Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/217

Rh of Education in Poland, Dr. B. Miklaszewski, who had also been a political prisoner in Russia, was then the editor of The Polish Chemist and, in printing my articles, placed under my signature the rather unusual address of "Political Prison, Harbin." It is just possible that I am the only scientist in the world who has had scientific works published with such an address.

I read much during this time and, among other volumes, I carefully studied two of the works of the remarkable self-made scholar, N. A. Morozoff, who attained to great learning after having spent twenty-four years in a solitary cell of the political prison at Schlusselburg and who quitted the prison in 1905, taking with him only a single bundle, containing three thick manuscripts, The New Explanation of the Periodical Law of Chemical Elements, The Astronomical Basis of the Apocalypse and a collection of verses full of hope and the bright joy of life. These volumes were very interesting and thrilling, not only from a scientific but also from a psychological standpoint, as the works of a man absolutely cut off from the turmoil of life, immersed in his own thoughts and in a sort of mystic, prophetic ecstasy.

Very soon I came to understand the meaning of solitude to this man. I can now myself compare two kinds of isolation which I have learned to know through actual experience. In 1920 I spent four long winter months in the unbroken solitude of a Siberian forest, hiding from the Bolsheviks and lying in wait for the spring under the roots of a great tree overturned by a storm. In those surroundings, left alone with nothing but my own moral and physical forces, I felt strongly the quick recrudescence of the primitive man—hunter, fisherman and warrior—whose every nerve responds to the power and beauty of Nature and who, at the same time, sees at