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

Free people who committed no crime are being sold like cattle! O laws! Your wisdom is often contained only in the letter. Is not this a clear mockery? But even more than this, it is a mockery of the sacred name of freedom! Oh! If the slaves oppressed by their heavy shackles in furious despair, using the irons that impede their freedom, shattered our heads, the heads of their inhuman masters, and stained their fields with our blood, what would the state lose because of this? From their midst great men would soon erupt to succeed the massacred tribe. But their view of themselves would be different, and they would give up the oppression of others as their right.—This is not a dream, but my gaze penetrates the thick curtain of time that hides the future from our eyes. I gaze across the entire century.—In indignation I walked away from the crowd.

But the shackled detainees are now free. If they had at least some initiative, they would frustrate the oppressive intentions of their tyrants…. Let us return. “My friends,” I told the captives in their own fatherland. “Are you aware that if you do not want to join the military nobody can force you to do so?” “Master, stop mocking wretched people. Even without your joke it is painful for one of us to part from his decrepit father; for the other, from his young sisters; for the third, from his young wife. We know that our master sold us for a thousand rubles, to be conscripted.” “If until now you did not know this, then know that it is forbidden to sell people to be conscripted; that peasants cannot buy people; that your master manumitted you; and that those who bought you want you to register in their district as if by your accord.” “Oh, if this is so, Master, thank you. When they line us up for measurement, we all will say that we do not want to be soldiers and that we are free people.” “Add to this that your owner sold you at a time when it was not legal and that you have been conscripted unwillingly.”* It is easy to imagine the joy that spread across the faces of these unfortunate people. Bouncing up from their place and vigorously shaking their shackles, it looked as if they were testing their strength to throw them off. But this conversation almost caused me great trouble: when they understood my speech, the recruiting agents were incandescent with anger and accosted me, saying: “Master, you are meddling in others’ business, get out of here while still in one piece.” And they began to push me so strongly as I resisted that I hastily had to move away from this crowd.

On walking up to the post station, I found another crowd of peasants surrounding a man in torn frock coat, somewhat drunk, it seemed, and making faces at the bystanders who looking at him laughed until they cried. “What wonder do you have here?” I asked one boy. “What are you laughing at?” “This recruit here is a foreigner, cannot utter a peep in Russian.” From a few words that he uttered I learned that he was a Frenchman. My curiosity arose even more. I wanted to learn how a foreigner could be given up for conscription by peasants. I asked him in his native tongue: “My friend, by what chance do you find yourself here?”

The Frenchman: “Fate wanted it so. Where it is good, that’s where one should live.”

I: “But how did you manage to become a recruit?”

Frenchman: “I like the military life, I know it already, I myself wanted it.”

I: “But how did it come about that you were taken as a recruit from the village? From villages they usually take to be soldiers only peasants and only Russians. I see that you are neither a peasant nor Russian.”

Frenchman: “This is how. In Paris, as a child, I trained to be a hairdresser. I went to Russia with a certain gentleman. In Petersburg, I dressed his hair for an entire year. He did not have money to pay me. I left him and, unable to find a position, nearly died from hunger. Fortunately, I managed to get a place as a sailor on a ship sailing under the Russian flag. Before leaving for sea I was put under oath as a Russian subject, and went to Lübeck. At sea, the captain often beat me with the end of a rope for being idle. Being careless, I fell from the rigging onto the deck and broke three fingers, which made me forever unable to manage a comb. Upon arriving in Lübeck, I ran into Prussian recruiters and served in different regiments. I was beaten with sticks, not infrequently, for idleness and drinking. While drunk I stabbed to death a fellow soldier and left Memel where I was stationed. Recalling that I was bound to Russia by oath, like a faithful son of the fatherland, I set off to Riga with two thalers in my pocket. On the way I fed myself by alms. In Riga, my luck and art served me well: I won about twenty rubles in a tavern and, having bought myself a good caftan for ten, went with a merchant to Kazan’ as a lackey. But, passing through Moscow, I met in the street two of my countrymen who advised me to leave my master and look for a position as a teacher in Moscow. I told them I was not good at reading. But they responded: ‘You speak French, that is enough.’ My master did not notice when I left him on the street. He continued on his way and I stayed in Moscow. Soon my countrymen found me a position as a teacher for a hundred and fifty rubles, a pood of sugar, a pood* of coffee, ten pounds of tea a year, meals, a servant, and the use