Siberia and the exile system . ections of flowers, and we kept the tdrantds decorated allday wdth goldenrod, wild hollyhocks, long blue spikes ofmonks-hood, and leafy branches of zMmolost or Tatarhoneysuckle, filled with showy scarlet or yellow berries. Late Saturday afternoon, as the sun was sinking behindthe western hills, we rode at a brisk trot down the long,beautiful ravine that leads into the valley of the Ulba, andbefore dark we were sitting comfortably in the neat wait-ing-room of the Ulbinsk post station, refreshing ourselveswith bread and milk and raspberries. Among the political exi
Siberia and the exile system . ections of flowers, and we kept the tdrantds decorated allday wdth goldenrod, wild hollyhocks, long blue spikes ofmonks-hood, and leafy branches of zMmolost or Tatarhoneysuckle, filled with showy scarlet or yellow berries. Late Saturday afternoon, as the sun was sinking behindthe western hills, we rode at a brisk trot down the long,beautiful ravine that leads into the valley of the Ulba, andbefore dark we were sitting comfortably in the neat wait-ing-room of the Ulbinsk post station, refreshing ourselveswith bread and milk and raspberries. Among the political exiles living in Ulbinsk at that timewere Alexander L. Blok, a young law student from the cityof Saratof on the Volga; Apollo Karelin, the son of a well-known photographer in Nizhni Novgorod; Seiverin Gross, TWO COLONIES OF POLITICAL EXILES 233 a young lawyer from the province of Kovno, and Mr. Vitort,a technologist from Riga. Mr. Karelin had been accompanied to Siberia by hiswife, but the others were, I believe, unmarried. I had. THE ULBfNSK RAVINE. learned the names, and something of the histories, of theseexiles from the politicals in Semipalatinsk, and there wereseveral reasons why I particularly wished to see them andto make their acquaintance. I had an idea that perhapsthe politicals in Semipalatinsk were above the averagelevel of administrative exiles in intelligence and education 234 SIBERIA —that thoy were uiiusiuiUy favorable specimens of their ^.jass, aiul it seemed to me not improbable that in the wilder and remoter parts of Western Siberia I should findtypes that would correspond more nearly to the conceptionof nihilists that I had formed in America. Before we had been in the village an hour, two of theexiles—Messrs. Blok and Gross—called upon us and intro-duced themselves. Mr. Blok won my heart from the veryfirst. He was a man twenty-six or twenty-eight years ofage, of medium height and athletic figure, with light-brownhair, blue eyes, and a beardless but stron
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectsiberiarussiadescrip
