regarded with scorn that he succeeded in recruiting other members of the criminal chambers for this purpose. And so it was not rare for me to see my benevolent intentions go up like smoke disappearing into the air. As a reward for their deplorable complicity these members, however, received distinctions whose wrongness made them as lackluster in my eyes as they were appealing to the others. In difficult cases, when belief in the innocence of a person deemed to be a criminal aroused my inclination to be softhearted, it was not rare for me to resort to the law to brace myself against hesitation. But I often discovered in the law cruelty instead of love of mankind, and cruelty had its origin not in the law as such, but rather in the fact that the law was obsolete. Disproportion of punishment to crime frequently extracted tears from me. I saw (and how could this be otherwise) that the law forms judgments about actions without regard for the causes that bring them about. Indeed, it was a final instance relating to this type of action that obliged me to quit service. Unable as I was to save the people who were dragged into guilt by the powerful hand of fate, I had no wish to be a participant in their punishment. Unable as I was to ease their fate, in my innocence I washed my hands and shunned hardness of heart.

“In our province there lived a nobleman who had resigned from the service several years earlier. Here is his service record. He began service at court as a stoker, was promoted to lackey, then a lackey of the bedchamber, and then a butler.54 I have no idea what special qualities are required for advancement up these rungs of court service. But I do know that he loved wine more than his life. After about fifteen years in service as a butler, he was transferred to the Office of Heraldry to be appointed in accordance with his rank. However, sensing his own lack of competence, he made a request to take retirement and was rewarded with the rank of collegiate assessor, with which he arrived in the place where he had been born, that is, to our province, about six years ago. It is not rare for vanity to be the cause of notable affection for one’s homeland. The person of low social origins who has achieved distinction; or a poor man who has acquired wealth, once having cast off the inhibition of shame, which is the last and weakest root of virtue, prefers the place of his birth for the display of his grandeur and pride. There, soon enough, the assessor found occasion to buy a village in which he settled with his not small family. Had there been born among us a Hogarth he would have found in the family of Mr. Assessor a rich vein of