In the summer of 1887 I came upon a pamphlet published by The Times five years previously, giving an account of the persecution of the Jews in Russia in 1881. At about the same time I found in the Brooklyn Times (U.S.) a tragic incident in the alleged career of a Jewess, which recalled to my mind a grim passage of Russian history. These three records inspired the story I have just concluded. It occurred to me to find in the one village of Russia where the Jews had for a time lived unmolested, a heroine who, falling under the lash of Russian persecution, should survive the keenest of human afflictions, to become, under very dramatic and romantic circumstances, the instrument of Divine vengeance upon her enemy, and probably a type of the fierce injustice which characterizes the civil and military government of Russia. My inspiration for this tragic figure sprung from the following narrative, related as absolutely true by Charles J. Rosebault, in the Brooklyn Times during the month of June, 1887:—
"Not far from the police station on Elizabeth-street is a large three-storey brick building. Years ago it was a handsome dwelling, but time and the small boy have played havoc with its façade, doors, windows, and railing. It is occupied by a well-to-do Russian, who years ago fled his native land for alleged complicity in some plot against the Czar. It has long been the rendezvous of political refugees of both sexes, Russians, Nihilists, Polish Liberators, French Communards, German Socialists, and Cosmopolitan Anarchists. The circle met there is composed of educated and clever people. Nearly all are excellent linguists, and more or less successful in trade, literature, or professional life. Owing probably to the terrible scenes in which they have been actors, all are more or less eccentric in behavior, speech, or ideas. Not long since a party of a dozen men and women were spending the evening in the large old-fashioned parlor. All smoked, a few sipped the vitriolic Vodka between the whiffs of their cigarettes, while all the rest assuaged thirst with the cheap wines of the Rhine and Moselle. The conversation had been political and literary rather than anecdotal in character, and had flagged until the room was almost silent. The only person speaking was a handsome Jewess of 24 or 25, whose name or nom de guerre was Theodora Ornavitsch. She was of a rare type of that race, being a superb blonde with bright golden hair, large lustrous blue eyes, and exhibiting the powerful figure and splendid health which characterize the Hebrew women to so remarkable a degree. As she paused at the end of an argument and drained a glass of Josephshoefer, some one asked, 'What made you a Nihilist, Dora?'
"'Nothing very remarkable to us Russians,' she replied. 'I belong to a good family in a small town in the Warsaw Province. I married the Rabbi of our Synagogue, and we were very happy for a few months. The Czar then made a change, and sent down a new governor from St. Petersburg to replace our old one, who was a good and just man, although a Russian general. The new comer had every vice, and no virtue of any kind. He was so bad and cruel that our friends and relatives wrote us when he came warning us against him. My husband the next Sabbath, in the Synagogue, told our people about him, and advised them to be over cautious in not violating any one of the thousand tyrannical laws with which we were cursed. Though he spoke in Hebrew, for fear of spies, someone betrayed him to the governor. He was arrested, tried, flogged on the public square into insensibility, and sent to Siberia for life. I was present when he underwent his agony, and stood it until I became crazed. I broke through the crowd toward the wretch of an official, and cursed him and his master, the Czar, and swore vengeance against both. I, too, was arrested, tried at court-martial, and sentenced to receive a hundred blows with the rod in the public square. I, a woman, was taken by drunken Moujiks and heathen Cossacks to the place, tied by my hands to the whipping post, my clothing torn from my body to the waist, and beaten before all the soldiery and the people of the town. At the twentieth blow I fainted, but the ropes held me up, and the full hundred were counted on my body. They cut me down, rubbed rock salt and water and some iron that eats like fire into my back to stop the bleeding, and carried me to the hospital. I lay there two months, and was discharged. I had but one idea then, and that was vengeance. By patience I managed to get employment in the governor's palace as a seamstress. One afternoon he was in his bath, and he sent for towels. The attendant was tired, and I volunteered to take them. I threw them over my arm, and under them I held a long stiletto, sharp as a needle. I entered the room, and he was reading and smoking in the bath. I laid the towels by his side with my left hand, and at the next moment with my right I drove the knife through his heart. It was splendidly done. He never made a sound, and I escaped to this land. That is why I am a Nihilist: Do any of you doubt?' She sprang excitedly from her chair, and in half a minute had bared herself to the waist. The front of her form from neck to belt might have passed as the model of the Venus di Milo. But the back! Ridges, welts, and furrows that crossed and interlaced as if cut out with a red-hot iron, patches of white, grey, pink, blue, and angry red, holes and hollows with hard, hideous edges, half visible ribs and the edges of ruined muscles, and all of which moved, contracted, and lengthened with the swaying of her body. There was a gasp from everyone present. The aged host rose, silently kissed her on the forehead, and helped her to put back her garments. Then again the wine passed round, and what secret toasts were made as the party drank will never be known."
The historic chapter which this newspaper paragraph brought to my mind was the story of Madame Lapoukin; the briefest account of which is probably the following, from The Knout, by Germain de Lagny:—
In 1760, under the reign of the indolent and luxurious Elizabeth, who had abolished capital punishment, Madame Lapoukin, a woman of rare beauty, of which the Czarina was envious, was condemned to the knout and transportation, in spite of the privilege of the nobility never to suffer the former punishment. She had been fêted, caressed, and run after at court, and had, it was said, betrayed the secret of the Empress' liaison with Prince Razoumowsky. She was conducted by the executioners to the public square, where she was exposed by one of them, who rolled up her chemise as far as her waist; he then placed her upon his shoulders, when another arranged her with his coarse dirty hands in the required position, obliging her to hold her head down, while a man of the lower classes, squatting at her feet, kept her legs still. The executioner cut her flesh into shreds by one hundred strokes of the knout, from the shoulders to the lower portion of the loins. After the infliction of the punishment, her tongue was torn out, and a short time subsequently she was sent to Siberia, whence she was recalled in 1762 by Peter III.
For the successful development of these journalistic literary and historical facts and suggestions into a full three volume novel, with truthful as well as characteristic accessories, it was necessary that I should make a study of Russian village life, and refresh my memory with such chapters of Russian history as should enable me to hold my imaginary characters and their actions within the reasonable control of probability. I was already fairly well acquainted with some of the best works of Russian fiction, which are full of strong local color and fine characterization, Gogol's stories more particularly, but in order that I might not stray from the path of truth any further than is reasonably permissible, I followed up the narrative of The Times in the files of the Daily Telegraph and the Jewish Chronicle; traced the anti-Jewish riots throughout their lurid march of fire and bloodshed; talked to several traveled authorities as to their experiences of Jewish life in Southern Russia; and settled down to a careful study of the literary, topographical, political and historical literature of the subject, in the course of which, for the purposes of this story, I have consulted and read: "The Jews and their Persecutors," by Eugenie Lawrence; "Scenes from the Ghetto," by Leopold Kompert; "The Knout and the Russians," by Germain de Lagny; "Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia," by Madame Cottin; "Russia under the Czars," by Stepniak; "Prison Life in Siberia" and "Crime and Punishment," by Fedor Dostoiffsky; "The Russian Revolt," by Edmund Noble; "The Jews of Barnow," by Karl Emil Franzos; "Russia, Political and Social," by L. Tikhanirov; "Called Back," by Hugh Conway; "Dead Souls," by Nikolai V. Gogol; "War and Peace," and "Anna Karenina," by Count Tolstoi; "A Hero of our Time," by M. V. Lermontoff; "Russia before and after the War," by the Author of "Society as it is in St. Petersburg," "The Encyclopaedia Britannica," "Russians of To-day," by the Author of "The Member for Paris;" "The Russian Peasantry," by Stepniak; "Stories from Russia, Siberia, Poland and Circassia," edited by Russell Lee; "Chambers' Encyclopaedia ;" George Kennan's Century papers on "Plains and Prisons of Western Siberia," and "Across the Russian Frontier;" Theodore Child's "Fair of Nijnii-Novogorod" in Harper's Magazine; The Times pamphlet (before mentioned), "Persecutions of the Jews in Russia, 1881;" "Venice," by Yriarte; "Venetian Life," by Howells; "Sketches from Venetian History;" "New Italian Sketches," by J. A. Symonds, and other miscellanous literature. It will be seen that I name these works without any view to classification or order. A foreign criticism upon the Venetian chapter of the story makes it desirable for me to state that the introduction of a Russian interest in the Royal Fêtes on the Grand Canal is pure invention. The pageantry is true enough; the presence of the King and Queen of Italy; the illumination and the rest; but the red gondola and the ghost of the lagoons belong to the region of fancy; though they might easily have formed part of the events of the time. I saw a dead swimmer towed into an English fishing port under very similar circumstances to those which I have described as occurring in the waters of the Adriatic.
With all due apologies for this personal note, I venture to express a hope that my readers may feel an interest in the Milbankes, the Forsyths, the Chetwynds, and the Klosstocks. If I shall make these people half as real to them as they are to me, they will keep them in their remembrance as acquaintances, if not as friends; and in reflective moments their hearts will go out to an old man and his daughter who in the spirit of chastened content are fulfilling their voluntary exile, their happiness a dream of the past, their chief hope in a future "where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest."
