For the last few years the health of my father had been going from
bad to worse, and when my brother Alexander and I came to see him, in
the spring of 1871, we were told by the doctors that with the first
frosts of autumn he would be gone. He had continued to live in the old
style, in the Stáraya Konúshennaya, but around him everything in this
aristocratic quarter had changed. The rich serf-owners, who once were
so prominent there, had gone. After having spent in a reckless way
the redemption money which they had received at the emancipation of
the serfs, and after having mortgaged and re-mortgaged their estates
in the new land banks which preyed upon their helplessness, they had
withdrawn at last to the country or to provincial towns, there to sink
into oblivion. Their houses had been taken by ‘the intruders’--rich
merchants, railway contractors, and the like--while in nearly every
one of the old families which remained in the Old Equerries’ Quarters
a young life struggled to assert its rights upon the ruins of the
old one. A couple of retired generals, who cursed the new ways, and
relieved their griefs by predicting for Russia a certain and speedy
ruin under the new order, or some relative occasionally dropping in,
were all the company my father had now. Out of our many relatives,
numbering nearly a score of families at Moscow alone in my childhood,
two families only had remained in the capital, and these had joined the
current of the new life, the mothers discussing with their girls and
boys such matters as schools for the people and women’s universities.
My father looked upon them with contempt. My stepmother and my younger
stepsister, Pauline, who had not changed, did their best to comfort
him; but they themselves felt strange in their unwonted surroundings.
My father had always been unkind and most unjust toward my brother
Alexander, but Alexander was utterly incapable of holding a grudge
against anyone. When he entered our father’s sick-room, with the deep,
kind look of his dark blue eyes and with a smile revealing his infinite
kindness, and when he immediately found out what could be done to
render the sufferer more comfortable in his sick-chair, and did it
as naturally as if he had left the sick-room only an hour before, my
father was simply bewildered; he stared at him without being able to
understand. Our visit brought life into the dull, gloomy house; nursing
became more bright; my stepmother, Pauline, the servants themselves,
grew more animated, and my father felt the change.
One thing worried him, however. He had expected to see us come as
repentant sons, imploring his support. But when he tried to direct
conversation into that channel we stopped him with such a cheerful
‘Don’t bother about that; we get on very nicely,’ that he was still
more bewildered. He looked for a scene in the old style--his sons
begging pardon, and money--perhaps he even regretted for a moment that
this did not happen; but he regarded us with a greater esteem. We were
all three affected at parting. He seemed almost to dread returning
to his gloomy loneliness amidst the wreckage of a system he had lived
to maintain. But Alexander had to go back to his service, and I was
leaving for Finland.
When I was called home again, from Finland, I hurried to Moscow, to
find the burial ceremony just beginning, in that same old red church
where my father had been baptized, and where the last prayers had
been said over his mother. As the funeral procession passed along the
streets, of which every house was familiar to me in my childhood, I
noticed that the houses had changed little, but I knew that in all of
them a new life had begun.
In the house which had formerly belonged to our father’s mother and
then to Princess Mírski, and which now was bought by General N----,
an old inhabitant of the Quarter, the only daughter of the family
maintained for a couple of years a painful struggle against her
good-natured but obstinate parents, who worshipped her but would not
allow her to study at the university courses which had been opened for
ladies at Moscow. At last she was allowed to join these courses, but
was taken to them in an elegant carriage, under the close supervision
of her mother, who courageously sat for hours on the benches
amongst the students, by the side of her beloved daughter; and yet,
notwithstanding all this care and watchfulness, a couple of years later
the daughter joined the revolutionary party, was arrested, and spent
one year in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.
In the house opposite, the despotic heads of the family, Count and
Countess Z----, were in a bitter struggle against their two daughters,
who were sick of the idle and useless existence their parents forced
them to lead, and who wanted to join those other girls who, free and
happy, flocked to the university courses. The struggle lasted for
years; the parents did not yield in this case, and the result of it
was that the elder girl ended her life by poisoning herself, when her
younger sister was allowed to follow her own inclinations.
In the house next door, which had been our family residence for a year,
when I entered it with Tchaykóvsky to hold in it the first secret
meeting of a circle which we founded at Moscow, I at once recognized
the rooms which had been so familiar to me, in such a different
atmosphere, in my childhood. It now belonged to the family of Nathalie
Armfeld, that highly sympathetic Kará ‘convict’ whom George Kennan has
so touchingly described in his book on Siberia.
And in a house within a stone’s throw of that where my father had died,
and within a few months after his death, I received Stepniák, clothed
as a peasant, he having escaped from a country village where he had
been arrested for socialist propaganda amongst the peasants.
Such was the change which had been accomplished in the Old Equerries’
Quarter within the last fifteen years. The last stronghold of the old
nobility was now invaded by the new spirit.