Smurny we are not told; but we do know that when he left the steamer to become a gardener's assistant, he pursued his studies whenever and wherever he had the chance. At the age of fifteen, indeed, his thirst for learning induced him to present himself at the gates of the University of Kazan, the great Volgan seminary, where Tolstoi had been educated forty years earlier, in the naïve belief that instruction of all sorts was to be had there by anyone for the simple asking. "I was mistaken, it appeared," he observes with pathetic sarcasm, "so I entered a biscuit factory at three roubles (6s.) a month." He has related his experiences of this grinding slavery in a subterranean "stone cage" in that powerful story, "Twenty-Six of Us and one Other."[1]
"It was a grievous evil life we lived within those thick walls.… We rose at five o'clock in the morning without having had our sleep out, and stupid and indifferent at six o'clock we were sitting at the table to make biscuits from dough already prepared for us by our comrades while we were still sleeping.… Our master called us niggers, and gave us rotten entrails for dinner instead of butcher's meat." No wonder he calls this drudgery "the hardest work I ever experienced."
And here there is a blank in our biographical record—a blank, however, which may, partially, be
- ↑ No. 2 of the present collection.
