Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/110

98 exploited. And when the floods of the Vistula desolate the land, Madam Gurko travels about the country distributing rubles from the imperial treasury by hundreds of thousands, to the peasants, who with the benefaction receive a recommendation to be grateful to the Tzar, their father—a recommendation which often bears fruit.

Exile to Siberia is another powerful weapon. There is no doubt that the flower of a whole generation, the preceding Polish generation, almost all of those most distinguished for courage, intellect, and enthusiasm, died there. Those who did return, have often lost something of their clearness of vision. They have not infrequently remained at the point where they stood when they left Poland. I may mention two writers as examples, both on the editorial staff of the Gazeta Polska, Haenckle, who, chained with four others to an iron bar, was compelled to travel on foot to Irkutsk during two winters and one summer, and was there for ten years, and Boguslawski, who was there for the same length of time. They are clever writers, but confirmed romanticists; modern men they will never be.

And the terrible uncertainty of the law is in itself destructive. A few weeks since a young man returned from a two years' banishment. His offence was that the day after Apuchtin received the box on the ear from the angry student already spoken of, he had sent twenty-five rubles to a newspaper for a charitable object with the words, "To commemorate a happy event." It did him no good that it could be proved that his brother had had a son born to him the day before—they would not believe that this was the event to which he had referred—he was sent away. Physically he had suffered nothing. He returned as so many Siberian exiles do, fresh and rosy; but he had become prudent, very conservative in all his utterances, and would not allow himself to criticise his sentence.

When the well-known Szymanowski, poet and publisher of the Courier Warszavsky, lay on his death-bed recently, I visited him. He told me of the fright he had received when a short time before some one had rung his door-bell in the night. He was reminded of the night ten years before,