We lived at that time in the Government of Riazan, some 120 versts from
the nearest railway station and even 25 versts from the large trading
village of Tuma. "Tuma is iron and its people are of stone," as the
local inhabitants say of themselves. We lived on an old untenanted
estate, where in 1812 an immense house of wood had been constructed to
accommodate the French prisoners. The house had columns, and a park
with lime trees had been made around it to remind the prisoners of
Versailles.
Imagine our comical situation. There were twenty-three rooms at our
disposal, but only one of them had a stove and was warmed, and even in
that room it was so cold that water froze in it in the early morning
and the door was frosted at the fastenings. The post came sometimes
once a week, sometimes once in two months, and was brought by a
chance peasant, generally an old man with the packet under his shaggy
snow-strewn coat, the addresses wet and smudged, the backs unsealed and
stuck again by inquisitive postmasters. Around us was an ancient pine
wood where bears prowled, and whence even in broad daylight the hungry
wolves sallied forth and snatched away yawning dogs from the street
of the hamlet near by. The local population spoke in a dialect we did
not understand, now in a sing-song drawl, now coughing and hooting,
and they stared at us surlily and without restraint. They were firmly
convinced that the forest belonged to God and the muzhik alone, and
the lazy German steward only knew how much wood they stole. There was
at our service a splendid French library of the eighteenth century,
though all the magnificent bindings were mouse-eaten. There was an old
portrait gallery with the canvases ruined from damp, mould, and smoke.
Picture to yourself the neighbouring hamlet all overblown with snow,
and the inevitable village idiot, Serozha, who goes naked even in the
coldest weather; the priest who does not play "preference" on a fast
day, but writes denunciations to the starosta, a stupid, artful man,
diplomat and beggar, speaking in a dreadful Petersburg accent. If you
see all this you understand to what a degree of boredom we attained.
We grew tired of encompassing bears, of hunting hares with hounds, of
shooting with pistols at a target through three rooms at a distance of
twenty-five paces, of writing humorous verses in the evening. Of course
we quarrelled.
Yes, and if you had asked us individually why we had come to this place
I should think not one of us would have answered the question. I was
painting at that time; Valerian Alexandrovitch wrote symbolical verses,
and Vaska amused himself with Wagner and played Tristan and Iseult on
the old, ruined, yellow-keyed clavicordia.
But about Christmas-time the village began to enliven, and in
all the little clearings round about, in Tristenka, in Borodina,
Breslina, Shustova, Nikiforskaya and Kosli the peasants began to
brew beer--such thick beer that it stained your hands and face at
the touch, like lime bark. There was so much drunkenness among the
peasants, even before the festival, that in Dagileva a son broke his
father's head, and in Kruglitsi an old man drank himself to death.
But Christmas was a diversion for us. We started paying the customary
visits and offering congratulations to all the local officials and
peasants of our acquaintance. First we went to the priest, then to
the psalm-singer of the church, then to the church watchman, then to
the two school-mistresses. After the school-mistresses we fared more
pleasantly. We turned up at the doctor's at Tuma, then trooped off
to the district clerk, where a real banquet awaited us, then to the
policeman, then to the lame apothecary, then to the local peasant
tyrant who had grown rich and held a score of other peasants in his own
grasp, and possessed all the cord, linen, grain, wood, whips in the
neighbourhood. And we went and went on!
It must be confessed, however, that we felt a little awkward now and
then. We couldn't manage to get into the _tempo_ of the life there.
We were really out of it. This life had creamed and mantled for years
without number. In spite of our pleasant manners and apparent ease
we were, all the same, people from another planet. Then there was a
disparity in our mutual estimation of one another: we looked at them
as through a microscope, they at us as through a telescope. Certainly
we made attempts to accommodate ourselves, and when the psalm-singer's
servant, a woman of forty, with warty hands all chocolate colour from
the reins of the horse she put in the sledge when she went with a
bucket to the well, sang of an evening, we did what we thought we ought
to do. She would look ashamed, lower her eyes, fold her arms and sing:
"Andray Nikolaevitch
We have come to you,
We wish to trouble you.
But we have come
And please to take
The one of us you love."
Then we would boldly make to kiss her on the lips, which we did in
spite of feigned resistance and screams.
And we would make a circle. One day there were a lot of us there; four
students on holiday from an ecclesiastical college, the psalm-singer, a
housekeeper from a neighbouring estate, the two school-mistresses, the
policeman in his uniform, the deacon, the local horse-doctor, and we
three æsthetes. We went round and round in a dance, and sang, roared,
swinging now this way, now that, and the lion of the company, a student
named Vozdvizhensky, stood in the middle and ordered our movements,
dancing himself the while and snapping his fingers over his head:
"The queen was in the town, yes, the town,
And the prince, the little prince, ran away.
Found a bride, did the prince, found a bride.
She was nice, yes she was, she was nice,
And a ring got the prince for her, a ring."
After a while the giddy whirl of the dance came to an end, and we
stopped and began to sing to one another, in solemn tones:
"The royal gates were opened,
Bowed the king to the queen,
And the queen to the king,
But lower bowed the queen."
And then the horse-doctor and the psalm-singer had a competition as to
who should bow lower to the other.
* * * * *
Our visiting continued, and at last came to the school-house at
Tuma. That was inevitable, since there had been long rehearsals of
an entertainment which the children were going to give entirely for
our benefit--Petersburg guests. We went in. The Christmas tree was
lit simultaneously by a touch-paper. As for the programme, I knew
it by heart before we went in. There were several little tableaux,
illustrative of songs of the countryside. It was all poorly done, but
it must be confessed that one six-year-old mite playing the part of a
peasant, wearing a huge cap of dog-skin and his father's great leather
gloves with only places for hand and thumb, was delightful, with his
serious face and hoarse little bass voice--a born artist.
The remainder was very disgusting. All done in the false popular style.
I had long been familiar with the usual entertainment items:
Little-Russian songs mispronounced to an impossible point; verses
and silly embroidery patterns: "There's a Christmas tree, there's
Petrushka, there's a horse, there's a steam-engine." The teacher, a
little consumptive fellow, got up for the occasion in a long frock-coat
and stiff shirt, played the fiddle in fits and starts, or beat time
with his bow, or tapped a child on the head with it now and then.
The honorary guardian of the school, a notary from another town,
chewed his gums all the time and stuck out his short parrot's tongue
with sheer delight, feeling that the whole show had been got up in his
honour.
At last the teacher got to the most important item on his programme.
We had laughed up till then, our turn was coming to weep. A little girl
of twelve or thirteen came out, the daughter of a watchman, her face,
by the way, not at all like his horse-like profile. She was the top
girl in the school and she began her little song:
"The jumping little grasshopper sang the summer through,
Never once considering how the winter would blow in
his eyes."
Then a shaggy little boy of seven, in his father's felt boots, took up
his part, addressing the watchman's daughter:
"That's strange, neighbour. Didn't you work in the summer?"
"What was there to work for? There was plenty of grass."
Where was our famous Russian hospitality?
To the question, "What did you do in the summer?" the grasshopper could
only reply, "I sang all the time."
At this answer the teacher, Kapitonitch, waved his bow and his fiddle
at one and the same time--oh, that was an effect rehearsed long before
that evening!--and suddenly in a mysterious half-whisper the whole
choir began to sing:
"You've sung your song, you call that doing,
You've sung all the summer, then dance all the winter,
You've sung your song, then dance all the winter,
Dance all the winter, dance all the winter.
You've sung the song, then dance the dance."
I confess that my hair stood on end as if each individual hair were
made of glass, and it seemed to me as if the eyes of the children and
of the peasants packing the schoolroom were all fixed on me as if
repeating that d----d phrase:
"You've sung the song, you call that doing,
You've sung the song, then dance the dance."
I don't know how long this drone of evil boding and sinister recitation
went on. But I remember clearly that during those minutes an appalling
idea went through my brain. "Here we stand," thought I, "a little
band of _intelligentsia,_ face to face with an innumerable peasantry,
the most enigmatical, the greatest, and the most abased people in the
world. What connects us with them? Nothing. Neither language, nor
religion, nor labour, nor art. Our poetry would be ridiculous to their
ears, absurd, incomprehensible. Our refined painting would be simply
useless and senseless smudging in their eyes. Our quest for gods and
making of gods would seem to them stupidity, our music merely a tedious
noise. Our science would not satisfy them. Our complex work would seem
laughable or pitiful to them, the austere and patient labourers of
the fields. Yes. On the dreadful day of reckoning what answer shall
we give to this child, wild beast, wise man, and animal, to this
many-million-headed giant?" We shall only be able to say sorrowfully,
"We sang all the time. We sang our song."
And he will reply with an artful peasant smile, "Then go and dance the
dance."
And I know that my companions felt as I did. We went out of the
entertainment-room silent, not exchanging opinions.
Three days later we said good-bye, and since that time have been
rather cold towards one another. We had been suddenly chilled in our
consciences and made ashamed, as if these innocent mouths of sleepy
children had pronounced death sentence upon us. And when I returned
from the post of Ivan Karaulof to Goreli, and from Goreli to Koslof,
and from Koslof to Zintabrof, and then further by railroad there
followed me all the time that ironical, seemingly malicious phrase,
"Then dance the dance."
God alone knows the destiny of the Russian people.... Well, I suppose,
if it should be necessary, we'll dance it!