Untitled

THE FATHER OF TERRORISM 25
and throw her into a revolutionary protest against so-
. . .
ciety. Do not cry out that this is exaggeration.
It has all been fully developed and proved. Seeing himself
unmasked, this poor Nechayeff
is indeed so childlike,
so simple, in spite of his systematic perversity, that
he believed it
possible to convert me. He has even gone
so far as to beg me to consent to develop this theory in a
Russian journal which he proposed to me to establish.
He has betrayed the confidence of us all, he has stolen
our letters, he has horribly compromised us— in a word,
he has acted like a villain. His only excuse is his fanaticism.
He is a terribly ambitious man without knowing
it, because he has at last completely
identified the
revolutionary cause with his own person. But he is not
an egoist in the worst sense of that word, because he
risks his own person terribly and leads the life of a mar-
and of unheard-of work. He is a
tyr, of privations,
fanatic, and fanaticism draws him on, even to the point
of becoming an accomplished Jesuit. At moments he becomes
simply stupid. Most of his lies are sewn with
white thread. ... In spite of this relative naivete,
he is
very dangerous, because he daily commits acts,
abuses of confidence, and treachery, against which it is
all the more difficult to safeguard
oneself because one
hardly suspects the possibility. With all that, Nechayeff
is a force, because he is an immense energy. It is with
great pain that I have separated from him, because the
service of our cause demands much energy, and one
rarely finds it developed to such a point." (31)
The irony of fate rarely executes itself quite so humorously.
Although perfectly familiar with NechayefFs
philosophy of action for over a year, the viciousness of it
aopeared to Bakounin only when he himself became a
victim. When Nechayeff arrived in London he began