PT3311

Part Three

Fate did not send him [Alexander II] a Richelieu or a Bismarck; but the point is that he was incapable of using a Richelieu or a Bismarck; he possessed pretensions and the fear of a weak man to seem weak....respect for the authority of the autocratic state collapsed: no type of system, no type of general plan...complete discord.

S. Soloviev

The definitions and boundary lines between good and evil have disappeared.... disintegration is everywhere, for everything has come apart, and no bonds remain.

F. Dostoevsky

They did not know whom and how to judge, they could not agree on what was evil and what was good. They did not know whom to accuse and whom to justify. People killed each other out of some sort of senseless evil anger.

F. Dostoevsky

I felt that if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek it amongst....the simple, unlearned, and poor men.

L. Tolstoy

Another remedy presents itself....Why not try it?

L. Tolstoy

THE TSAR VISITS LONDON

On a sunny but cool Wednesday in the middle of May 1874, Emperor Alexander II of Russia was in the English Channel on his yacht Derzhava; he was headed for Dover. Accompanying him was an entourage of more than a dozen aides and officials including his oldest son, the Tsarevich Alexander, by now himself the father of two boys. The Tsar's wife, Maria, was not with him. She seldom was any more, and the emotional ties which once bound husband and wife had long since come undone.

As far as the Tsar was concerned his true wife was Catherine Dolgorukova, whom he still loved passionately eight years after first consummating his love with her that July night at Peterhof. After their rendezvous in Paris and return to Russia, their lives became more and more intertwined. Although he tried to remain discreet, his love for Katia was not easily hidden. He provided her with an apartment in the capital and arranged for nearby quarters for her when he was at Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, Livadia in the Crimea, or Bad Ems in Germany. In 1870, she had become a lady-in-waiting to the Empress and therefore had an excuse often to be around the royal family. Her duties, however, did not obligate her to travel with Maria when she went off, as she often did, to take the cure in Europe. On such occasions Alexander could arrange their rendezvous a little more easily. In recent years Katia occasionally had even surreptitiously made her way into the Tsar's quarters at the Winter Palace. There, in May of 1872, she gave birth to their first child, George. A year and a half later a girl, Olga, followed.

A week before boarding his yacht for the Flushing-Dover crossing, he had written to Katia from Stuttgart, that she was his "idol," his "treasure," his "life." He also wrote: "Oh, my Angel, I cannot bear it any longer, I do so yearn for you and would so like to be warmed by you, my adored little wife, and I feel more than ever that my whole life is in you--May God continue to watch over us four." It was not at all unusual for Alexander to write to her, as he also did from Stuttgart, that "all my life is left in you, and yours in me. We want each other and nothing else." Although he fulfilled to the best of his abilities his duties as Tsar, his heart was no longer in his work. It belonged to this young woman still in her mid-twenties, with whom he loved to "clench" together "like hungry cats."¹

While attractive, Katia was not a great beauty, nor was she a woman of great refinement or culture. And she could be possessive, jealous, and shallow. But like most men in love, Alexander either did not notice or did not care about most of her imperfections. She was his island of rest and pleasure in a life otherwise full of duties and cares. And he was sure, as perhaps fitted a ruler who crowned himself, that God was with him and Katia and blessed their relationship. Once this visit to England was completed, she was to meet him in Bad Ems, where he would take the waters for a month.

As the white cliffs of Dover came clearly into view for the Tsar, and the early evening sun shone on the water, his daughter, Maria, waited on shore to greet him. Recently married to Queen Victoria's second son, who had joined the Tsar's party in Flushing, she was now the Duchess of Edinburgh. After some initial reservations on the part of both Victoria and Maria's parents, the couple had been allowed to marry in St. Petersburg that previous January. Although Queen Victoria awaited the Tsar at Windsor Castle, her oldest son, the portly Prince of Wales, was on hand to officially welcome him to English soil. Although Alexander had not been to England for thirty-five years, his son the Tsarevich, whose wife was the sister of the Princess of Wales, had visited London just the previous year.

When his daughter came into view the Tsar, dressed in military uniform and maintaining his royal bearing, threw kisses to her. By the time the yacht docked tears were in his eyes--she had always been his favorite. After words of welcome, embraces, and a booming salute from the guns of the castle on the hill, the Russian guests and English hosts boarded a train. As the crowd watched and the band played, the train headed out, bound for Windsor.

At Windsor Castle, Queen Victoria waited impatiently. The Tsar had been scheduled to appear much earlier that day, but his yacht had been delayed. She had last seen him when she had first turned twenty and he was twenty-one. (For pictures of Queen Victoria at various ages see this link.) She was then already the Queen and he but a Tsarevich. But they were both unmarried. She had written in her diary: "I really love this amiable and dear young man," and a little later "he is so frank, so really young and merry, has such a nice open countenance with a sweet smile, and such a manly, fine figure and appearance."² Only the Queen knew in what sense she "loved" this young man. And despite the fact that he was already smitten by his future wife, Maria of Hesse-Darmstadt, whom he had met shortly before coming to England, he also seems to have enjoyed the company of the young Queen. But regardless of how deep (or shallow) their feelings towards each other were, reasons of state would have prevented them from ever coming closer.

Now, thirty-five years later, Victoria waited in the Waterloo Gallery of Windsor Castle until finally at 10:15 p.m. word arrived that the train had pulled into Windsor Station. All was ready for the Tsar: a guards' unit and flowers on the Grand Staircase, a band, finely dressed ladies and gentlemen of the court; and at the Grand Entrance, the queen herself. His carriage came up the hill escorted by a guard of honor. Several minutes later he got out and reached down to embrace the Queen and then gave her his arm. She noticed that night how much he had changed since she had last seen him. She thought him "terribly altered," with a face that looked "old, sad, and careworn."³ She also thought him thin, but that was perhaps because when he was young he had been on the stout side. Victoria, on the other hand, was considerably heavier than when they had last met. And she was now a very matronly looking woman with fat jowls. Less than an hour after arriving, the Tsar sat down to dinner in the Oak Room between the Queen and his daughter. A band played in the quadrangle, beginning with "God Save the Tsar" and ending with "God Save the Queen." Finally, at about midnight, an exhausted Tsar parted from the Queen and retired to his rooms.

The next evening there was a state banquet in the long oak-paneled St. George's Hall. The Tsar, towering over the Queen, escorted her into the hall. He was in a Red Guards' uniform and she wore a coronet of diamonds to match the diamonds on her dress. He sat between Victoria and his daughter, who was wearing the brilliant sapphire stones he had given her. This set of earrings, necklace, bracelet, and broaches had once belonged to Catherine the Great. Although Victoria had at first opposed her second son's marriage to Maria, she had since grown fond of this pleasant young woman who spoke English well and possessed, according to her new mother-in-law, beautiful eyes, a nice nose, a pretty bust, but too short a chin and too long a neck. As they ate and the band of the Coldstream Guards played selections from Glinka, Schubert, Meyerbeer, and others, Alexander talked with Victoria of his previous visit. Speaking in French, he recalled how he had loved England, but then how his feelings had changed as a result of the events which brought about the Crimean War. He suggested that the Queen had been poorly served by former Prime Minister Palmerston, but he saw no reason why their two countries could not now be on the best of terms. But both he and Victoria knew very well that potential sources of conflict still existed between their two countries. In 1870, with the Franco-Prussian war sill in progress, the Russians had declared that they would no longer be bound by the hated Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris. Victoria found this behavior outrageous. Like many of her realm she was fearful of any strengthening of Russia at the expense of the Turkish government. British power in the eastern Mediterranean might thereby be adversely affected. This was especially important now that the Suez Canal had been completed.

There was also the question of Central Asia. During the past decade British diplomats had watched, often with alarm, as Tashkent, Kokand, Samarkand, Krasnovodsk, and other cities had fallen to Russia and as the Russians moved closer to British India. (See the entrance to the Palace of the Khan of Kokand.) Like the American white men taking over the Native American Indians' territory as they moved toward the Pacific Ocean, so the Russians continued taking over the smaller khanates of Central Asia and seemed destined to continue their forward movement until they also met a more formidable barrier, whether geographical or human.

Some Russians such as Ignatiev, still ambassador to Constantinople, or the War Minister, General Dmitry Milyutin, believed that Russia owed Great Britain no apologies for her advancement. Milyutin noted that the British did not consult the Russians when they wished to expand their empire. Others like Foreign Minister Gorchakov were more concerned with the opinion of other governments. He often advised caution in the Tsar's councils, but when further advances occurred he did his best to justify them. A decade earlier he sent out a circular dispatch to Russian representatives abroad; it urged them to justify Russian advances by pointing to the necessity of advancing against barbarous peoples in order to safeguard Russia's frontiers. It also indicated that the United States government in America and the British in India, as well as other colonial powers, had faced similar problems in attempting to maintain and advance the cause of civilization. When Russia's forward thrusts seemed to go beyond what Gorchakov had led the British to expect, he misleadingly downplayed the Tsar's responsibility and blamed it on insubordinate generals. Finance Minister Reutern's concerns about the costs of continuing expansion and military spending generally--still about one-third of the government's total expenditures--seemed no more capable than British verbal opposition of halting the Russian advance.

Yet, just the previous year, Alexander had sent to London Peter Shuvalov, the head of the Third Division (secret police) and a long time friend. His mission was not just to help arrange the wedding of the Tsar's daughter, but also to assure the British government that the Tsar did not intend to conquer Khiva. After it fell a little later that year, Shuvalov also blamed it on the generals. With a base now in the Turkoman steppes, some British diplomats feared Russia was in a better position than ever before to threaten the independence of Persia and Afghanistan and pose a heightened danger to British India.

Perhaps having in mind Constantinople or Central Asia, Alexander at the banquet that night asked Victoria if he could write to her directly if difficulties arose. She agreed. Then Alexander changed the subject, and with tears in his eyes he thanked Victoria for all of her kindnesses to his daughter and expressed the hope that Maria would always prove herself worthy of favor. Victoria herself was touched and reached out to take Maria's hand.

One of the guests that evening was Prime Minister Disraeli, who had just recently come to power and who had been critical of his predecessor Gladstone for not being concerned enough with Great Britain's international and imperial role. He found the Tsar to be dignified but "soft in his manners," unlike the Tsarevich whose manner seemed more that of a soldier.⁴ The following day the sixty-nine-year-old Prime Minister had an audience with the Tsar at Buckingham Palace, which had been made available for Alexander for the remainder of his stay. The Tsar expressed his friendly feelings toward England, but nothing of substance was discussed. Disraeli thought that the Russian Emperor was gracious, but that his face, with its muttonchop whiskers, was a sad one, probably habitually so. What Alexander thought that afternoon of the old Prime Minister who was also a novelist, a Jewish Christian, and a wily politician much appreciated by Queen Victoria, we do not know.

Alexander remained at Buckingham Palace for six days. Victoria stayed at Windsor Castle while her oldest sons and their wives escorted the Tsar around London, by now an enormous city of four million people. He visited the Houses of Parliament and Westminister Abbey; he went in procession, surrounded by cheering crowds, flags and bunting, and ringing bells, to Guildhall, where he was officially greeted by the city officials. In the evenings, he attended banquets, balls, and concerts. He also went to the Crystal Palace, the reconstruction on new grounds of the iron and glass structure that had been the centerpiece of the first great international exhibition in London in 1851. There, 30,000 people were on hand, and he enjoyed a concert and fireworks.

To many, including the critical Dostoevsky, the Crystal Palace symbolized the spirit of England in the midst of its prosperity. But a quarter century of almost unimpeded growth and unchallenged economic dominance was coming to an end for the island kingdom. The years 1873 and 1874 witnessed the beginning of a recessionary period for Western economies. In addition, in the years ahead Great Britain would face increasing competition from the newly united Germany, which was just now in the process of surpassing Queen Victoria's country as Russia's chief trading partner.

Alexander's own economy would not be as seriously affected by the recession as that of Victoria's, and his modernization process would be able to continue despite various obstacles. In the last five years alone he had overseen the doubling of his country's railway tracks. Nevertheless, serious economic problems continued to plague his administration. Despite increasing exports, especially of grain, they continually lagged behind imports. The government also constantly spent more than it received, and its foreign debt over the past decade was in the neighborhood of one billion rubles. And despite this indebtedness, Russia remained far behind the more industrialized Western countries.

One morning the Tsar took a brief train ride out to Chislehurst to visit the former Empress of France, Eugenie, widowed since the previous year. She and Napoleon III had settled on an estate here after he had been ousted from power in the wake of defeats at the hands of Prussia.

On the two days before he left London, the Tsar attended the inevitable military reviews that monarchs and rulers were so fond of putting on for one another. The first was on the dusty fields of Aldershot, which lay to the southwest of London. There in a dark green and gold uniform with a plume of feathers on his helmet and sitting atop a gray charger, the Tsar reviewed thousands of the queen's best Dragoons, Hussars, Fusileers, and Scottish Highlanders. The next afternoon, on the first really bright sunny day since he had arrived in London, he reviewed six horse batteries and ten of field artillery on the fields near the royal Arsenal at Woolwich.

In the past year the Tsar had been very concerned with his own military. He had finally taken the advice of his reform-minded Minister of War, Dmitry Milyutin, and introduced a new conscription law. Among other provisions, it made all classes, and not just the poorer ones, liable for military service. And it shortened the terms for active duty. Milyutin was a cultured, intellectual man, noted for his industriousness and his reserved and unpretentious demeanor. Although he had been at his post since 1861 and had been responsible for gradually improving the education, training, and treatment of Russian soldiers, the appointment of Peter Shuvalov as head of the Third Division in 1866 had prevented Milyutin from being more influential than he was. Instead, for almost eight years the influence of this chief of the gendarmes seemed to increase steadily until he was the second most powerful man in Russia. He usually sided with the interests of the large landowning class, who resisted any reforms which they thought would weaken their power and privileges. He was Milyutin's chief antagonist and opposed the War Minister's new conscription proposals. Milyutin blamed the suave Shuvalov for overemphasizing the personal and political dangers facing Alexander and for being the man most responsible for stemming the Tsar's earlier sympathy for reform.

But finally Shuvalov let his success go to his head. He became increasingly arrogant and also became critical of the Tsar's beloved Katia. After Alexander approved the military reform legislation at the very beginning of the year, he became more attentive to Milyutin and seemed to listen less to Shuvalov. Not long after leaving London, the Tsar would announce that Shuvalov was to take up a new post, and he was replaced as the head of the Third Division. The new position for this friend of the Tsar's youth who had accompanied him to England and who was at the review with him that day was to be that of ambassador to Great Britain.

On the day after the review at Woolwich, the Tsar, his daughter Maria, and the Tsarevich attended an Orthodox Church service on Welbeck Street. Then accompanied by Maria's husband and the Prince and Princess of Wales, they took a train to Gravesend. There, amidst the pomp of a military escort and the firing of guns, he said goodby to his daughter and hosts and steamed away on his yacht.

DOSTOEVSKY IN BAD EMS

About a month after the Tsar's departure from London, Fedor Dostoevsky arrived in Bad Ems (see 1872 painting of him). His Tsar had left this famous health resort less than a week before, seen off at the train station by his uncle Kaiser William, the Emperor of Germany. A reporter stated that the Tsar seemed to have benefited from the waters. But it is more likely that he looked healthier just being with Katia in this lovely valley town.

It was a beautiful sunny day close to noon when Dostoevsky's train pulled in from Berlin. At first, as he wrote to his wife Anna, he found Ems to be a beautiful place. The narrow, gentle Lahn River flowed through the town, which squeezed itself in between high hills which overlooked it on both sides.

Ems was then one of the most famous spas in all of Europe. As in Baden-Baden, the cream of European society could be seen walking its promenades or sitting in its gardens. Kaiser William went there regularly, as did the Russian Tsar. In 1870, the two monarchs, along with Bismarck and Gorchakov, met there. Shortly after the Tsar returned to Russia that year a famous meeting occurred at Ems between Kaiser William and the French ambassador to Prussia. It was utilized by Bismarck to provoke France into a war which would help to complete the unification of Germany. Alexander at that time gave diplomatic support to his uncle by pressuring Austria not to become involved against Prussia.

Several days after he had arrived, Dostoevsky came across Emperor William, now, thanks to Chancellor Bismarck, the head of a united and strong Germany. Dostoevsky thought that the tall old monarch was an imposing looking figure. He wrote to Anna that when the Emperor passed by, everyone stood up, took off their hats, and bowed or curtsied. The Emperor on the other hand didn't bow to anyone, but sometimes waved his hand. Dostoevsky, always the nationalist, contrasted the German Emperor's behavior to what he had heard of that of his own ruler, who in Ems had graciously bowed to others in return.

Dostoevsky was undoubtedly among the minority in Ems who admired the Russian monarch more than his German uncle. Even many Russians abroad tended to be critical of their Tsar. William I and Bismarck, on the other hand, despite conflicts with German Catholics and economic problems characteristic of the European recession, remained popular with most educated Germans, who were still flush with the excitement of German victories and nationhood. The support of liberals and university students and professors for the German government especially contrasted with the situation in Russia, where little such support was forthcoming.

For some five weeks Dostoevsky wrote to Anna about life in Ems, about his literary work, the weather, his health and the progress of his cure, and about how he loved and missed her and their two children.

Thanks in part to Anna's thriftiness and good business sense and to his having finally given up his gambling mania, the Dostoevskys were now better off financially than they had been in the first year of their marriage. But the income of a writer was still unsteady, and they both watched their expenditures closely. Dostoevsky thought that Ems was terribly expensive. Over the course of several weeks, he bargained hard with two different landladies, and he managed to pay only twelve thalers a week for his modest rooms at each lodging. He preferred the second place, the Hotel Ville d'Alger, run by a French woman from Algiers. Here his two rooms were larger and better furnished than at the first pension where he stayed, and he had a balcony. This small hotel was at the eastern edge of town and faced the Lahn river, which was a stone's throw away.

Like almost everyone taking the cure, Dostoevsky arose at 6:00 a.m. in order to go to one of the springs in the center of town and line up for his glasses of mineral water. By 6:30 some two thousand people would be lined up with their glasses. When their turn came they would hand them to young girls who would give them the prescribed amount from the springs. Just as at the gambling tables in Baden-Baden, Dostoevsky often got angry when jostled or nudged in the crowd. As the patients drank their water, which smelled just a little like rotten eggs, a band played in the garden. Much to the Orthodox Dostoevsky's chagrin, it often opened with a Lutheran hymn.

After having his morning coffee, he often tried to work in his rooms. After leaving Geneva six years earlier, he had finished The Idiot, and in Dresden written another novel, The Eternal Husband, and worked on still another, The Devils. The last work evolved to a large extent out of Dostoevsky's fascination with Nechaev's murder of Ivanov on the grounds of Moscow's Agricultural Academy, an event he had read about in the newspapers. His interest in the case might also have been heightened by the fact that Anna's brother Ivan was a student at the Agricultural Academy and had visited his sister and Dostoevsky in Dresden shortly before the murder. He told the couple something of the political atmosphere at the Academy.

Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, influenced by Western secular ideas, had reasoned that murder was permissible, and then with Nechaev, reality seemed to copy art. Nechaev became the prototype for one of the main characters of The Devils, Peter Verkhovensky. Although Nechaev was not brought to trial in Russia until January 1873, five months after his arrest by Swiss police, some of his co-conspirators were tried earlier in the summer of 1871. The government publicized the trial, and the Dostoevskys happened to return to Russia, after four years abroad, just as the lengthy trial was in its beginning stages. Dostoevsky followed it closely and was especially horrified by "The Catechism of a Revolutionary." In his novel he hoped to demonstrate the harmfulness of Western atheistic and socialist ideas. But he also wished to display in a more accurate fashion than he thought Turgenev had done the true relationship between the liberal "fathers" and their radical "sons." He wished to show that the "fathers" bore a heavy responsibility for helping to infect their "sons" with false Western ideas, for leading them away from true Russian ideas, including Russian Orthodoxy, and for acquiescing in their radicalism. One minor fictional character of the older generation was especially mocked and attacked in the novel, and that was Karmazinov. Dostoevsky clearly meant him to be a reflection of Turgenev. But as with Verkhovensky's likeness to Nechaev, Karmazinov was more of a caricature of Turgenev than a fair, objective portrait.

Now in Ems after his morning coffee, he was planning still another novel, one that he thought would mirror the true condition of a turbulent modern society, as opposed to one of those idyllic works of landowner literature sometimes written by his more acclaimed rivals for fame, Turgenev and especially Tolstoy. At first he contemplated entitling it "Disorder," but would eventually call it A Raw Youth. Surprisingly, he had promised to deliver it to Nekrasov. For the last six to seven years, following the government's indefinite suspension of The Contemporary, Nekrasov had edited the leftist Notes of the Fatherland. A few months before Dostoevsky had left for Ems, the enigmatic Nekrasov had come to him with a generous offer. When the conservative Katkov and his The Russian Messenger could not match it, Dostoevsky decided to accept Nekrasov's overture. But he was a little concerned about editorial tampering on the part of the radical staff of the Notes of the Fatherland.

He had already jotted down various ideas in his notebook. Among them: "Children. A mother who has married a second time. A group of orphans....The foundations of society have cracked as a result of the revolutionary reforms....The definitions and boundary lines of good and evil have disappeared." Now in Ems, he continued writing down pertinent material. "Most Important. The idea of disintegration is everywhere, for everything has come apart, and no bonds remain."¹

He also made many other notes including ones on abandoned children, about children murdering and robbing their father, and about a predatory type character who seduces his stepdaughter and plans to murder his wife. During his weeks in Ems two central characters gradually evolved in his mind. One was the predatory individual already mentioned and the other a youth, who for a while Dostoevsky envisioned as the younger brother of the predatory man. Eventually they would become father and illegitimate son. Dostoevsky thought of the first as an atheist, a shameless man, but already in his Ems notes a complex figure bearing some resemblance to the now deceased Alexander Herzen. The second, like some of the characters in the author's earlier works, dreams of making money, of becoming a Rothschild. When the older man treats this dream with disdain, the youth asks him to point out a better ideal. But his request is left unanswered. Once again, as in The Devils, Dostoevsky was pointing to the responsibility of the older generation for the behavior of the misguided youth.

In Ems, homesick for his wife and two young children and for Staraya Russa and the summer house they rented near a river lined with elm trees, Dostoevsky was afraid that many of Russia's educated minority were leading his country away from all that he loved. He planned to have one of his characters say: "The idea of children, the idea of the fatherland, the idea of integrity, of a future ideal--all these ideas no longer exit; they have been smashed, undermined, and ridiculed."² Like Tolstoy, he placed the highest emphasis on marriage and family life and disagreed fundamentally with the radicals who advocated free love. He believed that relationships like the ones Nekrasov and Herzen had had with their friends' wives were unnatural. Did he know or suspect that the Tsar himself had two families and had often slept with Catherine Dolgorukova at the villa she rented in Ems?

During 1873 and early 1874, Dostoevsky had edited the conservative journal The Citizen, owned by a friend of the Tsarevich. He also had become increasingly friendly with the Tsarevich's chief tutor and adviser, Constantine Pobedonostsev, a tall, thin, dour man who also contributed to the journal. It is possible that in his talks with such individuals who were close to the Tsarevich, Dostoevsky might have heard of some of the details of the Tsar's private life. By 1874 the Tsar's relationship to Katia was common knowledge at court and was probably among the reasons that some, such as Pobedonostsev, placed increasing hopes on the Tsarevich, who was faithful to his wife and in general behaved more as conservatives believed a good and upright Tsar should.

To someone such as Dostoevsky the number of children given up to foundling homes, often by mothers of illegitimate children, would also be alarming. Dostoevsky tended to attribute the break-up of family life, as well as most other evils, to Western influence. In the westernized St. Petersburg, for every three births in the city one child was left, usually by city residents, at the city's Foundling Home. And a majority of these infants would die during their first year, either at the Home or in the nearby peasants' households to which they were sent.³

In addition to radical Western ideas which challenged marriage, the family, religion, and monarchical rule, Dostoevsky was also opposed to the materialism and capitalist spirit he had witnessed in Western Europe and which he feared were becoming increasingly prevalent in Russia. Not only does his "raw youth" wish to become a Rothschild--the anti-Semitic Dostoevsky would also increasingly blame Jewish acquisitive influences for polluting the true Russian spirit--but in the author's Ems notes he has one of his characters bemoan the deforestation of Russia and the exhaustion of her soil by those interested only in immediate profit. Although a strong supporter of modernization efforts needed for Russian military strength, Dostoevsky never outlined how they could be carried out without encouraging the capitalistic spirit which distressed him.

When it was not raining, and it often was that summer in Ems, Dostoevsky would go out for a walk before he ate dinner at 1:00 p.m. He complained in his letters to Anna that besides a crowded garden and park there was nowhere else to go. Climbing the nearby hills would be too exhausting for an asthmatic like himself. He also complained of the Germans and of most of the Russians who came to Ems. He had never felt especially comfortable among the wealthy classes. And here in fashionable Ems, where some of the ladies walked about as if dressed for a ball, he worried about the adequacy of his white waistcoat and the calamanco suit he had had made in Ems. As the weeks succeeded each other, he spent a little time with a few Russian acquaintances, but mostly he stayed to himself and concluded that Ems was a vile place. Even worse, he wrote to Anna, than his Siberian prison experience!

When he failed to receive letters from Anna as frequently and regularly as he would have liked, he scolded her, but more frequently he expressed his love and his ardent longing for her. After she had mentioned some dreams in a letter to him, he wrote: "I strongly kiss you, and as for the account of your indecent dreams, my little dove, if you could only know what I see. For a woman, however, it is not so proper. Never mind, never mind. Hush! On the contrary, I am very happy. I kiss you passionately all over."⁴ He also frequently mentioned his children: Lyubov, who was not quite five, and little Fedor, or Fedya, who celebrated his third birthday during his father's absence that July. When one of Anna's letters was delayed, he often worried that perhaps something had happened to one of his precious little ones.

He put up with this and other anxieties and dissatisfactions caused by his stay in Ems only because he hoped to improve his health. So in addition to planning his novel and reading Pushkin or various newspapers at the Kurhaus, he occasionally went to the magnificent quarters of his doctor, a man named Orth. And he wrote to Anna about the progress of his "cure." He reported on which springs he drank from and whether or not he mixed his mineral water with milk. He also informed Anna that Dr. Orth told him to eat meat with fat and more acidic things. During one of his subsequent visits to Ems--he would come again in 1875, 1876, and 1879--Dr. Orth would forbid most fruits and greens. But Dostoevsky continued to smoke heavily, and Dr. Orth apparently never saw any significant connection between his patient's coughing and wheezing and his smoking habit. But then most other doctors of his day probably would not have either. After his first three weeks in Ems, Dr. Orth listened to his chest and told him it was completely healed in three places, but not yet in two others.

On the first of August Dostoevsky wrote to Anna that despite a cold and some hoarseness in his chest, he felt incomparably better than he had before arriving in Ems. And if it had not been for a couple of epileptic seizures, he was sure that the cure would have done him even more good. Not too many days after writing this letter, he left Ems and returned to Russia. But only after he had first gone to Geneva to visit the grave of his first daughter, Sonia.

SOPHIA PEROVSKAYA, RADICAL

In the same month that Dostoevsky arrived in Bad Ems, Sophia Perovskaya was released from five months in prison. What crime had merited such treatment for this little twenty-year old whose father had once been governor of St. Petersburg and who was now still a member of the Council of Ministers of the Ministry of the Interior?

Not long after her father had lost his job as governor in 1866, she had gone with her mother and sister to Kilburn, the family estate in the Crimea. There they lived for over two years. In the summers, and once in the spring after a two-month university suspension for taking part in student disorders, her brother Vasily came down from St. Petersburg armed with radical literature. The young Sophia longed to know more. And at the end of the sixties she got her chance. In the summer her father came to the Crimea with the news that it was necessary to sell Kilburn to help pay for his debts. The family returned to the capital, where he found a place for them, while he continued to live in his own apartment. Sophia enrolled in the newly begun classes for women being offered at the Alarchinsky gymnasium, which was located near her new lodgings on the western side of the city.

Soon she was spending hours in rooms with other women discussing the position of women in society and other social questions. (See this link for a photo of Sophia--at the bottom of the picture--with several other women.) Amidst heavy cigarette smoke, Sophia looked almost like a child. She seemed oblivious to her appearance. The look of her gray-blue eyes and the way she held her mouth indicated that she was a most serious woman. She often sat in the corner. She seldom talked for long in these sessions, but when she did speak she was not hesitant to present her views forcefully and sharply. She argued, for example, that the women should keep their discussion circles limited to women. If they merged with those of young men, the better educated men would make it difficult for them to come up with their own independent ideas.

Within a couple of years, however, young Sophia changed her mind. Along with several other women, including her good friend Alexandra Kornilova, she joined a circle headed by a young Jewish medical student named Mark Natanson. For several years he had opposed Nechaev's violent, hurried, elitist approach to change. Instead he emphasized a more gradual method which stressed the enlightenment of the self and of the masses. At the end of 1871, however, Natanson was arrested, and the circle eventually was referred to as the Chaikovsky Circle, after one of its other members. By the fall of 1873, it would have about thirty members in the capital and slightly more spread out in other areas of the country.

Despite its name, the men and women who made up the circle in the capital were opposed to having a single leader. Reacting in part against Nechaev's elitism and criminal behavior, they thought of themselves as a group of friends working honestly and forthrightly together for their own improvement and for the good of the people. One of their later members, Prince Kropotkin, said he never again met "such a collection of morally superior men and women."¹

At first the circle's main task, in addition to their own enlightenment and improvement, was the distribution of important books to various parts of Russia. Among these were works of Chernyshevsky, Lavrov's Historical Letters, a translation of Marx's Das Kapital, and Bervi-Flerovsky's The Situation of the Working Class in Russia and his Alphabet of Social Sciences. The circle also distributed pamphlets that were printed by circle members who had gone to Switzerland. These pamphlets were designed especially for propagandizing among the peasants.

Like other members of her group, Sophia was heavily influenced herself by these works, especially by those of the Russian writers. Chernyshevsky's feminist heroine Vera in What Is to Be Done? was an early model for radical young women, and his superhuman Rakhmetov became a model for both sexes. Lavrov was a middle-aged former artillery officer and mathematics instructor who had been arrested and exiled following Karakozov's attempted assassination of Alexander II. He had recently escaped and turned up in Paris. Along with Bakunin he would be the leading émigré influence on young Russians in the early seventies. In his Historical Letters young radicals read that the comforts and privileges which they enjoyed, including education, were made available to them as a result of the exploitation of the masses. Therefore, they had a heavy debt to repay to the people. The educated minority who realized their obligation had to help bring about social and economic justice. However, unlike Bakunin, who hoped for an immediate revolution, Lavrov thought that one could only come about after a great deal of preparation and education. Sophia reflected his influence when she thought, as she did in the early seventies, that it might take a couple of generations before a revolution could occur.

Bervi-Flerovsky's The Situation of the Working Class in Russia (1869) was based partly on his own experiences in exile in Siberia and other places within Russia. He wrote of both peasants and industrial laborers. He began his book with a quote from a peasant woman: "O, wretched is our life, little our land, great are our taxes, and we do not know what to do."² He rejected the argument that the poor's poverty was due to laziness and vice. On the contrary, he attributed it to the high redemption payments that peasants had been making for their land since the emancipation and to high taxes; and in the case of industrial workers, it resulted from low wages and their exploitation by the upper classes and the state. The Russian workers, Bervi-Flerovsky thought, were even worse off than those in capitalistic countries. And he was no doubt correct. While the conditions of both Russian peasants and urban workers had apparently deteriorated during the previous decade, the ten years prior to the economic downturn of 1873 had witnessed real economic gains for workers in the more industrialized western countries of Europe. Nevertheless, Bervi-Flerovsky did not want to see capitalism develop in Russia. Like Herzen and Chernyshevsky, he hoped that Russia could achieve socialism before capitalism became fully developed. (See this link for a photo of a Russian errand-boy and knife-grinder, c. 1913.)

Sophia and her young friends shared both this hope and his vagueness about the role of industrialization in any future socialist society. In addition, they were not especially interested in achieving a constitution for Russia. If one could be achieved, and that was doubtful, they thought it might end up benefiting only the upper classes while increasing the exploitation of Russia's vast poor and illiterate masses.

No, their concerns and obligations were for the welfare of "the people"--thus the confusing term "populists," which some radicals would soon adopt and which historians would later use to tag most radicals of the 1870s. In keeping with this spirit, in the spring of 1872, Sophia decided to go out and directly help them. She went to the Samara Province, located just east of the Volga river. There she assisted a school teacher, but then, after a few months, learned to give smallpox shots and went to administer them in the villages. That same summer Leo Tolstoy lived further south in the steppes of the same province on thousands of acres he had recently purchased.

In the villages Sophia slept in the small huts of the peasants, just as they did, on a bench or on the floor. Three-generational families, although beginning to break up, were still common then. And it was not at all unusual for ten to fifteen people to be living together in a single room. (For an excellent realistic depiction of Russian peasant life in the late nineteenth century, see Chekhov's short story "The Peasants" or see this link for a more detailed historical investigation of two peasant villages in this period.) Despite the appallingly high death rate of the Russian peasants--syphilis seemed to be the most recent scourge--she often had a difficult time convincing her superstitious villagers of the necessity for smallpox inoculations. (See Perov's painting "Village Burial.") As she talked to them she learned first hand how they felt about their lives. They complained of high taxes, too little land, and too many dishonest officials. But they did not blame the Tsar. And they continued to hope that he or one of his successors would someday deliver them from their crushing burdens--they paid taxes and redemption payments to the state at a rate of about ten times as much per acre of land owned as did the nobles. In the meantime, the peasants seemed to believe that there was little they could do about their fate, and nothing this earnest little teenage girl said seemed to have much effect. Despite Sophia's efforts, their religion or vodka probably continued to offer them more solace than any revolutionary hopes. (See the two paintings by Repin and Savitsky depicting religious events among the people.)

The winter after she arrived in the Samara Province, there was a famine there, but by then she was gone. She had left to go to a village in the Tver Province, the same province in which Bakunin had grown up. She had a friend there who taught in a village school, and Sophia assisted her. Not many Russian peasants or their children were yet literate, but thanks to the zemstvos and the peasants' desire for literacy for their children the number of schools was increasing. In the evenings Sophia and her friend, Alexandra Obodovskaya, taught some of the children's fathers to read. (See Kramskoi's 1882 painting "Study of a Peasant.")

After the formal lessons the two young ladies read to the peasant men from the writings of Nekrasov and Gogol, from stories about Ivan the Terrible and the old town councils of Novgorod, and about the folk rebels that Bakunin admired, the seventeenth-century Stenka Razin and the eighteenth-century Emelyan Pugachev.

Sophia was happy and content that winter and spring. She felt useful and healthy. She lived simply in a log hut in the snow-covered village. But then her friends in the capital wrote to her of their educational and propagandistic work among St. Petersburg workers, and she decided to go back to the capital.

She soon settled into quarters in the Vyborg District, north of the Neva River. From here she worked along with others at propagandizing among workers and helping to send out books and pamphlets to various parts of Russia. When the gendarmes began to watch too closely the little house where she stayed, she left it and settled into a house on the southeastern side of the city beyond the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. There in a gloomy unattractive house, divided into two parts by a dark narrow corridor, she lived with several other members of her circle.

On one side of the corridor lived the thin, gray-eyed Sergei Sinegub and his wife Larisa. Following the example of one of Chernyshevsky's heroes, he had married the young Larisa purely to assist her to obtain a life of her own free from parental interference. He understood that in keeping with the revolutionary ethics of the day, he obtained no rights over her as a result of the marriage. However, when he needed the presence of a wife to obtain a village teaching job, she had volunteered to accompany him. And while in the countryside love had bloomed, and the merely legal marriage had turned into a real one. Now back in the capital, Sergei, a wealthy nobleman by background, was one of the organizers of the circle's educational and propagandistic work among St. Petersburg's workers.

On the other side of the corridor, which contained two rooms and a kitchen, Sophia lived along with Dmitry Rogachev. According to her false internal passport, she was the wife of a worker. And although Rogachev was a former artillery officer, he looked the part of a worker and in fact had taken a job in the Putilov factory at the smelting furnaces. He was a strong, powerful man, who later on worked a stint as a Volga barge hauler. Unlike the Sinegubs, Sophia and Dmitry never became romantically interested in each other. At this time in her life, Sophia seemed not the least bit interested in romantic love or sex. She was very critical of "ladies men" and wanted only to devote herself to the cause of the people.

Sophia cooked and washed clothes for the group. Dressed in a cotton dress and men's boots, and with a kerchief on her head, she could also be seen supporting a yoke on her small shoulders as she brought two buckets of water back from nearby Neva. When her friends tracked in mud from the streets, she would scold them with a severe look on her girlish little face. But despite her rebukes and her serious nature, she was a general favorite among her circle.

In the evenings she now taught geography and geometry to some of the weavers and textile workers that the circle had attracted. After the lessons she talked with them about the evils of the government, the needs of the people, and about socialism.

Although industrial workers still comprised only a little over five percent of the city's population, they were growing rapidly in this the most industrialized city of Russia. Government sponsored railway construction had been one of the reasons for the growth. It had led to a considerable expansion of the metal-working industry and to the development of such metal-working plants as the large Putilov one where Dmitry Rogachev worked. Sophia and her friends, however, preferred working with some of the textile workers, who were more poorly paid than the metal workers and who were more peasant-like in their mentality. In fact, in the summers many of them, some infected with syphilis contracted in the city, still returned to work and to see their wives and families in their native villages. They did not need Sophia and her friends to tell them about their miserable urban conditions that often included thirteen or fourteen hour work days for subsistence wages that enabled them to live together ten or more crowded into a room or two. If their employers mistreated them, failed for example to pay them on time, they had little legal recourse. Unions and strikes were forbidden. Then there were the noisy and unhealthy factories where not only men, but large numbers of women and children, put in their long days. Yet these textile workers knew they were better off than many others in the capital, those without regular work, those in lower-paying industries, or some of those living in factory-owned dormitories. And, of course, life in the countryside had been no better, or many of them would not have come to the capital in the first place.

No, in regard to their lot in life and that of the workers and peasants in general, Sophia and her friends could not teach them much. But they could teach them how to read and write. Through history and geography they could give them some sense of their place in the world. Some of Sophia's friends told them about the activities of workers in Western Europe. Peter Kropotkin, a prince and former page to the Tsar, who often visited a friend in the Tsar's Winter Palace, would change into peasant work clothes and tell the workers about the labor movement aboard. He had been especially impressed by some of Bakunin's worker friends in Switzerland. Some of the St. Petersburg textile workers now became convinced that their fates were not inevitable, that they could work towards changing their conditions. Kropotkin incidentally also hoped to move some of his fellow propagandists more towards the less patient revolutionary methods of Bakunin.

The activities of the Chaikovsky Circle, however, were not going unnoticed. One night when Sophia was out, the gendarmes came, searched the house, and arrested Sergei Sinegub. Several months later when she was at Alexandra Kornilova's, the gendarmes once gain burst in. They found a letter in code, some revolutionary books and songs, and a French dictionary with Sinegub's name on it. The two young women, along with one of Alexandra's sisters, Lyubov, were arrested. This was in the beginning of January 1874.

Sophia was taken that night to a three-story building behind the Summer Garden. It had bars on the windows. Two helmeted gendarmes with sabers drawn, met her gendarme escorts and herself as their carriage came to a halt in a courtyard. She was led into the three-storied building. In her boots and old dress, this little young woman must have looked rather helpless that night, standing there surrounded by the bigger and uniformed gendarmes. She was taken up a staircase to the third floor, where a sentry unlocked iron bars and led them into a corridor. On one side was a blank wall, on the other a series of doors. Sophia was led through one of them into a fairly large room. A gendarme sentry then locked the door; she was now incarcerated in the Third Division's own special little prison.

Her room contained an iron bed, a blanket, and a little table and stool. The walls were ocher. The top part of the door was made of glass, covered on the outside by a green blind which the sentry would lift from time to time. She realized that although she was cut off from her friends, she would have little privacy. At first, between the morning's tea and roll and a dinner probably brought from a neighboring tavern, there was nothing to do. Nor was there any activity for her from dinner until more tea and a roll in the evening. But soon a friendly gendarme, who for some time had been secretly aiding the prisoners, saw to it that Sophia received a roll with a little writing paper and graphite in it. She was able to sneak messages out and, shortly afterwards, to receive, openly this time, books and clean clothes.

Once she was called before a gendarme colonel who sat behind a green table and asked her questions. The questions, however, seemed to indicate that he really did not have much incriminating evidence against her. She was returned to her room, and the months dragged slowly on.

One night she heard commotion in the corridor and found out later that Kropotkin and other friends had been arrested. After a short time in the Third Division's prison, he and some of the others were transferred to the Peter and Paul Fortress. A similar fate had earlier befallen Sinegub.

It was a year in which there would be many more arrests. In the spring and summer of 1874, over a thousand individuals, mostly young, "went to the people." From St. Petersburg and Moscow, from Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, and other university cities, they went to work (for example, giving smallpox inoculations and teaching literacy) and to propagandize among the people. Some had been part of the Chaikovsky Circle or one of its branches, most had not. Some following the ideas of Bakunin, hoped to start a fire that would soon lead to the type of massive conflagration that Razin and Pugachev had led in earlier centuries. Others, more influenced by Lavrov, stressed a more gradual education of the people. Almost all believed that they owed a debt to the peasants, and many thought they could also learn from the peasants. Some students left their universities shortly before they would have received their degrees. The movement was a manifestation of the dominant quest of the seventies: the desire on the part of Russian intellectuals to overcome their alienation and to achieve a sense of community and oneness with the people.

Yet the youths' propaganda had little effect. The movement was not well coordinated, and the peasants were naturally wary of the young outsiders and of becoming involved with them. Other rural elements such as the local gentry often reported these outsiders to the police. Before the year was out, over 700 of them were arrested, and more than 200 hundred of them would be held in prison for several years awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, that June, Sofia was led into a big room and found to her surprise that her father was there. The two of them had seldom seen each other in the last five years. There had been a brief period a year after Sofia had first returned to the capital when the family had all lived together in a crowded apartment on Little Meshchanskoi Street. Her father, however, was sickly and irritable at the time, and he objected to her radical, short-haired female friends. He told his daughter to tell them that he did not wish them to come around anymore. Shortly after this, she replied that she would live separately from the family. Her father raved at such a reply from his seventeen-year-old daughter. But that evening she left home. Her father asked her brother Vasily if he expected him, her father, to allow Sophia to destroy herself. Vasily replied that if he attempted to force his will on her, she might kill herself. Days passed and she did not return. Her father informed the authorities. Her mother went to Alexandra Kornilova and pleaded with her to tell her where Sophia was. But Alexandra would not. Without an internal passport, Sophia could be arrested as a vagrant and put in prison. Before too long, she left by train for Kiev. Finally, on his doctor's advice her father, whose health had grown worse, decided to allow Sophia to live separately. She returned to the capital, but did not go to see her father. For years he could not bear to hear her name mentioned.

Now, however, upon seeing his daughter in prison, Lev Perovsky bent down and kissed her. They both wept. He told her that Shuvalov, who had served in the same regiment as he, had promised to release her on bail. Not long after this meeting, Sophia was released, and Shuvalov took up his new post as ambassador to London. Not for three years would Sophia be brought to trial along with many others arrested in 1874 but, unlike her, kept for the entire three years in pre-trial detention. For a short time in 1874, Sophia lived with her father and Vasily. Her brother had by now himself become involved in her circle, which had been depleted by arrests and departures. Their father no longer pried or interfered in their lives. But that summer as arrests continued around them, Sophia and her brother decided to go and stay temporarily with their mother, who was living in the Crimea. After obtaining permission from the authorities, they left by train: from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and then, on recently opened lines, from Moscow via Kiev to Odessa. From there they went by steamboat on the Black Sea to Sevastopol, where they transferred to the other side of the bay and climbed a hill in a rented cart. Before too long they reached a little isolated house and a happy reunion with their mother. After a winter and spring locked up inside prison, Sophia was now free to enjoy herself in this picturesque retreat. She went riding in the hills, picked grapes, read books, and went down to the seashore to swim.

A MYSTIC IN THE DESERT

At the end of 1875, a young Russian the same age as Sophia Perovskaya found himself alone in the Egyptian desert. He was wearing a top hat and a long black coat. He was taller than average, pale and thin. But his dark blue eyes were what people noticed. Beneath his thick, dark brows, they seemed both penetrating and mysterious. The young man was Vladimir Soloviev, the son of the historian.

Although as a young teenager he had rejected the religious beliefs of his parents and become an atheist and a nihilist, he by now had given up such views. He still sought the transformation of society, but now by the workings of both God and man. Only gradually had he worked out this religiously oriented philosophy. At sixteen, he entered Moscow University, where his sober hard-working father continued to serve as dean of the Historical-Philological faculty and then, after 1871, as rector of the university. But the learning that was most important to the young Vladimir was not that dictated by his professors, but by his own inner search for truth. (For a photo of Soloviev as a young student see this link.)

From his preference for reading Darwin, the nihilist Pisarev, and the German materialist Büchner, he passed on to the philosophers Spinoza, Feuerbach, Mill, Kant, and especially, Comte and Schopenhauer. The latter helped lead him to other German philosophers such as Hegel and Schelling. He also became interested in Eastern religions and in mystical writings. After graduating from the university in 1873, Vladimir went to the Moscow Theological Academy at the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius. The monastery was one of Russia's most cherished holy places. Vladimir, however, did not intend to become a monk, as some rumors stated. He merely wished to attend lectures and study religion and philosophy. While there that year, he wrote an article on primitive religious beliefs and worked on a thesis, The Crisis of Western Philosophy, which would earn him a Master's degree at St. Petersburg University in 1874.

In his thesis he surveyed the development of Western philosophy and found all of its manifestations incomplete. Scholasticism, rationalism, materialism, and positivism all contained some truth, but also serious limitations. Finally, he thought that in his own day Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartman had begun to move Western philosophy back in the direction of the truths long proclaimed by Eastern faiths. Also influenced by some of the works of the Russian Slavophile thinkers, the young Soloviev suggested that the world was now ready for a new synthesis. It would be one of science, religion, and philosophy, and one which would incorporate the truths and discard the falsehoods that all three had manifested in the past.

His thesis was not just a manifestation of abstract thinking, but also reflected his deepest feelings. As he indicated to his cousin Katia, he thought himself called to help bring the desired synthesis about. And it in turn would help bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, "the kingdom of internal spiritual relations, of pure love and happiness."¹

Although he certainly had a head for abstract philosophical thinking and seemed often to have it in the clouds, he was not a dry, pedantic person, but an ardent young man strongly attracted to feminine beauty. The jealous pangs over a young girl and the vision of a beautiful lady that he had experienced when he was nine had been an early indication of his complex personality.

In the summer after his eighteenth birthday, he went south to visit his grandmother Romanova in the Kherson province. Her husband, the old Sevastopol hero, had been dead for seven years, but staying with her was a niece and a granddaughter, both of whom Vladimir found attractive. His feelings for the granddaughter, his cousin Katia, proved to be the most long lasting.

Her parents had separated years earlier, and for a while in the sixties she had lived with Vladimir's family in Moscow. But that summer as they read poetry together on his grandmother's estate, they became more intimate, and when he returned to Moscow they wrote to each other. Katia was sixteen that summer, and was a lovely dark-eyed, dark-haired girl who resembled her aunt, Vladimir's mother.

The following May he again went south to see her, but a strange event occurred on the train from Moscow to Kharkhov, where she was now staying with an aunt. Years after this event of 1872, he wrote a story about it. What parts actually happened and which ones were later figments of his imagination no one can say for sure. Nevertheless, the story relates how as the train moved southward towards Tula, he noticed a slender ash-blonde woman who, while not beautiful, seemed to him very appealing. To the thin, pale, nineteen-year-old Vladimir it seemed that after a while she began glancing at him with a friendly and encouraging smile. But he was too awe-struck to approach her. At the Tula station, however, some sort of troupe of loud French men and women entered their car and settled in near the slender blonde. She soon became upset by their disruptive and drunken behavior and came and sat next to Vladimir. Before long she was speaking frankly and openly of herself. She was married, with several children, but often fell in love with other men. As he was then still under the influence of Schopenhauer, he replied that love was an illusion, but one to be preferred over marriage, which entangled one too much in a corrupt world.

On tracks completed only three years earlier, the train rolled southward. It became dark outside. The exhausted French troupe fell asleep, and it became quiet in their second-class car. She took off her hat and let down her hair. A woman's hair falling on her shoulders had always had an irresistible appeal for him. And her thick luxurious hair now seemed the most beautiful he had ever seen. It induced in him an almost trance-like condition. Time seemed obliterated.

He began kissing her hair and then covered her arms with kisses. "How strange you are! Who allows you to do this?"² she asked. He whispered some naive apology. But then felt on his lips a long, hot kiss. Other kisses and embraces followed.

The next morning he felt guilty for violating his philosophic principles and for betraying his cousin, whom he was on the way to see. His companion no longer seemed so appealing, and he was a bit abrupt when he spoke with her.

In Kursk, they changed trains. She went to a first-class compartment and he went to a second-class seat, where he struck up a conversation with a radical medical student from Kiev University. The student took him for a fellow radical, perhaps because of Vladimir's long hair and unkempt appearance.

After they had talked a while, the slender blonde appeared in his car and invited him into her first-class compartment. She told him she was alone in it and bored; they could ride together all the way to Kharkhov. Although reluctant, he agreed. As they stepped out of the car to cross over to another one, he fainted. He discovered later that she had grabbed him and prevented him from falling between the cars. When he regained consciousness lying on the platform of his car, all he saw was clear sunlight, a strip of blue sky, and a beautiful woman with wonderful familiar eyes and a rosy light about her face. She was bending over him and whispering something soft and tender. It was his blonde friend but somehow transformed. And he felt himself also transformed. All his thoughts, feelings, and inclinations had dissolved into this sweet, light, calm, almost mystical, vision before him. In it he felt all the beauty and wonder, all the fullness and meaning of the universe.

Later, after he had returned with her to her compartment and kissed the edge of her dress and her legs, he told her that she had awakened in him a love in which he had completely forgotten himself, that only now did he really understand the workings of the divine in man and what goodness and true happiness were. He no longer felt guilty, but only filled with a pure love.

After he promised to visit her and her husband in Moscow, he departed at the train station at Kharkhov. As the train began to pull off into the night, she reached her hands out the train window to him and he felt warm tears in his eyes. Upon meeting his cousin Katia, he was disappointed. She appeared less tender and heavenly than he had remembered her.

At least that was the way he told it all twenty years later. In the two years which followed this memorable trip, his feelings for cousin Katia fluctuated. At one point, the two of them considered marriage. She was by then in St. Petersburg a good part of the time, and he became very jealous of the attentions directed towards her by one of his uncles and by his older brother Vsevolod. But at about the time that he was preparing to live at the Moscow Theological Academy, she apparently became upset with his reclusive ways, and their relationship soon cooled.

After receiving his Master's degree in the fall of 1874, the young Soloviev was befriended by some conservative Slavophiles and criticized by some Western-oriented thinkers who were upset with his thesis. One of his new Slavophile acquaintances was Ivan Aksakov, the brother of the deceased Constantine, who had once polemicized with his father. At the beginning of 1875, Vladimir was appointed a lecturer of philosophy at Moscow University, where his father was still rector and still completing each year a volume of Russian history. At the same time, Vladimir gave lectures at the Moscow Higher Courses for Women, which his father had helped to begin--women were not yet permitted to enroll in Russia's universities. In spring, however, Vladimir took leave to study Gnostic, medieval, and Hindu philosophy. By the end of June, he was in London.

At this point in his life he was still trying to integrate his abstract rational philosophizing with his deeper mystical inclinations. Before leaving for London he had become very interested in certain mystical writings, and at the British Museum he continued to seek out such works. He became especially interested in the Jewish Kabbala and in the works of the mystical German writer of the early seventeenth century, Jacob Boehme. Boehme emphasized the universal role of the Divine Wisdom, "Sophia" in the Greek. Divine Wisdom or the Wisdom of God had also been written of in the Bible and in Kabbalistic texts and depicted in Russian icons. Churches, the various St. Sophias, had also been dedicated to it in Soloviev's native land. (See, for example, St. Sophia in Novgorod, where Soloviev greatly admired an icon of Sophia the All-Wisdom of God.)

This concept of Sophia now became for the young Soloviev his lodestar and a key to integrating his philosophy and his mysticism. He came to think of Sophia as the universal oneness, the oneness of God with creation. He began to see history as a process of man and nature falling away from God and splintering into separateness and then eventually reuniting in a higher synthesis. Sophia symbolized that potential synthesis. And for Soloviev that all-oneness with God became the goal of history.

At the same time, however, Sophia had a more personal meaning. Like others before him, he perceived Sophia in feminine form and now identified her with the beautiful lady who had appeared to him in church when he was nine. In the reading room of the British Museum, also then a favorite haunt of Karl Marx's, he read all that he could in the mystic literature which related to her. Then one day when he longed to personally experience her, as he thought he had in childhood, he once again sensed her presence. As he later wrote:

All was filled with a golden azure,

And before me she once again shone.

Only her face--it alone.³

When he complained of seeing only her face, a voice within him told him to go to Egypt. By the end of October he had left London. By way of Paris, Lyon, Turin, Parma, Ancona, and Brindisi, where he boarded a steamboat, he finally one morning reached the port of Alexandria. That same evening he arrived by train in Cairo.

It had been a good trip ever since he had avoided seasickness crossing the English Channel. The train ride through the Alps and Italy was pleasant, as was the Mediterranean voyage. The weather was clear and warm, the sea blue, and the nights moonlit.

Upon arriving he checked into the Hotel Abbat on the Station Road, not far from the railway station. It was a comfortable hotel which catered to European tourists, of whom the number had increased significantly in recent years. The Suez Canal had opened just six years earlier in 1869, and British and French influence had been increasing in Egypt, which in theory was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Compared to most Middle Eastern cities, Cairo was large, but its population was still only half that of St. Petersburg and one-tenth that of London.

In his hotel, the young Soloviev met a retired Russian general who was advising the Egyptian khedive, Ismail, on the reorganization of his army. The general and Ambassador Ignatiev in Constantinople hoped that it might eventually be utilized against the Turkish sovereign, to whom Ismail still had to pay tribute. The general was the well-known Russian nationalist Rostislav Fadeev. A veteran of the wars in the Caucasus and the Crimean War, he also had written the official history of the Caucasian wars. But he had been forced to resign from active service because of his opposition to the proposed reforms of Minister of War Milyutin. At the very end of the sixties, Fadeev's The Eastern Question had appeared. In it he argued in behalf of Russian policies which would lead to the creation of a pan-Slavic federation. Such a grouping would unite all Slavs, as well as the Greeks, Rumanians, and the city of Constantinople, under the leadership of the Russian Tsar. Fadeev was not foolish enough to think such a dream could come about without a war or wars with Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire. He believed, however, that with the help of other Slavs, Russia could prove triumphant. No wonder he wished to help improve Egyptian forces and to strengthen the khedive's ties with Russia. Egypt might prove helpful before too long against Turkish forces. Soloviev often ate meals with Fadeev at the hotel and found this fifty-one year old general to be quite loquacious, full of opinions and risqué anecdotes.

During his first week in Cairo, Soloviev took in some of the sights of the city. He went up to the twelfth-century Citadel, which sat on a high rocky plateau at the eastern edge of town. It offered a wonderful view of Cairo. The colorful domes and minarets of the city's mosques, often red and white, were interspersed with acacias and palms, stone buildings, and narrow streets. From the Citadel he could also see the Nile valley stretching north and south, a green strip of fertility between brown desert sands. He also examined some of the city's mosques, visited the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities--which he thought marvelous--and went out to bathe in the Nile and see the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza. Nearby, he viewed the great Sphinx, with its body of a lion and head of a human. It was about an hour and a half carriage ride from his hotel, much of it via a new road into the desert and up to the rocky platform on which this and several other pyramids stood. In addition to climbing up the pyramid of Cheops, he also visited the burial chambers within it. Unlike many other tourists he did not complain, at least in his letters to his mother, of the local Egyptians who pressed their services upon foreigners and demanded a tip (baksheesh).

Soloviev remained in Egypt until March and seemed to enjoy his stay. Before the new year had begun, he had moved out of his hotel to live in quarters with the family of a photographer. By early February, a good friend, Prince Dmitry Tsertelev, had come to join him and moved into the same building with him. On the warm spring evenings they would sit on the roof and look out at the city and the sky above.

Sometimes, the tall, thin Soloviev would travel on the back of a donkey through the city's colorful sights. He especially liked to ride on a big white one who was guided through the narrow streets by a man named Tolbi. In these streets were turbaned men and veiled women, some dressed magnificently in a variety of colors, but also poorer people, often barefooted and wearing only simple gowns. Young children of both sexes sometimes wore nothing at all. In crowded bazaars one could buy almost anything from yellow slippers to green vegetables, from gold bracelets to camels, and one could see jugglers and barbers plying their trades.

In addition to its colorful, exotic aspect, Cairo also had a more modern side. French and English influence had increased in recent years. Khedive Ismail had been educated in France, and on a trip to Paris at about the same time that Tsar Alexander had visited there, he had been impressed by Baron Haussmann's wide new boulevards. He came back to Cairo and began imitating Haussmann. By the time Soloviev arrived in the city, the Esbekiya quarter had become the modern showpiece of the city. Here a military band played in a public garden. Cafes and clubs, a white opera house and French theater, European-style hotels and houses, gas lighting and broad streets, all set this quarter off from the rest of Cairo. In the Esbekiya one saw fewer turbans and more European attire. One might even see some American officers, for the khedive had purchased American weapons and employed some U. S. Civil War veterans, including several generals, in his effort to strengthen his army.

One day while Soloviev was in the Esbekiya and, in spite of the heat, dressed in a long black coat and tall black hat, he met Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal. De Lesseps was already seventy, but still an energetic, lively Frenchman with a talent for making friends. He brought Soloviev back with him to his quarters, and there Soloviev met the French writer M. de Vogue. In the course of their conversation, Soloviev told him that once in the same clothes he was then wearing he had gone into the Suez desert looking for a tribe that guarded certain secret Kabbalistic teachings. But he had not found the tribe. Instead he had been discovered by some Bedouins who relieved him of his watch.

Although Soloviev probably told the story with a touch of humor, for he often had a way of dealing with his deepest experiences in a light joking manner, his trip into the desert was one of the most serious events of his life. It had occurred just a few weeks after he had first arrived in Cairo, and within just a few days of a day that in retrospect would prove important to Egyptians and Europeans alike, a day on which occurred, according to Leopold II of Belgium, "the greatest event of modern politics."⁴ The event was the sale by the deeply indebted Ismail of his 177,000 shares in the Suez Canal to the British government under Disraeli. While not completely indifferent to such international occurrences, Soloviev was much more concerned with his own spiritual quest. Whether or not Soloviev told De Vogue his real reason for going into the desert is not altogether clear. Years later he wrote that the voice of the mystical Sophia had told him to seek her in the desert. At any rate, he set out in his tall hat and long black coat, but without food or money. About thirteen miles from Cairo the group of Bedouins who were to take his watch mistook him in the night for a devil. They tied up his arms and led him off further into the desert. Luckily, however, they soon released him. Exhausted by the walk and ordeal, he decided to lie down and sleep. With the stars shining above, he stretched himself out on the desert sands. Despite the heat of the day, the night was cold and he had trouble sleeping. He thought he heard a jackal howling, and then after a while, a voice saying "sleep, my poor friend."⁵ When he awoke it was to a mystic vision of Sophia, the Eternal Feminine.

Years later in words influenced by the symbolic language of the mystics and by the description of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, he would try to describe that indescribable experience. In the poem "Three Meetings" he would write of his desert vision of Sophia, her eyes full of azure flame, appearing amidst the purple of heavenly splendor and the smell of roses. The image of her filled his being. Only she existed. Past, present, and future were all encompassed in her gaze, as were the blue "seas and rivers," the "distant forest," and the "heights of snowy mountains," all of which Soloviev stated he saw stretched out before him.⁶

Before leaving Cairo he would write a poem about Sophia, his "queen," as he called her. It helps to fill out his image of her. He wrote of her palace with its golden pillars, her jewel-filled crown, and her garden full of roses and lilies and a silvery stream. But when far below she sees her desolate friend, she comes to him bathed in light and full of quiet tenderness. She covers him with her radiance.⁷ For Soloviev, Sophia represented not only the mystical oneness of the universe, but also a tender, loving, maternal force.

Thus, a year after thousands of his contemporaries sought, whether consciously or unconsciously, a sense of community and oneness by going to the people, the young Soloviev believed he had twice experienced a oneness much more profound than any earthly manifestations of it.

After his vision of Sophia in the desert, Soloviev followed the sun back towards the west to Cairo and arrived at his hotel in the evening. He told General Fadeev of his trip, but not of the vision. The general, who incidentally was the uncle of the theosophist Madame Blavatsky and thus would have been no stranger to unusual spiritual tales, advised him not to say anything more of his excursion unless he wanted to be thought a fool or a madman. (A handy summation of Soloviev's mature views is available on Mikhail Epstein's site dealing with Russian thinkers. )

THE TSAR AT THE FRONT

At the end of June 1877, the Tsar was in Simnitza, Rumania with his soldiers. Russia was again at war with Turkey, for the tenth time in two centuries. The day before his arrival in this little town, Russian troops had crossed the Danube under Turkish fire and successfully secured the opposite Bulgarian bank and surrounding heights. Before the day was over, they had also taken over the small town of Sistova, which lay a few miles south of the great river. After arriving in Simnitza, with an entourage that included the Tsarevich and Minister of War Milyutin, Alexander visited the wounded and established his quarters at a nearby country house which sat up on a hill overlooking a wide stretch of the Danube below. Later that same day he and his retinue rode down to the river and were transported to the southern bank. His soldiers greeted him with "hurrahs" and a regimental band. Then flanked by two solid rows of soldiers, his party rode up into the hills to congratulate the generals and troops now situated near Sistova. As the Tsar strode up on this hot sunny day to shake the hand of one of his victorious generals, an English war correspondent thought that he looked younger than his fifty-nine years and every inch a majestic ruler.

At the entrance of Sistova the Bulgarians welcomed him warmly. He was met by a crowd led by clergymen carrying banners, the gospels, and a cross. Alexander told them to lead him to their church. Along the route, the Bulgarians showered him and his men with flowers. The women and children seemed especially happy, and the old people crossed themselves. When he entered the crowded church some people kissed his hand, others applauded. Many Bulgarians thought of Alexander as the "divine figure from the north"¹ who had come to liberate his co-religionists and fellow Slavs from the hated infidel Turk. Already the windows of Turkish houses and shops in the town had been broken, some had been looted, and Turkish inhabitants had fled before the approaching Russians. Near one of the town's mosques the street was strewn with the pages of torn-up Islamic books.

Bulgarian hatred of their Turkish masters was understandable. In the spring and summer of the previous year, the Turks had put down a Bulgarian rebellion with the utmost severity. Thousands of defenseless peasants were massacred and about sixty villages destroyed.

In a proclamation issued at the beginning of Russia's involvement, Alexander himself told the Bulgarians that Russia was called upon by the "decrees of Providence" to assist the Bulgarians, to deliver them from the "arbitrary rule" of the Muslims.² Nevertheless, almost a full year had passed after the Bulgarians had first risen against the Turks before Alexander had answered the call of Providence. Many of his Russian subjects had hoped he would act sooner.

In fact, the Bulgarians were not even the first Orthodox Slavs to revolt against the Turks. A year before their revolt the Christians of Herzegovina and then Bosnia had begun an uprising against them. The following year, shortly after the Bulgarians had arisen, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey. In Russia during the summer of 1876 enthusiasm for the heroic battle of the Slavs against the Turks spread like a contagious disease. An unsympathetic Leo Tolstoy described the fever in Anna Karenina, which he was then writing.

Among the people to whom he belonged, nothing was written or talked about at that time except the Serbian war. Everything that the idle crowd usually does to kill time, it now did for the benefit of the Slavs: balls, concerts, dinners, speeches, ladies' dresses, beer, restaurants--all bore witness to our sympathy with the Slavs....The massacre of our co-religionists and brother Slavs evoked sympathy for the sufferers and indignation against their oppressors. And the heroism of the Serbs and Montenegrins, fighting for a great cause, aroused in the whole nation a desire to help their brothers not only with words but by deeds.³ (For an online translation of the chapter from which this passage is taken, see this link.)

Tolstoy made it clear, however, that he did not believe that the average peasant had any desire to fight for his fellow Slavs.

Some Russian radicals, though, did go off to help the Slavs. And a number of leftist journals supported the cause. It was, after all, a revolt against oppression, and some liberals and radicals hoped it would lead to more progressive policies in Russia itself. The leaders of public opinion, however, were primarily more conservative journalists such as Ivan Aksakov, the brother of Professor Soloviev's old critic, and Michael Katkov, the influential editor of The Russian Messenger and The Moscow Gazette. Dostoevsky in his popular The Dairy of a Writer, issued on a monthly basis in 1876 and 1877, also strongly supported the panslavic cause. All three men were also members of the Slavonic Benevolent Committee, which reached the height of its influence in these years. By 1877 the Moscow Committee and its branches in St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Odessa possessed over a thousand members. For over a decade before his death in 1875, the conservative panslavist M. P. Pogodin had been the president of the organization, and Ivan Aksakov took over the position after his death. General Fadeev, whom the young Vladimir Soloviev had met in Cairo, belonged to the St. Petersburg branch. Copies of his Eastern Question, with its call for Russia to battle her enemies and unite the Slavs, were now distributed widely. Another St. Petersburg member was N. Danilevsky. His Russia and Europe (1869) contained a message very similar to that of Fadeev's, but dressed up in more scientific garb.

The committee played an important role in 1876 in channeling aid to the Slavs. The Tsarina and Tsarevich, both aggrieved by the Tsar's continuing relationship with his beloved Katia and both more conservative nationalists than he, were ardent supports of aid. Important churchmen also helped, as did various volunteers including Russian officers permitted to volunteer in the Serbian army. The general who soon became the head of the Serbian army was the semi-retired Russian M. Chernyaev, whose earlier conquests in Central Asia had earned him the sobriquet "Lion of Tashkent."

From Constantinople, Russian ambassador Nicholas Ignatiev also encouraged Russian aid to the Slavs. The successful negotiator of the Treaty of Peking almost two decades earlier, Ignatiev was an ardent panslav and a member of the Slavonic Benevolent Committee. It had been Ignatiev who had persuaded the khedive in Cairo to accept General Fadeev's offer of help.

Although Ignatiev was fated to witness Egyptian troops enter the fight on the side of the Turks, first against the southern Slavs and a year later against the Russians, his schemes were usually more successful. To many British diplomats this mustached ambassador, with his mocking smile and wily seductive wife, was the devil incarnate.

While Alexander still was discouraging the Serbs from taking up arms against Turkey, Ignatiev encouraged them to believe that Russia would aid them in case of a conflict. Shortly after the Serbs declared war, he suggested to his government that Russia send an army of 200,000 men to aid the Serbs. Later, in the late summer and fall of 1876, after the Serbs had suffered a series of defeats, he joined other Tsarist advisers at Alexander's Livadia estate in the Crimea. Here amidst the semi-tropical vegetation, with the waves of the Black Sea below and the mountains behind them, he again urged the Tsar to fight. Although War Minister Milyutin and Finance Minister Reutern urged caution--the latter was especially fearful that a war would wreck his fifteen-year effort to stabilize Russian finances--the Tsarina and Tsarevich sided with more bellicose advisers such as Ignatiev. Alexander decided on a partial mobilization and on an overall campaign plan. But cautious as always about heeding the voices of extreme Russian nationalists eager for battle, he still hoped to avoid war.

Since late 1875 he had cooperated with other European rulers to solve the problem of the Turkish treatment of its European Christians. The major European governments, except Great Britain, agreed on Balkan land, tax, and religious reforms that Turkey should carry out. British Prime Minister Disraeli, however, encouraged Turkish resistance to these efforts. He distrusted Russian intentions and hoped to sow dissension between the members of the Three Emperors' League--Austria, Germany, and Russia--who since 1873 had agreed to consult together if war threatened in Europe. After Turkish military successes in the middle of 1876, and shortly after the Livadia decisions, Russia unilaterally sent an ultimatum to the Turks. Coming right after a Turkish victory that opened the way to Belgrade, Alexander believed that only this demand for an end to hostilities could save Serbia from another rout and possible Turkish massacres. Turkey agreed to a six week armistice.

In the months that followed, Alexander continued to seek a diplomatic solution that could be imposed upon the Turks. He assured the British ambassador to Russia that British fears of Russian intentions regarding Constantinople and India were ludicrous. But Disraeli remained uncooperative. And Alexander continued to feel pressure from ardent nationalists. He complained of being reproached for his "passive attitude," and foreign observers wondered how long he could resist "the national conscience." After several more months of futile diplomatic efforts, Russia decided to act alone. First, however, Alexander obtained Austria's assurance of neutrality, but only by assenting to a future Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Finally, in April 1877, by which time Serbia had made peace but Turkish-Montenegrin talks had broken off, Russia declared war on Turkey.

In the Russian cities public opinion was enthusiastic. Police reports indicated approval of the declaration of war by all classes. But it is difficult to say how the average peasant felt because no one paid much attention to peasant opinion, despite the fact that the peasants still made up more than eighty percent of the population. Among the educated public there were some exceptions to the general clamor of approval. As the Russian government and conservatives had become more bellicose, some of the radicals became increasingly disenchanted. And Tolstoy remained bitterly opposed to Russian involvement. But Dostoevsky's enthusiasm was much more characteristic of the spirit of the times. He believed that Russia was fighting for a holy cause and that the struggle would help unite Russia around its true Orthodox roots.

Another enthusiast for the war was the young mystic, Vladimir Soloviev. His father, despite his differences with Pogodin and the Aksakovs, had been a charter member of the Slavonic Benevolent Committee. In 1877, the old historian published a book on Alexander I; and in it he justified the past Tsar's policies toward Turkey and his sympathies with the Orthodox Christians then controlled by the Ottomans. Vladimir thought about volunteering but finally set off for Rumania and Bulgaria as a war correspondent for Katkov's conservative newspaper--about thirty Russian correspondents covered the war. On the road to Bucharest, he ran into his cousin and former loved one, Katia Romanova, who had volunteered as a nurse. It was later recounted by a family friend how during the war the beautiful Katia caught the appreciative eye of the Tsar himself when he visited an aid station where she was working. The young Soloviev, however, for some unknown reason, returned to Russia before ever reaching the front.

Meanwhile, the Tsar spent the last days of June and the first part of July in the hot and dusty little town of Simnitza. He watched his engineers build a narrow pontoon bridge over the Danube and his men and supplies cross it in a steady stream; he visited the sick in the hospital station set up near his lodgings; he read telegrams from his generals who had moved further into Bulgaria or who were engaging the Turks in the Caucuses; he met with his ministers and advisers; and he visited his troops on both sides of the Danube.

The Tsar usually dined with his entourage under a tent cover set up on the lawn of his "borrowed" estate. One day while dining he heard a funeral knell from a nearby church. Realizing that it was the service for an officer killed in the Danube crossing, he got up and went into the decrepit, dark Rumanian Orthodox church, where an old priest officiated. His ministers and generals followed. He remained for the whole service, lasting about an hour, and then had engineers prepare a grave under the peristyle of the church, and watched as the body was lowered into it.

The next day Alexander decided to visit two mutilated Bulgarians in the hospital set up near his quarters. He also invited the British military attaché to come along and "admire the work" of his government's Turkish "protégés."⁴ By the time of the royal arrival, one of the mutilated, his head having been split open by a Turkish saber, had died. His widow was grieving at his side.

That same day Alexander wrote to his beloved Katia that part of the British Mediterranean fleet had received an order to move closer to the Dardanelles and Constantinople. The British government feared Russian designs on Constantinople and the vital straits, the Bosporus and Dardanelles, leading from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. (For a picture of the Islamic Great Mosque on the Bosphorus, see this link.)

Two months earlier, Disraeli (now a "swine" according to the Tsar⁵) had threatened to go to war if Constantinople or the Straits were endangered. Having witnessed continued Russian expansion in Central Asia, in spite of earlier promises, Disraeli and Queen Victoria were wary of Alexander's new assurances regarding Constantinople. And indeed some of the Tsar's advisers recommended the establishment of Constantinople as a "free city." Dostoevsky had gone even further when in the spring of 1877 he had written that "Constantinople must be ours."⁶ (See this link for a picture of the Sultan's Palace at Constantinople.)

Despite being near the front, Alexander did not intend to command the Russian troops. Instead, he made his younger brother Nicholas the commander-in-chief. He, the Tsar, was to be a spectator, and hopefully an inspiration for his men. He called himself a "brother of mercy"⁷ (nurses were referred to as "sisters of mercy"), and when he visited the hospitals he told the doctors and nurses to carry on as if he were not there. Once again, as had happened more frequently early in his reign, he and others could see him as the benevolent, loving Tsar looking out for the welfare of his subjects. Although he was eager to cross the Danube and set up quarters closer to his troops who were pushing forward in Bulgaria, he temporarily allowed his brother to dissuade him from doing so.

At first the news was good. A week after his arrival, he wrote to Katia that the initial crossing of the Danube at Simnitza and the securing of Sistova had only cost the Russians a few hundred lives, whereas he had feared losing at least ten thousand. After receiving a favorable telegram from one of his advancing generals, he would frequently read it to his staff and some of his soldiers, who often greeted the news with "hurrahs" and thanksgiving services. With perhaps as much anticipation as for these military dispatches, Alexander awaited letters or telegrams from Katia. His passion and love for her was as strong as ever. At the beginning of the previous year when she was five months pregnant, he wrote to her as follows: "I enjoyed our love-making madly, and am still all steeped in it. You are so tempting, it is impossible to resist! There is no word for this delirium."⁸ The day before that, she had written to him that she could not be without his "fountain," which she loved so.⁹Now at the front, he longed to hear of her and their children.--George (or Gogo as they called him) was five and Olga (or Oly) three and a half; another boy, Boris, born a year earlier, had died soon after birth.

As the year went on, his letters to Katia reflected the changing fortunes of the Russian army and his changing locations in Bulgaria. He frequently mentioned Plevna, a Bulgarian town some forty miles southwest of Simnitza. There the Russians were twice repulsed by Turkish forces. Many young Russian soldiers with their bayonets affixed to their outdated rifles lost their lives in these attacks. And in September, although aided by the Rumanians who were now pressed into a more active role, the Russians were again repulsed and suffered about 16,000 casualties.

Despite some victories to counterbalance the defeats at Plevna, the war was not yet the rout that many Russians had expected. Some of the Russian deficiencies included the use of old-fashioned artillery, as well as rifles, failures in the organization of supplies and medical treatment, and a poor and disunified leadership. The presence of the Tsar in