Fedor Ivanovich Lavretsky (we must ask our reader's permission to
break off the thread of the story for a time) sprang from a noble
family of long descent. The founder of the race migrated from Prussia
during the reign of Basil the Blind,[A] and was favored with a grant
of two hundred _chetverts_[B] of land in the district of Biejetsk.
Many of his descendants filled various official positions, and were
appointed to governorships in distant places, under princes and
influential personages, but none of them obtained any great amount of
property, or arrived at a higher dignity, than that of inspector of
the Czar's table.
[Footnote A: In the fifteenth century.]
[Footnote B: An old measure of land, variously estimated at from two
to six acres.]
The richest and most influential of all the Lavretskys was Fedor
Ivanovich's paternal great-grandfather Andrei, a man who was harsh,
insolent, shrewd, and crafty. Even up to the present day men have
never ceased to talk about his despotic manners, his furious temper,
his senseless prodigality, and his insatiable avarice. He was very
tall and stout, his complexion was swarthy, and he wore no beard. He
lisped, and he generally seemed half asleep. But the more quietly he
spoke, the more did all around him tremble. He had found a wife not
unlike himself. She had a round face, a yellow complexion, prominent
eyes, and the nose of a hawk. A gypsy by descent, passionate and
vindictive in temper, she refused to yield in any thing to her
husband, who all but brought her to her grave, and whom, although she
had been eternally squabbling with him, she could net bear long to
survive.
Andrei's son, Peter, our Fedor's grandfather, did not take after his
father. He was a simple country gentleman; rather odd, noisy in voice
and slow in action, rough but not malicious, hospitable, and devoted
to coursing. He was more than thirty years old when he inherited from
his father two thousand souls,[A] all in excellent condition; but he
soon began to squander his property, a part of which he disposed of by
sale, and he spoilt his household. His large, warm, and dirty rooms
were full of people of small degree, known and unknown, who swarmed in
from all sides like cockroaches. All these visitors gorged themselves
with whatever came in their way, drank their fill to intoxication, and
carried off what they could, extolling and glorifying their affable
host. As for their host, when he was out of humor with them, he called
them scamps and parasites; but when deprived of their company, he soon
found himself bored.
[Footnote A: Male serfs.]
The wife of Peter Andreich was a quiet creature whom he had taken from
a neighboring family in acquiescence with his father's choice and
command. Her name was Anna Pavlovna. She never interfered in any
thing, received her guests cordially, and went out into society
herself with pleasure--although "it was death" to her, to use her own
phrase, to have to powder herself. "They put a felt cap on your head,"
she used to say in her old age; "they combed all your hair straight up
on end, they smeared it with grease, they strewed it with flour, they
stuck it full of iron pins; you couldn't wash it away afterwards. But
to pay a visit without powdering was impossible. People would have
taken offence. What a torment it was!" She liked to drive fast, and
was ready to play at cards from morning until evening. When her
husband approached the card-table, she was always in the habit of
covering with her hand the trumpery losses scored up against her; but
she had made over to him, without reserve, all her dowry, all the
money she had. She brought him two children--a son named Ivan, our
Fedor's father, and a daughter, Glafira.[A]
[Footnote A: The accent should be on the second syllable of this
name.]
Ivan was not brought up at home, but in the house of an old and
wealthy maiden aunt, Princess Kubensky. She styled him her heir (if it
had not been for that, his father would not have let him go), dressed
him like a doll, gave him teachers of every kind, and placed him
under the care of a French tutor--an ex-abbé, a pupil of Jean Jacques
Rousseau--a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles an adroit and subtle
intriguer--"the very _fine fleur_ of the emigration," as she expressed
herself; and she ended by marrying this _fine fleur_ when she was
almost seventy years old. She transferred all her property to
his name, and soon afterwards, rouged, perfumed with amber _á la
Richelieu_, surrounded by negro boys, Italian grey-hounds, and noisy
parrots, she died, stretched on a crooked silken couch of the style of
Louis the Fifteenth, with an enamelled snuff-box of Petitot's work
in her hands--and died deserted by her husband. The insinuating M.
Courtin had preferred to take himself and her money off to Paris.
Ivan was in his twentieth year when this unexpected blow struck him.
We speak of the Princess's marriage, not her death. In his aunt's
house, in which he had suddenly passed from the position of a wealthy
heir to that of a hanger-on, he would not slay any longer. In
Petersburg, the society in which he had grown up closed its doors upon
him. For the lower ranks of the public service, and the laborious and
obscure life they involved, he felt a strong repugnance. All this, it
must be remembered, took place in the earliest part of the reign of
the Emperor Alexander I[A]. He was obliged, greatly against his will,
to return to his father's country house. Dirty, poor, and miserable
did the paternal nest seem to him. The solitude and the dullness of a
retired country life offended him at every step. He was devoured by
ennui; besides, every one in the house, except his mother, regarded
him with unloving eyes. His father disliked his metropolitan
habits, his dress-coats and shirt-frills, his books, his flute, his
cleanliness--from which he justly argued that his son regarded him
with a feeling of aversion. He was always grumbling at his son, and
complaining of his conduct.
[Footnote A: When corruption was the rule in the public service.]
"Nothing we have here pleases him," he used to say. "He is so
fastidious at table, he eats nothing. He cannot bear the air and the
smell of the room. The sight of drunken people upsets him; and as to
beating anyone before him, you musn't dare to do it. Then he won't
enter the service; his health is delicate, forsooth! Bah! What an
effeminate creature!--and all because his head is full of Voltaire!"
The old man particularly disliked Voltaire, and also the "infidel"
Diderot, although he had never read a word of their works. Reading was
not in his line.
Peter Andreich was not mistaken. Both Diderot and Voltaire really
were in his son's head; and not they alone. Rousseau and Raynal and
Helvetius also, and many other similar writers, were in his head; but
in his head only. Ivan Petrovich's former tutor, the retired Abbé and
encyclopaedist, had satisfied himself with pouring all the collective
wisdom of the eighteenth century over his pupil; and so the pupil
existed, saturated with it. It held its own in him without mixing with
his blood, without sinking into his mind, without resolving into fixed
convictions. And would it be reasonable to ask for convictions from a
youngster half a century ago, when we have not even yet acquired any?
Ivan Petrovich disconcerted the visitors also in his father's house.
He was too proud to have anything to do with them; they feared him.
With his sister Glafira, too, who was twelve years his senior, he did
not at all agree. This Glafira was a strange being. Plain, deformed,
meagre--with staring and severe eyes, and with thin, compressed
lips--she, in her face and her voice, and in her angular and quick
movements, resembled her grandmother, the gipsy Andrei's wife.
Obstinate, and fond of power, she would not even hear of marriage.
Ivan Petrovich's return home was by no means to her taste. So long as
the Princess Kubensky kept him with her, Glafira had hoped to obtain
at least half of her father's property; and in her avarice, as well as
in other points, she resembled her grandmother. Besides this, Glafira
was jealous of her brother. He had been educated so well; he spoke
French so correctly, with a Parisian accent; and she scarcely knew how
to say "_Bonjour_" and "_Comment vous portez vous_?" It is true that
her parents were entirely ignorant of French, but that did not make
things any better for her.
As to Ivan Petrovich, he did not know what to do with himself for
vexation and ennui; he had not spent quite a year in the country, but
even this time seemed to him like ten years. It was only with his
mother that he was at ease in spirit; and for whole hours he used to
sit in her low suite of rooms listening to the good lady's simple,
unconnected talk, and stuffing himself with preserves. It happened
that among Anna Pavlovna's maids there was a very pretty girl named
Malania. Intelligent and modest, with calm, sweet eyes, and finely-cut
features, she pleased Ivan Petrovich from the very first, and he soon
fell in love with her. He loved her timid gait, her modest replies,
her gentle voice, her quiet smile. Every day she seemed to him more
attractive than before. And she attached herself to Ivan Petrovich
with the whole strength of her soul--as only Russian girls know how
to devote themselves--and gave herself to him. In a country house no
secret can be preserved long; in a short time almost every one knew
of the young master's fondness for Malania. At last the news reached
Peter Andreich himself. At another time it is probable that he would
have paid very little attention to so unimportant an affair; but he
had long nursed a grudge against his son, and he was delighted to have
an opportunity of disgracing the philosophical exquisite from St.
Petersburg. There ensued a storm, attended by noise and outcry.
Malania was locked up in the store-room.[A] Ivan Petrovich was
summoned into his father's presence. Anna Pavlovna also came running
to the scene of confusion, and tried to appease her husband; but he
would not listen to a word she said. Like a hawk, he pounced upon his
son charging him with immorality, atheism, and hypocrisy. He eagerly
availed himself of so good an opportunity of discharging on him all
his long-gathered spite against the Princess Kubensky, and overwhelmed
him with insulting expressions.
[Footnote A: A sort of closet under the stairs.]
At first Ivan Petrovich kept silence, and maintained his hold over
himself; but when his father thought fit to threaten him with a
disgraceful punishment, he could bear it no longer. "Ah!" he thought,
"the infidel Diderot is going to be brought forward again. Well, then,
I will put his teaching in action." And so with a quiet and even
voice, although with a secret shuddering in all his limbs, he told his
father that it was a mistake to accuse him of immorality; that he had
no intention of justifying his fault, but that he was ready to make
amends for it, and that all the more willingly, inasmuch as he felt
himself superior to all prejudices; and, in fact--that he was ready
to marry Malania. In uttering these words Ivan Petrovich undoubtedly
attained the end he had in view. Peter Andreich was so confounded that
he opened his eyes wide, and for a moment was struck dumb; but he
immediately recovered his senses, and then and there, just as he was,
wrapped in a dressing-gown trimmed with squirrels' fur, and with
slippers on his bare feet, he rushed with clenched fists at his son,
who, as if on purpose, had dressed his hair that day _a la Titus_,
and had put on a blue dress-coat, quite new and made in the English
fashion, tasselled boots, and dandified, tight-fitting buckskin
pantaloons. Anna Pavlovna uttered a loud shriek, and hid her face in
her hands; meanwhile her son ran right through the house, jumped into
the court-yard, threw himself first into the kitchen garden and then
into the flower garden, flew across the park into the road, and ran
and ran, without once looking back, until at last he ceased to hear
behind him the sound of his father's heavy feet, the loud and broken
cries with which his father sobbed out, "Stop, villain! Stop, or I
will curse you!"
Ivan Petrovich took refuge in the house of a neighbor,[A] and his
father returned home utterly exhausted, and bathed in perspiration.
There he announced, almost before he had given himself time to recover
breath, that he withdrew his blessing and his property from his son,
whose stupid books he condemned to be burnt; and he gave orders to
have the girl Malania sent, with out delay, to a distant village.
Some good people found out where Ivan Petrovich was, and told him
everything. Full of shame and rage, he swore vengeance upon his
father; and that very night, having lain in wait for the peasant's
cart on which Malania was being sent away, he carried her off by
force, galloped with her to the nearest town, and there married
her. He was supplied with the necessary means by a neighbor, a
hard-drinking, retired sailor, who was exceedingly good-natured, and a
very great lover of all "noble histories," as he called them.
[Footnote A: Literally, "of a neighboring _Odnodvorets_." That word
signifies one who belongs by descent to the class of nobles and
proprietors, but who has no serfs belonging to him, and is really a
moujik, or peasant. Some villages are composed of inhabitants of this
class, who are often intelligent, though uneducated.]
The next day Ivan Petrovich sent his father a letter, which was
frigidly and ironically polite, and then betook himself to the estate
of two of his second cousins,--Dmitry Pestof, and his sister Marfa
Timofeevna, with the latter of whom the reader is already acquainted.
He told them everything that had happened, announced his intention of
going to St. Petersburg to seek an appointment, and begged them to
give shelter to his wife, even if only for a time. At the word "wife"
he sobbed bitterly; and, in spite of his metropolitan education, and
his philosophy, he humbly, like a thorough Russian peasant, knelt down
at the feet of his relations, and even touched the floor with his
forehead.
The Pestofs, who were kind and compassionate people, willingly
consented to his request. With them he spent three weeks, secretly
expecting an answer from his father. But no answer came; no answer
could come. Peter Andreich, when he received the news of the marriage,
took to his bed, and gave orders that his son's name should never
again be mentioned to him; but Ivan's mother, without her husband's
knowledge, borrowed five hundred paper roubles from a neighboring
priest,[A] and sent them to her son, with a little sacred picture for
his wife. She was afraid of writing, but she told her messenger, a
spare little peasant who could walk sixty versts in a day, to say to
Ivan that he was not to fret too much; that please God, all would yet
go right, and his father's wrath would turn to kindness--that she,
too, would have preferred a different daughter-in-law; but that
evidently God had willed it as it was, and that she sent her paternal
benediction to Malania Sergievna. The spare little peasant had a
rouble given him, asked leave to see the new mistress, whose gossip[B]
he was, kissed her hand, and returned home.
[Footnote A: Literally, "from the _Blagochinny_" an ecclesiastic who
exercises supervision over a number of churches or parishes, a sort of
Rural Dean.]
[Footnote A: The word is used in its old meaning of fellow-sponsor.]
So Ivan Petrovich betook himself to St. Petersburg with a light heart.
An unknown future lay before him. Poverty might menace him; but he had
broken with the hateful life in the country, and, above all, he had
not fallen short of his instructors; he had really "put into action,"
and indeed done justice to, the doctrines of Rousseau, Diderot, and
the "Declaration of the Rights of Man." The conviction of having
accomplished a duty, a sense of pride and of triumph, filled his soul;
and the fact of having to separate from his wife did not greatly alarm
him; he would far sooner have been troubled by the necessity of having
constantly to live with her. He had now to think of other affairs. One
task was finished.
In St. Petersburg, contrary to his own expectations, he was
successful. The Princess Kubensky--whom M. Courtin had already flung
aside, but who had not yet contrived to die--in order that she might
at least to some extent, make amends for her conduct towards her
nephew, recommended him to all her friends, and gave him five thousand
roubles--almost all the money she had left--and a watch, with his
crest wrought on its back surrounded by a wreath of Cupids.
Three months had not gone by before he received an appointment on the
staff of the Russian embassy in London, whither he set sail (steamers
were not even talked about then) in the first homeward bound English
vessel he could find. A few months later he received a letter from
Pestof. The kind-hearted gentleman congratulated him on the birth of a
son, who had come into the world at the village of Pokrovskoe, on the
20th of August, 1807, and had been named Fedor, in honor of the holy
martyr Fedor Stratilates. On account of her extreme weakness, Malania
Sergievna could add only a few lines. But even those few astonished
Ivan Petrovich; he was not aware that Marfa Timofeevna had taught his
wife to read and write.
It must not be supposed that Ivan Petrovich gave himself up for any
length of time to the sweet emotion caused by paternal feeling. He was
just then paying court to one of the celebrated Phrynes or Laises of
the day--classical names were still in vogue at that time. The peace
of Tilset was only just concluded,[A] and every one was hastening to
enjoy himself, every one was being swept round by a giddy whirlwind.
The black eyes of a bold beauty had helped to turn his head also. He
had very little money, but he played cards luckily, made friends,
joined in all possible diversions--in a word, he sailed with all sail
set.
[Footnote A: In consequence of which the Russian embassy was withdrawn
from London, and Ivan Petrovich probably went to Paris.]