BARBAROUS RUSSIA.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 67, 14 March 1912, Page 5

BARBAROUS RUSSIA.

A terrible story of the treatment that has been accorded an eminent Russian poet and man of science is told in the current number of “Darkest Russia.” In January, 1881, Xicholas Morosoff was condemned to penal servitude for life on a charge of having spread socialistic ideas among the peasants. He was a young man, and his real offence lay in having written some articles that displeased the bureaucracy. Morosoff Avas confined first in a cell of the ill-famed fortress of Saints Peter and Paul. Four years later he was transferred to the terrible Schlusselburg fortress, whore ho was kept for twenty-one years. The prisoner was dangerously ill on many occasions, and he was brought to the verge of madness by long periods of solitary confinement. But his courage was indomitable and he gradually won the respect and even affection of his gaolers. During the last decade of his imprisonment he was allowed paper and pencil, and ho plunged into scientific work. Year after year he laboured Avith tremendous energy, though Ids body was emaciated and feeble and death seemed always close at hand.“ The greater part of his life was already behind him,” wrote one of his fellow prisoners, “and before him was nothing but blank hopelessness and a nameless grave in a little plot near the Avails of the fortress, Avliere lay his friends, once, like himself, full of- energy and strength, but cut off by consumption and scurvy. And yet how he worked! He never ceased to think and write, animated by the undying hope that his ideas would some day see the light.” (In /190 d, AA’hon the revolutionary movement had coAvcd the Russian autocracy for the moment, Morosoff and several of 'his companions Avere set free. The Avonderful man Avas then fifty-one years •of age, Avith trembling hands and whitened hair, but lie quickly shoAA'ed that his life in a prison cell had not been Avasted. He has published the valuable results of his scientific researches in the domains of chemistry and pin sics. Incidentally he issued in 1906 a little volume of poems containing songs of freedom. Last December he Avas arrested as the author of “seditious writings.” The poems AA’cre produced as evidence, and Morosoff was sentenced to another term of confinement in a fortress. The day of the people’s aAvakenicg is long delayed in Russia.