himself and said, "Thank God!" And so said all his family: in spite of
their former weakness for Kurolyessoff, they had long looked on him with
horror as a criminal and a ruffian. With Praskovya Ivanovna it was
different. Judging by their own feelings, they all supposed she would
welcome the news, and told her at once. But, to the surprise of every
one, she was utterly prostrated by it and became ill again; and, when
her strength got the better of the illness, her depression and
wretchedness were extreme: for some weeks she wept from morning till
night, and she grew so thin that Stepan Mihailovitch was alarmed. No one
could understand the cause of such intense sorrow for a husband whom she
could not love and who had treated her so brutally--"a disgrace to human
nature," as they called him. But there was an explanation, and this is
it.
Many years later, my mother, who was a great favourite with Praskovya
Ivanovna, was talking with her of past days--a thing which Praskovya
Ivanovna generally avoided--and in the openhearted frankness of their
conversation she asked: "Please tell me, aunt, why you took on so after
your husband's death. In your place, I should have said a prayer for his
soul, and felt quite cheerful." "You are a little fool, my dear,"
answered Praskovya Ivanovna: "I had loved him for fourteen years and
could not unlearn my feeling in one month, even though I had found out
what he was; and, above all, I grieved for his soul: he had no time to
repent before he died."
After six weeks, Praskovya Ivanovna's good sense mastered her grief to
some extent; and she consented, or, I should rather say, did not refuse,
to travel with all the Bagroff family to Parashino, in order to attend a
memorial service at Kurolyessoff's grave. To the general surprise, she
dropped no tear at Parashino or during the sad ceremony; but one may
imagine how much this effort cost her, in her condition of sorrow and
bodily weakness. By her wish, only a few hours were spent at Parashino,
and she did not enter that part of the house where her husband had lived
and died.
It is not difficult to guess the cause of Kurolyessoff's sudden death.
When Stepan Mihailovitch had rescued his cousin from the cellar, the
people at Parashino all plucked up heart, believing that the end of
Kurolyessoff's rule had come. They all supposed that the owner of
Bagrovo, who was in the position of a father to their mistress, would
turn her husband neck and crop out of a place that did not belong to
him. No one dreamed that their young mistress, insulted and beaten and
half-starved in an underground cellar in her own house, would fail to
appeal to the law for redress. Every day they expected an irruption from
Stepan Mihailovitch with the sheriff at his back; but week followed
week, and no one came. Kurolyessoff was as drunken and violent as ever:
every one of his retainers he flogged till they were half-dead, for
having betrayed him, not sparing even the sober man who had wakened him
on the night of the rescue; and he boasted that Praskovya Ivanovna had
given up to him the title-deeds of her estates. It was past the power of
human endurance; and the future seemed hopeless.[32] Two of the
scoundrels, who had been favourites, and, strangely enough, two who had
suffered less than the rest from his cruelty, ventured upon a horrible
crime. They poisoned him with arsenic, putting it into a decanter of
_kvass_, which Kurolyessoff generally emptied during the night; and they
put in so much, that he was dead in two hours. As they had taken no one
into their confidence, the catastrophe startled and terrified the whole
household. The servants suspected one another, but the real criminals
remained unknown for some time. Six months later one of them became
desperately ill and confessed his crime before he died; and his
accomplice, though the dying man had not betrayed him, made off and was
never seen again.
[32] From here to the end of the paragraph was removed by the censor
from the early editions of the work.
The sudden death of Kurolyessoff would certainly have been followed by
an inquest, but for the presence at Parashino of a young clerk called
Mihaila Maximitch, who had only lately come to the place. By cleverness
and good management, he contrived to get the affair hushed up. He became
later Praskovya Ivanovna's man of business and the chief agent on all
her estates, and enjoyed her full confidence. Under the name of
"Mihailushka" he was known to all and sundry in the Governments of
Simbirsk and Orenburg. He was a man of remarkable ability; though he
made a large fortune, he lived discreetly and modestly for many years;
but, when he received his freedom on the death of his mistress and lost
his wife to whom he was much attached, he took to drinking and died in
poverty. One of his sons, if I remember rightly, entered the official
class and was eventually ennobled.
I should not conceal the fact, that forty years later, when I became the
owner of Parashino, I found the recollection of Kurolyessoff's
management still fresh among the peasants, and they spoke of him with
gratitude, because they felt every day the advantage of many of his
arrangements. His cruelty they had forgotten, and they had felt it less
than his personal attendants; but they remembered his power of
distinguishing guilt and innocence, the honest workman and the shirker;
they remembered his perfect knowledge of their needs and his constant
readiness to give them help. The old men smiled as they told me that
Kurolyessoff used often to say: "Steal and rob as you please, if you
keep it dark; but, if I catch you, then look out!"
When she went back to Bagrovo, Praskovya Ivanovna, soothed by the
sincere and tender love of her cousin and by the assiduous attentions of
his womankind (whom she did not much like but who expected great favours
and benefits from her) gradually got over the terrible blow she had
suffered. Her good health came back, and her peace of mind; and at the
end of a year she resolved to go back to Choorassovo. It was painful to
Stepan Mihailovitch to part with his favourite: her whole nature
appealed to him, and he had become thoroughly accustomed to her society.
Not once in his whole life was he in a rage with Praskovya Ivanovna. But
he did not try to keep her: on the contrary, he pressed her to go as
soon as possible. "It's no sort of life for you here, my dear," he used
to say; "it's a dull place, though we have got accustomed to it. You are
young still"--she was thirty--"and rich and used to something different.
You should go back to Choorassovo, and enjoy your fine house and
splendid garden and the springs. You have plenty of kind neighbours
there, rich people who live a gay life. It is possible that God will
send you better fortune in a second venture; you won't want for offers."
Praskovya Ivanovna put off her departure from day to day--so hard did
she find it to part from the cousin who had saved her life and been her
benefactor from her childhood. At last the day was fixed. Early on the
previous morning, she came out to join Stepan Mihailovitch, who was
sitting on his stoop and thinking sad thoughts. She kissed and embraced
him; the tears came to her eyes as she said: "I feel all your love for
me, and I love and respect you like a daughter. God sees my gratitude;
but I wish that men should see it too. Will you let me bequeath to your
family all my mother's property? What I have from my father will come to
your son in any case. My relations on my mother's side are rich, and you
know that they have given me no reason to reward them with my wealth. I
shall never marry. I wish the Bagroff family to be rich. Say yes, my
dear cousin, and you will comfort me and set my mind at rest." She threw
herself at his feet and covered with kisses the hands with which he was
trying to raise her up. "Listen, my dear," said Stepan Mihailovitch in a
rather stern voice: "You don't know me aright. That I should covet what
does not belong to me, and cut out the rightful heirs to your
estates--no! that shall never be, and never shall any one be able to say
that of Stepan Bagroff! Mind you don't ever mention it again. If you do,
we shall quarrel; and it will be the first time in our lives."
Next day Praskovya Ivanovna left Bagrovo and began her own independent
life at Choorassovo.
FRAGMENT III: THE MARRIAGE OF THE YOUNG BAGROFF
Many years passed by and much happened during that time--famine and
plague, and the rebellion of Pugatchoff.[33] The landowners of the
Orenburg district scattered before the bands of the usurper, and Stepan
Mihailovitch also made off with his family, first to Samara, and then
down the Volga to Saratoff and as far off as Astrakhan. But by degrees
all disturbances passed over and calmed down and were forgotten.
Children became boys, boys became men, and men came to grey hairs; and
among these last was Stepan Mihailovitch. He saw this himself, but he
hardly believed it. He would sometimes allude to the ravages of time,
but he did so without uneasiness, as if there were no personal reference
to himself. Yet my grandfather had ceased to be his old self: his
herculean strength and tireless activity had gone for ever. This
sometimes surprised him; but he went on living precisely in the old
way--eating and drinking to his heart's content, and dressing with no
regard to the weather, though he sometimes suffered for this neglect.
Little by little, his keen clear eye became clouded and his great voice
lost its power; his fits of anger were rarer, but so were his bright and
happy moods. His elder daughters had all married, and the oldest had
been dead some time, leaving a daughter of three years old. Aksinya,[34]
the second, had lost one husband and married again; Elizabeth, a clever
but arrogant woman, had somehow married a General Yerlykin, who was old
and poor and given to drinking; and Alexandra had found herself a
husband in Ivan Karatayeff, well-born, young, and rich, but a passionate
lover of the Bashkirs and their wandering life--a true Bashkir himself
in mind and body. The youngest daughter, Tanyusha, had not married. The
only son[35] was now twenty-six, a handsome youth with a complexion of
lilies and roses: his own father used to say of him, "Put a petticoat on
him, and he'd be a prettier girl than any of his sisters!" Though his
wife, Arina Vassilyevna, shed bitter tears and would not be comforted,
Stepan Mihailovitch sent his son into the Army as soon as he was
sixteen. He served for three years, and, owing to the influence of
Mihail Kurolyessoff, acted as aide-de-camp for part of the time to
Suvoroff. But Suvoroff left the district of Orenburg and was succeeded
by a German general (I think his name was Treubluth); and he sentenced
the young man to a severe flogging, from which his entire innocence, if
not his noble birth, should have protected him. His mother nearly died
of grief, when she heard it; and even my grandfather thought this was
going too far. He withdrew his son from the Army and got him a place in
the law court at Ufa, where he earned promotion by long and zealous
service.
[33] Pugatchoff was a Cossack, who raised a formidable rebellion in East
Russia; taken prisoner by Suvoroff, he was executed at Moscow in
1775.
[34] The popular form of Xenia; the diminutive is Aksyutka.
[35] The author's father.
I cannot pass over in silence a strange fact that I have noticed: most
of the Germans and foreigners in general who held posts in the Russian
service in those days were notorious for their cruelty and love of
inflicting corporal punishment. The German who punished young Bagroff so
cruelly was a Lutheran himself, but at the same time a great stickler
for all the rites and ceremonies of the Russian Church. This historic
incident in the annals of the Bagroff family happened in the following
way. The general ordered a service to be performed in the regimental
chapel on the eve of some unimportant saint's-day; he was always present
himself on these occasions, and all officers were expected to attend. It
was summer, and the chapel windows were open. Suddenly, a voice in the
street outside struck up a popular song. The general rushed to the
window: three subalterns were walking along the street, and one of them
was singing. He ordered them under arrest and sentenced each of them to
300 lashes. My unfortunate father, who was not singing but merely
walking with his friends, pleaded his noble birth; but the general said
with a sneer, "A noble is bound to show special respect to divine
service"; and then the brute himself looked on till the last stripe was
inflicted on the innocent youth. This took place in a room next the
chapel, where the solemn singing of the choir could be distinctly heard;
and the tyrant forbade his victim to cry out, "for fear of disturbing
divine worship." After his punishment, he was carried off unconscious to
hospital, where it was found necessary to cut off his uniform, owing to
the swelling of his tender young body. It was two months before his back
and shoulders healed up. What must it have cost his mother to hear such
news of her only son whom she simply worshipped! My grandfather lodged a
complaint in some quarter; and his son, who had sent in his papers at
once, got his discharge from the Army before he left the hospital, and
entered the Civil Service as an official of the fourteenth or lowest
class. Eight years had now gone by, and the incident was by this time
forgotten.
Alexyei Stepanitch was now living peacefully at Ufa and performing his
duties there. Twice a year he paid a visit to his parents at Bagrovo,
240 _versts_ away. His life was quite uneventful. Quiet, bashful, and
unassuming, this young heir to a landed estate lived on good terms with
all the world, till suddenly the modest course of his existence became
disturbed.
There was a permanent military administration in the town of Ufa, and
next in authority the Lieutenant-Governor was Nikolai Zubin, who
resided regularly in the town. M. Zubin was an honest and able man,
but his character was weak. His wife had died, leaving three
children--Sonitchka,[36] a girl of twelve, and two younger boys. He
was devoted to his daughter; and it was no wonder he should love a
child so beautiful and so clever, who, in spite of her tender years,
soon became her father's companion and assisted him in the management
of the household. Eighteen months after the death of his first wife,
whom he had loved and sincerely mourned, M. Zubin found consolation by
falling in love with the daughter of M. Rychkoff, a landowner in
Orenburg, well-known for his descriptions of that country. The
marriage soon took place; and the young wife, Alexandra, by her
intelligence and beauty, soon gained entire control over her
submissive husband. But she was hard and unfeeling, and conceived a
hatred for her stepdaughter, her father's darling, who bade fair to
grow up into a beautiful woman. The thing is common enough. The name
of stepmother has long been proverbial for cruelty, and it fitted Mme.
Zubin precisely. But it was by no means easy to tear Sonitchka from
her place in her father's heart: she was not a girl who could be put
down easily, and the contest which followed inflamed the stepmother's
anger to an extraordinary pitch. She swore that this hussy of
thirteen, who was the idol of her father and all the town, should some
day live in the maids' room, wear the coarsest clothes, and carry the
slops out of the children's nursery. She kept her oath to the letter:
after two or three years, Sonitchka was living with the servants and
clothed like a scullion, and she scrubbed and cleaned the nursery
which was now inhabited by two half-sisters. But what was the father
doing? He had once loved her dearly; but now for whole months he never
saw her; and when he did meet her going about in rags, he turned away
with a sigh, wiped away a furtive tear, and made off as soon as
possible. It is the way of many elderly men who have married again and
are dominated by young wives. As I do not know exactly the ways and
methods by which Mme. Zubin attained her object, I shall not speak of
them; nor shall I dwell upon the cruelties and sufferings inflicted
upon the bereaved girl, with her sensitive temper and strong will;
nothing was spared her, not even the most humiliating punishments and
beatings for imaginary offences. I shall only say, that the
stepdaughter was not far from suicide, and was only saved from it by a
miracle. It happened thus. When she had decided to put an end to an
intolerable existence, the poor child wished to say her last prayer
before an image of Our Lady of Smolensk, the image with which her
mother on her deathbed had blessed her. She fell on her knees in her
garret before the _ikon_, and, with floods of bitter tears, pressed
her face on the dirt-stained floor. Suffering deprived her of
consciousness for some minutes; when she recovered and got up, she saw
the candle, which she had put out the night before, still burning
before the image. At first she cried out with surprise and involuntary
fear; but soon she recognised that she had seen a miracle wrought by
Divine Power. She took courage; she was conscious of a strength and
composure she had never felt before; and she firmly resolved to suffer
and endure and live. From that day the helpless child wore armour of
proof against the increasing exasperation of her stepmother: whatever
she was told to do, she did; whatever was inflicted upon her, she
bore. Degrading punishment no longer forced the tears from her eyes,
no longer made her turn sick and faint, as it used to do. "Mean slut"
had long been her title, and "desperate wretch" was now added to it.
But the measure of God's patience now brimmed over, and His thunder
pealed: Mme. Zubin, in the prime of life and in the pride of her
health and beauty, died ten days after giving birth to a son.
Twenty-four hours before the end, knowing that she must die, she was
eager to take the load off her conscience. Sonitchka was suddenly
wakened in the night and summoned to her stepmother's bedside. The
dying woman confessed in the presence of witnesses her guilty conduct
towards her stepdaughter, begged her forgiveness, and conjured her in
the name of God to be good to the children. The girl forgave her and
promised to care for the orphans; and she kept that promise. Mme.
Zubin confessed also to her husband that the accusations which had
been brought against his daughter were all calumnies and falsehoods.
[36] A pet name for Sofya (Sophia). This is the author's mother, whose
real name was Marya.
Her death caused a complete reversal of affairs. M. Zubin also had a
paralytic stroke, and, though he survived for some years, never left his
bed again. The oppressed and ragged Cinderella, whom the servants--and
especially those belonging to Mme. Zubin--had been mean enough to
humiliate and insult to their heart's content, suddenly became the
absolute mistress of the household, her sick father having put
everything under her control. The reconciliation between the guilty
father and the injured daughter was touching and even distressing to the
daughter and all who saw it. For long, M. Zubin was wrung by remorse:
his tears flowed day and night, and he repeated the same words over and
over, "No, Sonitchka, it is impossible you should forgive me!" To each
one of his acquaintance in the town he formally confessed his misconduct
towards his daughter; and "Sofya Nikolayevna," as she was now called,
became the object of general respect and admiration. Made wise by years
of suffering, this girl of seventeen developed into a grown woman, a
mother to the children, and the manager of the household. She even
discharged public duties; for, owing to her father's illness, she
received all heads of departments, officials, and private citizens; she
discussed matters with them, wrote letters and official documents, and
at last became the real manager of the business in her father's office.
Sofya Nikolayevna nursed her father with anxious care and tenderness;
she looked after her three brothers and two sisters, and even took
trouble about the education of the elder children. Her own brothers,
Serghei and Alexander, were now boys of twelve and ten; and she
contrived to find teachers for them--a kind old Frenchman called
Villemer, whom fortune had somehow stranded at Ufa, and a half-educated
Little Russian who had been exiled to the town for an attempted fraud.
She availed herself of the opportunity to study with her brothers, and
worked so hard that she could soon understand a French book or
conversation and even talk French a little herself. Eighteen months
later she sent her brothers to Moscow for their education. Through a
certain M. Anitchkoff who lived at Ufa, she had become acquainted with
his cousin who lived at Moscow, and they often corresponded. The
well-known writer, Novikoff, shared a house at Moscow with this M.
Anitchkoff; and both friends were so struck by the letters from this
young lady on the banks of the river Byelaya, that they sent her
regularly all new and important books in the way of Russian literature;
and this did much for her mental development. This M. Anitchkoff had a
special respect for her, and considered it an honour to carry out her
request. He undertook to receive both her brothers and place them at a
boarding-school connected with Moscow University, and performed his
undertaking punctiliously. The boys got on well at school, but their
studies were broken off when the summons came for them to enter the
Guards, in which they had been enrolled while still in the cradle.
All clever and educated people who came to Ufa hastened to make the
acquaintance of Sofya Nikolayevna, were attracted by her, and never
forgot her. Many of these acquaintances became in course of time the
intimate friends of her children, and the relation was severed only by
death. I shall name only those of them whom I knew myself--V.
Romanovsky, A. Avenarius, Peter Chichagoff, Dmitri Myortvavo, and V.
Itchansky. Scholars also and travellers, attracted by the novelty and
beauty of the district, invariably made the young lady's acquaintance
and left written testimony of their admiration for her beauty and wit.
It is true that her position in society and her home helped her, and
served, one might say, as a pedestal for the statue; but the statue
itself was a noble figure. I remember especially the verses of Count
Manteuffel, a traveller; he sent them to Sofya Nikolayevna with a most
respectful letter in French; and he also sent a copy of an immense work
in five quarto volumes, by a Dr. Buchan,[37] which had just been
translated from English into Russian and made a great sensation in the
medical world of that day. Buchan's _Domestic Medicine_ was a real
treasure to Sofya Nikolayevna: she was able to make use of its
directions to make up medicines for her father's benefit. In his verses
Count Manteuffel compared the fair lady of Ufa to both Venus and
Minerva.
[37] Buchan's _Domestic Medicine_ was published in 1769; the author died
in 1805.
In spite of his enfeebled state, M. Zubin did not resign his office for
several years. Twice a year he gave a ball; he did not appear himself,
in order to welcome the ladies, but the men went to see him where he lay
in his study; and the young hostess had to receive the whole town.
Several times a year, her father insisted on her going out to balls in
the houses of the leading people, and she yielded to his earnest
entreaties and put in a short appearance at the ball. She wore fine
dresses and was an excellent dancer in the fashion of the time. When she
had gone through a Polish minuet and a single country-dance or
schottische, she went away at once, after flashing through the room like
a meteor. All who had the right to be so, were in love with Sofya
Nikolayevna, but they sighed at a respectful distance; for this young
lady gave none of them any encouragement whatever.