Not only had I much to tell, but I was much interested in learning the views of my comrades, though all that I heard was not entirely to my liking. I recollect a conversation I had with an old acquaintance, Volòshenko,[79] who passed for a very intelligent man. He had been arrested at Kiëv in 1879, and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, afterwards increased by eleven years more in consequence of an attempted escape. When I spoke of the new tendencies in the Russian revolutionary movement, and mentioned that a Socialist group had been formed calling itself the “League for the Emancipation of Labour,” and professing the Marxian views held by the German Social Democrats, Volòshenko seemed highly amused. Footnote 79: See note, p. 189. “Social Democrats in Russia! That’s a comical idea! Who are these people?” “You see one of them before you,” I replied. Volòshenko and many others in the room stared in blank astonishment. Had I announced myself a follower of the prophet Mahomet they could scarcely have been more surprised. The ideas of Karl Marx were at that time but little known in Russia. It was indeed thought one’s duty to read the first volume of _Das Kapital_, which had appeared in a Russian translation, and it was usual to find educated people in European Russia recognising Marx’s services to the science of political economy; but in Kara they had not progressed even so far. As to the philosophical basis of Marx’s theory of Socialism practically nothing was known; nevertheless it was rejected, partly owing to the influence of Eugene Dühring, partly to that of the Russian author N. Mihailovsky, and finally on account of a _dictum_ of so-called “sane common sense” that Marx’s ideas were quite inapplicable to Russia. This last was Volòshenko’s contention, fortified, however, by no personal knowledge of Marx’s writings.