Volume 1 / Part 2 — Chapter 18 The Beginning of my Life at Vladimir

When I went to get into my sledge at Kosmodemiansk it was harnessed in the Russian style, three horses abreast, and the shaft horse with the yoke over its head was gaily jingling the bells.

In Perm and Vyatka the horses are put in tandem, one before the other or two side by side and the third in front. So my heart throbbed with delight when I saw the familiar troika.

‘Come now, show us your mettle,’ I said to the young lad who sat smartly on the box in an unlined sheepskin and stiff gauntlets which barely allowed his fingers to close enough to take fifteen kopecks from my hand.

‘We’ll do our best, sir, we’ll do our best. Hey, darlings! Now, sir,’ he said, turning suddenly to me, ‘you only hold on, there is a hill yonder, so I will let them go.’

It was a steep descent to the Volga which was used as a road in the winter.

He certainly did let the horses go. The sledge bounded from right to left, from left to right, as the horses flew downhill; the driver was tremendously pleased, and indeed, sinful man that I am, so was I—it is the Russian temperament.

So I raced with posting horses into 1838—into the best, the brightest year of my life. I will describe how we saw the New Year in.

Eighty versts from Nizhni, we, i.e. Matvey, my valet, and I, went into the station superintendent’s to warm ourselves. There was a very sharp frost, and it was windy too. The superintendent, a thin, sickly, pitiful-looking man, made the inscription in my travelling permit, dictating every letter to himself and yet making mistakes. I took off my fur-lined coat and walked up and down 357the room in immense fur boots, Matvey was warming himself at the red-hot stove, the superintendent muttered, while a wooden clock ticked on a faint, cracked note.

‘I say,’ Matvey said to me, ‘it will soon be twelve o’clock, it’s the New Year, you know. I will bring something,’ he added, looking at me half-inquiringly, ‘from the stores they gave us at Vyatka.’ And without waiting for an answer he ran to fetch bottles and a parcel of food.

Matvey, of whom I shall have more to say later, was more than a servant, he was a friend, a younger brother to me. A Moscow artisan, apprenticed to Sonnenberg to learn the art of bookbinding, in which Sonnenberg, however, was not very proficient, he passed into my hands.

I knew that if I refused it would disappoint Matvey, besides I had nothing against celebrating the day at the posting-station.... The New Year is a station of a sort.

Matvey brought ham and champagne. The champagne turned out to be frozen solid; the ham could have been chopped with an axe, it was all glistening with ice; but à la guerre comme à la guerre. ‘May the New Year bring new happiness.’ Yes indeed, new happiness. Was I not on my homeward way? Every hour was bringing me nearer to Moscow—my heart was full of hope.

The frozen champagne did not exactly please the superintendent. I added half a glass of rum to his wine. This new ‘half-and-half’ had a great success.

The driver, whom I also invited to join us, was still more extreme in his views; he sprinkled pepper into the glass of foaming wine, stirred it with a spoon, drank it off at one gulp, uttered a painful sigh and almost with a moan added: ‘It did scorch fine!’

The superintendent himself tucked me into the sledge, and was so zealous in his attentions that he dropped the 358lighted candle into the hay and could not find it afterwards. He was in great spirits and kept repeating: ‘You’ve given me a New Year’s Eve, too!’

The scorched driver whipped up the horses.

At eight o’clock on the following evening I reached Vladimir and put up at the hotel, which is extremely accurately described in the Tarantass with its fowls in rice, its dough-like pastry, and vinegar by way of Bordeaux.

‘A man was asking for you this morning, he’s waiting at the beer-shop,’ the waiter, who wore the rakish parting and killing lovelocks, which in old days were only affected by Russian waiters, but are now worn by Louis Napoleon also, told me after reading my name on my travel permit.

I could not conceive who this could be. ‘But here he is,’ added the waiter, moving aside.

What I saw first, however, was not a man but a tray of terrific size, on which were piles of all sorts of good things, a cake and cracknels, oranges and apples, eggs, almonds, raisins ... and behind the tray appeared the grey head and blue eyes of the village elder, from my father’s Vladimir estate.

‘Gavril Semyonitch,’ I cried, and rushed to hug him. This was the first of our own people, the first figure out of my former life whom I met after imprisonment and exile. I could not take my eyes off the intelligent old man, and felt as though I would never say all I had to say to him. He was the living proof of my nearness to Moscow, to my home, to my friends; only three days before, he had seen them all, he brought me greetings from all of them.... So it was not so far away after all!

The governor, who was a clever Greek called Kuruta, had a thorough knowledge of human nature, and had long ceased to have a strong preference for good or evil. He grasped my position at once and did not make the 359slightest attempt to worry me. Office work was not even referred to; he commissioned me and a master at the high school to edit the Vladimir Provincial News—that was my only duty.

The work was familiar to me; I had in Vyatka successfully edited the unofficial part of the Provincial News, and had published in it an article which almost got my successor into trouble. Describing the festival on the Great river, I said that the mutton sacrificed to St. Nicholas at Hlynov used in old days to be distributed to the poor, but now was sold. The bishop was incensed and the governor had difficulty in persuading him to let the matter drop.

These provincial newspapers were introduced in 1837. The very original idea of training the inhabitants of the land of silence and dumbness to express themselves in print occurred to Bludov the Minister of Home Affairs. The latter, famous for being chosen to continue Karamzin’s History, though he never actually added a line to it, and for being the author of the report of the committee of investigation into the affair of the 14th of December, which it would have been better not to write at all, belonged to the group of political doctrinaires who appeared on the scene at the end of the reign of Alexander. They were intelligent, cultured, old ‘Arzamass geese’^[154] who had risen in the service. They could write Russian, were patriots, and were so zealously engaged in the history of their native land that they had no time to give serious attention to its present condition. They all cherished the never-to-be-forgotten memory of N. M. Karamzin, loved Zhukovsky, knew Krylov by heart, and used to go to Moscow to converse with I. I. Dmitriev in his house in Sadovy Street, where I too visited him as a student, 360armed with romantic prejudices, a personal acquaintance with N. Polevoy, and a concealed disapproval of the fact that Dmitriev, who was a poet, should be Minister of Justice. Great things were hoped of them, and like most doctrinaires of all countries they did nothing. Perhaps they might have succeeded in leaving more permanent traces under Alexander, but Alexander died and left them with nothing but their desire to do something worth doing.

At Monaco there is an inscription on the tombstone of one of the hereditary princes: ‘Here lies the body of Florestan So-and-so—he desired to do good to his subjects.’^[155] Our doctrinaires also desired to do good, not to their own subjects but to the subjects of Nicholas, but they reckoned without their host. I do not know who hindered Florestan, but they were hindered by our Florestan. They were drawn into taking part in all the measures detrimental to Russia and had to restrict themselves to useless innovations, mere alterations of name and form. Every head of a department among us thinks it his duty to produce at intervals a project, an innovation, usually for the worse but sometimes simply neutral. They thought it necessary for instance to call the secretary in the governor’s office by a name of purely Russian origin, while they left the secretary of the provincial office untranslated into Russian. I remember that the Minister of Justice brought forward a plan for necessary changes in the uniforms of civil servants. This scheme opened in a majestic and solemn style: ‘taking into special consideration the lack of unity, of standard, in the make and pattern of certain uniforms in the civil department and adopting as a fundamental principle,’ and so on.

Possessed by the same mania for reform the Minister of Home Affairs replaced the rural assessors by police 361inspectors. The assessors lived in the towns and used to visit the villages. The police inspectors sometimes met together in the town but lived permanently in the country. In this way all the peasants were put under the supervision of the police and this was done with full knowledge of the predatory, rapacious, corrupt character of our police officials. Bludov initiated the policeman into the secrets of the peasants’ industry and wealth, into their family life, into the affairs of the commune, and in this way attacked the last stronghold of peasant life. Fortunately our villages are very many and there are only two police inspectors in a district.

Almost at the same time the same Bludov had the notion of establishing provincial newspapers. In Russia, although the government has no regard for popular education, it has literary pretensions, and while in England, for instance, there are no official organs, every one of our departments has its own magazine, and so have the universities and the academy. We have journals relating to mining, to dry-salting, to marine affairs, and to means of communication, some in Russian, others in French or German. All these are published at the government expense; contracts for literary articles are made with the department exactly as contracts for fuel and candles, but without competition; there are plenty of statistics, invented figures and fantastic inferences from them. After monopolising everything else, the government has now taken the monopoly of talk and, imposing silence on every one else, has begun chattering unceasingly. Continuing this system, Bludov commanded every provincial government to publish its own newspaper, which was to have an unofficial part for articles on historical, literary, and other subjects.

No sooner said than done, and the officials in fifty provinces were tearing their hair over this unofficial part. Priests of seminary education, doctors of medicine, 362high-school teachers, all who could be suspected of a tinge of culture and ability to spell correctly were requisitioned. After much reflection and reading over of the Library of Good Reading and the Notes of the Fatherland, with inward tremors and misgivings, they at last set to work to write articles.

The desire to see one’s name in print is one of the strongest artificial passions of this bookish age. Nevertheless it needs favourable circumstances to induce people to expose their efforts to public criticism. People who would never have dared to dream of sending their essays to the Moscow News or to a Petersburg magazine, were ready to publish them at home. And, meanwhile, the fatal habit of the newspaper took root. And, indeed, it may not be amiss to have an instrument ready. The printing press, too, is an unruly member.

My colleague in the editorship was also a Moscow graduate and of the same faculty. I have not the heart to speak of him with a smile because of his sad death, and yet he was an absurd figure up to the end. Though far from being stupid, he was extraordinarily clumsy and awkward. It would be hard to find an ugliness not merely so complete but so great, that is, on so large a scale. His face was half as large again as ordinary and somehow rugged-looking; a huge fish-like mouth reached to his ears, white eyelashes did not shade but rather emphasised his pale grey eyes, his skull was scantily covered with bristling hair, and at the same time he was a head taller than I was, round-shouldered, and very untidy in his appearance.

Even his name was such that a sentry at Vladimir locked him up on account of it. Late one evening he was walking past the governor’s house, wrapped up in his overcoat, carrying a pocket telescope; he stood still and took aim with it at some planet. This perturbed the sentry who probably regarded stars as public property. 363‘Who goes there?’ he shouted to the motionless stargazer. ‘Nebaba,’^[156] answered my friend in a deep voice, without budging.

‘Don’t play the fool,’ answered the sentry, offended, ‘I am on duty.’

‘But I tell you I am Nebaba.’

This was too much for the sentry and he rang his bell; a sergeant appeared and the sentry handed over the astronomer to be taken to the guardroom. ‘There they’ll find out whether you are a woman or not.’ He would certainly have spent the night in custody had not the officer on duty recognised him.

One morning Nebaba came to tell me that he was going to Moscow for a few days; he gave a sly, rather appealing smile as he told me this. ‘I shall not return alone,’ he said hesitatingly.

‘What, you mean...?’

‘Yes, I am actually getting married,’ he said shyly. I marvelled at the heroic courage of the woman who could bring herself to marry this good-hearted but monstrously ugly man. But when two or three weeks later I saw in his house a girl of eighteen, who was not exactly good-looking but rather prepossessing and with a lively expression in her eyes, I began to look upon him as a hero.

Six weeks later I began to notice that things were not going well with my Quasimodo. He was plunged in dejection, corrected his proofs badly, did not finish his article on migratory birds, and was gloomily preoccupied. It did not last long. One day as I was returning home through the Golden Gate I saw shopmen and boys running to the churchyard; policemen bustled about. I went with them.

Nebaba’s dead body was lying by the church wall and beside him a gun. He had shot himself just opposite 364the window of his house; the string with which he had pulled the trigger was still on his foot. The inspector of the medical board, in well-rounded sentences, assured the bystanders that the dead man had felt no pain; the police were preparing to take the body to the police station.

How savage nature is to some people! What were the feelings in the heart of the victim before he brought himself to stop with his bit of string the pendulum that measured for him nothing but humiliations and misfortunes? And why? Because his father was scrofulous and his mother lymphatic? That may all be so. But what right have we to expect justice, to call to account, to ask for reasons from—what? The whirling vortex of life?...

At that very time a new chapter in my life was opening, a chapter full of purity, serenity, youth, earnestness, secluded and bathed in love....

It belongs to another volume.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Page Changed from Changed to

160 they used to keep them for going walks, that strangers they used to keep them for going on walks, that strangers

Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter.