Page:Memoirs of a revolutionist volume 1.djvu/10

 vi MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST

what his fellow-men have thought of him and said about him.

The author of the autobiography before us is not pre-occupied with his own capacities, and consequently describes no struggle to gain recognition. Still less does he care for the opinions of his fellow-men about himself ; what others have thought of him, he dismisses with a single word.

There is in this work no gazing upon one's own image. The author is not one of those who willingly speak of themselves ; when he does so, it is reluctantly and with a certain shyness. There is here no confes- sion that divulges the inner self, no sentimentality, and no cynicism. The author speaks neither of his sins nor of his virtues ; he enters into no vulgar intimacy with his reader. He does not say when he fell in love, and he touches so little upon his relations with the other sex, that he even omits to mention his marriage, and it is only incidentally we learn that he is married at all. That he is a father, and a very loving one, he finds time to mention just once in the rapid review of the last sixteen years of his life.

He is more anxious to give the psychology of his contemporaries than of himself ; and one finds in his book the psychology of Kussia : the official Kussia and the masses underneath Kussia struggling forward and Kussia stagnant. He strives to tell the story of his contemporaries rather than his own ; and consequently, the record of his life contains the history of Kussia during his lifetime, as well as that of the labour move-