Chapter 2

THE TALK OF NURSES AND OF GENERALS—FALSE POSITION—RUSSIAN ENCYCLOPAEDISTS—BOREDOM—THE MAIDS’ ROOM AND THE SERVANTS’ HALL—TWO GERMANS—LESSONS AND READING—THE CATECHISM AND THE GOSPEL

Until I was ten years old I noticed nothing strange or special in my position; it seemed to me simple and natural that I should be living in my father’s house; that in his part of it I should be on my good behaviour, while my mother lived in another part of the house, in which I could be as noisy and mischievous as I liked. The Senator spoiled me and gave me presents, Calot carried me about in his arms, Vera Artamonovna dressed me, put me to bed, and gave me my bath, Madame Proveau took me out for walks and talked to me in German; everything went on in its regular way, yet I began pondering on things.

Stray remarks, carelessly uttered words, began to attract my attention. Old Madame Proveau and all the servants were devoted to my mother, while they feared and disliked my father. The scenes which sometimes took place between them were often the subject of conversation between Madame Proveau and Vera Artamonovna, both of whom always took my mother’s side.

My mother certainly had a good deal to put up with. Being an extremely kind-hearted woman, with no strength of will, she was completely crushed by my father, and, as always happens with weak characters, put up a desperate opposition in trifling matters and things of no consequence. Unhappily, in these trifling matters, my father was nearly always in the right, and the dispute always ended in his triumph.

‘If I were in the mistress’s place,’ Madame Proveau would say, for instance, ‘I would simply go straight back to Stuttgart; much comfort she gets—nothing but ill-humour and unpleasantness, and deadly dullness.’

‘To be sure,’ Vera Artamonovna would assent, ‘but that’s what ties her, hand and foot,’ and she would point with her knitting-needle towards me. ‘How can she take him with her—what to? And as for leaving him here alone, with our ways of going on, that would be too dreadful!’

Children in general have far more insight than is supposed, they are quickly distracted and forget for a time what has struck them, but they go back to it persistently, especially if it is anything mysterious or dreadful, and with wonderful perseverance and ingenuity they go on probing until they reach the truth.

Once on the look out, within a few weeks I had found out all the details of my father’s meeting my mother, had heard how she had brought herself to leave her parents’ home, how she had been hidden at the Senator’s in the Russian Embassy at Cassel, and had crossed the frontier, dressed as a boy; all this I found out without putting a single question to any one.

The first result of these discoveries was to estrange me from my father on account of the scenes of which I have spoken. I had seen them before, but it had seemed to me that all that was in the regular order of things; for I was so accustomed to the fact that every one in the house, not excepting the Senator, was afraid of my father and that he was given to scolding every one, that I saw nothing strange in it. Now I began to take a different view of it, and the thought that part of all this was endured on my account sometimes threw a dark oppressive cloud over my bright, childish imagination.

A second idea that took root in me from that time, was that I was far less dependent on my father than children are as a rule. I liked this feeling of independence which I imagined for myself.

Two or three years later, two of my father’s old comrades in the regiment, P. K. Essen, the governor-general of Orenburg, and A. N. Bahmetyev, formerly commander in Bessarabia, a general who had lost his leg at Borodino, were sitting with my father. My room was next to the drawing-room in which they were sitting. Among other things my father told them that he had been speaking to Prince Yussupov about putting me into the service. ‘There’s no time to be lost,’ he added; ‘you know that he will have to serve for years in order to reach any grade worth speaking of.’

‘What a strange idea, friend, to make him a clerk,’ Essen said, good-naturedly. ‘Leave it to me, and I will get him into the Ural Cossacks. We’ll promote him from the ranks, that’s all that matters, after that he will make his way as we all have.’

My father did not agree, he said that he had grown to dislike everything military, that he hoped in time to get me a post on some mission to a warm country, where he would go to end his days.

Bahmetyev, who had taken little part in the conversation, got up on his crutches and said: ‘It seems to me that you ought to think very seriously over Pyotr Kirillovitch’s advice. If you don’t care to put his name down at Orenburg, you might put him down here. We are old friends and it’s my way to tell you openly what I think; you will do your young man no good with the civil service and university, and you will make him of no use to society. He is quite obviously in a false position, only the military service can open a career for him and put him right. Before he reaches the command of a company, all dangerous ideas will have subsided. Military discipline is a grand schooling, his future depends on it. You say that he has abilities, but you don’t mean to say that none but fools go into the army, do you? What about us and all our circle? There’s only one objection you can make—that he will have to serve a long time before he gets a commission, but it’s just in that particular that we can help you.’

This conversation had as much effect as the remarks of Madame Proveau and Vera Artamonovna. By that time I was thirteen and such lessons, turned over and over, and analysed from every point of view during weeks and months of complete solitude, bore their fruit. The result of this conversation was that, although I had till then, like all boys, dreamed of the army and a uniform, and had been ready to cry at my father’s wanting me to go into the civil service, my enthusiasm for soldiering suddenly cooled, and my love and tenderness for epaulettes, stripes and gold lace, was by degrees completely eradicated. My smouldering passion for the uniform had, however, one last flicker. A cousin of ours, who had been at a boarding-school in Moscow and used sometimes to spend a holiday with us, had entered the Yamburgsky regiment of Uhlans. In 1825 he came to Moscow as an ensign and stayed a few days with us. My heart throbbed when I saw him with all his little cords and laces, wearing a sword and a four-cornered helmet put on a little on one side and fastened with a chin-strap. He was a boy of seventeen and short for his age. Next morning I dressed up in his uniform, put on his sword and helmet and looked at myself in the glass. Oh dear! how handsome I thought myself in the short blue jacket with red braiding! And the pompon, and the pouch ... what were the yellow nankeen breeches and the short camlet jacket which I used to wear at home, in comparison with these?

The cousin’s visit destroyed the effect of the generals’ talk, but soon circumstances turned me against the army again, and this time for good.

The spiritual result of my meditations on my ‘false position’ was somewhat the same as what I had deduced from the talk of my two nurses. I felt myself more independent of society, of which I knew absolutely nothing, felt that in reality I was thrown on my own resources, and with somewhat childish conceit thought I would show the old generals what I was made of.

With all that it may well be imagined how drearily and monotonously the time passed in the strange conventlike seclusion of my father’s house. I had neither encouragement nor distraction; my father had spoilt me until I was ten, and now he was almost always dissatisfied with me; I had no companions, my teachers came and went, and, seeing them out of the yard, I used to run off on the sly, to play with the house-serf boys, which was strictly forbidden. The rest of my time I spent wandering aimlessly about the big dark rooms, which had their windows shut all day and were only dimly lighted in the evening, doing nothing or reading anything that turned up.

The servants’ hall and the maids’ room provided the only keen enjoyment left me. There I found perfect peace and happiness; I took the side of one party against another, discussed with my friends their affairs, and gave my opinion upon them, knew all their private business, and never dropped a word in the drawing-room of the secrets of the servants’ hall.

I must pause upon this subject. Indeed, I do not intend to avoid digressions and episodes; that is the way of every conversation, that is the way of life itself.

Children as a rule are fond of servants; their parents forbid them, especially in Russia, to associate with servants; the children do not obey them because it is dull in the drawing-room and lively in the maids’ room. In this case, as in thousands of others, parents do not know what they are about. I cannot conceive that our servants’ hall was a less wholesome place for children than our ‘tea-room’ or ‘lounge-room.’ In the servants’ hall children pick up coarse expressions and bad manners, that is true; but in the drawing-room they pick up coarse ideas and bad feelings.

The very instruction to children to hold themselves aloof from those with whom they are continually in contact is immoral.

A great deal is said among us about the complete depravity of servants, especially when they are serfs. They certainly are not distinguished by exemplary strictness of conduct, and their moral degradation can be seen from the fact that they put up with too much and are too rarely moved to indignation and resistance. But that is not the point. I should like to know what class in Russia is less depraved? Are the nobility or the officials? the clergy, perhaps?

Why do you laugh? The peasants, perhaps, are the only ones who may claim to be different....

The difference between the nobleman and the serving man is very small. I hate the demagogues’ flattery of the mob, particularly since the troubles of 1848, but the aristocrats’ slander of the people I hate even more. By picturing servants and slaves as degraded beasts, the planters throw dust in people’s eyes and stifle the voice of conscience in themselves. We are not often better than the lower classes, but we express ourselves more gently and conceal our egoism and our passions more adroitly; our desires are not so coarse, and the ease with which they are satisfied and our habit of not controlling them make them less conspicuous; we are simply wealthier and better fed and consequently more fastidious. When Count Almaviva reckoned up to the Barber of Seville the qualities he expected from a servant, Figaro observed with a sigh: ‘If a servant must have all these virtues, are there many gentlemen fit to be lackeys?’

Immorality in Russia as a rule does not go deep; it is more savage and dirty, noisy and coarse, dishevelled and shameless than profound. The clergy, shut up at home, drink and overeat themselves with the merchants. The nobility get drunk in the sight of all, play cards until they are ruined, thrash their servants, seduce their housemaids, manage their business affairs badly and their family life still worse. The officials do the same, but in a dirtier way, and in addition are guilty of grovelling before their superiors and pilfering. As far as stealing in the literal sense goes, the nobility are less guilty, they take openly what belongs to others; when it suits them, however, they are just as smart as other people. All these charming weaknesses are to be met with in a still coarser form in those who are in private and not government service, and in those who are dependent not on the Court but on the landowners. But in what way they are worse than others as a class, I do not know.

Going over my remembrances, not only of the serfs of our house and of the Senator’s, but also of two or three households with which we were intimate for twenty-five years, I do not remember anything particularly vicious in their behaviour. Petty thefts, perhaps, ... but on that matter all ideas are so muddled by their position, that it is difficult to judge; _human property_ does not stand on ceremony with its kith and kin, and is hail-fellow-well-met with the master’s goods. It would be only fair to exclude from this generalisation the confidential servants, the favourites of both sexes, masters’ mistresses and talebearers; but in the first place they are an exception—these Kleinmihels of the stable[15] and Benckendorfs[16] from the cellar, Perekusihins[17] in striped linen gowns, and barelegged Pompadours; moreover, they do behave better than any of the rest, they only get drunk at night and do not pawn their clothes at the pot-house.

The simple-hearted immorality of the rest revolves round a glass of vodka and a bottle of beer, a merry talk and a pipe, absences from home without leave, quarrels which sometimes end in fights, and sly tricks played on the masters who expect of them something inhuman and impossible. Of course, on the one hand, the lack of all education, on the other, the simplicity of the peasant in slavery have brought out a great deal that is monstrous and distorted in their manners, but for all that, like the negroes in America, they have remained half children, a trifle amuses them, a trifle distresses them; their desires are limited, and are rather naïve and human than vicious.

Vodka and tea, the tavern and the restaurant, are the two permanent passions of the Russian servant; for their sake, he steals, for their sake, he is poor, on their account, he endures persecution and punishment and leaves his family in poverty. Nothing is easier than for a Father Matthew[18] from the height of his teetotal intoxication to condemn drunkenness, and sitting at the tea-table, to wonder why servants go to drink tea at the restaurant, instead of drinking it at home, although at home it is cheaper.

Vodka stupefies a man, it enables him to forget himself, stimulates him and induces an artificial cheerfulness; this stupefaction and stimulation are the more agreeable the less the man is developed and the more he is bound to a narrow, empty life. How can a servant not drink when he is condemned to the everlasting waiting in the hall, to perpetual poverty, to being a slave, to being sold? He drinks to excess—when he can—because he cannot drink every day; that was observed fifteen years ago by Senkovsky in the _Library of Good Reading_.[19] In Italy and the South of France there are no drunkards, because there is plenty of wine. The savage drunkenness of the English working man is to be explained in the same way. These men are broken in the inevitable and unequal conflict with hunger and poverty; however hard they have struggled they have met everywhere a blank wall of oppression and sullen resistance that has flung them back into the dark depths of social life, and condemned them to the never-ending, aimless toil that consumes mind and body alike. It is not surprising that after spending six days as a lever, a cogwheel, a spring, a screw, the man breaks savagely on Saturday afternoon out of the penal servitude of factory work, and in half an hour is drunk, for his exhaustion cannot stand much. The moralists would do better to drink Irish or Scotch whisky themselves and to hold their tongues, or with their inhuman philanthropy they may provoke terrible replies.

Drinking tea at the restaurant has a different significance for servants. Tea at home is not the same thing for the house-serf; at home everything reminds him that he is a servant; at home he is in the dirty servants’ room, he must get the samovar himself; at home he has a cup with a broken handle, and any minute his master may ring for him. At the restaurant he is a free man, he is a gentleman; for him the table is laid and the lamps are lit; for him the waiter runs with the tray; the cup shines, the tea-pot glitters, he gives orders and is obeyed, he enjoys himself and gaily calls for pressed caviare or a turnover for his tea.

In all of this there is more of childish simplicity than immorality. Impressions quickly take possession of them but do not send down roots; their minds are continually occupied, or rather distracted, by casual subjects, small desires, trivial aims. A childish belief in everything marvellous turns a grown-up man into a coward, and the same childish belief comforts him in the bitterest moments. Filled with wonder, I was present at the death of two or three of my father’s servants; it was then that one could judge of the simple-hearted carelessness with which their lives had passed, of the absence of great sins upon their conscience; if there were anything, it had all been settled satisfactorily with the priest.

This resemblance between servants and children accounts for their mutual attraction. Children hate the aristocratic ideas of the grown-ups and their benevolently condescending manners, because they are clever and understand that in the eyes of grown-up people they are children, while in the eyes of servants they are people. Consequently they are much fonder of playing cards or loto with the maids than with visitors. Visitors play for the children’s benefit with condescension, give way to them, tease them and throw up the game for any excuse; the maids, as a rule, play as much for their own sakes as for the children’s; and that gives the game interest.

Servants are extremely devoted to children, and this is not a slavish devotion, but the mutual affection of the weak and the simple. In old days there used to be a patriarchal dynastic affection between landowners and their serfs, such as exists even now in Turkey. To-day there are in Russia no more of those devoted servants, attached to the race and family of their masters. And that is easy to understand. The landowner no longer believes in his power, he does not believe that he will have to answer for his serfs at the terrible Day of Judgment, but simply makes use of his power for his own advantage. The servant does not believe in his subjection and endures violence not as a chastisement and trial from God, but simply because he is defenceless; it is no use kicking against the pricks.

I used to know in my youth two or three specimens of those fanatics of slavery, of whom eighteenth century landowners speak with a sigh, telling stories of their unflagging service and their great devotion, and forgetting to add in what way their fathers and themselves had repaid such self-sacrifice.

On one of the Senator’s estates a feeble old man called Andrey Stepanov was living in peace, that is, on free rations.

He had been valet to the Senator and my father when they were serving in the Guards, and was a good, honest, and sober man, who looked into his young masters’ eyes, and, to use their own words, ‘guessed from them what they wanted,’ which, I imagine, was not an easy task. Afterwards he looked after the estate near Moscow. Cut off from the beginning of the war of 1812 from all communication, and afterwards left alone, without money, on the ashes of a village which had been burnt to the ground, he sold some beams to escape starvation. The Senator, on his return to Russia, proceeded to set his estate in order, and going into details of the past, came to the sale of the beams. He punished his former valet by sending him away in disgrace, depriving him of his duties. The old man, burdened with a family, departed into exile. We used to stay for a day or two on the estate where Andrey Stepanov was living. The feeble old man, crippled by paralysis, used to come every time leaning on his crutch, to pay his respects to my father and to speak to him.

The devotion and the gentleness with which he talked, his grievous appearance, the locks of yellowish grey hair on each side of his bald pate, touched me deeply. ‘I have heard, master,’ he said on one occasion, ‘that your brother has received another decoration. I am getting old, your honour, I shall soon give up my soul to God, and yet the Lord has not vouchsafed to me to see your brother in his decorations, not even once before my end to behold his honour in his ribbons and all his finery!’

I looked at the old man, his face was so childishly candid, his bent figure, his painfully twisted face, lustreless eyes, and weak voice—all inspired confidence; he was not lying, he was not flattering, he really longed before his death to see, in ‘all his ribbons and finery,’ the man who could not for fifteen years forgive him the loss of a few beams. Was this a saint, or a madman? But perhaps it is only madmen who attain saintliness?

The new generation has not this idolatrous worship, and if there are cases of serfs not caring for freedom, that is simply due to indolence and material considerations. It is more depraved, there is no doubt, but it is a sign that the end is near; if they want to see anything on their master’s neck, it is certainly not the Vladimir ribbon.

Here I will say something of the position of our servants in general.

Neither the Senator nor my father oppressed the house-serfs particularly, that is, they did not ill-treat them physically. The Senator was hasty and impatient, and consequently often rough and unjust, but he had so little contact with the house-serfs and took so little notice of them that they scarcely knew each other. My father wearied them with his caprices, never let pass a look, a word or a movement, and was everlastingly lecturing them; to a Russian this often seems worse than blows or abuse.

Corporal punishment was almost unknown in our house, and the two or three cases in which the Senator and my father resorted to the revolting method of the police station were so exceptional, that all the servants talked about it for months afterwards; and it was only provoked by glaring offences.

More frequently house-serfs were sent for soldiers, and this punishment was a terror to all the young men; without kith or kin, they still preferred to remain house-serfs, rather than to be in harness for twenty years. I was greatly affected by those terrible scenes.... Two soldiers of the police would appear at the summons of the landowner: they would stealthily, in a casual, sudden way, seize the appointed victim. The village elder commonly announced at this point that the master had the evening before ordered that he was to be taken to the recruiting office, and the man would try through his tears to put a brave face on it, while the women wept: every one made him presents and I gave him everything I could, that is, perhaps a twenty-kopeck piece and a neck-handkerchief.

I remember, too, my father’s ordering some village elder’s beard to be shaved off, because he had spent the obrok[20] which he had collected. I did not understand this punishment, but was struck by the appearance of this old man of sixty; he was in floods of tears, and kept bowing to the ground and begging for a fine of one hundred roubles in addition to the obrok if only he might be spared this disgrace.

When the Senator was living with us, the common household consisted of thirty men and almost as many women; the married women, however, performed no service, they looked after their own families; there were five or six maids or laundresses, who never came upstairs. To these must be added the boys and girls who were being trained in their duties, that is, in sloth and idleness, in lying and the use of vodka.

To give an idea of the life in Russia of those days, I think it will not be out of place to say a few words on the maintenance of the house-serfs. At first, they used to be given five roubles a month for food and afterwards six. The women had a rouble a month less, and children under ten had half the full allowance. The servants made up ‘artels’[21] and did not complain of the allowance being too small, and, indeed, provisions were extraordinarily cheap in those days. The highest wage was a hundred roubles a year, while others received half that amount and some only thirty roubles. Boys under seventeen got no wages at all. In addition to their allowance, servants were given clothes, greatcoats, shirts, sheets, quilts, towels and mattresses covered with sailcloth; boys, who did not get wages, were allowed money for their physical and moral purification, that is, for the bath-house and for preparing for communion. Taking everything into account, a servant cost three hundred roubles a year; if to this we add a share of medicine, of a doctor and of the surplus edibles brought from the village, even then it is not over 350 roubles. This is only a quarter of the cost of a servant in Paris or London.

The planters usually take into account the insurance premium of slavery, that is, the maintenance of wife and children by the owner, and a meagre crust of bread somewhere in the village for the slave in old age. Of course this must be taken into account; but the cost is greatly lessened by the fear of corporal punishment, the impossibility of changing their position, and a much lower scale of maintenance.

I have seen enough of the way in which the terrible consciousness of serfdom destroys and poisons the existence of house-serfs, the way in which it oppresses and stupefies their souls. Peasants, especially those who pay a fixed sum in lieu of labour, have less feeling of their personal bondage; they somehow succeed in not believing in their complete slavery. But for the house-serf, sitting on a dirty locker in the hall from morning till night, or standing with a plate at table, there is no room for doubt.

Of course there are people who live in the servants’ hall like fish in water, people whose souls have never awakened, who have acquired a taste for their manner of life and who perform their duties with a sort of artistic relish.

Of that class we had one extremely interesting specimen, our footman Bakay, a man of tall figure and athletic build, with solid, dignified features and an air of the greatest profundity; he lived to an advanced age, imagining that the position of a footman was one of the greatest consequence.

This worthy old man was perpetually angry or a little drunk, or angry and a little drunk at once. He took an exalted view of his duties and ascribed a serious importance to them: with a peculiar bang and crash he would throw up the steps of the carriage and slam the carriage door with a report like a pistol shot. With a gloomy air he stood up stiff and rigid behind the carriage, and every time there was a jolt over a rut he would shout in a thick and displeased voice to the coachman: ‘Steady!’ regardless of the fact that the rut was already five paces behind.

Apart from going out with the carriage, his chief occupation, a duty he had voluntarily undertaken, consisted of training the serf boys in the aristocratic manners of the servants’ hall. When he was sober, things went fairly well, but when his head was a little dizzy, he became incredibly pedantic and tyrannical. I sometimes stood up for my friends, but my authority had little influence on Bakay, whose temper was of a Roman severity; he would open the door into the drawing-room for me and say: ‘This is not the place for you; be pleased to leave the room or I shall carry you out.’ He lost no opportunity of scolding the boys, and often added a cuff to his words, or, with his thumb and first finger, gave them a flip on the head with the sharpness and force of a spring.

When at last he had chased the boys out and was left alone, he transferred his persecution to his one friend, Macbeth, a big Newfoundland dog, whom he used to feed, comb and groom. After sitting in solitude for two or three minutes he would go out into the yard, call Macbeth to join him on the locker, and begin a conversation. ‘What are you sitting out there in the yard in the frost for, stupid, when there is a warm room for you? What a beast! What are you rolling your eyes for, eh? Have you nothing to say?’ Usually a slap would follow these words. Macbeth would sometimes growl at his benefactor; and then Bakay would upbraid him in earnest: ‘You may go on feeding a dog, but he will still remain a dog, he will show his teeth at any one, without caring who it is ... the fleas would have eaten him up if it had not been for me!’ And offended by his friend’s ingratitude he would wrathfully take a pinch of snuff and fling what was left between his fingers on Macbeth’s nose. Then the dog would sneeze, clumsily brush away the snuff with his paw, and, leaving the bench indignantly, would scratch at the door; Bakay would open it with the word ‘Rascal’ and give him a kick as he went out. Then the boys would come back, and he would set to flipping them on the head again.

Before Macbeth, we had a setter called Berta; she was very ill and Bakay took her on to his mattress and looked after her for two or three weeks. Early one morning I went out into the servants’ hall. Bakay tried to say something to me, but his voice broke and a big tear rolled down his cheek—the dog was dead. There is a fact for the student of human nature. I do not for a moment suppose that he disliked the boys; it was simply a case of a severe character, accentuated by drink and unconsciously moulded by the spirit of the servants’ hall.

But besides these amateurs of slavery, what gloomy images of martyrs, of hopeless victims, pass mournfully before my memory.

The Senator had a cook Alexey, a sober industrious man of exceptional talent who made his way in the world. The Senator himself got him taken into the Tsar’s kitchen, where there was at that time a celebrated French cook. After being trained there, he got a post in the English club, grew rich, married and lived like a gentleman; but the bonds of serfdom would not let him sleep soundly at night, nor take pleasure in his position.

After having a service celebrated to the Iversky Madonna, Alexey plucked up his courage and presented himself before the Senator to ask for his freedom for five thousand roubles. The Senator was proud of _his_ cook, just as he was proud of _his_ painter, and so he would not take the money, but told the cook that he should be set free for nothing at his master’s death. The cook was thunderstruck; he grieved, grew thin and worn, turned grey and ... being a Russian, took to drink. He neglected his work; the English Club dismissed him. He was engaged by the Princess Trubetskoy, who worried him by her petty niggardliness. Being on one occasion extremely offended by her, Alexey, who was fond of expressing himself eloquently, said, speaking through his nose with his air of dignity: ‘What a clouded soul dwells in your illustrious body!’ The princess was furious, she turned the cook away, and, as might be expected from a Russian lady, wrote a complaint to the Senator. The Senator would have done nothing to him, but, as a polite gentleman, he felt bound to send for the cook, gave him a good scolding and told him to go and beg the princess’s pardon.

The cook did not go to the princess but went to the pot-house. Within a year he had lost everything from the capital he had saved up for his ransom to the last of his aprons. His wife struggled and struggled on with him, but at last went off and took a place as a nurse. Nothing was heard of him for a long time. Then the police brought Alexey in tatters and wild-looking; he had been picked up in the street, he had no lodging, he wandered from tavern to tavern. The police insisted that his master should take him. The Senator was distressed and perhaps conscience-stricken, too; he received him rather mildly and gave him a room. Alexey went on drinking, was noisy when he was drunk and imagined that he was composing verses; he certainly had some imagination of an incoherent sort. We were at that time at Vassilyevskoe. The Senator, not knowing what to do with the cook, sent him there, thinking that my father would bring him to reason. But the man was too completely shattered. I saw in his case the concentrated anger and hatred against the masters which lies in the heart of the serf, and might be particularly dangerous in a cook; he would grind his teeth and speak with malignant mimicry. He was not afraid to give full rein to his tongue in my presence; he was fond of me and would often, patting me familiarly on the shoulders, say that I was ‘a good branch of a rotten tree.’

After the Senator’s death, my father gave him his freedom at once. It was too late and simply meant getting rid of him, he was ruined in any case.

Besides Alexey, I cannot help recalling another victim of serfdom. The Senator had a serf aged about five-and-thirty who acted as his secretary. My father’s eldest brother, who died in 1813, had sent him as a boy to a well-known doctor to be trained as a feldsher (or doctor’s assistant) that he might be of use in a village hospital which his master was intending to found. The doctor procured permission for him to attend the lectures of the Academy of Medicine and Surgery; the young man had abilities, he learned Latin, German, and something of doctoring. At five-and-twenty he fell in love with the daughter of an officer, concealed his position from her and married her. The deception could not last long. After his master’s death, the wife learned with horror that they were serfs. The Senator, his new owner, did not oppress them in any way, indeed he was fond of young Tolotchanov, but the trouble with the wife persisted; she could not forgive her husband for the deception and ran away from him with another man. Tolotchanov must have been devoted to her, for from that time he sank into a melancholy that bordered upon madness, spent his nights in debauchery, and, having no means of his own, squandered his master’s money. When he saw that he could not set things right, on the 31st of December 1821 he poisoned himself.

The Senator was not at home; Tolotchanov went in to my father in my presence and told him that he had come to say good-bye to him and to ask him to tell the Senator that he had spent the money that was missing.

‘You are drunk,’ my father told him. ‘Go and sleep it off.’

‘I shall soon go for a long sleep,’ said the doctor, ‘and I only beg you not to remember evil against me.’

Tolotchanov’s tranquil air rather alarmed my father and, looking more intently at him, he asked:

‘What’s the matter with you, are you raving?’

‘Not at all, I have only taken a wine-glassful of arsenic.’

They sent for a doctor and the police, gave him an emetic, and made him drink milk. When he was on the point of vomiting, he restrained himself and said: ‘Stay there, stay there, I did not swallow you for that.’

Afterwards, when the poison began to act more freely, I heard his moans and his voice repeating in agony, ‘It burns! it burns! it’s fire!’

Some one advised him to send for a priest; he refused, and told Calot that there could not be a life beyond the grave, that he knew too much anatomy to believe that. At midnight he asked the doctor, in German, what time it was, then saying, ‘Well, it’s the new year, I wish you a happy one,’ he died.

In the morning I rushed to the little lodge that served as a bath-house; Tolotchanov had been taken there; the body was lying on the table, dressed just as he had died, in a dress-coat without a cravat, with his chest open, and his features were terribly distorted and had even turned black. This was the first dead body I had seen; I went away almost fainting. And the playthings and pictures I had had given me for the New Year did not comfort me. Tolotchanov’s dark-looking face hovered before my eyes and I kept hearing his ‘It burns! it’s fire!’

I will say only one thing more, to conclude this gloomy subject: the servants’ hall had no really bad influence upon me at all. On the contrary, it awakened in me from my earliest years an invincible hatred for every form of slavery and every form of tyranny. At times when I was a child, Vera Artamonovna would say by way of the greatest rebuke for some naughtiness: ‘Wait a bit, you will grow up and turn into just such another master as the rest.’ I felt this a horrible insult. The old woman need not have worried herself—just such another as the rest, anyway, I have not become.

Besides the servants’ hall and the maids’ room I had one other distraction, and in that I was not hindered in any way. I loved reading as much as I hated lessons. My passion for unsystematic reading was, indeed, one of the chief obstacles to serious study. I never could, for instance, then or later, endure the theoretical study of languages, but I very soon learnt to understand and chatter them incorrectly, and at that stage I remained, because it was sufficient for my reading.

My father and the Senator had between them a fairly large library, consisting of French books of the eighteenth century. The books lay about in heaps in a damp, unused room in a lower storey of the Senator’s house. Calot had the key. I was allowed to rummage in these literary granaries as I liked, and I read and read to my heart’s content. My father saw two advantages in it, that I should learn French more quickly and that I should be occupied, that is, should sit quietly and in my own room. Besides, I did not show him all the books I read, nor lay them on the table; some of them were hidden in the sideboard.

What did I read? Novels and plays, of course. I read fifty volumes of the French and Russian drama; in every volume there were three or four plays. Besides French novels my mother had the Tales of La Fontaine and the comedies of Kotzebue, and I read them two or three times. I cannot say that the novels had much influence on me; though like all boys I pounced eagerly on all equivocal or somewhat improper scenes, they did not interest me particularly. A play which I liked beyond all measure and read over twenty times in the Russian translation, the _Marriage of Figaro_,[22] had much greater influence on me. I was in love with Cherubino and the Countess, and what is more, I was myself Cherubino; my heart throbbed as I read it and without myself clearly recognising it I was conscious of a new sensation. How enchanting I thought the scene in which the page is dressed up as a girl, how intensely I longed to hide somebody’s ribbon in my bosom and kiss it in secret. In reality I had in those years no feminine society.

I only remember that occasionally on Sundays Bahmetyev’s two daughters used to come from their boarding-school to visit us. The younger, a girl of sixteen, was strikingly beautiful. I was overwhelmed when she entered the room and never ventured to address a word to her, but kept stealing looks at her lovely dark eyes and dark curls. I never dropped a hint on the subject and the first breath of love passed unseen by any one, even by her.

Years afterwards when I met her, my heart throbbed violently and I remembered how at twelve years old I had worshipped her beauty.

I forgot to say that _Werther_ interested me almost as much as the _Marriage of Figaro_; half the novel was beyond me and I skipped it, and hurried on to the terrible _dénouement_, over which I wept like a madman. In 1839 _Werther_ happened to come into my hands again; this was when I was at Vladimir and I told my wife how as a boy I had cried over it and began reading her the last letters ... and when I came to the same passage, my tears began flowing again and I had to stop.

Up to the age of fourteen I cannot say that my father greatly restricted my liberty, but the whole atmosphere of our house was oppressive for a lively boy. The persistent and unnecessary fussiness concerning my physical health, together with complete indifference to my moral well-being, was horribly wearisome. There were everlasting precautions against my taking a chill, or eating anything indigestible, and anxious solicitude over the slightest cough or cold in the head. In the winter I was kept indoors for weeks at a time, and when I was allowed to go out, it was only wearing warm high boots, thick scarves and such things. At home it was always insufferably hot from the stoves. All this would inevitably have made me a frail and delicate child but for the iron health I inherited from my mother. She by no means shared my father’s prejudices, and in her half of the house allowed me everything which was forbidden in his.

My education made slow progress without emulation, encouragement, or approval; I did my lessons lazily, without method or supervision, and thought to make a good memory and lively imagination take the place of hard work. I need hardly say that there was no supervision over my teachers either; once the terms upon which they were engaged were settled, they might, so long as they turned up at the proper time and sat through their hour, go on for years without rendering any account to any one.

One of the queerest episodes of my education at that time was the engagement of the French actor Dalès to give me lessons in elocution.

‘No attention is paid to it nowadays,’ my father said to me, ‘but my brother Alexander was every evening for six months reciting “Le récit de Théramène”[23] with his teacher without reaching the perfection that he insisted upon.’

So I set to work at recitation.

‘Well, Monsieur Dalès, I expect you can give him dancing lessons as well?’ my father asked him on one occasion.

Dalès, a fat old man over sixty, who was fully aware of his own qualities, but no less fully aware of the propriety of being modest about them, replied: ‘that he could not judge of his own talents, but that he had often given advice in the ballet dances _au grand Opéra_.’

‘So I supposed,’ my father observed, offering him his open snuff-box, a civility he would never have shown to a Russian or a German teacher. ‘I should be very glad if you could _le dégourdir un peu_; after his recitation he might have a little dancing.’

‘_Monsieur le comte peut disposer de moi._’

And my father, who was excessively fond of Paris, began recalling the foyer of the opera in 1810, the youth of George,[24] the declining years of Mars,[25] and inquiring about cafés and theatres.

Now imagine my little room, a gloomy winter evening, the windows frozen over and water dripping down a string from them, two tallow candles on the table and our tête-à-tête. On the stage, Dalès still spoke fairly naturally, but at a lesson thought it his duty to depart further from nature in his delivery. He read Racine in a sort of chant and at the cæsura made a parting such as an Englishman makes in his hair, so that each line seemed like a broken stick.

At the same time he waved his arm like a man who has fallen into the water and does not know how to swim. He made me repeat every line several times and always shook his head, saying, ‘Not right, not right at all, _attention_, “_Je crains Dieu, cher Abner_,”’ then the parting, at which he would close his eyes and with a slight shake of his head, tenderly pushing away the waves with his hand, add: ‘_et n’ai point d’autre crainte_.’

Then the old gentleman who ‘feared nothing but God’ looked at his watch, shut the book and pushed a chair towards me; this was my partner.

Under the circumstances it was not surprising that I never learned to dance.

The lessons did not last long; they were cut short very tragically a fortnight later.

I was at the French theatre with the Senator; the overture was played once, then a second time and still the curtain did not rise. The front rows, wishing to show they knew their Paris, began to be noisy in the way the back rows are there. The manager came before the curtain, bowed to the right, bowed to the left, bowed straight before him, and said: ‘We ask the kind indulgence of the audience; a terrible calamity has befallen us, our comrade Dalès’—and the man’s voice was actually broken by tears—‘has been found in his room stifled by charcoal fumes.’

It was in this violent way that the fumes of a Russian stove delivered me from recitations, monologues and solo dances with my four-legged mahogany partner.

At twelve years old I was transferred from feminine to masculine hands. About that time my father made two unsuccessful attempts to engage a German to look after me.

A German who looks after children is neither a tutor nor a nurse; it is quite a special profession. He does not teach the children and he does not dress them, but sees that they are taught and dressed, takes care of their health, goes out for walks with them and talks any nonsense to them so long as it is in German. If there is a tutor in the house, the German is under his orders; if there is a male-nurse, he takes his orders from the German. The visiting teachers, who come late owing to unforeseen causes and leave early owing to circumstances over which they have no control, do their best to win the German’s favour, and in spite of his complete ignorance he begins to regard himself as a man of learning. Governesses employ the German in shopping for them and in all sorts of commissions, but only allow him to pay his court to them if they suffer from striking physical defects or a complete lack of other admirers. Boys of fourteen will go, without their parents’ knowledge, to the German’s room to smoke, and he puts up with it because he must do everything he can to remain in the house. Indeed at about that period the German is thanked, presented with a watch and discharged. If he is tired of sauntering about the streets with children and receiving reprimands for their having colds, or stains on their clothes, the ‘children’s German’ becomes simply a German, sets up a little shop, sells amber cigarette-holders, eau-de-Cologne and cigars to his former nurslings, and carries out other secret commissions for them.[26]

The first German who was engaged to look after me was a native of Silesia and was called Jokisch; to my mind the surname was sufficient reason not to have engaged him. He was a tall, bald man, distinguished by an extreme lack of cleanliness; he used to boast of his knowledge of agricultural science, and I imagine it must have been on that account that my father engaged him. I looked on the Silesian giant with aversion, and the only thing that reconciled me to him was that he used, as we walked to the Dyevitchy grounds and to the Pryesnensky ponds, to tell me indecent anecdotes which I repeated in the servants’ hall. He stayed no more than a year; he did something disgraceful in the village and the gardener tried to kill him with a scythe, so my father told him to take himself off.

He was succeeded by a Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel soldier (probably a deserter) called Fyodor Karlovitch, who was distinguished by his fine handwriting and extreme stupidity. He had been in the same position in two families before and had acquired some experience, so adopted the tone of a tutor; moreover, he spoke French with the accent invariably on the wrong syllable.[27]

I had not a particle of respect for him and poisoned every moment of his existence, especially after I had convinced myself that he was incapable of understanding decimal fractions and the rule of three. As a rule there is a great deal of ruthlessness and even cruelty in boys’ hearts; with positive ferocity I persecuted the poor Wolfenbüttel _Jäger_ with proportion sums; this so interested me that I triumphantly informed my father of Fyodor Karlovitch’s stupidity, though I was not given to discussing such subjects with him.

Moreover, Fyodor Karlovitch boasted to me that he had a new swallow-tail coat, dark blue with gold buttons, and I actually did see him on one occasion setting off to attend a wedding in a swallow-tail coat which was too big for him but had gold buttons. The boy whose duty it was to wait upon him informed me that he had borrowed the coat from a friend who served at the counter of a perfumery shop. Without the slightest sympathy I pestered the poor fellow to tell me where his blue dress-coat was.

‘There are so many moths in your house,’ he said, ‘that I have left it with a tailor I know, to be taken care of.’

‘Where does that tailor live?’

‘What is that to you?’

‘Why not tell me?’

‘You needn’t poke your nose into other people’s business.’

‘Well, perhaps not, but it is my name-day in a week, so please do get the blue coat from the tailor for that day.’

‘No, I won’t, you don’t deserve it because you are so impertinent.’

For his final discomfiture Fyodor Karlovitch must needs one day brag before Bouchot, my French teacher, of having been a recruit at Waterloo, and of the Germans having given the French a terrible thrashing. Bouchot merely stared at him and took a pinch of snuff with such a terrible air that the conqueror of Napoleon was a good deal disconcerted. Bouchot walked off leaning angrily on his gnarled stick and never referred to him afterwards except as ‘_le soldat de Villainton_.’ I did not know at the time that this pun was perpetrated by Béranger and could not boast of having sprung from Bouchot’s fertile fancy.

At last Blücher’s companion in arms had some quarrel with my father and left our house; after that my father did not worry me with any more Germans.

While our Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel friend held the field I sometimes used to visit some boys with whom a friend of his lived, also in the capacity of a German; and with these boys we used to take long walks; after his departure I was left again in complete solitude. I was bored, struggled to get out of it, and found no means of escape. As I had no chance of overriding my father’s will I might perhaps have been broken in to this existence, if a new intellectual interest and two meetings, of which I will speak in the following chapter, had not soon afterwards saved me. I am quite certain that my father had not the faintest notion what sort of life he was forcing upon me, or he would not have thwarted me in the most innocent desires, nor have refused me the most natural requests.

Sometimes he allowed me to go with the Senator to the French theatre, and this was the greatest enjoyment for me; I was passionately fond of seeing acting, but this pleasure brought me as much pain as joy. The Senator used to arrive with me when the play was half over, and as he invariably had an invitation for the evening, would drag me away before the end. The theatre was in Apraxin’s House, at Arbatsky Gate, and we lived in Old Konyushenny Street, that is very close by, but my father sternly forbade my returning without the Senator.

I was about fifteen when my father engaged a priest to give me Scripture lessons, so far as was necessary for entering the University. The Catechism came into my hands after I had read Voltaire. Nowhere does religion play so modest a part in education as in Russia, and that, of course, is a great piece of good fortune. A priest is always paid half-price for lessons in religion, and, indeed, if the same priest gives Latin lessons also, he is paid more for them than for teaching the Catechism.

My father regarded religion as among the essential belongings of a well-bred man; he used to say that one must believe in the ‘Holy Scriptures’ without criticism, because you could do nothing in that domain with reason, and all intellectual considerations merely obscured the subject; that one must observe the rites of the religion in which one was born, without, however, giving way to excessive devoutness, which was all right for old women, but not proper in men. Did he himself believe? I imagine that he did believe a little, from habit, from regard for propriety, and from a desire to be on the safe side. He did not himself, however, take part in any church observances, sheltering himself behind the delicate state of his health. He scarcely ever received a priest, at most he would ask him to perform a service in the empty drawing-room and would send him there five roubles. In the winter he excused himself on the plea that the priest and the deacon always brought such chilliness with them that he invariably caught cold. In the country he used to go to church and receive the priest, but rather with a view to secular affairs than religious considerations. My mother was a Lutheran and therefore one degree more religious; on one or two Sundays in every month she would drive to her church, or as Bakay persisted in calling it, to ‘her kirche,’ and, having nothing better to do, I went with her. There I learned to mimic the German pastors, their declamation and verbosity with artistic finish, and I retained the talent in riper years.

Every year my father commanded me to fast, confess, and take the sacrament. I was afraid of confession, and the church _mise en scène_ altogether impressed and alarmed me. With genuine awe I went up to take the sacrament, but I cannot call it a religious feeling, it was the awe which is inspired by everything incomprehensible and mysterious, especially when a grave and solemn significance is attributed to it; casting spells and telling fortunes affect one in the same way. I took the sacrament after matins in Holy Week, and, after devouring eggs coloured red and Easter cakes, I thought no more of religion for the rest of the year.

But I used to read the Gospel a great deal and with love, both in the Slavonic and in the Lutheran translation. I read it without any guidance, and, though I did not understand everything, I felt a deep and genuine respect for what I read. In my early youth I was often influenced by Voltairianism, and was fond of irony and mockery, but I do not remember that I ever took the Gospel in my hand with a cold feeling; and it has been the same with me all my life; at all ages and under various circumstances I have gone back to reading the Gospel, and every time its words have brought peace and gentleness to my soul.

When the priest began giving me lessons he was surprised to find not only that I had a general knowledge of the Gospel but that I could quote texts, word for word; ‘but the Lord God,’ he said, ‘though He has opened his mind, had not yet opened his heart.’ And my theologian, shrugging his shoulders, marvelled at my ‘double nature,’ but was pleased with me, thinking that I should be able to pass my examination.

Soon a religion of a different sort took possession of my soul.