In the course of their long conversation on Wednesday evening Speransky kept saying things like, ‘With
This first long conversation with Speransky served only to reinforce the feeling about him that Prince Andrey had had when they first met. He saw in him a thinking man of ruthless reason and enormous intellect, who had used nothing but his own energy and doggedness to gain power, which he was now using solely for the good of Russia. In Prince Andrey’s eyes Speransky was just what he wanted to be – a man with a rational explanation for every aspect of human life, accepting reason as the only yardstick of validity and fully capable of applying this standard of reason to everything that came along. Everything came out so clear and straightforward in Speransky’s exposition that Prince Andrey couldn’t help agreeing with every word he said. If he raised objections and put up arguments it was only to assert his own independence and avoid being swamped by Speransky’s ideas. Everything was as it should be, except for two things that disconcerted Prince Andrey. There was Speransky’s cold, mirror-like stare, which blocked everything out of his soul, and also those flabby white hands of his, which Prince Andrey was drawn to magnetically, as people are to the hands of men who hold power. For some reason the mirror-like stare and the flabby hands irritated Prince Andrey. Another thing he disliked was Speransky’s excessive contempt for other people, and then there was the changeability of his arguments when he was making a point. He would wield all possible weapons of thought other than metaphor, and when he changed from one to another it always seemed to Prince Andrey too much of a wrench. One moment he put himself forward as a practical man with no time for dreamy idealists, then he would take a satirical stance with ironical jeers at his opponents, before turning to ruthless logic or even soaring away into the realm of metaphysics. (This was one of his favourite weapons in any argument.) He would carry the question to the loftiest heights of metaphysical speculation, with digressions aimed at the defining of space, time and thought, and from here he would pluck a few arguments to crush his opponent, before swooping back down to terra firma with the original discussion. What did impress Prince Andrey as the great strength of Speransky’s thinking was his totally unshakeable faith in the power and authority of the reasoning mind. One thing was clear: Speransky would never even think of acknowledging the idea that we all have thoughts beyond our power to express them, though this concept came naturally to Prince Andrey. Speransky never had any nagging doubts that everything he thought and believed in might be rubbish. And it was this quality of Speransky’s mind that attracted Prince Andrey most of all.
In the first days of his acquaintance with Speransky, Prince Andrey regarded him with passionate admiration, not unlike the feelings he had once entertained for Napoleon. The fact that he was the son of a village priest, which was reason enough for foolish people to treat him with vulgar contempt, as many did, sneering at his humble origins, gave Prince Andrey a particular sensitivity in marshalling his own feelings towards Speransky, which were unconsciously strengthened in the process.
On the first evening that Bolkonsky spent with him they talked of the commission set up for the revision of the legal code, and Speransky told him sarcastically that the commission had now been sitting for a hundred and fifty years, was costing millions and had done nothing, except for Rosenkampf, who had stuck little labels on corresponding paragraphs of the different legal codes.
‘And that’s all the state gets for its millions!’ he said. ‘We want the senate to have new judicial powers, but we have no laws. That’s why it’s a sin for men like you, Prince, not to offer yourself for service.’
Prince Andrey observed that legal training was necessary for work like this, and he had none.
‘Nobody else has. So what would you have us do? This amounts to a
Within a week Prince Andrey was on the Army Regulations Committee, and amazed to find himself also chairman of a sub-committee on the Commission for Revision of the Legal Code. At Speransky’s request he took the first part of the Civil Code under current review, and used both the Napoleonic Code and the Institutes of Justinian to help revise the section on Personal Rights.
CHAPTER 7
