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

Like Samson of old they shake down

The palace full of nasty plots.

By law is nature’s fortress firmed,

How great you are, spirit of freedom,

Of founders, just like God himself!

24

The next eleven stanzas contain the description of the kingdom of freedom and its effects; that is, safety, tranquility, well-being, greatness….

34

But passions, sharpening malice …

turn the tranquility of the citizenry into ruin …

Turn father against son,

Tear apart marital bonds,

and all the consequences of the limitless desire to exercise power….

35, 36, 37

Description of the fatal consequences of luxury. Internecine strife. Civil war. Marius, Sulla, Augustus….

He sedates anxious liberty.

He wound round the cast-iron scepter with flowers …

as a result—enslavement….

38, 39

Such is the law of nature: from torment arises liberty, from liberty slavery….

40

Why one should wonder at this,—and man too is born to

The next eight stanzas contain prophecies of the future fate of the fatherland, which will be divided into parts.116 The larger it is, the quicker this comes about. But the time has not yet come. Indeed, when it does come then

The door bolts of the awful night will crack.

Resilient power at its extinction will set a guard on speech and will gather all its strength so as with one final blow to crush liberty as it arises….

49

But mankind will howl in chains and, guided by the hope for freedom and the indestructible right of nature, will act…. And power will be brought to tremble. At that time the consolidation of all forces, at that time heavy power

Will be dissipated in a single second.

O day most sought of all days!

50

I already hear the voice of nature,

The primal voice, the voice of divinity.

The gloomy firmament shuddered, and liberty shone forth.

“Here finally is the end,” said the newfangled versifier to me.

I was very glad of it and almost wished to utter, perhaps, unpleasant criticism of his poem, but the little bell announced that it was more seemly to hasten on the road on postal nags than to clamber on to Pegasus if it is willful.

GORODNYA

On arriving in this village, it was not singing in verses that struck my hearing but the heart-piercing lamentations of women, children, and elders. Leaving my carriage, I sent it off to the postal yard, curious as I was to learn the cause of the noticeable disturbance from the street.

On drawing close to one gang, I learned that conscription was the cause of the sobbing and tears of the throng. From many hamlets, belonging either to the state or landowners, conscripts had gathered on their way to surrender for conscription.

In one crowd an old woman of about fifty years, holding a twenty-year-old lad by the head, wailed, “My dear little child, for whom are you abandoning me? To whom are you entrusting the parental home? Our fields will be overgrown with grass; our hut, with moss, and I, your poor elderly mother, will be forced to go begging. Who will warm my decrepit body from cold, who will shelter it from the heat? Who will give me to drink and feed me? Well, this does not lie so heavily on the heart but who will close my eyes when I expire? Who will receive my parental blessing? Who will commit my body to our shared mother, the raw earth? Who will come to commemorate me at the grave? Your burning tear will not fall on it, that comfort I shall not have.”

Next to the old woman there stood a maiden, already grown up. She, too, wailed: “Farewell, friend of my heart, farewell, my beautiful little sun. For me, your chosen bride, there will no longer be any consolation, any amusement. My girlfriends will not envy me. The sun will not rise over me to bring me joy. You abandon me to grieve though neither as a widow nor as a married wife. If only our elders, inhuman though they are, had allowed us to marry; if you had only, my dear friend, gone to sleep just one night, gone to sleep on my white breast. Perhaps God would have taken pity on me and given me a little boy as a comfort.”

The lad said to them, “Stop weeping, stop tearing my heart out. Our ruler summons us to service. My lot was chosen. It is God’s will. He will live to whom it is not given to die. Perhaps somehow with the regiment I shall come to see you. Perhaps I shall somehow manage to earn a rank. Do not grieve, my little dear mother. Look after little Praskovya for me.” This conscript was rendered from a state settlement.

My ear picked out from the crowd standing nearby words of a completely different type. In their midst I saw a man of about thirty years, average height, standing staunchly and cheerfully gazing upon those standing around.

“The Lord has heard my prayer,” he said. “The tears of an unhappy man have reached the comforter of all. Now I shall at least know that my fate will depend on my good or bad behavior. Until now it depended on female caprice. The simple thought that I shall not be punished by the cudgel without a trial consoles me.”

Having learned from his speech that he was a house serf, I was curious to learn the reason for his uncommon delight. To my question about this he replied: “If, Sir, on the one side stood the gallows and on the other side was a deep river, and standing between the two perils there was no way to avoid going right or left, into the noose or the water, what would you choose, what would reason and sensibility force you to wish? I think that you and indeed any other person would choose to plunge into the river in the hope that once he swam across to the other bank the danger would have passed. Nobody would agree to test with their own neck whether