Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Irina Reyfman (snow like ashes .TXT) 📖

why my head, when I arrived at the postal station, was in worse shape than a wig stand.

I remembered that in the old days my nanny of blessed memory, Klementevna, Praskovya by name and therefore called Friday,35 was a coffee lover and used to say that it gave relief from the headache. “If I drink about five cups,” she used to say, “I then see the light, but without it I would die within three days.”

I set about getting nanny’s medicine, but not having the habit of drinking at once five cups or so, I offered the leftovers of what had been prepared for me to a young man who sat on the same bench albeit in a different corner by the window. “I thank you in earnest,” he said, having taken the coffee cup.—His amicable look, plucky glance, polite bearing, it seemed, did not go with the long demi-caftan and hair slicked down with kvass. Pardon me, reader, for my conclusion, I was born and grew up in the capital, and if someone is not curly-haired and powdered then I reckon him to be a nonentity. If you are a country bumpkin yourself and do not powder your hair do not blame me if I were to walk past you and not even look.

My conversation with my new acquaintance about this and that settled down. I learned that he was from a seminary in Novgorod and was on foot to Petersburg to pay a visit to an uncle, who worked as a clerk in the administration of the province. His main aim, though, was to find an opportunity for acquiring learning. “Our store of means to enlightenment is deeply inadequate,” he said to me. “A knowledge of the Latin language on its own is unable to satisfy the mind’s reason for learning. I know practically by heart Virgil, Horace, Livy, even Tacitus, but when I compare the knowledge of seminarians with what I have had the chance to learn thanks to good fortune I consider our school to be a relic of past centuries. We are familiar with all the classical authors, but we better understand critical commentaries of texts than know what at present makes them pleasant, what has secured eternity for them. We are taught philosophy, we study logic, metaphysics, ethics, theology, but to cite the words of Kuteikin in The Minor: let us complete our philosophical education and start all over again.36 No surprise in this: Aristotle and Scholasticism to the present day reign supreme in seminaries. I, to my good fortune, being a familiar in the house of one functionary of the provincial administration in Novgorod, had the opportunity there to acquire a smatter of learning in the French and German languages and used the books of the owner of that house. What a difference in enlightenment between times when the Latin language exclusively was used in schools and the present period! What an aid to learning when knowledge is taught in the national language and are mysteries open only to initiates in the Latin language! But why,” he continued after an interruption of his speech, “why have we not established institutions of higher learning in which the sciences are taught in the vernacular, in Russian? Learning would be more intelligible to all; enlightenment would be attained all the more quickly; and after a generation, for each Latinist you would have two hundred enlightened people. At the very least, in every tribunal you would have perhaps at least one member who understands what jurisprudence or legal education is. My God!” he continued with an exclamation, “if it were possible to adduce examples from the reflections and ravings of our judges about cases! What would Grotius, Montesquieu, Blackstone say?”37 “You’ve read Blackstone?” “I read the first two parts that were translated into Russian. It would do no harm to compel our judges to have this book instead of the calendar of saints and to compel them to take a peek at it more often than at the court almanac.38 How not to regret,” he repeated, “that we do not have educational establishments where the sciences are taught in the vernacular language.”

The stationmaster disturbed the continuation of our conversation when he came in. I managed to tell the seminarian that his wish would soon be fulfilled, that there was already a decree about the establishment of new universities where the sciences were going to be taught as he would wish. “High time, Sir, high time….”

While I was paying the stationmaster the travel allowance, the seminarian walked out. As he left he dropped a small bunch of paper. I picked up what had fallen and did not hand it to him. Do not accuse me, dear reader, of theft: on that condition, I shall inform you what I filched. Once you do read it I know for sure that you will not then reveal my theft to the outside world. For as is written in the Russian law, the thief is not only the one who stole but also the one who did the accepting. I confess that I have sticky fingers. Where I see something that looks a little reasonable I immediately swipe it.—Look, do not leave your ideas lying about. Read what my seminarian says:

“The person who likened the moral world to a wheel—this is a person who, in speaking a great truth, did perhaps no more than glance at the round image of the earth and other great bodies circulating in space and express only what he saw. When mortals advance the knowledge of the physical universe, they will perhaps discover the hidden connection of spiritual or moral entities with corporeal or natural entities; that the cause of all changes, transformations, vicissitudes of the moral or spiritual world depends, perhaps, on the rounded form of our habitation and other bodies that belong to the solar system that just like it are circular and revolve….” This resembles a follower of Saint-Martin,39 a pupil of Swedenborg….40 No,