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

forfeit application and diligence, trade would dry up at the source, wealth would surrender to miserable poverty, the grandest buildings would become dilapidated, the laws would be eclipsed and grow ineffectual. At that point, the immense organism of society would fall into pieces that, separated from the whole, would atrophy; then the seat of royalty, on which the support, bulwark, and integration of society currently rest, would decay and collapse; then the ruler of nations would become a simple citizen and society would witness its end.’ This picture, worthy of a hellish brush, my colleagues endeavored to lay before the gaze of anyone who happened to hear about the case. ‘It is natural that the president of our court,’ they pontificated, ‘is minded to defend a murder committed by peasants. Inquire of him as to his social origins. Unless we are mistaken, he himself walked behind the plow in his youth. It is always these newly minted members of the nobility who have odd ideas about the natural rights of the nobility over the peasants. If this depended on him, he would, we believe, lump us all together as peasants with land57 in order to level his class origins with our own.’ These were the words with which my colleagues thought they could insult me and make me hated by the entire society. But this was not enough for them. They said that I had taken a bribe from the wife of the murdered assessor who did not want to be deprived of the peasants she owned if they were sent off to do labor, and that this was the real reason for strange and harmful views of mine that were broadly offensive to the rights of the entire gentry. Mindless as they were, they thought that their mockery would wound me, that their calumny would humiliate me, that their misrepresentation of my good purpose would alienate me from it! They had no knowledge of my heart. They were ignorant that I would always remain unflinching and staunch before the judgment of my conscience, and that my cheeks had no cause to blush with the crimson flush of conscience.

“My venality they alleged on the grounds that the wife of the assessor did not wish to avenge the death of her husband, but rather, led by her own greed and following the practice of her husband, preferred to spare the peasants punishment in order, as she said, not to forfeit her estate. She also came to see me with a request along these lines. I agreed with her about forgiving the murder of her husband, but our motivations differed. She assured me that she would punish them quite enough, whereas I tried to persuade her that in acquitting her husband’s murderers it was important not to submit them to the same extreme punishment so that they wouldn’t again become evildoers—as they were wrongly called.

“The governor-general was soon informed of my view on this matter, learned that I had tried to win over my colleagues to my thoughts, and that they were beginning to waiver in their reasoning—wherein it was not the firmness and persuasiveness of my arguments that proved conducive but rather the money of the assessor’s wife. Being himself a product of the rules of unlimited power over the peasants, he does not agree with my judgments and, indignant on seeing this reasoning, begins to prevail in the deliberation of this affair albeit for other reasons. He sends for my colleagues, admonishes them, asserting the deplorable nature of such views as injurious to noble society, injurious to supreme power because they violate legal statutes; he promises reward to all those who fulfilled the law, threatening with sanction anyone who does not obey it; and he soon brings round to their previous views weak judges lacking principles in their reflections or firmness of spirit. I was not surprised to note the change, since their previous reversal caused me no surprise. It is natural for weak, timid, and base souls to shudder at the menace of power and to embrace its acceptance.

“Our governor-general, having reversed the opinions of my colleagues, perhaps planned, and flattered himself on this, to change mine, too. He had this goal in mind when he summoned me on the morning of what happened to be a holiday. He was obliged to summon me, since I was not in the habit of attending those mindless audiences that pride regards as the duty of subordinates, flattery regards as necessary, but the wise man regards as loathsome and offensive to humanity. He deliberately chose a day of celebration when a large number of people attended his gathering; he deliberately chose a public gathering for his speech, reckoning that this would convince me more conclusively. He counted on discovering in me either a timorous soul or mental weakness. He took aim at both of these in his speech. But I consider it unnecessary to paraphrase for you all that his arrogance, sense of power, and overweening confidence in his astuteness and learning imparted to his eloquence. To his arrogance I replied with indifference and calm; to his power—with firmness, matching logical argument for argument, and I spoke for a long time with icy control. But in the end a shaken heart spilled out its surplus of feeling. The clearer the audience’s acquiescence became, the more emotional my speech. In a firm voice and ringing enunciation I finally cried out: ‘Each person is born into this world the equal of any other. We all have similar limbs, we all have reason and will. Man considered, therefore, outside society is a being dependent on nobody else for his own deeds. But he puts a limit on these, consents not to subordinate himself to his own will alone, and becomes obedient to the commands of other human beings, in a word becomes a citizen. For the sake of what cause does he restrain his desires? For what purpose does he set a power over himself?