The Story of a Siberian Exile: Followed by A Narrative of Recent Events in Poland
9781465670649
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There is an expression in use in Poland which surpasses all that human eloquence has ever employed to give intensity to despair; it consists of the words ‘we never meet again:’ and thus it is that any political exile, when about to depart for Siberia, takes leave of his family and of his friends; ‘we never meet again!’ for the only way in which an exile could find himself once more among those whom he loves would be for him to meet them in the same place of torment. The conviction is deep that they who are once transported to those regions of pain can quit them no more; that Siberia never relinquishes her prey. For nearly a century she has torn from Poland her most devoted women, her most generous sons. Back to those realms of snow and of blood fly the thoughts of every Pole who inquires into the past fortunes of hisfamily; and when the poet dreams for his country a future which is all liberty and bliss, it is again Siberia which rears herself before his eyes, ready after victory itself still to demand her victims. It is a mysterious and dismal land!—a land ‘from which one returns no more,’ as the Polish peasants say, or, as Hamlet speaks of that other region which Siberia so fatally resembles, it is an ‘undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.’ And yet now and then some one does come back. Sometimes at the accession of a Czar to the throne, an amnesty (which, however incomplete it may be, receives no less the surname of general) sends back to heart-broken families some of those who have not wholly succumbed to pain. At least, this did happen twice in one century; at the accession of Paul I. and of Alexander II.: the Emperor Nicholas never felt a similar weakness. In other cases, very rare ones, and therefore not hard to enumerate, entreaties and prayers backed by some distinguished protection have, after years of persevering efforts, obtained the return of the condemned exile. Finally, we have even seen, reappearing in the light, and among the living, those who, neither waiting nor hoping for an amnesty, whether general or particular, have found, in their own courage and in their own despair, a way of extricating themselves from their horrible fate; but such a phenomenon as this is not to be met with twice in any hundred years. Several of those who have thus returned, like ghosts from the tomb, have afterwards written an account of their sojourn in these desolate places; others again left notes on the spot, which were afterwards to be piously collected; and thus it happens that the literature of Poland possesses a complete collection of the writings of Siberian exiles, a collection already sufficiently large, and which, in spite of the monotony of the subject, certainly is not lacking in interest. Very strange in truth are the adventures of Beniowski, a soldier of Bar, deported to Kamtschatka, organising there among its indigenous savages a vast conspiracy, administering to them an oath of fidelity to the confederation of Bar, passing Behring’s Straits, conquering Madagascar, and coming to offer the sovereignty of it to the French king. A very different fate awaited General Kopec, who was banished some years later to the same district. Submissive, patient, almost serene, during the time of his exile, his mind became clouded at the moment when he was told that the hour of his deliverance had come. Joy was too great for his soul, and he took back to his native country only the remnants of his reason. He had some sane and lucid intervals, and these he employed in dictating a few pages of a history of his past sufferings, in a style at once sweet and subdued.
