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# "How could the younger generation have lacked the clear-sightedness, the tact, the heart to grasp all the grandeur, all the power of these brilliant young men, emerging from the ranks of the Guards, these darlings of rank and wealth, leaving their drawing
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/kak-u-molodogo-pokoleniia-nedostalo-iasnovideniia-takta-serdtsa-poniat-vse-velichie-vsiu-silu-etikh-blestiashchikh-iunoshei-vykhodiashchikh-iz-riadov-gvardii-etikh-balovnei-znatnosti-bo/
- Published: 2022-12-15T08:02:14.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:37:23.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Society, People

To be angry that these people appeared in the one estate that had any education, any leisure and any security is senseless. Had these "princes, boyars, voivodes", these statssekretari and colonels not been the first to awake from moral hunger, and had they waited for physical hunger to rouse them, there would have been no grumbling and restless Rudins, nor yet any Bazarovs, slumbering in their "unity of will and knowledge". There would have been, instead, some regimental doctor who starved his soldiers, stealing from their rations and their medicines, and sold Kirsanov's steward certificates of natural death for peasants flogged to death; or some bribe-taking clerk, forever drunk, who would squeeze quarter-roubles out of the peasants and hand his Excellency Kirsanov, governor of the province, his greatcoat and galoshes. Moreover, there would have been neither the Mortal Blow to serfdom, nor anything of all that works beneath the heavy crust of power, undermining the imperial ermine and the quilted dressing gown of the landowner.

It is a blessing that alongside men whose gentlemanly whims consisted of the kennel and the household serfs, of violence and flogging at home, of servility in Saint Petersburg, there were found others whose "whims" consisted in wresting the rod from their hands and winning room to breathe: not the room for reckless dash on a hunting field, but room for the mind and for human life. Whether this whim of theirs was a serious undertaking, a passion, they proved on the gallows, at hard labour... they proved it on returning from Siberia thirty years later."

Alexander Herzen