27

THE final matter to keep Nekhlyudov in Petersburg was the case of the sectarians whose petition to the Tsar he intended to hand to an officer of his old regiment, Bogatyrev, an aide-de-camp. He went to see him in the morning and found him at home having lunch, though about to leave the house. Bogatyrev was a short thick-set man, endowed with extraordinary physical strength (he could bend a horseshoe); a kindly, honest, straightforward man of liberal views even. Yet in spite of these qualities he was an intimate at Court, devoted to the Tsar and the Imperial family, and by some strange means able, while in those exalted circles, to see only the good side and to have no share in anything evil and corrupt. He never criticized people or legislative measures, but either kept silent or said whatever he had to say in a loud bold voice, almost shouting it, and often laughing in an equally boisterous manner as he spoke. And he did this, not for diplomatic reasons but because such was his nature.

‘Ah, that’s splendid! I’m so glad you called. Would you like some lunch? Do sit down. Superb beefsteak! I always begin and end with something substantial. Ha! ha! ha! Have a glass of wine, anyway,’ he cried, pointing to a decanter of red wine. ‘I was thinking about you. I will hand in the petition. I will give it into His Majesty’s own hands. You can count on that. Only it occurred to me – hadn’t you better see Toporov first?’

Nekhlyudov frowned at the mention of Toporov.

‘Everything depends on him. He would be consulted in any event. And it might be he would meet your wishes himself.’

‘If you advise it, I will call on him.’

‘Good! Well, how does Petersburg agree with you?’ shouted Bogatyrev. ‘Tell me, eh?’

‘I feel I am getting hypnotized,’ said Nekhlyudov.

‘Hypnotized?’ Bogatyrev echoed, and laughed boisterously. ‘Sure you won’t have anything? Well, just as you please.’ He wiped his moustaches with a napkin. ‘So you will call on him, then? Eh? If he refuses, then let me have it and I will hand it in tomorrow as ever is,’ he shouted, and getting up from the table crossed himself energetically, apparently as unconsciously as he had wiped his mouth, and began to buckle on his sword. ‘Now good-bye, I must be off.’

‘We can go out together,’ said Nekhlyudov, and shaking Bogatyrev’s broad strong hand he parted from him on the doorstep with the pleasant feeling one always has at contact with something so unselfconsciously fresh and healthy.

Although he expected no good result to come of his visit, Nekhlyudov followed Bogatyrev’s advice and went to see Toporov, on whom the case of the sectarians depended.

The post occupied by Toporov involved an incongruity of purpose which only someone obtuse and lacking in moral sense could fail to notice. Toporov possessed both these negative qualities. The contradiction inherent in the post he occupied lay in this, that it was his duty to uphold and defend by secular means, not excluding violence, a Church which, by its own definition, had been established by God Himself and could not be shaken by the gates of hell or by any human agency. This divine and absolutely unshakeable, godlike institution had to be sustained and protected by a human institution,¹ over which Toporov and his officials presided. Toporov did not see (or did not want to see) this incompatibility, and was therefore very seriously concerned lest some Romish priest, Protestant minister or other sectarian destroy the Church against which the gates of hell could not prevail. Like all men who lack the fundamental religious sense which recognizes the equality and brotherhood of man, Toporov was quite certain that the common people were vastly different from himself and needed the something that he could very well do without. At the bottom of his heart he really believed in nothing, and found such a state very convenient and agreeable, but fearing that the people might some day arrive at the same state he considered it his sacred duty (as he called it) to try to save them from it.

Just as it says in a certain cookery book that lobsters like being boiled alive, so he was firmly convinced – not figuratively, as in the cookery book, but literally – and was wont to declare that the people liked to be kept in a state of superstition.

His attitude towards the religion he upheld was like that of a poultry-keeper to the offal he feeds his fowls on: offal is quite disgusting but fowls like it and eat it, therefore they must be fed on offal.

Of course, all that worship of the ikons of Iberia, Kazan and Smolensk is gross idolatry, but the people like it and believe in it, and therefore the superstition must be encouraged. This was how Toporov reasoned, not seeing that if the people like superstition, it is only because there have always been, and still are, cruel men like himself, who, being themselves enlightened, use their enlightenment, not as they should, to help others to struggle out of their dark ignorance, but to plunge them still deeper into it.

When Nekhlyudov entered the waiting-room Toporov was in his office talking with an abbess, a lively aristocrat who was spreading and supporting the Orthodox Faith in Western Russia among the Uniates who had been forcibly converted to the Orthodox Church.

A secretary in the waiting-room inquired Nekhlyudov’s business and when he heard that Nekhlyudov proposed to hand in a petition from the sectarians to the Emperor asked if he might look through it. Nekhlyudov gave it to him and the official took it into the study. The nun in her tall head-dress, flowing veil and black train trailing behind her left the study and went out clasping a topaz rosary in her white hands with their well-tended nails. Nekhlyudov was still not asked to go in. Toporov was reading the petition and shaking his head. He was unpleasantly surprised by its clear and emphatic wording.

‘If this should come into His Majesty’s hands it might raise unpleasant questions and cause misunderstanding,’ he thought as he finished reading the petition. And laying it on the table he rang and ordered Nekhlyudov to be shown in.

He remembered the case of these sectarians: he had had a petition from them before. The substance of the matter was that they were Christians who had fallen away from Orthodoxy and had first been exhorted, then tried in a court of law but finally acquitted. After that, the bishop and the governor had decided, on the plea that their marriages were illegal, to separate husbands, wives and children, and send them into exile. What these fathers and wives were now asking was that they should not be separated. Toporov remembered the first time the case had come to his notice. He had then hesitated, having half a mind to quash the sentence. But there could be no harm in confirming the arrangement to scatter the various members of these sectarian peasant families to different parts; whereas to allow them to remain where they were might have a bad effect on the rest of the population, in the sense that they, too, might defect from Orthodoxy. Moreover, the case was evidence of the bishop’s zeal, and so he had decided to let things proceed on the lines laid out.

But now, with an advocate such as Nekhlyudov, who had influential connexions in Petersburg, the affair might be presented to the Emperor as an act of cruelty, or find its way into the foreign newspapers, and therefore he made a quick and unexpected decision.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, with the air of a very busy man, continuing to stand after greeting Nekhlyudov, and passing at once to the business in hand.

‘I am familiar with this case. As soon as I saw the names I remembered the whole unfortunate affair,’ he went on, taking up the petition and showing it to Nekhlyudov. ‘And I am most grateful to you for reminding me of it. The provincial authorities have been a little over-zealous – ’

Nekhlyudov was silent, looking with distaste at the pale immobile mask of a face before him.

‘– and I shall give orders to have this measure revoked and the families reinstated in their homes.’

‘So that I need not present the petition?’ said Nekhlyudov.

‘Most assuredly not. I give you my word,’ he said with especial emphasis on the ‘I’, evidently quite convinced that his honesty, his word were the best of guarantees. ‘Better still, I will write a note at once. Please take a seat.’

He went up to the table and began to write. Nekhlyudov continued to stand, looking down on the narrow bald skull, at the hand with its thick blue veins that was swiftly moving the pen, and wondered why he was doing it, why a man who seemed to be so unfeeling in every way should be doing it with such care. What was the reason?

‘There you are,’ said Toporov, sealing the envelope. ‘You may let your clients know,’ he added, compressing his Lips into a semblance of a smile.

‘Why, then, were these people made to suffer?’ Nekhlyudov asked, taking the envelope.

Toporov raised his head and smiled, as though gratified by Nekhlyudov’s query.

‘That I cannot tell you. All I can say is that the interests of the people over which we stand guard are of such great importance that excess of zeal in matters of religion is not so dangerous or harmful as the over-indifference which is now spreading.’

‘But how is it that in the name of religion the fundamental conditions of morality are violated – families broken up…’

Toporov continued to smile patronizingly, as though finding Nekhlyudov’s remarks very charming. Whatever Nekhlyudov might say, Toporov would have found charming and one-sided, from what he considered the lofty heights and long perspectives of his position as a statesman.

‘That, from the point of view of the private individual, may seem to be the case,’ he said, ‘but to the State it appears in a rather different light. However, I must now bid you goodbye,’ he added, bowing and holding out his hand.

Nekhlyudov pressed it in silence and quickly left the room, regretting that he had taken that hand.

‘The interests of the people! ‘he repeated Toporov’s words. ‘Your own interests, you mean,’ he thought as he left Toporov’s office.

And he ran over in his mind the people he knew who were suffering from the activity of the various institutions for the re-establishment of justice, the support of religion and the education of the masses – the peasant woman punished for selling vodka without a licence, the young fellow for stealing, the tramp for vagrancy, the incendiary for arson, the banker for misappropriation of funds and that unfortunate Lydia Shustova, simply because they might have got some information out of her that they wanted, and the sectarians for violating Orthodoxy, and Gourkevich for desiring a constitution – and he saw with remarkable clarity that all these people had been arrested, locked up or exiled, not in the least because they had transgressed against justice or committed lawless acts but merely because they were an obstacle hindering the officials and the rich from enjoying the wealth they were busy amassing from the people.

And the woman who sold vodka without having a licence, the thief prowling about the town and Lydia Shustova with her proclamations, and the sectarians upsetting superstitions, and Gourkevich desiring a constitution – were all obstacles to this. It seemed perfectly clear to Nekhlyudov, therefore, that all these officials, beginning with his aunt’s husband, the senators and Toporov, down to the petty, neat, orderly gentlemen sitting at desks in the various ministries, were not in the least troubled by the fact that innocent people suffered: their one concern was to get rid of dangerous elements.

Thus the commandment to forgive ten guilty men rather than let one innocent man be condemned was not merely disregarded but, on the contrary, ten who were harmless were punished for the sake of eliminating one dangerous person, just as in cutting a rotten piece out of anything some of the good has to be cut away too.

This explanation of all that took place seemed very simple and clear to Nekhlyudov but its very simplicity and explicitness made him hesitate to accept it. Was it possible that so complicated a phenomenon could have so simple and terrible an explanation? Could it really be that all the talk about justice, goodness, law, religion, God and so on, was nothing but so many words to conceal the grossest self-interest and cruelty?