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

semblance of persuasions. If anyone now should want to affirm his message from above, he would sooner use the semblance of utility and everybody will be moved by this. But we who are focusing all our energies on what is good for all and for each, what does brilliance of external appearance matter to us? Is it not the usefulness of our resolutions, directed toward the good of the state, that makes our countenance resplendent? Each person considering us will see our good intention, will see his own benefit in our action and for that reason will bow to us not as to one walking in terror but as to one enthroned in goodness. If the ancient Persians had always been ruled generously then they would not have imagined the existence of Ahriman, or the hated origin of evil. But if opulent trappings are of no use to us, how dangerous their upholders are in the state. If in service their only duty is to indulge us how resourceful they will be in all that can please us. Our inclination will be anticipated; not only will no inclination be allowed to be born in us, but not even a thought since its satisfaction will already have been prepared. Look with terror on the effect of these sorts of indulgences. The firmest soul will falter in its principles, will lend an ear to flattering mellifluousness, will fall asleep. And these delicious charms will work round reason and the heart. Others’ despair and injury will scarcely make an impression on us as passing afflictions; to feel grief about them we will consider either unbecoming or repugnant, and we shall forbid even complaining about them. The most biting sorrows and wounds, and even death, will look like the inevitable results of the course of things; and since they appear to us from behind an opaque screen, they can hardly produce in us even the ephemeral effects that theatrical performances produce in us. For it is not in us that the piercing arrow of illness or the prod of evil shudder.

This is a pale picture of all the detrimental consequences of the conceited actions of kings. Are we not be blessed if we have been able to hide from the perversion of our good intentions? Are we not blessed also if we have put a limit to the contagion of example? Assured of our good-heartedness, assured that there will not be corruption from without, assured of the moderation of our desires, we will flourish again and shall be an example to the most distant posterity of how power and freedom should be conjoined for the common good.

TORZHOK

Here in the postal yard I was greeted by a man heading to Petersburg on a quest to submit a petition. This petition was to attain permission to establish in this city a free press. I told him that permission was not needed for this, since freedom has already been granted to all in this regard. But he wanted freedom from censorship and here are his thoughts on the matter:

“We all have permission to possess printing establishments, and the time when it was feared to grant this to private individuals has already passed; the reason whereby at the time they refrained from introducing a general good and useful institution was that they feared forged passes could be printed on private presses. Now everyone is free to maintain printing tools but what can be printed remains under regulation. Censorship has become a nanny to reason, wit, imagination, all that is grand and exquisite. But where there are nannies it follows that there will be children; they go about in a harness, as a result often their legs are crooked; where there are guardians, it follows that there are young, immature minds unable to control themselves. If nannies and guardians carry on forever, then the child will long go about in a harness and at maturity be a complete cripple. This minor will always be a Mitrofanushka,79 unable to take a step without his tutor, unable to manage his inheritance without a guardian. These are the sorts of things that everywhere are the consequences of routine censorship, and the stricter it is the more damaging the consequences. Let us listen to Herder.80

The very best way to encourage the good is nonhindrance, license, freedom in thought. An inquisition is damaging in the kingdom of knowledge: it thickens the air and hampers breathing. A book that passes through ten censors before it comes into the world is not a book but the product of the Holy Inquisition, a prisoner often disfigured, beaten with rods and a muzzle in its mouth, and always a slave…. In the spheres of truth, in the kingdom of thought and spirit, no kind of earthly power can give permissions nor should it; the government cannot do this, even less the censor whether wearing a klobuk or a lanyard.81 In the kingdom of truth, the censor is not the judge but the defendant, so too the writer. Improvement can only occur through enlightenment; without a head and brain neither a hand nor leg will stir…. The more principled a state is in its rules, the more ordered, brighter, and firmer it is in itself, the less it can falter and be buffeted by the gust of every opinion, each piece of ridicule from an angry writer; and the more a government exercises benevolence in freedom of thought and freedom of writing, the gain therefrom will be in the end, of course, to truth. Wreckers are suspicious; secret villains are timid. A bold man, one doing right and firm in his principles, will permit any word to be said about him. He walks in the light and turns the calumny of his enemies to his own advantage. Monopolies of opinion are dangerous…. Let the ruler of the state be objective in his views so that he might apprehend the opinions of all and in his kingdom