Chapter 3

THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER I. AND THE FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER—MORAL AWAKENING—THE TERRORIST BOUCHOT—MY KORTCHEVA COUSIN

One winter morning the Senator arrived not at the time he usually visited us; looking anxious, he went with hurried footsteps into my father’s study and closed the door, motioning me to remain in the drawing-room.

Luckily I had not long to rack my brains guessing what was the matter. The door of the servants’ hall opened a little way and a red face, half-hidden in the wolf-fur of a livery overcoat, called me in a whisper; it was the Senator’s footman. I rushed to the door.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘The Tsar has just died at Taganrog.’

The news impressed me; I had never thought of the possibility of the Tsar’s death; I had grown up with a great respect for Alexander, and recalled mournfully how I had seen him not long before in Moscow. When we were out walking, we had met him beyond the Tverskoy Gate; he was quietly riding along with two or three generals, returning from Hodynki, where there had been a review. His face was gracious, his features soft and rounded, his expression tired and melancholy. When he was on a level with us, I raised my hat, he bowed to me, smiling. What a contrast to Nicholas, who always looked like a slightly bald Medusa with cropped hair and moustaches. In the street, at the court, with his children and ministers, with his couriers and maids of honour, he was incessantly trying whether his eyes had the power of a rattlesnake, of freezing the blood in the veins.[28] If Alexander’s external gentleness was assumed, surely such hypocrisy is better than the naked shamelessness of despotism.

While vague ideas floated through my mind, while portraits of the new Emperor Constantine were sold in the shops, while appeals to take the oath of allegiance were being delivered, and good people were hastening to do so, rumours were suddenly afloat that the Tsarevitch had refused the crown. Then that same footman of the Senator’s, who was greatly interested in political news and had a fine field for gathering it—in all the public offices and vestibules of senators, to one or other of which he was always driving from morning to night, for he did not share the privilege of the horses, who were changed after dinner—informed me that there had been rioting in Petersburg and that cannons were being fired in Galerny Street.

On the following evening Count Komarovsky, a general of the gendarmes, was with us: he told us of the troops in St. Isaac’s Square, of the Horse Guards’ attack, of the death of Count Miloradovitch.

Then followed arrests; ‘so-and-so has been taken,’ ‘so-and-so has been seized,’ ‘so-and-so has been brought up from the country’; terrified parents trembled for their children. The sky was overcast with gloomy storm-clouds.

In the reign of Alexander political punishments were rare; the Tsar did, it is true, banish Pushkin for his verses and Labzin for having, when he was secretary, proposed to elect a coachman, called Ilya Baykov, a member of the Academy of Arts[29]; but there was no systematic persecution. The secret police had not yet grown into an independent body of gendarmes, but consisted of a department under the control of De Sanglain, an old Voltairian, a wit, a great talker, and a humorist in the style of Jouy.[30] Under Nicholas, this gentleman himself was under the supervision of the police and he was considered a liberal, though he was exactly what he had always been; from this fact alone, it is easy to judge of the difference between the two reigns.

Nicholas was completely unknown until he came to the throne; in the reign of Alexander he was of no consequence, and no one was interested in him. Now every one rushed to inquire about him; no one could answer questions but the officers of the Guards; they hated him for his cold cruelty, his petty fussiness and his vindictiveness. One of the first anecdotes that went the round of the town confirmed the officers’ opinion of him. The story was that at some drill or other the Grand Duke had so far forgotten himself as to try and take an officer by the collar. The officer responded with the words: ‘Your Highness, my sword is in my hand.’ Nicholas drew back, said nothing, but never forgot the answer. After the Fourteenth of December he made inquiries on two occasions as to whether this officer was implicated. Fortunately he was not.[31]

The tone of society changed before one’s eyes; the rapid deterioration in morals was a melancholy proof of how little the sense of personal dignity was developed among Russian aristocrats. Nobody (except women) dared show sympathy, dared utter a warm word about relations or friends, whose hands had been shaken only the day before they had been carried off at night by the police. On the contrary, there were savage fanatics for slavery, some from abjectness, others, worse still, from disinterested motives.

Women alone did not take part in this shameful abandonment of those who were near and dear ... and women alone stood at the Cross too, and at the blood-stained guillotine there stood, first, Lucile Desmoulins,[32] that Ophelia of the Revolution, always beside the axe, waiting for her turn, and later, George Sand, who gave the hand of sympathy and friendship on the scaffold to the youthful fanatic Alibaud.[33]

The wives of men, exiled to hard labour, lost their civil rights, abandoned wealth and social position, and went to a lifetime of bondage in the terrible climate of Eastern Siberia, under the still more terrible yoke of the police there. Sisters, who had not the right to go with their brothers, withdrew from court, and many left Russia; almost all of them kept a feeling of love for the victims alive in their hearts; but there was no such love in the men, terror consumed it in their hearts, not one of them dared mention the luckless exiles.

While I am touching on the subject, I cannot forbear saying a few words about one of those heroic stories, of which very little has been heard. A young French governess was living in the old-fashioned family of the Ivashevs. Ivashev’s son and heir wanted to marry her. This drove all his relations frantic; there was an uproar, tears, petitions. The French girl had not the support of a brother like Tchernov, who on his sister’s behalf killed Novosiltsov and was killed by him in a duel. She was persuaded to leave Petersburg, and he to put off for a time his design of marrying her. Ivashev was one of the more active conspirators and he was sentenced to penal servitude for life. His relations did not succeed in saving him from the _mésalliance_. As soon as the dreadful news reached the young girl in Paris, she set off for Petersburg and asked permission to go to the province of Irkutsk to join her betrothed. Benckendorf tried to dissuade her from this criminal intention; he did not succeed and reported the matter to Nicholas. The Tsar directed that the position of women who did not desert their exiled husbands should be explained to her, adding that he would not prevent her going, but that she must know that, if wives who went to Siberia from fidelity to their husbands deserved some indulgence, she had not the slightest right to any since she was wilfully entering into marriage with a criminal. Nicholas and she both kept their word, she went to Siberia, and he did nothing to alleviate her fate.

‘The Monarch though severe was just.’[34]

In the prison nothing was known of the permission given her, and when the poor girl arrived she had, while a correspondence was carried on with the authorities in Petersburg, to wait in a little settlement inhabited by all sorts of former criminals, with no means of finding out anything about Ivashev or communicating with him.

By degrees she became acquainted with her new companions. Among them was an exiled robber who worked in the prison; she told him her story. Next day the robber brought her a note from Ivashev. A day later he offered to bring her notes from Ivashev and to take her letters to him. He had to work in the prison from morning till evening; at nightfall he would take Ivashev’s letter and would set off with it regardless of snowstorms and fatigue, and return to his work at dawn.[35]

At last the permission came and they were married. A few years later penal servitude was exchanged for a settlement. Their position was somewhat better, but their strength was exhausted; the wife was the first to sink under the weight of all she had gone through. She faded away as a flower of southern lands must fade in the Siberian snows. Ivashev did not survive her, he actually died a year later, but before then he had left this sphere; his letters (which made some impression on the Third Section[36]) bear the traces of an infinitely mournful, holy madness and gloomy poetry; he was not really living after her death, but slowly and solemnly dying. This chronicle does not end with his death. After Ivashev’s exile his father made over his estate to his illegitimate son, begging him to help his poor brother and not to forget him. The exiles left two little boys, helpless, fatherless and motherless, who had neither name nor rights and seemed likely to become cantonists[37] and settlers in Siberia. Ivashev’s brother entreated Nicholas for permission to take the children. Nicholas granted permission. A few years later he risked another petition, he moved heaven and earth for their father’s name to be restored to them; and in this too he was successful.

The accounts of the rising and of the trial of the leaders, and the horror in Moscow, made a deep impression on me; a new world which became more and more the centre of my moral existence was revealed to me. I do not know how it came to pass, but though I had no understanding, or only a very dim one, of what it all meant, I felt that I was not on the same side as the grape-shot and victory, prisons and chains. The execution of Pestel,[38] and his associates finally dissipated the childish dream of my soul.

Every one expected some mitigation of the sentence on the condemned men, the coronation was about to take place. Even my father, in spite of his caution and his scepticism, said that the death penalty would not be carried out, and that all this was done merely to impress people. But, like every one else, he knew little of the youthful monarch. Nicholas left Petersburg, and, without visiting Moscow, stopped at the Petrovsky Palace.... The citizens of Moscow could scarcely believe their eyes when they read in the _Moscow News_ of the terrible event of the fourteenth of July.

The Russian people had become unaccustomed to the death penalty; since the days of Mirovitch,[39] who was executed instead of Catherine II., and of Pugatchov[40] and his companions, there had been no executions; men had died under the knout, soldiers had run the gauntlet (contrary to the law) until they fell dead, but the death penalty _de jure_ did not exist. The story is told that in the reign of Paul there was some partial rising of the Cossacks on the Don in which two officers were implicated. Paul ordered them to be tried by court martial, and gave the hetman or general full authority. The court condemned them to death, but no one dared to confirm the sentence; the hetman submitted the matter to the Tsar. ‘They are a pack of women,’ said Paul; ‘they want to throw the execution on me, very much obliged to them,’ and he commuted the sentence to penal servitude.

Nicholas re-introduced the death penalty into our criminal proceedings, at first illegally, but afterwards he included it in the Code.

The day after receiving the terrible news there was a religious service in the Kremlin.[41] After celebrating the execution Nicholas made his triumphal entry into Moscow. I saw him then for the first time; he was on horseback riding beside a carriage in which the two empresses, his wife and Alexander’s widow, were sitting. He was handsome, but there was a coldness about his looks; no face could have more mercilessly betrayed the character of the man than his. The sharply retreating forehead and the lower jaw developed at the expense of the skull were expressive of iron will and feeble intelligence, rather of cruelty than of sensuality; but the chief point in the face was the eyes, which were entirely without warmth, without a trace of mercy, wintry eyes. I do not believe that he ever passionately loved any woman, as Paul loved Anna Lopuhin,[42] and as Alexander loved all women except his wife; ‘he was favourably disposed to them,’ nothing more.

In the Vatican there is a new gallery in which Pius VII., I believe, has placed an immense number of statues, busts, and statuettes, dug up in Rome and its environs. The whole history of the decline of Rome is there expressed in eyebrows, lips, foreheads; from the daughters of Augustus down to Poppaea, the matrons have succeeded in transforming themselves into cocottes, and the type of cocotte is predominant and persists; the masculine type, surpassing itself, so to speak, in Antinous and Hermaphroditus, divides into two. On one hand there is sensual and moral degradation, low brows and features defiled by vice and gluttony, bloodshed and every wickedness in the world, petty as in the hetaira Heliogabalus, or with sunken cheeks like Galba; the last type is wonderfully reproduced in the King of Naples.... But there is another—the type of military commander in whom everything social and moral, everything human has died out, and there is left nothing but the passion for domination; the mind is narrow and there is no heart at all; they are the monks of the love of power; force and austere will is manifest in their features. Such were the Emperors of the Praetorian Guard and of the army, whom the turbulent legionaries raised to power for an hour. Among their number I found many heads that recalled Nicholas before he wore a moustache. I understand the necessity for these grim and inflexible guards beside what is dying in frenzy, but what use are they to what is youthful and growing?

In spite of the fact that political dreams absorbed me day and night, my ideas were not distinguished by any peculiar insight; they were so confused that I actually imagined that the object of the Petersburg rising was, among other things, to put the Tsarevitch Constantine on the throne, while limiting his power. This led to my being devoted for a whole year to that eccentric creature. He was at that time more popular than Nicholas; for what reason I do not know, but the masses, for whom he had never done anything good, and the soldiers, to whom he had done nothing but harm, loved him. I well remember how during the coronation he walked beside the pale-faced Nicholas with scowling, light-yellow, bushy eyebrows, a bent figure with the shoulders hunched up to the ears, wearing the uniform of the Lettish Guards with a yellow collar. After giving away the bride at the wedding of Nicholas with Russia, he went away to complete the disaffection of Warsaw. Nothing more was heard of him until the 29th of November 1830.[43]

My hero was not handsome and you could not find such a type in the Vatican. I should have called it the Gatchina type, if I had not seen the King of Sardinia.

I need hardly say that now solitude weighed upon me more than ever, for I longed to communicate my ideas and my dreams to some one, to test them and to hear them confirmed; I was too proudly conscious of being ‘ill-intentioned’ to say nothing about it, or to speak of it indiscriminately. My first choice of a confidant was my Russian tutor.

I. E. Protopopov was full of that vague and generous liberalism which often passes away with the first grey hair, with marriage and a post, but yet does ennoble a man. My teacher was touched, and as he was taking leave embraced me with the words: ‘God grant that these feelings may take root and grow stronger in you.’ His sympathy was a great comfort to me. After this he began bringing me much-dog’s-eared manuscript copies in small handwriting of Pushkin’s poems, the ‘Ode to Freedom,’ ‘The Dagger,’ ‘Ryleyev’s Reverie.’ I used to copy them in secret ... (and now I print them openly!).

Of course, my reading, too, took a different turn. Politics was now in the foreground, and above all the history of the Revolution, of which I knew nothing except from Madame Proveau’s tales. In the library in the basement I discovered a history of the ‘nineties written by a Royalist. It was so partial that even at fourteen I did not believe it. I happened to hear from old Bouchot that he had been in Paris during the Revolution; and I longed to question him; but Bouchot was a stern and forbidding man with an immense nose and spectacles; he never indulged in superfluous conversation, he conjugated verbs, dictated copies, scolded me and went away, leaning on his thick gnarled stick.

‘Why did they execute Louis XVI.?’ I asked him in the middle of a lesson.

The old man looked at me, frowning with one grey eyebrow and lifting the other, pushed his spectacles up on his forehead like a visor, pulled out a large blue handkerchief and, blowing his nose with dignity, said: ‘_Parce qu’il a été traître à la patrie_.’

‘If you had been one of the judges, would you have signed the death sentence?’

‘With both hands.’

This lesson was of more value to me than all the subjunctives; it was enough for me; it was clear that the king deserved to be executed.

Old Bouchot did not like me and thought me empty-headed and mischievous, because I did not prepare my lessons properly, and he often used to say ‘you’ll come to no good,’ but when he noticed my sympathy with his regicide ideas, he began to be gracious instead of being cross, forgave my mistakes and used to tell me episodes of the year ’93, and how he had left France, when ‘the dissolute and the dishonest’ got the upper hand. He would finish the lesson with the same dignity, without a smile, but now he would say indulgently: ‘I really did think that you were coming to no good, but your generous feelings will be your salvation.’

To this encouragement and sympathy from my teacher was soon added a warmer sympathy which had more influence on me.

The granddaughter[44] of my father’s eldest brother was living in a little town in the province of Tver. I had known her from my earliest childhood, but we rarely met; she used to come once a year for Christmas or for Carnival to stay at Moscow with her aunt. Nevertheless, we became friends. She was five years older than I, but so small and young-looking that she might have been taken for the same age. What I particularly liked her for was that she was the first person who treated me as a human being, that is, did not continually express surprise at my having grown, ask me what lessons I was doing, and whether I was good at them, and whether I wanted to go into the army and into what regiment, but talked to me as people in general talk to each other; though she retained that tone of authority which girls like to assume with boys who are a little younger than themselves. We had written to each other and after 1824 fairly often, but letters again mean pens and paper, again the schoolroom table with its blots and pictures carved with a penknife; I longed to see her, to talk to her about my new ideas, and so it may be imagined with what joy I heard that my cousin was coming in February (1826), and would stay with us for some months. I scratched on my table the days of the month until her arrival and blotted them out as they passed, sometimes intentionally forgetting three days so as to have the pleasure of blotting out rather more at once, and yet the time dragged on very slowly; then the time fixed had passed and her coming was deferred until a later date, and that passed, as it always does.

I was sitting one evening with my tutor Protopopov in my schoolroom, and he as usual, taking a sip of fizzing kvass after every sentence, was talking of the hexameter, horribly with voice and hand chopping up every line of Gnyeditch’s _Iliad_ at the cæsura, when all of a sudden the snow in the yard crunched with a different sound from that made by town sledges, the tied-up bell gave the relic of a tinkle, there was talk in the yard.... I flushed crimson, I had no more thought for the measured wrath of ‘Achilles, son of Peleus’; I rushed headlong to the hall and my cousin from Tver, wrapped in fur coats, shawls, and scarves, wearing a bonnet and fluffy white high boots, red with the frost and, perhaps, with joy, rushed to kiss me.

People usually talk of their early childhood, of its griefs and joys with a smile of condescension, as though, like Sofya Pavlovna in _Woe from Wit_, they would say with a grimace: ‘Childishness!’ As though they had grown better in later years, as though their feelings were keener or deeper. Within three years children are ashamed of their playthings—let them be, they long to be grown-up, they grow and change so rapidly, they see that from their jackets and the pages of their schoolbooks; but one would have thought grown-up people might understand that childhood together with two or three years of youth is the fullest, most exquisite part of life, the part that is most our own, and, indeed, almost the most important, for it imperceptibly shapes our future.

So long as a man is advancing with discreet footsteps forward, without stopping or taking thought, so long as he does not come to a precipice or break his neck, he imagines that his life lies before him, looks down on the past and does not know how to appreciate the present. But when experience has crushed the flowers of spring and the flush of summer has cooled, when he begins to suspect that his life is practically over, though its continuation remains, then he turns with different feelings to the bright, warm, lovely memories of early youth.

Nature with her everlasting snares and economic devices _gives_ man youth, but _takes_ the formed man for herself; she draws him on, entangles him in a web of social and family relations, three-fourths of which are independent of his will; he, of course, gives his personal character to his actions, but he belongs to himself far less than in youth; the lyrical element of the personality is feebler and therefore also the power of enjoyment—everything is weaker, except the mind and the will.

My cousin’s life was not a bed of roses. Her mother she lost when she was a baby. Her father was a desperate gambler, and, like all who have gambling in their blood, he was a dozen times reduced to poverty and a dozen times rich again, and ended all the same by completely ruining himself. _Les beaux restes_ of his property he devoted to a stud-farm on which he concentrated all his thoughts and feelings. His son, an ensign in the Uhlans, my cousin’s only brother and a very good-natured youth, was going the straight road to ruin; at nineteen he was already a more passionate gambler than his father.

At fifty, the father, for no reason at all, married an old maid who had been a pupil in the Smolny Convent.[45] Such a complete, perfect type of the Petersburg boarding-school miss it has never been my lot to meet. She had been one of the best pupils, and afterwards had become _dame de classe_ in the school; thin, fair, and short-sighted, she had something didactic and edifying about her very appearance. Not at all stupid, she was full of an icy enthusiasm in words, talked in hackneyed phrases of virtue and devotion, knew chronology and geography by heart, spoke French with a revolting correctness and concealed an inner vanity which was like an artificial Jesuitical modesty. In addition to these traits of the ‘seminarists in yellow shawls’ she had others which were purely Nevsky or Smolny characteristics. She used to raise her eyes full of tears to heaven, as she spoke of the visits of their common mother (the Empress Maria Fyodorovna), was in love with the Emperor Alexander, and, I remember, used to wear a locket, or a signet ring, with a scrap of a letter from the Empress Elizabeth in it, ‘_Il a repris son sourire de bienveillance!_’

The reader can picture the harmonious trio: the father, a gambler, passionately devoted to horses, gypsies, noise, carousals, races, and trotting matches; the daughter brought up in complete independence, accustomed to do what she liked in the house; and the learned lady who, from an elderly schoolmistress, had been turned into a young wife. Of course, she did not like her stepdaughter, and of course her stepdaughter did not like her; as a rule great affection can only exist between women of five-and-thirty and girls of seventeen when the former, with resolute self-sacrifice, determine to have no sex.

I am not at all surprised at the common hostility between stepdaughters and stepmothers, it is natural and it is right. The new person put into the mother’s place excites aversion in the children, the second marriage is for them like a second funeral. The children’s love is vividly expressed in this feeling, it whispers to the orphans: ‘Your father’s wife is not your mother.’ At first Christianity understood that with the conception of marriage which it developed, with the immortality of the soul which it preached, a second marriage was altogether incongruous; but, making continual concessions to the world, the Church compromised with its principles and was confronted with the implacable logic of life, with the simple childish heart that in practice revolts against the pious incongruity of regarding its father’s companion as its mother.

On her side, too, the woman who comes to her new home from church and finds a family, children awaiting her, is in an awkward position; she has nothing to do with them, she must affect feelings which she cannot have, she must persuade herself and others that another woman’s children are as dear to her as her own.

And therefore I do not in the least blame the lady from the convent nor my cousin for their mutual dislike, but I understand how the young girl, unaccustomed to discipline, was fretting to escape anywhere out of the parental home. Her father was beginning to get old and was more and more under the thumb of his learned wife. Her brother, the Uhlan, was going from bad to worse, and, in fact, life was not pleasant at home, and at last she persuaded her stepmother to let her come for some months, possibly even for a year, to us.

The day after her arrival my cousin turned the whole order of my life, except my lessons, upside down, arbitrarily fixed hours for our reading together, advised me not to read novels, but recommended Ségur’s _Universal History_ and the _Travels of Anacharsis_. Her stoical ideals led her to oppose my marked inclination for smoking in secret, which I did by wrapping the tobacco in paper (cigarettes did not exist in those days); she liked preaching morality to me in general, and if I did not obey her teaching, at least I listened meekly. Luckily she could not keep up to her own standards, and, forgetting her rules, she read Zschokke’s[46] tales with me instead of the archæological novel, and secretly sent a boy out to buy, in winter, buckwheat cakes and pease-pudding, and, in summer, gooseberries and currants.

I think my cousin’s influence over me was very good; with her a warm element came into the cell-like seclusion of my youth, it fostered and perhaps, indeed, preserved the scarcely developing feelings which might very well have been completely crushed by my father’s irony. I learnt to be observant, to be wounded by a word, to care about somebody else, to love; I learnt to talk about my feelings. She supported my political aspirations, predicted for me an extraordinary future and fame, and I, with childish vanity, believed her that I was a future ‘Brutus or Fabricius.’

To me alone she confided the secret of her love for an officer of the Alexandrinsky Regiment of Hussars, in a black cape and a black dolman; it was a genuine secret, for the hussar himself, as he commanded his squadron, never suspected what a pure flame was glowing for him in the bosom of a girl of eighteen. I do not know whether I envied his lot, probably I did a little, but I was proud of having been chosen as a confidant, and imagined (after Werther) that this was one of those tragic passions, which would have a great _dénouement_ accompanied by suicide, poison, and a dagger, and the idea even occurred to me that I might go to him and tell him all about it.

My cousin had brought shuttlecocks from Kortcheva; in one of the shuttlecocks there was a pin, she would never play with any other, and whenever it fell to me or any one else she would take it, saying she was used to playing with it. The demon of mischief, which was always my evil tempter, prompted me to change the pin, that is, to stick it in another shuttlecock. The trick was fully successful, my cousin always took to the one with the pin in it. A fortnight later I told her; her face changed, she dissolved into tears and went off to her own room. I was panic-stricken and unhappy and, after waiting for half an hour, went to her; her door was locked. I begged her to open it; she refused to let me in and said that she was ill, that I was no friend to her, but a heartless boy. I wrote her a note and besought her to forgive me; after tea we made it up, I kissed her hand, she embraced me and at once explained the full importance of the matter. A year before, the hussar had dined with them and after dinner played battledore and shuttlecock, and this was the shuttlecock with which he had played. I had pangs of conscience, I thought that I had committed a real sacrilege.

My cousin stayed until October. Her father sent for her to come home, promising to let her come to us at Vassilyevskoe the following year. We looked forward with horror to parting and, behold, one day a chaise came for her, and her maid carried off boxes and baskets to pack in it while our servants filled the chaise with all sorts of provisions for a full week’s journey, and crowded at the entrance to say good-bye. We embraced warmly, she wept and I wept—the chaise drove out into the side street beside the very place where they used to sell us buckwheat cakes and pease-pudding, and vanished. I crossed the yard, it seemed so cold and horrid; I went up into my room—and there it seemed cold and empty. I set to work on my lesson for Protopopov, while I wondered where the chaise was now, and whether it had passed the town-gate or not.

My only comfort was the thought of our being together again at Vassilyevskoe the following June!

For me the country was always a time of renewal, I was passionately fond of country life. The forest, the fields, and the freedom—it was all so new for me who had been brought up in cotton-wool, within brick walk, not daring on any pretext to go out beyond the gate without asking leave and being accompanied by a footman....

‘Are we going this year to Vassilyevskoe or not?’ From early spring I was greatly interested in this question. My father invariably said that this year he was going away early, that he longed to see the leaves come out, but he never could get off before July. Some years he would put it off so late that we never went at all. He wrote to the country every winter that the house was to be got ready and thoroughly warmed, but this was done through deep diplomatic considerations rather than quite seriously, in order that the village elder and the counting-house clerk might be afraid he would soon be coming and look after their work more carefully.

It seemed that we were going. My father told the Senator that he was longing to rest in the country and that the estate wanted looking after, but again weeks went by.

Little by little there seemed more ground for hope, provisions began to be sent off, sugar, tea, all sorts of cereals, and wine—then again there was a pause, and then at last an order was despatched to the village elder to send so many peasants’ horses on such a day—and so we were going, we were going!

I did not think then what the loss of four or five days when work in the fields was at its height must have meant to the peasants, but rejoiced with all my heart and hastened to pack my books and exercise books. The horses were brought, with inward satisfaction I heard their munching and snorting in the yard, and took great interest in the bustle of the coachmen, and the wrangling of the servants as to who should sit in which cart and where each should put his belongings. In the servants’ quarters lights were burning until daybreak, and all were packing, dragging sacks and bags from place to place, and dressing for the journey (which was one of over fifty miles). My father’s valet was the most exasperated of all, he realised the full importance of the packing; with intense irritation he flung out everything which had been put in by others, tore his hair with vexation and was quite unapproachable.

My father did not get up a bit earlier next day, in fact I think he got up later than usual, and drank his coffee just as slowly, but at last, at eleven o’clock, he ordered the horses to be put in. Behind the carriage, which had four seats and was drawn by six carriage horses, there followed three and sometimes four conveyances—a coach, a chaise, a wagon, or instead of it, two carts; all these were filled with the house-serfs and their belongings, although wagon-loads had been sent on beforehand, and everything was so tightly packed that no one could sit with comfort. We stopped half way to have dinner and to feed the horses in the big village of Perhushkovo, the name of which occurs in Napoleon’s bulletins. This village belonged to the son of that elder brother of my father of whom I have spoken in connection with the division of the property. The neglected house of the owner stood on the high-road, surrounded by flat, cheerless-looking fields; but even this dusty vista delighted me after the stuffiness of town. In the house the warped boards and stairs shook, sounds and footsteps resounded loudly, the walls echoed as it were with astonishment. The old-fashioned furniture from the former owner’s art museum was living out its day in this exile; I wandered with curiosity from room to room, went upstairs and downstairs and finally into the kitchen. There our man-cook, with a cross and ironical expression, was preparing a hasty dinner. The steward, a grey-haired old man with a swelling on his head, was usually sitting in the kitchen; the cook addressed his remarks to him and criticised the stove and the hearth, while the steward listened to him and from time to time answered laconically: ‘May-be,’ and looked disconsolately at all the upset, wondering when the devil would carry us off again.

The dinner was served on a special English service, made of tin or some composition, bought _ad hoc_. Meanwhile the horses had been put in; in the hall and vestibule, people who were fond of meetings and leave-takings were gathering together: footmen who were finishing their lives on bread and pure country air, old women who had been prepossessing maids thirty years before, all the locusts of a landowner’s household who through no fault of their own eat up the peasants’ substance like real locusts. With them came children with flaxen hair; barefooted and muddy, they kept poking forward while the old women pulled them back. They caught me on every opportunity, and every year wondered that I had grown so much. My father said a few words to them; some went up to kiss his hand, which he never gave them, others bowed, and we set off.

A few miles from Prince Golitsyn’s estate of Vyazma the elder of Vassilyevskoe was waiting for us on horseback at the edge of the forest, and he escorted us by a cross-road. In the village by the big house, approached by a long avenue of limes, we were met by the priest, his wife, the church servitors, the house-serfs, several peasants, and the village fool, who was the only one to display a feeling of human dignity, for he did not take off his hat, but stood smiling at a little distance and took to his heels as soon as any of the town servants attempted to approach him.

I have seen few places more picturesque than Vassilyevskoe. For any one who knows Kuntsovo and Yussupov’s Arhangelskoe, or Lopuhin’s estate facing the Savin monastery, it is enough to say that Vassilyevskoe lies on a continuation of the same bank of the Moskva, twenty miles from the same monastery. On the sloping side of the river lie the village, the church, and the old manor house. On the other side there is a hill and a small village, and there my father built a new house. The view from it embraced an expanse of ten miles of country; seas of quivering cornfields stretched endlessly; homesteads and villages with white churches could be seen here and there; forests of various hues made a semicircular setting, and the Moskva like a pale blue ribbon ran through it all. Early in the morning I opened the window in the room upstairs and gazed and listened and breathed.

And yet I regretted the old brick house, perhaps because I was there when I first went to the country; I so loved the long, shady avenue leading up to it and the garden that had run wild; the house had fallen into ruins and a slender graceful birch tree was growing out of a crack in the wall of the hall. On the left an avenue of willows ran along the riverside, beyond it there were reeds and the white sand down to the river; on that sand and among those reeds I used at ten and eleven years old to play for a whole morning. A bent old man, the gardener, used always to be sitting before the house, he used to distil peppermint water, cook berries, and secretly regale me on all sorts of vegetables. There were great numbers of rooks in the garden: the tops of the trees were covered with their nests, and they used to circle round them, cawing; sometimes, especially in the evening, they used to fly up in regular hundreds racing after one another with a great clamour; sometimes one would fly hurriedly from tree to tree and then all would be still.... And towards night an owl would wail somewhere in the distance like a child, or go off into a peal of laughter.... I was afraid of these wild wailing sounds and yet I went to listen to them.

Every year, or, at least, every alternate year, we used to go to Vassilyevskoe. As I went away, I used to measure my height on the wall by the balcony, and I went at once on arriving to find how much I had grown. But in the country I could measure not only my physical growth, these periodical returns to the same objects showed me clearly the difference in my inner development. Other books were brought, other objects interested me. In 1823 I was quite a child, I had children’s books with me, and even those I did not read, but was much more interested in a hare and a squirrel which were living in the loft near my room. One of my principal enjoyments consisted in my father’s permission to shoot from a falconet every evening, which operation of course entertained all the servants, and grey-haired old men of fifty were as much diverted as I was. In 1827 I brought with me Plutarch and Schiller; early in the morning I used to go out into the forest as far as I could and, imagining that I was in the Bohemian forests, read aloud to myself. Nevertheless, I was greatly interested in a dam which I was making on a small stream with the help of a serf-boy and would run a dozen times a day to look at it and repair it. In 1829 and 1830 I was writing a philosophical article on Schiller’s _Wallenstein_, and of my old toys none but the falconet retained its charm.

Besides shooting there was, however, another enjoyment for which I retained an unalterable passion—watching the evenings in the country; now as then, such evenings are still times of devoutness, peace, and poetry. One of the last serenely-bright moments in my life reminds me also of those village evenings. The sun was sinking majestically, brilliantly, into an ocean of fire, was dissolving into it.... All at once the rich purple was followed by deep blue dusk, everything was covered with a smoky mist: in Italy the darkness falls quickly. We mounted our mules; on the way from Frascati to Rome we had to ride through a little village; here and there lights were already twinkling; everything was still, the mules’ hoofs rang musically on the stone, a fresh and rather damp wind was blowing from the Apennines. As we came out of the village, there was a little Madonna standing in a niche with a lamp burning before her; some peasant girls as they came from work with white kerchiefs on their heads sank on their knees and chanted a prayer; they were joined by some strolling flute-players who were passing by. I was deeply affected, deeply touched. We looked at each other ... and with slow steps rode on to the inn where a carriage was waiting for us. As we drove homewards I talked of the evenings at Vassilyevskoe, and what was there to tell?

‘In silence stood the garden trees, Among the hills the village lay, And thither at the fall of night The lingering cattle wend their way.’ OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.

... The shepherd cracks his long whip and plays on his birch-bark pipe; there is the lowing and bleating and stamping of the herds returning over the bridge, the dog with a bark chases a straying sheep while she runs with a sort of wooden gallop; and then the songs of the peasant girls, on their way home from the fields, come closer and closer; but the path turns off to the right and the sounds retreat again. From the houses children run out at the creaking gates to meet their cows and sheep; work is over. The children are playing in the street and on the river-bank, their voices ring out with shrill clearness over the river in the evening glow; the parched smell of corn-kilns mingles in the air, the dew begins little by little to lie like smoke over the fields, the wind moves over the forest with a sound as though the leaves were boiling and the summer lightning, quivering, lights up the landscape with a dying, tremulous azure, and Vera Artamonovna, grumbling rather than cross, says, coming upon me under a lime tree: ‘How is it there is no finding you anywhere, and tea has been ready long ago and every one is at the table, here I have been looking and looking for you until my legs are tired. I can’t go running about at my age; and why are you lying on the damp grass like that? ... you’ll have a cold to-morrow, I’ll be bound.’

‘Oh, come, come,’ I say, laughing to the old woman, ‘I shan’t have a cold and I don’t want any tea, but you steal me the best of the cream from the very top.’

‘Well, you really are a boy, there’s no being angry with you ... that’s a queer thing to ask for! I have got the cream ready for you without your asking. Look at the lightning ... well, that’s right! It’s good for the corn.’

And I go home skipping and whistling.

We did not visit Vassilyevskoe after 1832. My father sold it while I was in exile. In 1843 we stayed at another estate in the Moscow province, in the district of Zvenigorod, about fourteen miles from Vassilyevskoe. I could not help going over to visit my old home. And here we were again riding along the same cross-road; the familiar fir-wood and the hill covered with nut trees came into view, and then the ford over the river, the ford that had so delighted me twenty years before, the gurgling of the water, the crunching of the pebbles, the shouting coachmen and the struggling horses ... and here was the village and the priest’s house where he used to sit on a bench in a dark-brown cassock, simple-hearted, good-natured, red-haired, always in a sweat, always nibbling something and always afflicted with a hiccup; and here was the counting-house where the clerk Vassily Epifanov, who was never sober, used to write his accounts, huddled up over the paper, holding the pen by the very end with his third finger bent tightly under it. The priest was dead and Vassily Epifanov was keeping accounts and getting drunk in another village. We stopped at the village elder’s hut, but found only the wife at home, the man himself was in the fields.

A strange element had crept in during those ten years; instead of our house on the hill there was a new one, and a new garden was laid out beside it. As we turned by the church and the graveyard, we met a deformed-looking figure, dragging itself along almost on all fours; it was showing me something, I went up: it was a hunchback and paralytic old woman, half-crazy, who used to live on charity and work in the former priest’s garden. She had been about seventy then and death seemed to have overlooked her. She recognised me, shed tears, shook her head and kept saying: ‘Ough! why even you are getting old, I only knew you from your walk, while I—there, there, ough! ough! don’t talk of it!’

As we were driving back, I saw in the fields in the distance the village elder, the same as in our time. At first he did not know me, but when we had driven by, as though suddenly coming to himself with a start, he took off his hat and bowed low. When we had driven a little further I turned round; the village elder, Grigory Gorsky, was still standing in the same place, looking after us; his tall, bearded figure, bowing in the midst of the cornfield, gave us a friendly send-off from the home which had passed into strangers’ hands.