During the raids of January, 1898, I was arrested, not in Nikolayev but on the estate of a wealthy landowner, Sokovnin, where Shvigovsky had found a job as a gardener. I had stopped off there on the way from Yanovka to Nikolayev with a large brief-case filled with manuscripts, drawings, letters, and all manner of other “illegal” material. Shvigovsky hid the dangerous packages for the night in a hole, along with cabbages; and at sunrise, when he was going out to plant his trees, he took it out again to turn it over to me for our work. It was just at that very moment that the police suddenly invaded the place. Shvigovsky managed to drop the package behind a water-barrel, when he was in the hall, and whispered to the housekeeper, who gave us our dinner under supervision of the police, to take it away from there and hide it. The old woman decided that the best thing was to bury it under the snow in the garden. We were quite sure that the papers would never get into the hands of our enemies. When spring came the snow melted away, but a fresh crop of green grass covered the package, which had swollen somewhat with the spring rains.
We were still in prison. It was summer. A workman was cutting the grass in the garden when two of his boys who were playing there stumbled on the package and gave it to their father. And he, in turn, took it to the landowner, who was so terrified at the sight of it that he went to Nikolayev at once and turned it over to the chief of the secret police. The handwriting on the manuscripts was evidence against many of our people.
The old prison in Nikolayev had no decent accommodation for political prisoners, especially for so many of them. I was put into the same cell with a young bookbinder named Yavitch. The cell was a very large one; it could hold about thirty, but there was no furniture of any sort, and it had very little heat. There was a big square opening in the door that looked out on an open corridor leading straight into the courtyard. The January frosts were very bitter. A straw mattress was spread on the floor for us to sleep on at night, and was taken away at six o’clock in the morning. It was torture to get up and dress ourselves. Yavitch and I would sit on the floor, in hats, over coats and rubbers, pressing close to one another and leaning against the stove, which was barely warm, and would dream away for two hours or more at a time. It was the happiest part of the day for us. We were not being called up for cross-examination, so we would run back and forth from one corner to the other, trying to keep warm; we talked about the past and hoped wonderingly about our future. I began to teach Yavitch some thing about the sciences. Three weeks passed in this way.
Then there was a change. With all my belongings, I was summoned to the prison office and given over to two tall gendarmes, who drove me by horse to a prison at Kherson. It was a building even older than the other. My cell was roomy, but it had only a narrow window that did not open, and was protected by heavy iron bars through which little light could enter. My isolation was absolute and hopeless. There was no walking, nor were there any neighbors. I couldn’t see anything through my window, which had been entirely sealed up for the winter. I got no parcels from outside, and I had no tea or sugar. Prisoner’s stew was given to me once a day, for dinner. A ration of rye bread with salt was breakfast and supper. I had long discussions with myself as to whether I should increase my morning portion at the expense of the evening one. The morning arguments in favor of an increase seemed quite senseless and criminal at night; at supper-time, I hated the person who had treated himself at breakfast. I didn’t have a change of linen. For three months I had to wear the same underwear, and I had no soap. The vermin there were eating me alive. I would set myself to taking one thousand, one hundred and eleven steps on the diagonal. That was my nineteenth year. The solitude was unbroken, worse than any I ever experienced afterward, although I served time in nearly twenty prisons. I didn’t have even a book, a piece of paper or a pencil. The cell was never aired. The only way I could gauge the comparative purity of the air was by the grimace that twisted the face of the assistant warden when he sometimes visited me.
Biting off a piece of the prison bread, I would compose verses while I walked on the diagonal. I turned the populist song Dubinushka into a proletarian Machinushka, and I composed a revolutionary Kamarinsky. Although they were most mediocre, these verses became very popular later on. They are reprinted in the song-books even to-day. There were times, however, when I was sick with loneliness. And on such occasions I would be exaggeratedly firm with myself and count out another one thousand, one hundred and eleven steps in shoes already worn out.
At the end of the third month, when a straw-filled bag, prison-bread, and lice were the fixed elements of existence, as much so as day and night, one evening the guards brought me a great bundle of things from that other, utterly fantastic world; there were fresh linen, covers and a pillow, white bread, tea, sugar, ham, canned foods, apples, oranges — yes, big bright-colored oranges! Even to-day, after thirty-one years, I list all these marvellous things with emotion, and I even pull myself up for having forgotten the jar of jam, the soap and the comb for my hair. “Your mother sent them,” said the assistant warden. And little as I knew about reading the thoughts of people in those days, I could tell from his tone that he had been bribed.
A little while later, I was taken on a steamer to Odessa, where I was put into solitary confinement in a prison built only a few years before, and the last word in technical equipment. After Nikolayev and Kherson, the Odessa prison seemed a perfect place. Tapping, notes, “telephone,” and shouting through windows — in other words, communication service — were continuous. I tapped my verses written at Kherson to my neighbors, and they sent me news in return. By way of the window, Shvigovsky managed to tell me of the discovery of the brief-case, so that I had no trouble in avoiding the trap that Lieutenant-Colonel Dremlyuga set for me. At that time, I must explain, we had not yet begun to refuse to give evidence, as we did a few years later.
The prison was overcrowded after the thoroughgoing spring arrests. On March 1st, 1898, while I was still at Kherson, the first congress of the Social Democratic Party met at Minsk and drew up its constitution. There were nine members there, and most of them were caught in a wave of arrests that followed their meeting. A few months afterward, no one talked about the congress any more. But what followed it affected the history of man. The manifesto adopted there limned the future of political struggle as follows: “The farther we go to the East of Europe, the more cowardly and dishonest, in a political sense, do we find the bourgeoisie; and the greater, correspondingly, becomes the political and cultural task confronting the proletariat.” There is a certain historical piquancy in the fact that the author of the manifesto was the notorious Peter Struve, who later became the leader of liberalism, and still later the publicist of the clerical and monarchist reaction.
During the first few months of my stay in the prison in Odessa, I received no books from the outside, and so I had to be content with the prison library, which was made up mostly of conservative historical and religious magazines covering several years. I studied them insatiably, and learned through them to know all the sects and heresies of ancient and modern times, all the advantages of the orthodox church service, and the best arguments against Catholicism, Protestantism, Tolstoyism, and Darwinism. “The Christian consciousness,” I read in the Orthodox Review, “loves true sciences, including natural sciences, as the intellectual kinsmen of faith.” The miracle of Balaam’s ass, who entered into an argument with a prophet, could not be disproved even from the point of view of natural science. “Isn’t it a fact, for instance, that parrots and even canary-birds can talk?” This argument by the archbishop Nikanor occupied my mind for several days, even in my dreams.
The investigations of devils and their chief, the Prince of Darkness, and of their dark kingdom, were constantly amazing to me, and diverted my rationalist mind with their codified stupidities of thousands of years. The exhaustive description and study of Paradise, with detailed bits about its location and inner structure, ended melancholically with: “The precise location of paradise is not known.” And, at tea, at dinner, and during my walks, I repeated this sentence: “Regarding the geographical longitude of the felicitous paradise, there is no precise information.” I seized on every opportunity to indulge in theological bickering with the police sergeant Miklin, a greedy, malicious fellow and an inveterate liar, who was extremely pious and well read in the holy books. He used to hum hymns as he hurried from cell to cell, his dangling keys ringing out as he climbed the iron stairs.
“Only for one single word, ‘Christ’s mother’ instead of ‘God’s mother,’” he instructed me, “the heretic Anus’s belly burst.”
“And why are the bellies of the heretics to-day still intact?” I retorted. “These are . . . these are different times,” he replied, in an offended tone.
Through my sister, who had come from the country, I managed to get four copies of the Bible in different languages. So I read the Gospels, verse by verse, with the help of the little knowledge of German and French that I had acquired in school, and side by side with this a parallel reading in English and Italian. In a few months, I made excellent progress in this way. I must admit, however, that my linguistic talents are very mediocre. Even now I do not know a single foreign language well, although I stayed for some time in various European countries.
For their meeting with relatives, the prisoners were transferred to narrow wooden cages separated from the visitors by a double grating. When my father came to see me for the first time, he imagined that I was always kept in that narrow box and was so overcome at the thought that he could not speak. In answer to my questions, he only moved his bloodless lips in silence. Never will I forget his face. My mother came forewarned, and was much calmer.
Echoes of what was taking place in the outside world reached us in bits. The South African war hardly touched us. We were still provincials in the full sense of the word. We were inclined to interpret the struggle between the Boers and the English chiefly as an instance of the inevitable victory of large capital over sm............