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

before our very eyes? The bestial custom of enslaving one’s fellow man, a custom that originated in the torrid regions of Asia, a custom suited to savage nations, a custom signifying a petrified heart and complete absence of soul, spread across the face of the earth, quickly, far, and wide. And we, the sons of glory, we, glorious by name and deeds among the peoples of the earth,70 stunned by the benightedness of ignorance, have adopted this practice; and have maintained it intact even to the present day to our shame, to the shame of past centuries, to the shame of this Age of Reason.

You know from the deeds of your fathers, everyone knows from our chronicles, that the wise rulers of our people, incited by a genuine philanthropy and from having understood the natural tie of the social contract, attempted to place a limit on this hydra-headed evil. But their sovereign triumphs were then rendered useless by the hereditary nobility. Now being retrograde and sunk into scorn, they were known at the time for their arrogant privileges in the rank-based order of our government. Despite the might of the scepter’s power, our sovereign ancestors were powerless to destroy the chains of civic bondage. Far from realizing their good intentions—indeed, ensnared by the aforementioned rank-based order—they were induced to accept rules that were against their heart and mind. Our fathers viewed these wreckers with tears, perhaps heartfelt tears, as they tightened the bonds and weighed down the shackles of society’s most useful members. To the present day, landworkers are slaves among us; we do not acknowledge them as fellow citizens equal to us, have forgotten the human in them. O fellow citizens beloved of us! O true sons of the fatherland! Look around you and recognize your error. The servants of the eternal Divine One strove for the benefit of society and the benefaction of man following ideas similar to ours, explained to you in their sermons that were preached in the name of the all-beneficent God about how it contravened His wisdom and love to rule arbitrarily over one’s neighbor. They attempted through arguments drawn from nature and our heart to demonstrate to you your cruelty, falsehood, and sin. In the temples of the living God, their voice triumphantly continues to cry out loudly: “Come to your senses, misguided ones; relent, hard-hearted ones. Shatter the shackles of your brothers, open the dungeon of captivity, and grant your fellow humans to partake of the sweetness of communal life for which they have been readied by the Munificent One, just like you. On a par with you, they rejoice in the beneficial rays of the sun, their limbs and feelings are the same as yours, and their right to use them should be the same.”

But if the servants of the Divine represented to your gaze the injustice of human enslavement, we consider it our duty to reveal to you its damage to society and the unfairness to the citizen. It would seem superfluous, at a time long marked by the philosophical spirit, to furnish or renew arguments about the essential equality of men and, therefore, of citizens. To one who grew up under the protection of freedom, filled with noble feeling rather than prejudices, the proofs of the primacy of equality are the ordinary motions of one’s heart. But here is the misfortune of mortal life on this earth: to blunder in the light and not to see what stands before one’s own eyes.

When you were young, you were taught in school the foundations of natural law and civil law. Natural law showed you men conceived outside society, endowed with the same organism by nature and thereby possessing the same rights; consequently, equal in everything to one another and individually, not subordinated one to another. Civil law showed you men having exchanged unlimited freedom for a peaceful use of it. However, if everyone imposed a limit on their freedom and a rule to their own actions, since they are equal from the maternal womb in respect of natural freedom, they should then be equal in respect of its limitation. It follows, therefore, that here, too, the individual is not subservient to another. In society, the first sovereign is the law, since it is the same for all. But what was the motivation to enter into a social bond and fix arbitrary limits to actions? Reason will say: self-interest. The heart will say: self-interest. The uncorrupted civil law will say: self-interest. We live in a society that has already spanned many stages of improvement, and we have, therefore, forgotten its original state. But consider all young peoples and all societies in a state of nature (if one can put it that way). First, slavery is a crime; second, only the criminal or enemy experiences there the oppression of captivity. By looking at these attitudes, we recognize how far we have strayed from the goal of society, how far we still stand from the summit of social welfare. Everything said by us is familiar to you, and rules like these you have sucked with your mother’s milk. Only a momentary prejudice, only greed (may you not be stung by our utterances), only greed blinds us so we become akin to people going mad in the dark.

But who among us wears chains, who feels the weight of servitude? The landworker! the nourisher of our wants, the feeder of our hunger, he who gives us health and sustains our life has not the right to utilize what he cultivates or what he produces. Who has the tightest claim to the field if not its cultivator? Let us imagine in our minds men who have arrived in the wilderness in order to set up a society. In considering their subsistence, they divide the land overgrown by grass. Who in the division receives a parcel of land? Is it not he who is able to plow, is it not he who has sufficient strength and desire? A