book about Nikolai Sukhanov

In an autobiographical essay dated 20 January 1927, Sukhanov –
born in Moscow on 10 December 1882 – remembered his childhood
and youth thus:
My father [Nikolai Samuilovich Gimmer] was a minor railway
official. He suffered from alcoholism and died in 1903; I never
saw him, nor did I ever know what is called a family. I spent
some of my childhood with my mother, but the larger part with
my grandmother. My mother [Ekaterina Pavlovna Simon] was a
clever and able woman from a noble family, yet without intellectual
culture, a midwife by profession. But I was never close to her.
I was of weak physique and compared with my schoolmates I did
badly in those activities that are characteristic of childhood and
adolescence. I was of a contemplative disposition. My first memories:
lack of money and endless, futile talks about divorce, partly
in French so that I should not understand – but I did half understand
and in the presence of strangers felt that I was the bearer of
some shameful secrets.1
Thanks to the painstaking research of Dr Arkadii Kornikov, of
the University of Ivanovo, who pieced together information on
Sukhanov’s family, we know that the Gimmers, his father’s family,
were of German descent; that his great-grandfather was a Protestant
pastor, while his grandfather, Samuil Philipovich Gimmer, was a
physician who had practised in the Novgorod province and had
acquired the title of Staff Physician and the rank of Titled
Councillor with the rights of a nobleman. Sukhanov’s father was
listed as of Russian nationality and Russian Orthodox religion.
Sukhanov’s mother, Ekaterina Pavlovna, also belonged to the
service nobility. Her father was a retired army officer and her mother,
Elizaveta Antonovna Simon, was a cultured, well-educated woman, an
admirer of Lev Tolstoy with whom she frequently corresponded.2
Until 1896, when he was 14, Sukhanov attended high school in
Moscow with his mother paying his way. He read a great deal and
was passionately interested in the theatre and music. But in that
year, as he recalled, a shadow was cast over his life by ‘my mother’s
sensational court case, the substance of which served Tolstoy as
material for his drama The Living Corpse.3 Having left her drunken
and dissolute husband in 1883 shortly after the birth of her son
Nikolai and gone to live with her mother, she met Stepan Ivanovich
Chistov whom she wanted to marry. But the Moscow Ecclesiastical
Consistory refused her application for a divorce on the grounds that
the evidence proving her husband’s ‘marital infidelity’ was
‘insufficient’. In despair, she persuaded her legal husband to feign
suicide: a farewell letter was prepared and his clothes, complete with
documents, were thrown down on the ice of the Moskva river while
he made off for Petersburg with the money she had given him.
Unfortunately, the fake suicide was soon exposed by the police
and the newly-wed couple were charged with bigamy. When the
court case was heard in Moscow, it became a country-wide sensation,
with all its details reported in the newspapers, including the
seven-year sentence of exile to Yeniseisk province in Siberia handed
down to the couple. But thanks to their case being taken up by
A.F. Koni, a well-known lawyer in the criminal appeals department
of the Senate, in 1898 Tsar Nikolai II, acting on the advice of his
minister of justice, commuted the sentence to one year’s imprisonment.
While his mother was in the Butyrki prison and employed as
a midwife, Sukhanov was left to fend for himself and began giving
private lessons in the afternoons and evenings. He was apparently
so successful at this, that the headmaster of his school asked him to
tutor his own sons. Earning more than he needed to keep himself,
he was able to spend the summer months of 1900 and 1901 travelling
by boat along the Volga from Nizhnii Novgorod to Astrakhan,
to the Urals, the Caucasus and the Crimea, and to Kiev, seeing
for himself how Russia, and rural Russia in particular, lived.
Distinguishing himself at his school , where he was the best student,
he read deeply in history, classical antiquity, literature and religion.
He was captivated by Tolstoy and his philosophy of self-improvement
and rejection of culture, but that included
a critical rejection of the political regime and of its economic
structure which turned me into a left-wing radical and induced
me to join illegal high school circles for general and political selfeducation.


source

**************************

Book Nikolai Sukhanov Chronicler of the Russian Revolution


ISRAEL GETZLER was born in 1920 in Berlin and spent the war years in Soviet Russia. He is the author of Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat, Neither Toleration Nor Favor: The Australian Chapter of Jewish Emancipation, Kronstadt: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy, and of numerous articles and chapters in scholarly journals and books.