“All this may appear madness to you, but it is, nevertheless, the exact truth, and, in short, one morning she bluntly made the offer:  ’Become Bakounine’s soul, and you shall have me.’

“Of course, I accepted, for it was too fantastically strange to refuse; do you think so?  What an adventure!  What luck!  A number of letters between the Countess and Bakounine prepared the way; I was introduced to him at his house, and they discussed me there.  I became a sort of Western prophet, a mystic charmer who was ready to nihilate the Latin races, the Saint Paul of the new religion of nothingness, and at last a day was fixed for us to meet in London.  He lived in a small, one-storied house in Pimlico, with a tiny garden in front, and nothing noticeable about it.

“We were first of all shown into the commonplace parlor of all English homes, and then upstairs.  The room where the Countess and I were left, was small, and very badly furnished, with a square table with writing materials on it, in the middle.  That was his sanctuary; the deity soon appeared, and I saw him in flesh and bone; especially in flesh, for he was enormously stout.  His broad face, with prominent cheek-bones, in spite of the fat; and with a nose like a double funnel, with small, sharp eyes, which had a magnetic look, proclaimed the Tartar, the old Turanian blood, which produced the Attilas, the Gengis-Khams, the Tamerlanes.  The obesity, which is characteristic of the nomad races, who are always on horseback or driving, added to his Asiatic look.  The man was certainly not a European, a slave, a descendant of the deistic Aryans, but a descendant of the Atheistic hordes, who had several times already almost overrun Europe, and who, instead of any ideas of progress, have the belief in nihility, at the bottom of their hearts.

“I was astonished, for I had not expected that the majesty of a whole race, could be thus revived in a man, and my stupefaction increased after an hour’s conversation.  I could quite understand why such a Colossus had not wished for the Countess as his Egeria; she was a mere silly child to have dreamt of acting such a part to such a thinker.  She had not felt the profoundness of that horrible philosophy which was hidden under that material activity, nor had she seen the prophet under that man of the barricades.  Or, perhaps, he had not thought it advisable to reveal himself to her like that; but he revealed himself to me, and inspired me with terror.

“A prophet?  Oh! yes.  He thought himself an Attila, and foresaw the consequences of his revolution; it was not only from instinct, but also from theory that he urged a nation on to nihilism.  The phrase is not his, but Tourgueneff’s, I believe, but the idea certainly belongs to him.  He got his program of agricultural communism from Herzen, and his destructive radicalism from Pougatcheff, but he did not stop there.  I mean that he went on to evil for the sake of evil.  Herzen wished for the happiness of the Slav peasant; Pougatcheff wanted to be elected Emperor, but all that Bakounine wanted, was to overthrow the actual order of things, no matter by what means, and to replace social concentration by a universal upheaval.