Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/355

Rh years, and his term of banishment would have expired on the 9th of next September. He had begun to make arrangements for returning to Russia, and had already sent his wife and his three children back to his relatives in the province of Kharkóf. He was devotedly attached to them, and soon after their departure he grew lonely and low-spirited, and showed that he felt very deeply his separation from them. To this reason for despondency must also be added anxiety with regard to the means of subsistence. Although, at one time, a rather wealthy landed proprietor, Prince Kropótkin, during his long period of exile in Siberia, had expended almost his whole fortune; so that on the day of his death his entire property did not amount to three hundred rubles [$150]. At the age of forty-five, therefore, he was compelled, for the first time, seriously to consider the question how he should live and support his family—a question which was the more difficult to answer for the reason that a scientific man, in Russia, cannot count upon earning a great deal in the field of literature, and Prince Kropótkin was not fitted for anything else. While under the disheartening influence of these considerations he received, moreover, several telegrams from his relatives which he misinterpreted. Whether he committed suicide as a result of sane deliberation, or whether a combination of circumstances superinduced acute mental disorder, none who were near him at the moment of his death can say." Eastern Review, No. 34, St. Petersburg, August 21, 1886.

Of course the editor of the Eastern Review was not allowed by the censor to say even one last kind word of the innocent man who had been driven to self-destruction by injustice and exile; but I will say—and say it with all my heart—that in Prince Kropótkin's death Russia lost an honest man, a cultivated scholar, a true patriot, and a most gallant gentleman.

To me perhaps the most attractive and sympathetic of the Tomsk exiles was the Russian author Felix Volkhófski, who was banished to Siberia for life in 1878, upon the charge of "belonging to a society that intends, at a more or less remote time in the future, to overthrow the existing form of government." He was about thirty-eight years of age at the time I made his acquaintance, and was a man of