Home of the Gentry

  X

  IVAN PETROVICH returned to Russia an Anglomaniac. With his hair cut short, the starched frill on his shirt-front, the long pea-green frock-coat with its multitude of collars, a sour expression on his face, something both brusque and negligent in his manner, the pronunciation of words through his teeth, a sudden wooden laugh, lack of smiles, exclusively political and politico-economic talk, a passion for underdone roast-beef and port wine – everything about him literally reeked of Great Britain; he seemed to be entirely saturated in its spirit. But – wonders will never cease! – having turned himself into an Anglomaniac, Ivan Petrovich at the same time became a patriot, or at least he called himself a patriot, although he did not know Russia well, did not uphold a single Russian custom and had a strange way of expressing himself in Russian: in ordinary conversation his speech, cumbersome and flaccid, was profusely dotted with Gallicisms; but as soon as a conversation turned on important matters, there at once appeared on Ivan Petrovich’s lips expressions such as: ‘Occasion new lessons in self-endeavour’, ‘that does not accord, egad, with the very nature of the circumstances’ and so on. Ivan Petrovich brought with him several draft plans which were concerned with the arrangement and improvement of the estate; he was very dissatisfied with everything he saw – the absence of system particularly aroused his bitter animosity. Upon seeing his sister his very first words to her were a declaration that he intended to introduce radical changes and that from henceforth in his house everything would be run on a new system. Glafira Petrovna made no answer to Ivan Petrovich apart from gritting her teeth and mentally asking herself: ‘I wonder where I’ll fit into all this?’ However, having arrived at the country estate along with her brother and nephew, she was soon consoled. Certain changes were certainly made in the house: the spongers and parasites underwent immediate expulsion; among those who suffered were two old women, one blind, the other afflicted by paralysis, and a decrepit major of Ochakov days who, by virtue of his truly remarkable greediness, had been fed exclusively on black bread and lentils. An order was also issued not to receive former guests: they were all superseded by a distant neighbour, some fair-haired scrofulous baron, who was a very well-educated and very stupid fellow. New furniture appeared from Moscow; spittoons, hand-bells for the table and wash-hand-stands were introduced; lunch was served in a new way; foreign wines ousted vodka and native spirits; the servants had new liveries made for them; the family crest had the words In recto virtus… added to it. In essence Glafira’s authority was in no way reduced: the responsibility for all outgoings and purchases still rested with her; the valet from Alsace, who had been brought from abroad, attempted to cross swords with her – and lost his post despite the fact that the master of the house was his patron. So far as the economics and management of the estate were concerned (Glafira Petrovna went into all these matters), despite Ivan Petrovich’s repeatedly expressed intention to breathe new life into this chaos, everything remained as before, save that quit-rent payments were increased here and there and the compulsory work on the master’s land was made more onerous, and the peasants were forbidden to approach Ivan Petrovich directly. The patriot had a very low opinion of his fellow citizens. Ivan Petrovich’s system was applied in full force only to Fedya; his education really underwent ‘radical transformation’: his father concerned himself with it to the exclusion of all else.

  XI

  UNTIL Ivan Petrovich’s return from abroad Fedya, as has already been said, was in the hands of Glafira Petrovna. He was not yet eight years old when his mother died; he saw her infrequently and he loved her passionately: his recollection of her calm white face, her despondent eyes and timorous displays of fondness remained imprinted in his heart forever; but he had a vague awareness of her position in the house; he sensed that between him and her there existed a barrier which she neither dared to, nor could, break down. He avoided his father, and Ivan Petrovich for his part never showed him any affection; his grandfather occasionally stroked his head and allowed him to kiss his hand, but used to call him surly and considered him a fool. After Malanya Sergeyevna’s death his aunt finally got him into her hands. Fedya was frightened of her, frightened of her penetrating bright eyes and her sharp voice; he dared not open his mouth in her presence; if he so much as began to stir on his chair, she would hiss out: ‘Where are you off to? Sit still.’ On Sundays after dinner he was allowed to play, that is to say he was given a mysterious stout book, the work of a certain Maximovich-Ambodik, entitled Symbols and Emblems1. This book contained about a thousand partly very enigmatic drawings, with as many equally enigmatic descriptions in five languages. Cupid, with a naked, chubby body, played a great part in these drawings. To one of them, with the title ‘The Saffron Flower and the Rainbow’, was given the explanation: ‘The Effect of Ye Flower is Greater’; opposite another depicting ‘A Heron flying with a Violet in its Beak’ stood the inscription: ‘To Thee All Things Are Known’. ‘Cupid and a Bear licking her Young One’ signified: ‘Little by Little’. Fedya used to study these drawings; they were all known to him down to the smallest details; some, always the same ones, made him stop to think and aroused his imagination; he knew no other pastimes. When the time came for him to be taught languages and music, Glafira Petrovna engaged for a pittance an elderly maiden lady, a Swede with darting eyes, who could just manage to speak French and German and played the piano so-so, but was above all excellent at pickling cucumbers. In the company of this instructress, his aunt and an old maid-servant, Vasilyevna, Fedya spent four whole years. There were times when he used to sit in a corner with his Emblems – and go on sitting there for hours at a time; the low-ceilinged room had a smell of geraniums, a single tallow candle burned faintly, a cricket sang monotonously, literally as if it were bored, a little clock ticked briskly on the wall, a mouse furtively scratched and gnawed behind the wallpaper, and the three old women, like the Parcae, would rapidly and soundlessly ply their needles, and the shadows from their hands would run up the walls or quiver strangely in the half-light of the room, and strange, similarly half-dark thoughts would swarm in the boy’s head. No one would have called Fedya an interesting child: he was fairly pale, but fat and of awkward and ungainly build – a real muzhik, in Glafira Petrovna’s words; the pallor would soon have vanished from his face if he had been sent out in the open air more often. He did his lessons well enough, although he was frequently lazy; he never cried; yet at times he would be possessed by a savage obstinacy and then no one could do anything with him. Fedya loved none of those around him…. Woe to the heart that has not loved in youth!

  This is how Ivan Petrovich found him and, wasting no time, he set about applying his system to him. ‘Above all I want to make a man of him, un homme,’ he told Glafira Petrovna, ‘and not only a man, but a Spartan.’ Ivan Petrovich began putting his intention into effect by dressing his son in a Scottish outfit: the twelve-year-old lad began to go about with bare legs and a cock’s feather in his bonnet; the Swedish lady was replaced by a young Swiss who had studied gymnastics to perfection; music, as an occupation unworthy of a man, was banished altogether; the natural sciences, international law, mathematics, carpentry, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau had advised, and heraldry for the cultivation of chivalrous feelings – these were what the ‘man-to-be’ had to concern himself with; he was woken at four o’clock in the morning, at once doused with cold water and made to run round a high pole on a string; he ate one meal a day consisting of one dish, rode on horseback and shot from a cross-bow; at every suitable opportunity he would give himself lessons in strength of will, on the example of his parent, and each evening he would enter in a special book an account of the past day and his impressions; while Ivan Petrovich, for his part, would write him edifying dithyrambs in French in which he called him mon fils and addressed him as vous. Fedya addressed his father in Russian with the familiar ‘thou’, but never dared to sit down in his presence. The ‘system’ bemused the boy, sowed confusion in his head and cramped his mind; but, despite this, the ne
w way of life had a beneficial effect on his health: at first he caught a fever, but he quickly recovered and became a sturdy youngster. His father was proud of him and described him in his strange manner of speaking as ‘a son of nature, all my own work’. When Fedya was sixteen, Ivan Petrovich considered it his duty, in good time, to instil in him a contempt for the female sex – and the young Spartan, timid at heart, with the first down on his cheeks, full of sap, strength and new blood, made an attempt to appear indifferent, cold and rude.

  Meanwhile, time was relentlessly passing. Ivan Petrovich was used to spending a great part of each year in Lavriki (such was the name of his main estate), but in the winters he went off alone to Moscow, put up in an inn, assiduously visited his club, dilated oratorically on his plans in drawing-rooms and behaved more than ever like an Anglomaniac and querulous elder statesman. Then came the year 18252 and brought much grief with it. Close acquaintances and friends of Ivan Petrovich underwent painful ordeals. Ivan Petrovich hurriedly withdrew to the country and locked himself in his house. Another year passed and Ivan Petrovich suddenly went into a decline, grew weak and poorly; his health played traitor to him. The freethinker began to go to church and order prayers to be said; the European began taking steam baths, dining at two o’clock, going to bed at nine and falling asleep to the old steward’s chatter; the elder statesman burned all his plans and correspondence, trembled before the governor and fawned before the district police officer; the man of tempered will whimpered and groaned when a boil erupted on his skin or he was served a bowl of cold soup. Glafira Petrovna once again took charge of everything in the house; once again stewards, bailiffs and simple peasants began to frequent the back door to see ‘the browbeating old bitch’, as the house-serfs called her. The change in Ivan Petrovich had a powerful effect on his son; he was already nineteen and beginning to think for himself and break free of the oppressive authority wielded by his father’s hand. He had previously noticed the discrepancy between his father’s words and his deeds, between his broad liberal theories and crusty, petty despotism; but he had not expected such a sharp about-turn. The chronic egoist now revealed himself in his true colours. The young Lavretsky was about to go off to Moscow to prepare for the university when a new and unexpected misfortune broke over Ivan Petrovich’s head: he went blind, hopelessly blind, in the course of a single day.

  Mistrusting the expertise of Russian doctors, he began to petition to be allowed to go abroad. He was refused. Then he took his son with him and for three whole years wandered about Russia from one doctor to another, ceaselessly travelling from town to town and driving the doctors, his son and his servants to despair through his cowardice and impatience. He was an utterly wet rag, like a snivelling and capricious child, when he returned to Lavriki. Bitter, miserable days ensued, in which everyone had to put up with a great deal from him. Ivan Petrovich ceased his tantrums only at mealtimes; he had never eaten so greedily or so much; the rest of the time he gave no peace to himself or others. He prayed, fretted at his fate, scolded himself, scolded his politics and his system, blasphemed against all the things of which he had previously boasted and been proud, against everything which he had once extolled as an example to his son; he repeatedly asserted that he had no faith, and repeatedly started praying again; he could not stand being left alone for an instant and insisted that his servants should sit constantly beside his armchair, both day and night, and entertain him with stories which he would interrupt from time to time by exclaiming: ‘You’re telling a pack of lies! What bloody nonsense!’

  Glafira Petrovna found it especially unbearable; he simply could not get on without her, and to the end she executed all the sick man’s whims, although there were times when she could not bring herself to answer him at once for fear that her voice might betray the wrath which choked her. In this way he scraped along for another two years and died early one May, out on the balcony, in the sun. ‘Glashka, Glashka! My beef-tea, my beef-tea, you old hag…’ he mumbled with his stiffening tongue and, without finishing the final word, fell silent forever. Glafira Petrovna, who had only just taken the cup of beef-tea from the steward’s hands, stopped, looked into her brother’s face, slowly, with a broad flourish, made the sign of the cross and withdrew in silence; and his son, who was also present, said nothing, but leaned on the handrail of the balcony and gazed long and hard into the garden that was all perfumed and green and glistening in the rays of a golden springtime sun. He was twenty-three years old; how terribly, how insensibly swift had been the passing of those twenty-three years!… Life was opening its arms before him.

  XII

  HAVING buried his father and entrusted the running of the estate and supervision of the bailiffs to the immutable Glafira Petrovna, the young Lavretsky set off for Moscow, whither he was drawn by an obscure but strong feeling. He was conscious of deficiencies in his education and vowed to make good these deficiencies as far as possible. In the last five years he had read much and seen this and that; many ideas were fermenting in his brain; any professor would have envied him some of the things he knew, but at the same time he was ignorant of many things which every schoolboy had known for years. Lavretsky was conscious that he was not free; he secretly felt himself to be a curiosity. The Anglomaniac had played an unkind joke on his son; the capricious education brought forth its fruit. For many long years he had unaccountably humbled himself before his father and when he finally saw through him the deed was already done, the habits of his education had taken root. He had no idea how to get on with people; at twenty-three years of age, with an uncontrollable thirst for love welling up in his shame-stricken heart, he could still not bring himself to look a woman in the eyes. With his mind, so lucid and healthy, if a little pedestrian, with his tendency to stubbornness, introspection and indolence, he should have been cast into the whirlpool of life at an early age, but instead he had been kept in artificial isolation…. And yet now that the enchanted ring was broken he continued to stand in the same place, locked up and compressed within himself. At his age it was laughable to put on a student’s uniform, but he was not frightened of sniggers: his Spartan education at least had the merit of having bred in him an indifference to others’ opinions – and, without batting an eyelid, he dressed up in a student’s uniform. He entered the department of mathematics and physics. Healthy, ruddy-cheeked, with an already copious beard, taciturn in his ways, he produced a strange impression on his fellow-students, and they did not even suspect that in this stern-faced grown man, who arrived punctually at lectures in a broad country-style sledge drawn by a pair of horses, there lurked scarcely more than a child. He seemed to them to be some sort of screwball pedant; they had no need of him, sought nothing from him and he avoided them. During the course of his first two years at university he made friends with only one student, from whom he took Latin lessons. This student, by name Mikhalevich, endowed with enthusiasm and a talent for writing verses, grew sincerely fond of Lavretsky and quite by accident became guilty of causing an important change in his life.

  On one occasion in the theatre (Mochalov1 was then at the height of his fame and Lavretsky did not miss a single one of his appearances) he caught sight of a girl in a box in the dress circle – and although no woman could pass by his outwardly sombre figure without causing his heart to quiver, it had never begun beating as hard as it did now. Leaning on the velvet of the box’s balustrade, the girl was utterly still; a sensitive, youthful vivacity played in every feature of her dark, round, pleasant face; a tastefully refined mind was reflected in the beautiful eyes gazing softly and attentively from beneath delicate brows, in the swift smiles of her expressive lips, in the very pose of her head and arms and neck; she was delightfully dressed. Next to her there sat a sallow, wrinkled woman of about forty-five in a low-cut dress and black toque, with a toothless smile on her intently preoccupied and empty face, while in the depths of the box could be seen an elderly man in a broad frock-coat and high cravat, with an expression of mindless stateliness and a kind of
fawning suspiciousness in his tiny eyes, with dyed moustache and side-whiskers, massive but unremarkable temples and deeply creased cheeks, who gave every indication of being a retired general. Lavretsky could not take his eyes off the stunning girl. Suddenly the door of the box opened and Mikhalevich entered. The appearance of this man, almost his sole acquaintance in the whole of Moscow, in the company of the one girl who had absorbed all his attention, struck Lavretsky as ominous and strange. As he continued to watch the box he noticed that everyone in it treated Mikhalevich as an old friend. The performance on the stage ceased to concern Lavretsky; Mochalov himself, although he was that evening ‘on his best form’, did not make his usual impression on him. In one very moving scene Lavretsky glanced involuntarily at his beauty: she was leaning right forward and her cheeks glowed with excitement; under the influence of his steady gaze her eyes, directed though they were at the stage, slowly turned and rested on him…. All night he could not get them out of his thoughts. The artificially constructed dam had finally been breached; he throbbed and burned with love, and the next day set off to find Mikhalevich. From him he learned that the beauty was called Varvara Pavlovna Korobyn, that the elderly man and woman sitting with her in the box were her father and mother and that he, Mikhalevich, had got to know them a year ago during the time he had spent ‘tutoring’ at Count N’s house near Moscow. The enthusiastic Mikhalevich expressed himself in terms of the greatest praise about Varvara Pavlovna. ‘My dear fellow, that,’ he exclaimed with the characteristically impetuous lilt in his voice, ‘that girl’s a – an astonishing, a – a creature of genius, an artiste in the true sense of the word and kindness itself as well.’ Noting from Lavretsky’s persistent questions the kind of impression Varvara Pavolvna had made on him, he offered to introduce him to her, adding that he was treated like one of them at their house, that the general was not at all arrogant and the mother was so silly that about all she didn’t do was suck eggs. Lavretsky went red, mumbled something unintelligible and fled. For five whole days he struggled with his shyness; on the sixth the young Spartan dressed himself up in a new uniform and placed himself at Mikhalevich’s disposal, who, being a friend of the family, did no more than comb his hair – and both of them set off for the Korobyns’.