In the autumn of 1852 my brother Alexander was sent to the corps of
cadets, and from that time we saw each other only during the holidays
and occasionally on Sundays. The corps of cadets was six miles from our
house, and although we had a dozen horses, it always happened that when
the time came to send the sledge to the corps there was no horse free
for that purpose. My eldest brother, Nicholas, came home very seldom.
The relative freedom which Alexander found at school, and especially
the influence of two of his teachers in literature, developed his
intellect rapidly, and later on I shall have ample occasion to speak of
the beneficial influence that he exercised upon my own development. It
is a great privilege to have had a loving, intelligent elder brother.
In the meantime I remained at home. I had to wait till my turn to enter
the corps of pages should come, and that did not happen until I was
nearly fifteen years of age. M. Poulain was dismissed, and a German
tutor was engaged instead. He was one of those idealistic men who are
not uncommon among Germans, but I remember him chiefly on account of
the enthusiastic way in which he used to recite Schiller’s poetry,
accompanying it by a most naïve kind of acting that delighted me. He
stayed with us only one winter.
The next winter I was sent to attend the classes at a Moscow gymnasium;
and finally I remained with our Russian teacher, Smirnóff. We soon
became friends, especially after my father took both of us for a
journey to his Ryazán estate. During this journey we indulged in all
sorts of fun, and we used to invent humorous stories in connection
with the men and the things that we saw; while the impression produced
upon me by the hilly tracts we crossed added some new and fine touches
to my growing love of nature. Under the impulse given me by Smirnóff,
my literary tastes also began to grow, and during the years from 1854
to 1857 I had full opportunity to develop them. My teacher, who had
by this time finished his studies at the university, obtained a small
clerkship in a law court, and spent his mornings there. I was thus
left to myself till dinner-time, and after having prepared my lessons
and taken a walk, I had plenty of leisure for reading and writing. In
the autumn, when my teacher returned to his office at Moscow, while
we remained in the country, I was left again to myself, and though in
continual intercourse with the family, and spending part of the day in
playing with my little sister Pauline, I could in fact dispose of my
time as I liked.
* * * * *
Serfdom was then in the last years of its existence. It is recent
history--it seems to be only of yesterday; and yet, even in Russia, few
realize what serfdom was in reality. There is a dim conception that the
conditions which it created were very bad; but how these conditions
affected human beings bodily and mentally is only vaguely understood.
It is amazing, indeed, to see how quickly an institution and its social
consequences are forgotten when the institution has ceased to exist,
and with what rapidity men and things change after that. I will try to
recall the conditions of serfdom by telling, not what I heard, but what
I saw.
Uliána, the housekeeper, stands in the passage leading to father’s
room, and crosses herself; she dares neither to advance nor to retreat.
At last, after having recited a prayer, she enters the room, and
reports, in a hardly audible voice, that the store of tea is nearly at
an end, that there are only twenty pounds of sugar left, and that the
other provisions will soon be exhausted.
‘Thieves, robbers!’ shouts my father. ‘And you, you are in league with
them!’ His voice thunders throughout the house. Our stepmother leaves
Uliána to face the storm. But father cries, ‘Frol, call the princess!
Where is she?’ And when she enters, he receives her with the same
reproaches.
‘You also are in league with this progeny of Ham; you are standing up
for them;’ and so on, for half an hour or more.
Then he commences to verify the accounts. At the same time, he thinks
about the hay. Frol is sent to weigh what is left of that, and our
stepmother is sent to be present during the weighing, while father
calculates how much of it ought to be in the barn. A considerable
quantity of hay appears to be missing, and Uliána cannot account for
several pounds of such and such provisions. Father’s voice becomes more
and more menacing; Uliána is trembling; but it is the coachman who now
enters the room, and is stormed at by his master. Father springs at
him, strikes him, but he keeps repeating, ‘Your highness must have made
a mistake.’
Father repeats his calculations, and this time it appears that there is
more hay in the barn than there ought to be. The shouting continues;
he now reproaches the coachman with not having given the horses their
daily rations in full; but the coachman calls on all the saints to
witness that he gave the animals their due, and Frol invokes the Virgin
to confirm the coachman’s appeal.
But father will not be appeased. He calls in Makár, the piano-tuner
and sub-butler, and reminds him of all his recent sins. He was drunk
last week, and must have been drunk yesterday, for he broke half a
dozen plates. In fact, the breaking of these plates was the real
cause of all the disturbance: our stepmother had reported the fact to
father in the morning, and that was why Uliána was received with more
scolding than was usually the case, why the verification of the hay was
undertaken, and why father now continues to shout that ‘this progeny of
Ham’ deserve all the punishments on earth.
Of a sudden there is a lull in the storm. My father takes his seat at
the table and writes a note. ‘Take Makár with this note to the police
station, and let a hundred lashes with the birch rod be given to him.’
Terror and absolute muteness reign in the house.
The clock strikes four, and we all go down to dinner; but no one has
any appetite, and the soup remains in the plates untouched. We are
ten at table, and behind each of us a violinist or a trombone-player
stands, with a clean plate in his left hand; but Makár is not among
them.
‘Where is Makár?’ our stepmother asks. ‘Call him in.’
Makár does not appear, and the order is repeated. He enters at last,
pale, with a distorted face, ashamed, his eyes cast down. Father looks
into his plate, while our stepmother, seeing that no one has touched
the soup, tries to encourage us.
‘Don’t you find, children,’ she says, ‘that the soup is delicious?’
Tears suffocate me, and immediately after dinner is over I run out,
catch Makár in a dark passage and try to kiss his hand; but he tears it
away, and says, either as a reproach or as a question, ‘Let me alone;
you, too, when you are grown up, will you not be just the same?’
‘No, no, never!’
Yet father was not among the worst of landowners. On the contrary, the
servants and the peasants considered him one of the best. What we saw
in our house was going on everywhere, often in much more cruel forms.
The flogging of the serfs was a regular part of the duties of the
police and of the fire brigade.
A landowner once made the remark to another, ‘Why is it, general,
that the number of the souls on your estate increases so slowly? You
probably do not look after their marriages.’
A few days later the general ordered that a list of all the inhabitants
of his village should be brought him. He picked out from it the names
of the boys who had attained the age of eighteen, and of the girls just
past sixteen--these are the legal ages for marriage in Russia. Then he
wrote, ‘John to marry Anna, Paul to marry Paráshka,’ and so on with
five couples. The five weddings, he added, must take place in ten days,
the next Sunday but one.
A general cry of despair rose from the village. Women, young and old,
wept in every house. Anna had hoped to marry Gregory; Paul’s parents
had already had a talk with the Fedótoffs about their girl, who would
soon be of age. Moreover, it was the season for ploughing, not for
weddings; and what wedding can be prepared in ten days? Dozens of
peasants came to see the landowner; peasant women stood in groups at
the back entrance of the mansion, with pieces of fine linen for the
landowner’s spouse, to secure her intervention. All in vain. The master
had said that the wedding should take place at such a date, and so it
must be.
At the appointed time, the nuptial processions, in this case more like
burial processions, went to the church. The women cried with loud
voices, as they are wont to cry during burials. One of the house valets
was sent to the church, to report to the master as soon as the wedding
ceremonies were over; but soon he came running back, cap in hand, pale
and distressed.
‘Paráshka,’ he said, ‘makes a stand; she refuses to be married to Paul.
Father’ (that is, the priest) ‘asked her, “Do you agree?” but she
replied in a loud voice, “No, I don’t.”’
The landowner grew furious. ‘Go and tell that long-maned drunkard’
(meaning the priest; the Russian clergy wear their hair long) ‘that if
Paráshka is not married at once, I will report him as a drunkard to the
archbishop. How dares he, clerical dirt, disobey me? Tell him he shall
be sent to rot in a monastery, and I shall exile Paráshka’s family to
the steppes.’
The valet transmitted the message. Paráshka’s relatives and the priest
surrounded the girl; her mother weeping, fell on her knees before her,
entreating her not to ruin the whole family. The girl continued to say
‘I won’t,’ but in a weaker and weaker voice, then in a whisper, until
at last she stood silent. The nuptial crown was put on her head; she
made no resistance, and the valet ran full speed to the mansion to
announce, ‘They are married.’
Half an hour later, the small bells of the nuptial processions
resounded at the gate of the mansion. The five couples alighted from
the cars, crossed the yard and entered the hall. The landlord received
them, offering them glasses of wine, while the parents, standing behind
the crying daughters, ordered them to bow to the earth before their
lord.
Marriages by order were so common that amongst our servants, each time
a young couple foresaw that they might be ordered to marry, although
they had no mutual inclination for each other, they took the precaution
of standing together as godfather and godmother at the christening
of a child in one of the peasant families. This rendered marriage
impossible, according to Russian Church law. The stratagem was usually
successful, but once it ended in a tragedy. Andréi, the tailor, fell
in love with a girl belonging to one of our neighbours. He hoped that
my father would permit him to go free, as a tailor, in exchange for
a certain yearly payment, and that by working hard at his trade he
could manage to lay aside some money and to buy freedom for the girl.
Otherwise, in marrying one of my father’s serfs she would have become
the serf of her husband’s master. However, as Andréi and one of the
maids of our household foresaw that they might be ordered to marry,
they agreed to unite as god-parents in the christening of a child. What
they had feared happened: one day they were called to the master, and
the dreaded order was given.
‘We are always obedient to your will,’ they replied, ‘but a few weeks
ago we acted as godfather and godmother at a christening.’ Andréi also
explained his wishes and intentions. The result was that he was sent to
the recruiting board to become a soldier.
Under Nicholas I. there was no obligatory military service for all,
such as now exists. Nobles and merchants were exempt, and when a new
levy of recruits was ordered, the landowners had to supply a certain
number of men from their serfs. As a rule, the peasants, within their
village communities, kept a roll amongst themselves; but the house
servants were entirely at the mercy of their lord, and if he was
dissatisfied with one of them, he sent him to the recruiting board and
took recruit acquittance, which had a considerable money value, as it
could be sold to any one whose turn it was to become a soldier.
Military service in those times was terrible. A man was required to
serve twenty-five years under the colours, and the life of a soldier
was hard in the extreme. To become a soldier meant to be torn away
for ever from one’s native village and surroundings, and to be at
the mercy of officers like Timoféeff, whom I have already mentioned.
Blows from the officers, flogging with birch rods and with sticks,
for the slightest fault, were normal affairs. The cruelty that was
displayed surpasses all imagination. Even in the corps of cadets, where
only noblemen’s sons were educated, a thousand blows with birch rods
were sometimes administered, in the presence of all the corps, for a
cigarette--the doctor standing by the tortured boy, and ordering the
punishment to end only when he ascertained that the pulse was about to
stop beating. The bleeding victim was carried away unconscious to the
hospital. The Grand Duke Mikhael, commander of the military schools,
would quickly have removed the director of a corps in which one or two
such cases did not occur every year. ‘No discipline,’ he would have
said.
With common soldiers it was far worse. When one of them appeared
before a court-martial, the sentence was that a thousand men should
be placed in two ranks facing each other, every soldier armed with a
stick of the thickness of the little finger (these sticks were known
under their German name of _Spitzruthen_), and that the condemned man
should be dragged three, four, five, and seven times between these two
rows, each soldier administering a blow. Sergeants followed to see that
full force was used. After one or two thousand blows had been given,
the victim, spitting blood, was taken to the hospital and attended
to, in order that the punishment might be finished as soon as he had
more or less recovered from the effects of the first part of it. If he
died under the torture, the execution of the sentence was completed
upon the corpse. Nicholas I. and his brother Mikhael were pitiless;
no remittance of the punishment was ever possible. ‘I will send you
through the ranks; you shall be skinned under the sticks,’ were threats
which made part of the current language.
A gloomy terror used to spread through our house when it became known
that one of the servants was to be sent to the recruiting board.
The man was chained and placed under guard in the office to prevent
suicide. A peasant cart was brought to the office door, and the doomed
man was taken out between two watchmen. All the servants surrounded
him. He made a deep bow asking everyone to pardon him his willing or
unwilling offences. If his father and mother lived in our village,
they came to see him off. He bowed to the ground before them, and his
mother and his other female relatives began loudly to sing out their
lamentations--a sort of half-song and half-recitative: ‘To whom do you
abandon us? Who will take care of you in the strange lands? Who will
protect me from cruel men?’--exactly in the same way in which they sang
their lamentations at a burial, and with the same words.
Thus Andréi had now to face for twenty-five years the terrible fate of
a soldier: all his schemes of happiness had come to a violent end.
* * * * *
The fate of one of the maids, Pauline, or Pólya, as she used to be
called, was even more tragical. She had been apprenticed to make fine
embroidery, and was an artist at the work. At Nikólskoye her embroidery
frame stood in sister Hélène’s room, and she often took part in the
conversations that went on between our sister and a sister of our
stepmother who stayed with Hélène. Altogether, by her behaviour and
talk Pólya was more like an educated young person than a housemaid.
A misfortune befell her: she realized that she would soon be a mother.
She told all to our stepmother, who burst into reproaches: ‘I will not
have that creature in my house any longer! I will not permit such a
shame in my house! oh, the shameless creature!’ and so on. The tears
of Hélène made no difference. Pólya had her hair cut short, and was
exiled to the dairy; but as she was just embroidering an extraordinary
skirt, she had to finish it at the dairy, in a dirty cottage, at
a microscopical window. She finished it, and made many more fine
embroideries, all in the hope of obtaining her pardon. But pardon did
not come.
The father of her child, a servant of one of our neighbours, implored
permission to marry her; but as he had no money to offer, his request
was refused. Pólya’s ‘too gentlewoman-like manners’ were taken as an
offence, and a most bitter fate was kept in reserve for her. There was
in our household a man employed as a postillion, on account of his
small size; he went under the name of ‘bandy-legged Fílka.’ In his
boyhood a horse had kicked him terribly, and he did not grow. His
legs were crooked, his feet were turned inward, his nose was broken
and turned to one side, his jaw was deformed. To this monster it was
decided to marry Pólya--and she was married by force. The couple were
sent to become peasants at my father’s estate in Ryazán.
Human feelings were not recognized, not even suspected, in serfs, and
when Turguéneff published his little story ‘Mumú,’ and Grigoróvich
began to issue his thrilling novels, in which he made his readers weep
over the misfortunes of the serfs, it was to a great number of persons
a startling revelation. ‘They love just as we do; is it possible?’
exclaimed the sentimental ladies who could not read a French novel
without shedding tears over the troubles of the noble heroes and
heroines.
* * * * *
The education which the owners occasionally gave to some of their serfs
was only another source of misfortune for the latter. My father once
picked out in a peasant house a clever boy, and sent him to be educated
as a doctor’s assistant. The boy was diligent, and after a few years’
apprenticeship made a decided success. When he returned home, my father
bought all that was required for a well-equipped dispensary, which
was arranged very nicely in one of the side houses of Nikólskoye. In
summer time Sásha the Doctor--that was the familiar name under which
this young man went in the household--was busy gathering and preparing
all sorts of medical herbs, and in a short time he became most popular
in the region round Nikólskoye. The sick people among the peasants
came from the neighbouring villages, and my father was proud of the
success of his dispensary. But this condition of things did not last.
One winter, my father came to Nikólskoye, stayed there for a few days,
and left. That night Sásha the Doctor shot himself--by accident, it was
reported; but there was a love story at the bottom of it. He was in
love with a girl whom he could not marry, as she belonged to another
landowner.
The case of another young man, Gherásim Kruglóff, whom my father
educated at the Moscow Agricultural Institute, was almost equally sad.
He passed his examinations most brilliantly, getting a gold medal, and
the director of the Institute made all possible endeavours to induce my
father to give him freedom and to let him go to the university--serfs
not being allowed to enter there. ‘He is sure to become a remarkable
man,’ the director said, ‘perhaps one of the glories of Russia, and it
will be an honour for you to have recognized his capacities and to have
given such a man to Russian science.’
‘I need him for my own estate,’ my father replied to the many
applications made on the young man’s behalf. In reality, with the
primitive methods of agriculture which were then in use, and from which
my father would never have departed, Gherásim Kruglóff was absolutely
useless. He made a survey of the estate, but when that was done he
was ordered to sit in the servants’ room and to stand with a plate
at dinner-time. Of course Gherásim resented it very much; his dreams
carried him to the university, to scientific work. His looks betrayed
his discontent, and our stepmother seemed to find an especial pleasure
in offending him at every opportunity. One day in the autumn, a rush of
wind having opened the entrance gate, she called out to him, ‘Garáska,
go and shut the gate.’
That was the last drop. He answered, ‘You have a porter for that,’ and
went his way.
My stepmother ran into father’s room, crying, ‘Your servants insult me
in your house!’
Immediately Gherásim was put under arrest, and chained, to be sent away
as a soldier. The parting of his old father and mother with him was one
of the most heartrending scenes I ever saw.
This time, however, fate took its revenge. Nicholas I. died, and
military service became more tolerable. Gherásim’s great ability was
soon remarked, and in a few years he was one of the chief clerks,
and the real working force in one of the departments of the Ministry
of War. Meanwhile, my father, who was absolutely honest, and, at a
time when almost every one was receiving bribes and making fortunes,
had never let himself be bribed, departed once from the strict rules
of the service in order to oblige the commander of the corps to which
he belonged, and consented to allow an irregularity of some kind. It
nearly cost him his promotion to the rank of general; the only object
of his thirty-five years’ service in the army seemed on the point
of being lost. My stepmother went to St. Petersburg to remove the
difficulty, and one day, after many applications, she was told that
the only way to obtain what she wanted was to address herself to a
particular clerk in a certain department of the ministry. Although he
was a mere clerk, he was the real head of his superiors, and could do
everything. This man’s name was Gherásim Ivánovich Kruglóff.
‘Imagine, our Garáska!’ she said to me afterward. ‘I always knew that
he had great capacity. I went to see him, and spoke to him about this
affair, and he said, “I have nothing against the old prince, and I will
do all I can for him.”’
Gherásim kept his word: he made a favourable report, and my father got
his promotion. At last he could put on the long-coveted red trousers
and the red-lined overcoat, and could wear the plumage on his helmet.
These were things which I myself saw in my childhood. If, however, I
were to relate what I heard of in those years it would be a much more
gruesome narrative: stories of men and women torn from their families
and their villages, and sold, or lost in gambling, or exchanged for a
couple of hunting dogs, and then transported to some remote part of
Russia for the sake of creating a new estate; of children taken from
their parents and sold to cruel or dissolute masters; of flogging ‘in
the stables,’ which occurred every day with unheard-of cruelty; of a
girl who found her only salvation in drowning herself; of an old man
who had grown grey-haired in his master’s service, and at last hanged
himself under his master’s window; and of revolts of serfs, which were
suppressed by Nicholas I.’s generals by flogging to death each tenth
or fifth man taken out of the ranks, and by laying waste the village,
whose inhabitants, after a military execution, went begging for bread
in the neighbouring provinces, as if they had been the victims of a
conflagration. As to the poverty which I saw during our journeys in
certain villages, especially in those which belonged to the imperial
family, no words would be adequate to describe the misery to readers
who have not seen it.
* * * * *
To become free was the constant dream of the serfs--a dream not easily
realized, for a heavy sum of money was required to induce a landowner
to part with a serf. ‘Do you know,’ my father said to me once, ‘that
your mother appeared to me after her death? You young people do not
believe in these things, but it was so. I sat one night very late in
this chair, at my writing-table, and slumbered, when I saw her enter
from behind, all in white, quite pale, and with her eyes gleaming.
When she was dying she begged me to promise that I would give liberty
to her maid, Másha, and I did promise; but then what with one thing
and another, nearly a whole year passed without my having fulfilled my
intention. Then she appeared, and said to me in a low voice, “Alexis,
you promised me to give liberty to Másha: have you forgotten it?” I
was quite terrified: I jumped out of my chair, but she had vanished. I
called the servants, but no one had seen anything. Next morning I went
to her grave and had a litany sung, and immediately gave liberty to
Másha.’
When my father died, Másha came to his burial, and I spoke to her. She
was married, and quite happy in her family life. My brother Alexander,
in his jocose way, told her what my father had said, and we asked her
what she knew of it.
‘These things,’ she replied, ‘happened a long time ago, so I may tell
you the truth. I saw that your father had quite forgotten his promise,
so I dressed up in white and spoke like your mother. I recalled the
promise he had made to her--you won’t bear a grudge against me, will
you?’
‘Of course not!’
* * * * *
Ten or twelve years after the scenes described in the early part of
this chapter, I sat one night in my father’s room, and we talked of
things past. Serfdom had been abolished, and my father complained of
the new conditions, though not very severely; he had accepted them
without much grumbling.
‘You must agree, father,’ I said, ‘that you often punished your
servants cruelly, and without any reason.’
‘With the people,’ he replied, ‘it was impossible to do otherwise;’
and, leaning back in his easy-chair, he remained plunged in thought.
‘But what I did was nothing worth speaking of,’ he said after a long
pause. ‘Take that same Sábleff: he looks so soft, and talks in such a
meek voice; but he was really terrible with his serfs. How many times
they plotted to kill him! I, at least, never took advantage of my
maids, whereas that old devil Tónkoff went on in such a way that the
peasant women were going to inflict a terrible punishment upon him....
Good-bye; _bonne nuit_!’