Calligraphy Lesson (18 page)

Once, in a weak moment she writes, “I remember your green lamp, your eyes, beard, your books, your pipe. I see you filling it and blowing smoke at the ceiling. If only I could be with you now. I blame myself for upsetting you instead of being affectionate when we were together.”

At this time Lydia's mother was living in Lausanne, sending her money and begging her to return to Switzerland. Lydia wouldn't hear of it. “I'm having a hard time, but that's exactly why I'll stay here. To spite her!
Leaving, giving up—that's admitting defeat. I'll fight on!”

The steady flow of letters with Fritz helped her in this struggle.

In the letters, Fritz gave Lydia full support, but in his diary he was more honest with himself, revealing his doubts.

“There's theory and then there's practice. In theory, of course, I'm for sexual equality and independence of partners. I'd even sign that marriage contract of ours again. But how far we are from real life! How painful it is to live apart! I can't go on this way. It's night. At night I'm no fighter but the most ordinary fellow. I want a family, a home, a child—only I'm afraid to say it openly. Then, after a sleepless night and a moment's drifting off before dawn, morning comes. And I take myself in hand. Again I'm ready to push ahead. And my Lydia helps me. Our letters give us both strength.” A few days later there's another entry on what keeps haunting him. “By day there are my patients. They need me. Then there are meetings, speeches, the city council, time with the workers—I write an article—but in the evening, at night, I sink into a funk. I want so much to press her to me, embrace her, make love to her!”

And again he's of two minds. “Lydia and I promised each other we'd bear together the whole weight of our common cause, to renounce our petty world for the sake of a greater one, our personal life for the sake of humanity. And I will keep my word.”

Their long separation took its toll. The question of faithfulness crops up.

“The only important thing is whether you love me,” Lydia claims. “Because while you love me, I need you to be faithful. But if you fall out of love with me, then you're free. I won't need you to be faithful any longer.”

They kept writing about how they couldn't wait to see each other and finally, in June 1903, after working a year in the backwoods of Smolensk, Lydia traveled to her husband in Switzerland. However, subsequent letters
suggest they both weren't exactly ecstatic about this long awaited tryst.

En route to Zurich, she sent him a post card from Moscow. “It's so wonderful I'm on the way to see you! That's the greatest happiness I can imagine!” Departing Zurich in the fall she writes, “My darling, why are our meetings filled more with sadness than joy? I'm despicable. Just like that I can turn, without knowing why, become vulgar, rigid, even cruel, and all this towards those most close to me. I hurt them for no reason and then I regret it and cry. Forgive me, my beloved! Forgive me!”

Fritz notes in his diary, August 1903: “How can that be? To love someone from afar is one thing, but to love a real person right next to you, that's something else. It seems like we're very close in our letters, but when we meet we draw apart. Why is that? I don't understand. It pains me. We're better off in letters than in real life. Maybe that's why she didn't stay in Zurich and left for a resort in Marbach? Maybe her health was only an excuse? I'm beginning to think we're actually both afraid of our meetings. We take refuge in our letters. They're our escape from the impossibility of being either together or apart.”

In the fall Lydia returned to Russia, now settling in as a local doctor in the village of Aleksandrovo, 12 versts from the town of Sudogda in Vladimir Oblast.

The impressions of the new locale and work hardly differed from what was in her letter from Krapivnya. “The outpatient department is past description—cramped, dirty, squalid. I'm here alone for 150 villages in the area. I can't sleep at night for the hordes of bloodthirsty bugs. A chicken that flew in the window broke the mirror so now I don't even know what I look like. Maybe that's for the best. They don't trust me. An old woman treats a hernia in the old way by biting people. Vodka takes care of all other ills. They pour it on wounds and sores and in the eyes for trachoma.”

Fritz complained of the difficulty of getting the Swiss workers interested in Socialism, to which she replies, “Everything you say about your workers is pure Eldorado compared to what's going on here. It's hard enough for an educated person to go out among the people, but if it's the Russian people, then that requires eternal optimism. And it's especially difficult for someone who's lived so long in Europe.”

Each new letter brought fresh doubts about herself and the wisdom of her choice. “I keep asking myself if I'm capable at all of practicing medicine. I sit by myself and cry my eyes out. My sole consolation is writing you about it. My beloved, if it weren't for you I couldn't go on.”

In October an accident occurred for which she blamed herself and which strongly affected how the peasants saw her. “I poisoned someone. An 80 year old man got drunk and since the liquor store was already closed and you couldn't get your hands on vodka anywhere, he drank up the vial of medicine I had given him. Atropine eye drops. Tomorrow's the funeral. Now his children and the whole village hate me. They stood under my window, screaming curses and threats. Again they're all getting drunk and again at night I'll try to fall asleep and tremble from fear.”

In another letter she told how a drunk was pestering her and how she had to grab an ax in self-defense. “He sobered up in a flash. But now I have to go to sleep with an ax by my bed because the lock's loose.”

Again she's plagued by uncertainty. “I remember how I dreamed in Zurich of the great goal of working among the people for the people, of sacrificing myself for them. This isn't the same people they meant when they said Socialism lives in the heart of our people. So where is this Russian people. Take me to them!”

After working a year and a half in Vladimir Oblast, Lydia decided she must dedicate herself fully to the revolution.

“The more frustrated I am in what I'm doing, the more my hatred grows.
It's impossible to create anything here. It's all a waste. One must first destroy this system which keeps people from living as humans. These people are like animals because they don't know another way. Life in Russia corrupts them. You can't survive here without the basest instincts. Remember we studied this! It's natural selection. Here only the lowlife and parasites survive, the blockheads and boors. We need to alter life itself, down to the bare bones. This whole rotten system has to go. Yes, I hate this unjust world. Now my direction is clear!”

Thus, Lydia resolved to become a professional revolutionary.

“My darling,” she writes in late 1904. “Once again I feel strength and confidence in myself and my future. All the hesitations and depression are in the past. I often revisit in memory our Venice and the countless times I asked myself if I acted wisely then. And now I'm happy I made the right choice. And I know, my beloved, that you'll support me.”

The following year, with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War and growing mass restlessness, Lydia decided she must take her place among those leading the Russian people against tsarism. She traveled to Switzerland, home to the headquarters of all the radical parties, and on the road from Petersburg sent Fritz an ebullient letter. “There's revolution in the air at last! We, the entire Russian intelligentsia, believe and hope the Japanese will give it to the Russians. A defeat will shake the people's trust in the government. All around us is discontent and a weakening State. Great moments in history come only once in a lifetime. Glorious revolutions only once in a century. What bliss to live to see it, to prepare it, to be part of it! Long live the revolution!”

She was closest to the Socialist Revolutionary Party and spent almost all of 1905 in Geneva, renting a room in the very same building that housed their headquarters. She met Party leaders and waited impatiently to return to her homeland with an important assignment. She frequented
the circle of known revolutionaries, was friends with the radicals Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Vera Figner, and also got to know Vladimir Burtsev, activist and scholar, who would expose the double agent Yevno Azef. Burtsev really impressed her and she didn't suspect the role he'd play in her fate. She was 33. She was happy to find her life's purpose. Her letters to Zurich expressed this delight in her upcoming work and a twinge of sadness that she hadn't as yet been sent to Russia.

Finally, when the revolution was already losing steam, she traveled to Saratov, assigned to resurrect the crippled Party organization and oversee the spread of revolutionary propaganda. She was also to supervise the preparation for land expropriations and peasant revolts. The Party directives called for immediate initiation of local riots, which would boil over into a full-blown revolution. From 1906 to 1908, Lydia was the Party representative in the Saratov province.

At first her letters from this place on the Volga were optimistic. Party membership inspired her. “It's so important to feel yourself a part of something big, important, and meaningful. I'm happy as I never was before. If I pay for this for my life, that's a small price to pay for what I now feel.”

The chance to be rid of one's ego, to give it up, to meld into a great communal endeavor, gave meaning to her existence. She thought she had found what she was striving for all these years. “My family is my comrades. No matter where I am, I'm part of one great family—the Party. Most likely in this sense of belonging, of kinship, I've finally discovered what I was looking for all my life.”

As had Fritz, she compared this experience to a religious ecstasy. “Yes, indeed we truly resemble first century Christians—the same firm faith in the approaching, joyous salvation of the world, the same readiness to sacrifice, the same denial of the ego, of the philistine, of material things, of
children, of everything that detracts from the grand idea. The difference being that religion is a lie and revolution, the truth!”

In a letter of 2 May, 1906, she described a boat trip along the Volga for an International Workers' Day picnic on an island. “We returned at night. There was a huge moon, and my darling, I suddenly remembered our Venice and that moon of ours! And what an aching sadness welled up in me. I burst into tears. My comrades began to make fun of me and we broke into revolutionary songs. I tingled from tip to toe! My beloved! We're so far from one another! And so close!”

At the end of May she reported excitedly about an assassination attempt on the Saratov prison's warden. But in her next letter she sounded pensive. The accused, a 17-year-old apprentice to a metal worker in the railroad shops where Lydia's comrades distributed proclamations, had failed. “Shatalov, the warden, recovered and got promoted and went to work for Prime Minister Stolypin. The prison has a new warden. They hung the boy. So now I can't stop thinking—is this why that child was born and lived out his 17 years? He's truly a hero and won't be forgotten by progressive Russia. One day they'll erect a monument to him, but I can't bear to think of his last moments before the gallows. And what if he repented of his act? How terrible it was then for him to die!”

Still, in the following letter, Lydia cast off all her doubts. Her conscience troubled her for being a crybaby and that her faith was shaken. Once again she threw herself into revolutionary work. In the summer of 1906, she was sent by the Party to spread propaganda in the Atkarsk district of Saratov province. She was able to regulate the publication and distribution of leaflets and then became involved in the delivery of weapons and the organization of expropriations.

On 1 October, 1906, Lydia, euphoric, writes to Zurich from Atkarsk about the destruction of landed estates. “Expropriations going on
throughout the whole province! Our people are the most marvelous on earth! Its soul is as close to Kropotkin's anarchism as they come. Total disregard for the law, no understanding whatsoever of this word. The expropriations proceed so simply, with the effortlessness of those who have no compunctions when it comes to property, theirs and others, only communist instincts.”

But soon after, her disenchantment deepened. By the minute she awaited the start of a universal revolution. Her task was to organize militant peasant divisions and stir up revolts, but not only didn't the revolution take hold, on the contrary, it burned out. Prime Minister Stolypin instilled order with his ruthless measures and formulated reforms. Because of the work of double agents, they arrested revolutionaries en masse.

“The snow's gone,” she writes in March 1907, “but instead of revolts, they're sowing. And my heart tells me that this year there won't be any revolution! Our program—a call for local uprisings—that's one thing. But it seems peasant life is another story. The moment the sowing or harvest of the crop begins, the peasant loses all revolutionary zeal. Everyone, young and old, is out in the fields. All they really care about is daily survival, the here and now, not the visionary socialist republic of tomorrow.”

She began to reflect on Russian women, simple peasants, whom it was necessary to awaken to the struggle against tsarism. “I compare myself with these peasant women. They have no time to think about saving mankind, no time to worry about the people's happiness. They have to save their own family, their children, to think about how to feed them. I want to invest all of me into trying to free them, but a doubt creeps in—what if they don't need any part of me altogether? What sad thoughts come to me in these sleepless nights.”