Varvara Pavlovna’s father, Pavel Petrovitch Korobyin, a retired
general-major, had spent his whole time on duty in Petersburg. He had
had the reputation in his youth of a good dancer and driller. Through
poverty, he had served as adjutant to two or three generals of no
distinction, and had married the daughter of one of them with a dowry
of twenty-five thousand roubles. He mastered all the science of military
discipline and manoeuvres to the minutest niceties, he went on in
harness, till at last, after twenty-five years’ service, he received
the rank of a general and the command of a regiment. Then he might have
relaxed his efforts and have quietly secured his pecuniary position.
Indeed this was what he reckoned upon doing, but he managed things a
little incautiously. He devised a new method of speculating with public
funds--the method seemed an excellent one in itself--but he neglected to
bribe in the right place, and was consequently informed against, and a
more than unpleasant, a disgraceful scandal followed. The general got
out of the affair somehow, but his career was ruined; he was advised
to retire from active duty. For two years he lingered on in Petersburg,
hoping to drop into some snug berth in the civil service, but no such
snug berth came in his way. His daughter had left school, his expenses
were increasing every day. Resigning himself to his fate, he decided to
remove to Moscow for the sake of the greater cheapness of living, and
took a tiny low-pitched house in the Old Stables Road, with a coat of
arms seven feet long on the roof, and there began the life of a retired
general at Moscow on an income of 2750 roubles a year. Moscow is
a hospitable city, ready to welcome all stray comers, generals by
preference. Pavel Petrovitch’s heavy figure, which was not quite
devoid of martial dignity, however, soon began to be seen in the best
drawing-rooms in Moscow. His bald head with its tufts of dyed hair, and
the soiled ribbon of the Order of St. Anne which he wore over a cravat
of the colour of a raven’s wing, began to be familiar to all the pale
and listless young men who hang morosely about the card-tables while
dancing is going on. Pavel Petrovitch knew how to gain a footing in
society; he spoke little, but from old habit, condescendingly--though,
of course, not when he was talking to persons of a higher rank than his
own. He played cards carefully; ate moderately at home, but consumed
enough for six at parties. Of his wife there is scarcely anything to
be said. Her name was Kalliopa Karlovna. There was always a tear in her
left eye, on the strength of which Kalliopa Karlovna (she was, one
must add, of German extraction) considered herself a woman of great
sensibility. She was always in a state of nervous agitation, seemed as
though she were ill-nourished, and wore a tight velvet dress, a cap, and
tarnished hollow bracelets. The only daughter of Pavel Petrovitch and
Kalliopa Karlovna, Varvara Pavlovna, was only just seventeen when she
left the boarding-school, in which she had been reckoned, if not the
prettiest, at least the cleverest pupil and the best musician, and where
she had taken a decoration. She was not yet nineteen, when Lavretsky saw
her for the first time.