III
Upon my return to Russia, I made several attempts to gather information about the exiled branch of the Chernyshov family. The pages of the history of Catherine’s reign often spoke of the name of Zakhary Grigoryevich Chernyshov, but he was never exiled. Once, while waiting for the steamer some where on the Volga, I heard a sailor singing about the imprisonment of the brave Russian warrior, Zakhar Grigoryevich Chernyshov, in Prussia. The sailor, of course, knew nothing about this historical person, but his song was nevertheless partly connected with the actual occurrences. At the time of the Pugachov uprising, a Cossack by the name of Chika called him self Chernyshov and added the glory of an outlaw to the popular name of the famous general. Another song spoke about a prison on the shore of the Volga. In it, the bold hero, Chernyshov, calls the freemen of the Volga to rally to his standard …
For some reason or other this name became popular in the people’s memory and the name of Chernyshov is met quite often among the mysterious exiles of Siberia. I used this as an explanation of my experience in the Nuysk hamlet. Evidently the real name of the exile was unknown, and the old man unconsciously assumed that popular name … There had been conviction and truthfulness in his sad tone.
It was only recently that I met this name again in the list of the Decembrists … Then the incident in the Nuysk hamlet again arose in my memory and assumed a new significance.
I decided that the old man was right. But upon further investigation, I found that I was mistaken. The Decembrist Chernyshov had returned to Russia, had married there, and died abroad …
The curtain again fell over the genealogy of the Avdeyevs … In the vast gloom of Siberia, many lives become lost in this manner, and many a family has descended forever from the heights lit up by the sun, into the cold, misty ravines … On the shore of the Lena, above Yakutsk, there is a peak with a narrow path leading up to its crown. In a cleft on the slope of this peak one can still see the remains of a human habitation. There is a touching legend connected with this spot. A man very high in life was exiled to Siberia many years ago. For a long time he lived in different places, until he finally settled here, in the cleft of the mountain peak. He cut his own wood and brought up his own water. Once, when he was going up the mountain with a bundle of wood on his shoulders, he suddenly saw on the path above him a well-known figure. It was his wife, who had at last found him in this lonely spot. The exile recognized her, but because of joy or of shock, he fainted, and fell down into the precipice.
It was in vain that I tried to learn the name of this man and the details of the occurrence. Cold and indifferent, Siberia does not preserve such information, and the memory of the tragedy dies away as the afterglow of a dim legend connected merely with the rock, and not with the man …
The origin of the boy whom I met in the Nuysk hamlet is just as uncertain and just as dim. But whenever I think of Siberia, there inevitably rises in my imagination the spectacle of the dark crevice, the rapid river, the wretched huts of the hamlet, and the dying rays of the departing sun fading away in the sad eyes of the last offspring of a lost family.