Two years after the death of our mother our father married again. He
had already cast his eyes upon a nice-looking young person, this time
belonging to a wealthy family, when the fates decided another way. One
morning, while he was still in his dressing-gown, the servants rushed
madly into his room, announcing the arrival of General Timoféeff, the
commander of the sixth army corps, to which our father belonged. This
favourite of Nicholas I. was a terrible man. He would order a soldier
to be flogged almost to death for a mistake made during a parade, or he
would degrade an officer and send him as a private to Siberia because
he had met him in the street with the hooks on his high, stiff collar
unfastened. With Nicholas General Timoféeff’s word was all-powerful.
The general, who had never before been in our house, came to propose to
our father to marry his wife’s niece, Mademoiselle Elisabeth Karandinó,
one of several daughters of an admiral of the Black Sea fleet--a young
lady with a classical Greek profile, said to have been very beautiful.
Father accepted, and his second wedding, like the first, was solemnized
with great pomp.
‘You young people understand nothing of this kind of thing,’ he said in
conclusion, after having told me the story more than once, with a very
fine humour which I will not attempt to reproduce. ‘But do you know
what it meant at that time, the commander of an army corps--above all
that one-eyed devil, as we used to call him--coming himself to propose?
Of course she had no dowry; only a big trunk filled with ladies’
finery, and that Martha, her one serf, dark as a gypsy, sitting upon
it.’
I have no recollection whatever of this event. I only remember a big
drawing-room in a richly furnished house, and in that room a young
lady, attractive but with a rather too sharp southern look, gambolling
with us, and saying, ‘You see what a jolly mamma you will have;’ to
which Sásha and I, sulkily looking at her, replied, ‘Our mamma has
flown away to the sky.’ We regarded so much liveliness with suspicion.
* * * * *
Winter came, and a new life began for us. Our house was sold and
another was bought and furnished completely anew. All that could convey
a reminiscence of our mother disappeared--her portraits, her paintings,
her embroideries. In vain Madame Búrman implored to be retained in
our house, and promised to devote herself to the baby our stepmother
was expecting as to her own child: she was sent away. ‘Nothing of the
Sulímas in my house,’ she was told. All connection with our uncles
and aunts and our grandmother was broken. Uliána was married to Frol,
who became a major-domo, while she was made housekeeper; and for our
education a richly paid French tutor, M. Poulain, and a miserably paid
Russian student, N. P. Smirnóff, were engaged.
Many of the sons of the Moscow nobles were educated at that time by
Frenchmen, who represented the débris of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. M.
Poulain was one of them. He had just finished the education of the
youngest son of the novelist Zagóskin; and his pupil, Serge, enjoyed
in the Old Equerries’ Quarter the reputation of being so well brought
up that our father did not hesitate to engage M. Poulain for the
considerable sum of six hundred roubles a year.
M. Poulain brought with him his setter, Trésor, his coffee-pot
Napoléon, and his French text-books, and he began to rule over us and
the serf Matvéi who was attached to our service.
His plan of education was very simple. After having woke us up he
attended to his coffee, which he used to take in his room. While we
were preparing the morning lessons he made his toilet with minute care:
he shampooed his grey hair so as to conceal his growing baldness, put
on his tail-coat, sprinkled and washed himself with eau-de-cologne,
and then escorted us downstairs to say good-morning to our parents. We
used to find our father and stepmother at breakfast, and on approaching
them we recited in the most ceremonious manner, ‘Bonjour, mon cher
papa,’ and ‘Bonjour, ma chère maman,’ and kissed their hands. M.
Poulain made a very complicated and elegant obeisance in pronouncing
the words, ‘Bonjour, monsieur le prince,’ and ‘Bonjour, madame la
princesse,’ after which the procession immediately withdrew and retired
upstairs. This ceremony was repeated every morning.
Then our work began. M. Poulain changed his tail-coat for a
dressing-gown, covered his head with a leather cap, and dropping into
an easy-chair said ‘Recite the lesson.’
We recited it ‘by heart’ from one mark which was made in the book with
the nail to the next mark. M. Poulain had brought with him the grammar
of Noël and Chapsal, memorable to more than one generation of Russian
boys and girls; a book of French dialogues; a history of the world,
in one volume; and a universal geography, also in one volume. We had
to commit to memory the grammar, the dialogues, the history, and the
geography.
The grammar, with its well-known sentences, ‘What is grammar?’ ‘The art
of speaking and writing correctly,’ went all right. But the history
book, unfortunately, had a preface, which contained an enumeration
of all the advantages which can be derived from a knowledge of
history. Things went on smoothly enough with the first sentences. We
recited: ‘The prince finds in it magnanimous examples for governing
his subjects; the military commander learns from it the noble art
of warfare.’ But the moment we came to law all went wrong. ‘The
jurisconsult meets in it’--but what the learned lawyer meets in history
we never came to know. That terrible word ‘jurisconsult’ spoiled all
the game. As soon as we reached it we stopped.
‘On your knees, _gros pouff_!’ exclaimed Poulain. (That was for me.)
‘On your knees, _grand dada_!’ (That was for my brother.) And there we
knelt, shedding tears and vainly endeavouring to learn all about the
jurisconsult.
It cost us many pains, that preface! We were already learning all about
the Romans, and used to put our sticks in Uliána’s scales when she was
weighing rice, ‘just like Brennus;’ we jumped from our table and other
precipices for the salvation of our country, in imitation of Curtius;
but M. Poulain would still from time to time return to the preface,
and again put us on our knees for that very same jurisconsult. Was
it strange that later on both my brother and I should entertain an
undisguised contempt for jurisprudence?
I do not know what would have happened with geography if M. Poulain’s
book had had a preface. But happily the first twenty pages of the book
had been torn away (Serge Zagóskin, I suppose, rendered us that notable
service), and so our lessons commenced with the twenty-first page,
which began, ‘of the rivers which water France.’
It must be confessed that things did not always end with kneeling.
There was in the class-room a birch rod, and Poulain resorted to it
when there was no hope of progress with the preface or with some
dialogue on virtue and propriety; but one day sister Hélène, who by
this time had left the Catherine Institut des Demoiselles, and now
occupied a room underneath ours, hearing our cries, rushed, all in
tears, into our father’s study, and bitterly reproached him with having
handed us over to our stepmother, who had abandoned us to ‘a retired
French drummer.’ ‘Of course,’ she cried, ‘there is no one to take their
part, but I cannot see my brothers being treated in this way by a
drummer!’
Taken thus unprepared, our father could not make a stand. He began to
scold Hélène, but ended by approving her devotion to her brothers.
Thereafter the birch rod was reserved for teaching the rules of
propriety to the setter, Trésor.
No sooner had M. Poulain discharged himself of his heavy educational
duties than he became quite another man--a lively comrade instead of a
gruesome teacher. After lunch he took us out for a walk, and there was
no end to his tales: we chattered like birds. Though we never went with
him beyond the first pages of syntax, we soon learned, nevertheless,
‘to speak correctly;’ we used to _think_ in French; and when he had
dictated to us half through a book of mythology, correcting our faults
by the book, without ever trying to explain to us why a word must be
written in a particular way, we had learned ‘to write correctly.’
After dinner we had our lesson with the Russian teacher, a student of
the faculty of law in the Moscow University. He taught us all ‘Russian’
subjects--grammar, arithmetic, history, and so on. But in those years
serious teaching had not yet begun. In the meantime he dictated to
us every day a page of history, and in that practical way we quickly
learned to write Russian quite correctly.
Our best time was on Sundays, when all the family, with the exception
of us children, went to dine with Madame la Générale Timoféeff.
It would also happen occasionally that both M. Poulain and N. P.
Smirnóff would be allowed to leave the house, and when this occurred
we were placed under the care of Uliána. After a hurriedly eaten
dinner we hastened to the great hall, to which the younger housemaids
soon repaired. All sorts of games were started--blind man, vulture
and chickens, and so on; and then, all of a sudden, Tíkhon, the
Jack-of-all-trades, would appear with a violin. Dancing began;
not that measured and tiresome dancing, under the direction of a
French dancing-master ‘on india-rubber legs,’ which made part of our
education, but free dancing which was not a lesson, and in which a
score of couples turned round any way; and this was only preparatory
to the still more animated and rather wild Cossack dance. Tíkhon
would then hand the violin to one of the older men, and would begin to
perform with his legs such wonderful feats that the doors leading to
the hall would soon be filled by the cooks and even the coachmen, who
came to see the dance so dear to the Russian heart.
About nine o’clock the big carriage was sent to fetch the family
home. Tíkhon, brush in hand, crawled on the floor, to make it shine
with its virgin glance, and perfect order was restored in the house.
And if, next morning, we two had been submitted to the most severe
cross-examination, not a word would have been dropped concerning the
previous evening’s amusements. We never would have betrayed any one of
the servants, nor would they have betrayed us. One Sunday, my brother
and I, playing alone in the wide hall, ran against a bracket which
supported a costly lamp. The lamp was broken to pieces. Immediately a
council was held by the servants. No one scolded us; but it was decided
that early next morning Tíkhon should at his risk and peril slip out of
the house and run to the Smiths’ Bridge in order to buy another lamp
of the same pattern. It cost fifteen roubles--an enormous sum for the
servants; but it was done, and we never heard a word of reproach about
it.
When I think of it now, and all these scenes come back to my memory,
I notice that we never heard coarse language in any of the games, nor
saw in the dances anything like the kind of dancing which children
are now taken to admire in the theatres. In the servants’ house,
among themselves, they assuredly used coarse expressions; but we were
children--_her_ children--and that protected us from anything of the
sort.
* * * * *
In those days children were not bewildered by a profusion of toys, as
they are now. We had almost none, and were thus compelled to rely upon
our own inventiveness. Besides, we both had early acquired a taste for
the theatre. The inferior carnival theatres, with the thieving and
fighting shows, produced no lasting impression upon us: we ourselves
played enough at robbers and soldiers. But the great star of the
ballet, Fanny Elssler, came to Moscow, and we saw her. When father
took a box in the theatre, he always secured one of the best, and paid
for it well; but then he insisted that all the members of the family
should enjoy it to its full value. Small though I was at that time,
Fanny Elssler left upon me the impression of a being so full of grace,
so light, and so artistic in all her movements, that ever since I have
been unable to feel the slightest interest in a dance which belongs
more to the domain of gymnastics than to the domain of art.
Of course the ballet that we saw--‘Gitana,’ the Spanish Gypsy--had to
be repeated at home; its substance, not the dances. We had a ready-made
stage, as the doorway which led from our bedroom into the class-room
had a curtain instead of a door. A few chairs put in a half-circle in
front of the curtain, with an easy-chair for M. Poulain, became the
hall and the imperial box, and an audience could easily be mustered
with the Russian teacher, Uliána, and a couple of maids from the
servants’ rooms.
Two scenes of the ballet had to be represented by some means or
other: the one where the little Gitana is brought by the gypsies into
their camp in a wheelbarrow, and that in which Gitana makes her first
appearance on the stage, descending from a hill and crossing a bridge
over a brook which reflects her image. The audience burst into frantic
applause at this point, and the cheers were evidently called forth--so
we thought, at least--by the reflection in the brook.
We found our Gitana in one of the youngest girls in the maid-servants’
room. Her rather shabby blue cotton dress was no obstacle to
personifying Fanny Elssler. An overturned chair, pushed along by
its legs, head downwards, was an acceptable substitute for the
wheelbarrow. But the brook! Two chairs and the long ironing-board of
Andréi, the tailor, made the bridge, and a piece of blue cotton made
the brook. The image in the brook, however, would not appear full size,
do what we might with M. Poulain’s little shaving-glass. After many
unsuccessful endeavours we had to give it up, but we bribed Uliána to
behave as if she saw the image, and to applaud loudly at this passage,
so that finally we began to believe that perhaps something of it could
be seen.
Racine’s ‘Phèdre,’ or at least the last act of it, also went off
nicely; that is, Sásha recited the melodious verses beautifully--
A peine nous sortions des portes de Trézène;
and I sat absolutely motionless and unconcerned during the whole length
of the tragic monologue intended to apprise me of the death of my son,
down to the place where, according to the book, I had to exclaim, ‘_O
dieux!_’
But whatsoever we might impersonate, all our performances invariably
ended with hell. All candles save one were put out, and this one was
placed behind a transparent paper to imitate flames, while my brother
and I, concealed from view, howled in the most appalling way as the
condemned. Uliána, who did not like to have any allusion to the evil
one made at bedtime, looked horrified; but I ask myself now whether
this extremely concrete representation of hell, with a candle and a
sheet of paper, did not contribute to free us both at an early age from
the fear of eternal fire. Our conception of it was too realistic to
resist scepticism.
I must have been very much of a child when I saw the great Moscow
actors: Schépkin, Sadóvskiy, and Shúmski, in Gógol’s _Revisór_ and
another comedy; still, I remember not only the salient scenes of the
two plays, but even the attitudes and expressions of these great
actors of the realistic school which is now so admirably represented by
Duse. I remembered them so well that when I saw the same plays given at
St. Petersburg by actors belonging to the French declamatory school, I
found no pleasure in their acting, always comparing them with Schépkin
and Sadóvskiy, by whom my taste in dramatic art was settled.
This makes me think that parents who wish to develop artistic taste in
their children ought to take them occasionally to really well-acted,
good plays, instead of feeding them on a profusion of so-called
‘children’s pantomimes.’
V
When I was in my eighth year, the next step in my career was taken,
in a quite unforeseen way. I do not know exactly on what occasion
it happened, but probably it was on the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Nicholas I.’s reign, when great festivities were arranged at Moscow.
The imperial family were coming to the old capital, and the Moscow
nobility intended to celebrate this event by a fancy-dress ball in
which children were to play an important part. It was agreed that the
whole motley crowd of nationalities of which the population of the
Russian Empire is composed should be represented at this ball to greet
the monarch. Great preparations went on in our house, as well as in
all the houses of our neighbourhood. Some sort of remarkable Russian
costume was made for our stepmother. Our father, being a military man,
had to appear, of course, in his uniform; but those of our relatives
who were not in the military service were as busy with their Russian,
Greek, Caucasian, and Mongolian costumes, as the ladies themselves.
When the Moscow nobility gives a ball to the imperial family, it must
be something extraordinary. As for my brother Alexander and myself, we
were considered too young to take part in so important a ceremonial.
And yet, after all, I did take part in it. Our mother was an intimate
friend of Madame Nazímoff, the wife of the general who was Governor
of Wilno when the emancipation of the serfs began to be spoken of.
Madame Nazímoff, who was a very beautiful woman, was expected to be
present at the ball with her child, about ten years old, and to wear
some wonderful costume of a Persian princess in harmony with which
the costume of a young Persian prince, exceedingly rich, with a belt
covered with jewels, was made ready for her son. But the boy fell ill
just before the ball, and Madame Nazímoff thought that one of the
children of her best friend would be a good substitute for her own
child. Alexander and I were taken to her house to try on the costume.
It proved to be too short for Alexander, who was much taller than I,
but it fitted me exactly, and therefore it was decided that I should
impersonate the Persian prince.
The immense hall of the House of the Moscow nobility was crowded with
guests. Each of the children received a standard bearing at its top
the arms of one of the sixty provinces of the Russian Empire. I had an
eagle floating over a blue sea, which represented, as I learned later
on, the arms of the government of Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea. We
were then ranged at the back of the great hall, and slowly marched in
two rows toward the raised platform upon which the Emperor and his
family stood. As we reached it we went right and left, and thus stood
aligned in one row before the platform. At a given signal all standards
were lowered before the Emperor. The apotheosis of autocracy was made
most impressive: Nicholas was enchanted. All provinces of the Empire
worshipped the supreme ruler. Then we children slowly retired to the
rear of the hall.
But here some confusion occurred. Chamberlains in their
gold-embroidered uniforms were running about, and I was taken out of
the ranks; my uncle, Prince Gagárin, dressed as a Tungus (I was dizzy
with admiration of his fine leather coat, his bow, and his quiver full
of arrows), lifted me up in his arms, and planted me on the imperial
platform.
Whether it was because I was the tiniest in the row of boys, or that
my round face, framed in curls, looked funny under the high Astrakhan
fur bonnet I wore, I know not, but Nicholas wanted to have me on the
platform; and there I stood amidst generals and ladies looking down
upon me with curiosity. I was told later on that Nicholas I., who was
always fond of barrack jokes, took me by the arm, and, leading me to
Marie Alexándrovna (the wife of the heir to the throne), who was then
expecting her third child, said in his military way, ‘That is the sort
of boy you must bring me’--a joke which made her blush deeply. I well
remember, at any rate, Nicholas asking me whether I would have sweets;
but I replied that I should like to have some of those tiny biscuits
which were served with tea (we were never overfed at home), and he
called a waiter and emptied a full tray into my tall bonnet. ‘I will
take them to Sásha,’ I said to him.
However, the soldier-like brother of Nicholas, Mikhael, who had the
reputation of being a wit, managed to make me cry. ‘When you are a good
boy,’ he said, ‘they treat you so,’ and he passed his big hand over my
face downwards; ‘but when you are naughty, they treat you so,’ and he
passed the hand upwards, rubbing my nose, which already had a marked
tendency toward growing in that direction. Tears, which I vainly tried
to stop, came into my eyes. The ladies at once took my part, and the
good-hearted Marie Alexándrovna took me under her protection. She set
me by her side, in a high velvet chair with a gilded back, and our
people told me afterward that I very soon put my head in her lap and
went to sleep. She did not leave her chair during the whole time the
ball was going on.
I remember also that, as we were waiting in the entrance-hall for our
carriage, our relatives petted and kissed me, saying, ‘Pétya, you have
been made a page;’ but I answered, ‘I am not a page; I will go home,’
and was very anxious about my bonnet which contained the pretty little
biscuits that I was taking home for Sásha.
I do not know whether Sásha got many of those biscuits, but I recollect
what a hug he gave me when he was told about my anxiety concerning the
bonnet.
To be inscribed as a candidate for the corps of pages was then a great
favour, which Nicholas seldom bestowed on the Moscow nobility. My
father was delighted, and already dreamed of a brilliant court career
for his son. Our stepmother, every time she told the story, never
failed to add, ‘It is all because I gave him my blessing before he went
to the ball.’
Madame Nazímoff was delighted too, and insisted upon having her
portrait painted in the costume in which she looked so beautiful, with
me standing at her side.
* * * * *
My brother Alexander’s fate, also, was decided next year. The jubilee
of the Izmáylovsk regiment, to which my father had belonged in his
youth, was celebrated about this time at St. Petersburg. One night,
while all the household was plunged in deep sleep, a three-horse
carriage, ringing with the bells attached to the harnesses, stopped at
our gate. A man jumped out of it, loudly shouting, ‘Open! An ordinance
from his Majesty the Emperor.’
One can easily imagine the terror which this nocturnal visit
spread in our house. My father, trembling, went down to his study.
‘Court-martial, degradation as a soldier,’ were words which rang
then in the ears of every military man; it was a terrible epoch.
But Nicholas simply wanted to have the names of the sons of all the
officers who had once belonged to the regiment, in order to send the
boys to military schools, if that had not yet been done. A special
messenger had been dispatched for that purpose from St. Petersburg
to Moscow, and now he called day and night at the houses of the
ex-Izmáylovsk officers.
With a shaking hand my father wrote that his eldest son, Nicholas,
was already in the first corps of cadets at Moscow; that his youngest
son, Peter, was a candidate for the corps of pages; and that there
remained only his second son, Alexander, who had not yet entered the
military career. A few weeks later came a paper informing father of the
‘monarch’s favour.’ Alexander was ordered to enter a corps of cadets
in Orel, a small provincial town. It cost my father a deal of trouble
and a large sum of money to get Alexander sent to a corps of cadets at
Moscow. This new ‘favour’ was obtained only in consideration of the
fact that our elder brother was in that corps.
And thus, owing to the will of Nicholas I., we had both to receive a
military education, though, before we were many years older, we simply
hated the military career for its absurdity. But Nicholas I. was
watchful that none of the sons of the nobility should embrace any other
profession than the military one, unless they were of infirm health;
and so we had all three to be officers, to the great satisfaction of my
father.