Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/261

Rh and fifty of them that he had known at Kará only three or four had any education, and that Madam Kutitónskaya's attempt to assassinate Governor Ilyashévich was "a mere crazy freak" — that "she didn't know herself what she did it for." The attentive reader will see that I have had no difficulty in making my choice between such preposterous statements as these and the clear, coherent, and detailed narratives of the political convicts themselves. If my history of the Kará political prison is one-sided, it is simply because the other side either refused to give me information, or was too ignorant to state its own case with any show of plausibility.

How far from the real truth were the statements made to me by officials with regard to the character of the political convicts at Kará, I purpose to show by giving brief biographies of three or four of the men and women who took an active part in the series of events that I have tried to describe, or who were identified with the later history of the political prison. One of the ablest and most distinguished of them was Anna Pávlovna Korbá, whose portrait, made from a photograph taken before her exile, will be found on page 247. She was the daughter of a Russian nobleman named Paul Mengart, and was born in the province of Tver, near Moscow, in 1849. She was carefully educated under the direction of her mother, a cultured and deeply religious woman, and at the early age of eighteen or nineteen she was married to a Swiss gentleman residing in Russia named Victor Korbá. Her beauty and accomplishments made her greatly sought after in society, her husband was wealthy and was proud of her social success, and for a time she lived the life of a woman of the great world. This life, however, could not long satisfy a young girl of bright mind and serious character, and in 1869, when she was only twenty years of age, she made an attempt to fit herself for something better. A school for the higher education of the daughters of the nobility was opened about that time in