Page:Memoirs of a revolutionist volume 1.djvu/13

 PREFACE IX

every heart will be touched by them. The landscapes, the story of the unusually intense love between the two brothers all this is pure idyll.

Side by side there is, unhappily, plenty of sorrow and suffering : the harshness in the family life, the cruel treatment of the serfs, and the narrow-minded- ness and heartlessness which are the ruling stars of men's destinies.

There is variety and there are dramatic cata- strophes : life at Court and life in prison ; life in the highest Eussian society, by the side of emperors and grand dukes, and life in poverty, with the working proletariat, in London and in Switzerland. There are changes of costume as in a drama ; the chief actor having to appear during the day in fine dress in the Winter Palace, and in the evening in peasant's clothes in the suburbs, as a preacher of revolution. And there is, too, the sensational element that belongs to the novel. Although nobody could be simpler in tone and style than Kropotkin, nevertheless parts of his narrative, from the very nature of the events he has to tell, are more intensely exciting than anything in those novels which aim only at being sensational. One reads with breathless interest the preparations for the escape from the hospital of the fortress of St. Paul and St. Peter, and the bold execution of the plan.

Few men have moved, as Kropotkin did, in all layers of society ; few know all these layers as he does. What a picture ! Kropotkin as a little boy with curled hair, in a fancy-dress costume, standing by the Emperor