becomes my duty to report it to the curator.”

Here Pievakin, losing control of himself, shouted “Spy!” and “Scoundrel!” and darted out of the room.

This happened at a time when the “peasantist” movement, the peaceful, unresisting stage in the history of what is commonly known as Nihilism, was at its height. The educated young generation was in an ecstasy of altruism. It was the period of “going to the people,” when hundreds of well-bred men and women, children of the nobility, would don peasant garb and go to share the life of the tillers of the soil, teaching them to read, talking to them of universal love, liberty and equality. The government punished this “going to the people” with Asiatic severity. Russia has no capital punishment for the slaying of common mortals, the average penalty for murder being about ten years of penal servitude in Siberia; and this penalty the courts were often ordered to impose on absolutely peaceable missionaries, on university students who practically did the same kind of work as that pursued by the “university settlements” in English-speaking countries. There were about one thousand of these propagandists in the political prisons of the empire, and their number was growing. They were kept in solitary confinement in cold, damp cells. Scores of them went insane or died of consumption, scurvy or suicide before their cases came up for trial.

Pievakin’s house was searched by gendarmes, but no “underground” literature was discovered there. He was not arrested, but spies shadowed his movements and about a month after the domiciliary visit he was officially notified by the curator’s office that he was to be transferred to the[19] four-year “progymnasium” of a small town a considerable distance off. This implied that his work was to be restricted to boys of fourteen and less in a town out of the way of “dangerous tendencies.” He grew thin and haggard and a certain look of fright never left his eye. The other instructors at the gymnasium, all except one, and many of his private acquaintance plainly shunned him. He had become one of those people with whom one could not come in contact without attracting the undesirable attention of the police. One of those who were not afraid to be seen in his company was the “truncated cone.” “My crooked back is the only one that does not bend,” the deformed man would joke. The tacit philosophy of his attitude toward the world seemed to be something like this: “You people won’t consider me one of you. I am only a hunchback, something like an elf, and you will take many an unwelcome truth from me which you would resent in one like yourselves. So let 

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