The father of Varvara Pavlovna, Pavel Petrovitch Korobyn,
Major-General on the retired list, had spent his whole life in
Petersburg, in the service; had borne the reputation, in his youth, of
being an accomplished dancer and officer of the line; found himself,
owing to poverty, the adjutant of two or three ill-favoured Generals;
married the daughter of one of them, receiving twenty-five thousand
rubles as her dowry; acquired, in its finest details, the love of drills
and reviews; toiled, and toiled hard, for his livelihood, and at last, at
the end of twenty years, attained to the rank of General, and received a
regiment. It was time for him to rest, and without delay to establish his
prosperity on a firm basis; this was what he calculated on doing, but he
managed the matter somewhat incautiously: he hit upon a new method of
putting the coin of the realm into circulation,--the method proved to be
a capital one, but he did not get out in season: a complaint was made
against him; a more than unpleasant, an ugly scandal ensued. The General
managed to wriggle out of the scandal, after a fashion, but his career
was ruined: he was advised to resign. He hung about in Petersburg for a
couple of years longer in the hope that some snug little place would get
stranded on him: but the place did not strand on him, and his daughter
came out of the government school, and his expenses increased every
day.... Repressing his wrath, he decided to remove to Moscow for the sake
of economy, hired a tiny, low-roofed house on Old Stable Street, with a
coat of arms a fathom tall on the roof, and began to live the life of a
Moscow General on the retired list, spending 2750 rubles a year. Moscow
is a hospitable town, glad to welcome everybody who comes along, and more
particularly, Generals; Pavel Petrovitch's heavy figure, which yet was
not lacking in military mien, speedily began to make its appearance in
the best drawing-rooms of Moscow. His bald nape, with tufts of dyed hair,
and the dirty ribbon of the order of St. Anna on a neckcloth the hue of
the raven's wing, began to be well known to all the easily bored and
pallid young men who morosely hovered around the gambling-tables while
dancing was in progress. Pavel Petrovitch understood how to place
himself in society; he talked little, but, by force of old habit, through
his nose,--of course, not with individuals belonging to the higher ranks;
he played cards cautiously, at home he ate sparingly, but when visiting
he ate for six. Concerning his wife, there is hardly anything to say: her
name was Kalliope Karlovna; a tear oozed from her left eye, by virtue
of which Kalliope Karlovna (she was, moreover, of German extraction)
regarded herself as a woman of sentiment; she lived in constant fear of
something, never seemed to have had quite enough to eat, and wore tight
velvet gowns, a turban, and dull bracelets of hollow metal. Varvara
Pavlovna, the only daughter of Pavel Petrovitch and Kalliope
Karlovna, had just passed her seventeenth birthday when she came out of
the * * * Institute, where she had been considered, if not the greatest
beauty, certainly the cleverest girl and the best musician, and where she
had received the _chiffre_;[6] she was not yet nineteen when Lavretzky
beheld her for the first time.
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[6] In the Government Institutes for girls, the chief prize is the
Empress's initial, in jewels.--Translator.