Produced by Eric Eldred
RUDIN
A Novel
By Ivan Turgenev
Translated from the Russian By Constance Garnett
[With an introduction by S. Stepniak]
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1894
INTRODUCTION
I
Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the
last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public,
first in France, then in Germany and America, and finally in England.
In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical
of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest
writers of our times: ‘The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed
our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a
whole race,’ because ‘a whole world lived in him and spoke through his
mouth.’ Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic
world, to which it was ‘an honour to have been expressed by so great a
Master.’
This recognition was, however, of slow growth. It had nothing in it of
the sudden wave of curiosity and gushing enthusiasm which in a few years
lifted Count Tolstoi to world-wide fame. Neither in the personality of
Turgenev, nor in his talent, was there anything to strike and carry away
popular imagination.
By the fecundity of his creative talent Turgenev stands with the
greatest authors of all times. The gallery of living people, men, and
especially women, each different and perfectly individualised, yet all
the creatures of actual life, whom Turgenev introduces to us; the vast
body of psychological truths he discovers, the subtle shades of men’s
feelings he reveals to us, is such as only the greatest among the great
have succeeded in leaving as their artistic inheritance to their country
and to the world.
As regards his method of dealing with his material and shaping it into
mould, he stands even higher than as a pure creator. Tolstoi is more
plastical, and certainly as deep and original and rich in creative power
as Turgenev, and Dostoevsky is more intense, fervid, and dramatic.
But as an _artist_, as master of the combination of details into a
harmonious whole, as an architect of imaginative work, he surpasses all
the prose writers of his country, and has but few equals among the
great novelists of other lands. Twenty-five years ago, on reading the
translation of one of his short stories (_Assya_), George Sand, who was
then at the apogee of her fame, wrote to him: ‘Master, all of us have
to go to study at your school.’ This was, indeed, a generous compliment,
coming from the representative of French literature which is so
eminently artistic. But it was not flattery. As an artist, Turgenev
in reality stands with the classics who may be studied and admired
for their perfect form long after the interest of their subject has
disappeared. But it seems that in his very devotion to art and beauty he
has purposely restricted the range of his creations.
To one familiar with all Turgenev’s works it is evident that he
possessed the keys of all human emotions, all human feelings, the
highest and the lowest, the noble as well as the base. From the height
of his superiority he saw all, understood all: Nature and men had no
secrets hidden from his calm, penetrating eyes. In his latter days,
sketches such as _Clara Militch_, _The Song of Triumphant Love_, _The
Dream_, and the incomparable _Phantoms_, he showed that he could equal
Edgar Poe, Hofmann, and Dostoevsky in the mastery of the fantastical,
the horrible, the mysterious, and the incomprehensible, which live
somewhere in human nerves, though not to be defined by reason.
But there was in him such a love of light, sunshine, and living human
poetry, such an organic aversion for all that is ugly, or coarse and
discordant, that he made himself almost exclusively the poet of the
gentler side of human nature. On the fringe of his pictures or in their
background, just for the sake of contrast, he will show us the vices,
the cruelties, even the mire of life. But he cannot stay in these gloomy
regions, and he hastens back to the realms of the sun and flowers, or to
the poetical moonlight of melancholy, which he loves best because in it
he can find expression for his own great sorrowing heart.
Even jealousy, which is the black shadow of the most poetical of human
feelings, is avoided by the gentle artist. He hardly ever describes it,
only alluding to it cursorily. But there is no novelist who gives so
much room to the pure, crystalline, eternally youthful feeling of love.
We may say that the description of love is Turgenev’s speciality. What
Francesco Petrarca did for one kind of love--the romantic, artificial,
hot-house love of the times of chivalry--Turgenev did for the natural,
spontaneous, modern love in all its variety of forms, kinds, and
manifestations: the slow and gradual as well as the sudden and
instantaneous; the spiritual, the admiring and inspiring, as well as
the life-poisoning, terrible kind of love, which infects a man as a
prolonged disease. There is something prodigious in Turgenev’s insight
into, and his inexhaustible richness, truthfulness, and freshness in the
rendering of those emotions which have been the theme of all poets and
novelists for two thousand years.
In the well-known memoirs of Caroline Bauer one comes across a curious
legend about Paganini. She tells that the great enchanter owed his
unique command over the emotions of his audiences to a peculiar use of
one single string, G, which he made sing and whisper, cry and thunder,
at the touch of his marvellous bow.
There is something of this in Turgenev’s description of love. He has
many other strings at his harp, but his greatest effect he obtains in
touching this one. His stories are not love poems. He only prefers to
present his people in the light of that feeling in which a man’s soul
gathers up all its highest energies, and melts as in a crucible, showing
its dross and its pure metal.
Turgenev began his literary career and won an enormous popularity in
Russia by his sketches from peasant life. His _Diary of a Sportsman_
contains some of the best of his short stories, and his _Country Inn,_
written a few years later, in the maturity of his talent, is as good as
Tolstoi’s little masterpiece, _Polikushka_.
He was certainly able to paint all classes and conditions of Russian
people. But in his greater works Turgenev lays the action exclusively
with one class of Russian people. There is nothing of the enormous
canvas of Count Tolstoi, in which the whole of Russia seems to pass in
review before the readers. In Turgenev’s novels we see only educated
Russia, or rather the more advanced thinking part of it, which he knew
best, because he was a part of it himself.
We are far from regretting this specialisation. Quality can sometimes
hold its own against quantity. Although small numerically, the section
of Russian society which Turgenev represents is enormously interesting,
because it is the brain of the nation, the living ferment which alone
can leaven the huge unformed masses. It is upon them that depend the
destinies of their country. Besides, the artistic value of his works
could only be enhanced by his concentrating his genius upon a field
so familiar to him, and engrossing so completely his mind and his
sympathies. What he loses in dimensions he gains in correctness, depth,
wonderful subtlety and effectiveness of every minute detail, and the
surpassing beauty of the whole. The jewels of art he left us are like
those which nations store in the sanctuaries of their museums and
galleries to be admired, the longer they are studied. But we must look
to Tolstoi for the huge and towering monuments, hewn in massive granite,
to be put upon some cross way of nations as an object of wonder and
admiration for all who come from the four winds of heaven.
Turgenev did not write for the masses but for the _elite_ among men. The
fact that he has won such a fame among foreigners, and that the
number of his readers is widening every year, proves that great art
is international, and also, I may say, that artistic taste and
understanding is growing everywhere.
II
It is written that no man is a prophet in his own country, and from time
immemorial all the unsuccessful aspirants to the profession have found
their consolation in this proverbial truth. But for aught we know this
hard limitation has never been applied to artists. Indeed it seems
absurd on the face of it that the artist’s countrymen, for whom
and about whom he writes, should be less fit to recognise him than
strangers. Yet in certain special and peculiar conditions, the most
unlikely things will sometimes occur, as is proved in the case of
Turgenev.
The fact is that _as an artist_ he was appreciated to his full value
first by foreigners. The Russians have begun to understand him, and to
assign to him his right place in this respect only now, after his death,
whilst in his lifetime his _artistic genius_ was comparatively little
cared for, save by a handful of his personal friends.
This supreme art told upon the Russian public unconsciously, as it was
bound to tell upon a nation so richly endowed with natural artistic
instinct. Turgenev was always the most widely read of Russian authors,
not excepting Tolstoi, who came to the front only after his death. But
full recognition he had not, because he happened to produce his works in
a troubled epoch of political and social strife, when the best men were
absorbed in other interests and pursuits, and could not and would not
appreciate and enjoy pure art. This was the painful, almost tragic,
position of an artist, who lived in a most inartistic epoch, and whose
highest aspirations and noblest efforts wounded and irritated those
among his countrymen whom he was most devoted to, and whom he desired
most ardently to serve.
This strife embittered Turgenev’s life.
At one crucial epoch of his literary career the conflict became so
vehement, and the outcry against him, set in motion by his very artistic
truthfulness and objectiveness, became so loud and unanimous, that he
contemplated giving up literature altogether. He could not possibly
have held to this resolution. But it is surely an open question whether,
sensitive and modest as he was, and prone to despondency and diffidence,
he would have done so much for the literature of his country without the
enthusiastic encouragement of various great foreign novelists, who were
his friends and admirers: George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, in France;
Auerbach, in Germany; W. D. Howells, in America; George Eliot, in
England.
We will tell the story of his troubled life piece by piece as far as
space will allow, as his works appear in succession. Here we will only
give a few biographical traits which bear particularly upon the novel
before us, and account for his peculiar hold over the minds of his
countrymen.
Turgenev, who was born in 1818, belonged to a set of Russians very small
in his time, who had received a thoroughly European education in no way
inferior to that of the best favoured young German or Englishman. It
happened, moreover, that his paternal uncle, Nicholas Turgenev, the
famous ‘Decembrist,’ after the failure of that first attempt (December
14, 1825) to gain by force of arms a constitutional government for
Russia, succeeded in escaping the vengeance of the Tsar Nicholas I., and
settled in France, where he published in French the first vindication of
Russian revolution.
Whilst studying philosophy in the Berlin University, Turgenev paid short
visits to his uncle, who initiated him in the ideas of liberty, from
which he never swerved throughout his long life.
In the sixties, when Alexander Hertzen, one of the most gifted writers
of our land, a sparkling, witty, pathetic, and powerful journalist and
brilliant essayist, started in London his _Kolokol_, a revolutionary,
or rather radical paper, which had a great influence in Russia, Turgenev
became one of his most active contributors and advisers,--almost a
member of the editorial staff.
This fact has been revealed a few years ago by the publication, which
we owe to Professor Dragomanov, of the private correspondence between
Turgenev and Hertzen. This most interesting little volume throws quite a
new light upon Turgenev, showing that our great novelist was at the same
time one of the strongest--perhaps the strongest--and most clear-sighted
political thinkers of his time. However surprising such a versatility
may appear, it is proved to demonstration by a comparison of his views,
his attitude, and his forecasts, some of which have been verified only
lately, with those of the acknowledged leaders and spokesmen of the
various political parties of his day, including Alexander Hertzen
himself. Turgenev’s are always the soundest, the most correct and
far-sighted judgments, as latter-day history has proved.
A man with so ardent a love of liberty, and such radical views, could
not possibly banish them from his literary works, no matter how great
his devotion to pure art. He would have been a poor artist had he
inflicted upon himself such a mutilation, because freedom from all
restraints, the frank, sincere expression of the artist’s individuality,
is the life and soul of all true art.
Turgenev gave to his country the whole of himself, the best of his mind
and of his creative fancy. He appeared at the same time as a teacher, a
prophet of new ideas, and as a poet and artist. But his own countrymen
hailed him in the first capacity, remaining for a long time obtuse to
the latter and greater.
Thus, during one of the most important and interesting periods of our
national history, Turgenev was the standard-bearer and inspirer of
the Liberal, the thinking Russia. Although the two men stand at
diametrically opposite poles, Turgenev’s position can be compared to
that of Count Tolstoi nowadays, with a difference, this time in favour
of the author of _Dmitri Rudin_. With Turgenev the thinker and the
artist are not at war, spoiling and sometimes contradicting each other’s
efforts. They go hand in hand, because he never preaches any doctrine
whatever, but gives us, with an unimpeachable, artistic objectiveness,
the living men and women in whom certain ideas, doctrines, and
aspirations were embodied. And he never evolves these ideas and
doctrines from his inner consciousness, but takes them from real life,
catching with his unfailing artistic instinct an incipient movement just
at the moment when it was to become a historic feature of the time. Thus
his novels are a sort of artistic epitome of the intellectual history
of modern Russia, and also a powerful instrument of her intellectual
progress.
III
_Rudin_ is the first of Turgenev’s social novels, and is a sort of
artistic introduction to those that follow, because it refers to the
epoch anterior to that when the present social and political movements
began. This epoch is being fast forgotten, and without his novel it
would be difficult for us to fully realise it, but it is well worth
studying, because we find in it the germ of future growths.
It was a gloomy time. The ferocious despotism of Nicholas
I.--overweighing the country like the stone lid of a coffin,
crushed every word, every thought, which did not fit with its narrow
conceptions. But this was not the worst. The worst was that progressive
Russia was represented by a mere handful of men, who were so immensely
in advance of their surroundings, that in their own country they felt
more isolated, helpless, and out of touch with the realities of life
than if they had lived among strangers.
But men must have some outlet for their spiritual energies, and these
men, unable to take part in the sordid or petty pursuits of those around
them, created for themselves artificial life, artificial pursuits and
interests.
The isolation in which they lived drew them naturally together. The
‘circle,’ something between an informal club and a debating society,
became the form in which these cravings of mind or heart could be
satisfied. These people met and talked; that was all they were able to
do.
The passage in which one of the heroes, Lezhnyov, tells the woman he
loves about the circle of which Dmitri Rudin and himself were members,
is historically one of the most suggestive. It refers to a circle of
young students. But it has a wider application. All prominent men of
the epoch--Stankevitch, who served as model to the poetic and
touching figure of Pokorsky; Alexander Hertzen, and the great critic,
Belinsky--all had their ‘circles,’ or their small chapels, in which
these enthusiasts met to offer worship to the ‘goddess of truth, art,
and morality.’
They were the best men of their time, full of high aspirations and
knowledge, and their disinterested search after truth was certainly a
noble pursuit. They had full right to look down upon their neighbours
wallowing in the mire of sordid and selfish materialism. But by living
in that spiritual hothouse of dreams, philosophical speculations, and
abstractions, these men unfitted themselves only the more completely for
participation in real life; the absorption in interests having nothing
to do with the life of their own country, estranged them still more from
it. The overwhelming stream of words drained them of the natural sources
of spontaneous emotion, and these men almost grew out of feeling by dint
of constantly analysing their feelings.
Dmitri Rudin is the typical man of that generation, both the victim and
the hero of his time--a man who is almost a Titan in word and a pigmy in
deed. He is eloquent as a young Demosthenes. An irresistible debater,
he carries everything before him the moment he appears. But he fails
ignominiously when put to the hard test of action. Yet he is not an
impostor. His enthusiasm is contagious because it is sincere, and his
eloquence is convincing because devotion to his ideals is an absorbing
passion with him. He would die for them, and, what is more rare, he
would not swerve a hair’s-breadth from them for any worldly advantage,
or for fear of any hardship. Only this passion and this enthusiasm
spring with him entirely from the head. The heart, the deep emotional
power of human love and pity, lay dormant in him. Humanity, which
he would serve to the last drop of his blood, is for him a body of
foreigners--French, English, Germans--whom he has studied from books,
and whom he has met only in hotels and watering-places during his
foreign travels as a student or as a tourist.
Towards such an abstract, alien humanity, a man cannot feel any real
attachment. With all his outward ardour, Rudin is cold as ice at the
bottom of his heart. His is an enthusiasm which glows without warmth,
like the aurora borealis of the Polar regions. A poor substitute for the
bountiful sun. But what would have become of a God-forsaken land if
the Arctic nights were deprived of that substitute? With all their
weaknesses, Rudin and the men of his stamp--in other words, the men
of the generation of 1840--have rendered an heroic service to their
country. They inculcated in it the religion of the ideal; they brought
in the seeds, which had only to be thrown into the warm furrow of their
native soil to bring forth the rich crops of the future.
The shortcomings and the impotence of these men were due to their having
no organic ties with their own country, no roots in the Russian soil.
They hardly knew the Russian people, who appeared to them as nothing
more than an historic abstraction. They were really cosmopolitan, as a
poor makeshift for something better, and Turgenev, in making his hero
die on a French barricade, was true to life as well as to art.
The inward growth of the country has remedied this defect in the course
of the three generations which have followed. But has the remedy been
complete? No; far from it, unfortunately. There are still thousands of
barriers preventing the Russians from doing something useful for their
countrymen and mixing freely with them. The spiritual energies of the
most ardent are still compelled--partially at least--to run into the
artificial channels described in Turgenev’s novel.
Hence the perpetuation of Rudin’s type, which acquires more than an
historical interest.
In discussing the character of Hlestakov, the hero of his great comedy,
Gogol declared that this type is pretty nigh universal, because ‘every
Russian,’ he says, ‘has a bit of Hlestakov in him.’ This not very
flattering opinion has been humbly indorsed and repeated since, out of
reverence to Gogol’s great authority, although it is untrue on the
face of it. Hlestakov is a sort of Tartarin in Russian dress, whilst
simplicity and sincerity are the fundamental traits of all that is
Russian in character, manner, art, literature. But it may be truly said
that every educated Russian of our time has a bit of Dmitri Rudin in
him.
This figure is undoubtedly one of the finest in Turgenev’s gallery,
and it is at the same time one of the most brilliant examples of his
artistic method.
Turgenev does not give us at one stroke sculptured figures made from one
block, such as rise before us from Tolstoi’s pages. His art is rather
that of a painter or musical composer than of a sculptor. He has more
colour, a deeper perspective, a greater variety of lights and shadows--a
more complete portraiture of the spiritual man. Tolstoi’s people stand
so living and concrete that one feels one can recognise them in the
street. Turgenev’s are like people whose intimate confessions and
private correspondence, unveiling all the secrets of their spiritual
life, have been submitted to one.
Every scene, almost every line, opens up new deep horizons, throwing
upon his people some new unexpected light.
The extremely complex and difficult character of the hero of this story,
shows at its highest this subtle psychological many-sidedness. Dmitri
Rudin is built up of contradictions, yet not for a moment does he cease
to be perfectly real, living, and concrete.
Hardly less remarkable is the character of the heroine, Natalya, the
quiet, sober, matter-of-fact girl, who at the bottom is an enthusiastic
and heroic nature. She is but a child fresh to all impressions of life,
and as yet undeveloped. To have used the searching, analytical method
in painting her would have spoiled this beautiful creation. Turgenev
describes her synthetically by a few masterly lines, which show us,
however, the secrets of her spirit; revealing what she is and also what
she might have become under other circumstances.
This character deserves more attention than we can give it here.
Turgenev, like George Meredith, is a master in painting women, and his
Natalya is the first poetical revelation of a very striking fact in
modern Russian history; the appearance of women possessing a strength
of mind more finely masculine than that of the men of their time. By the
side of weak, irresolute, though highly intellectual men we see in his
first three novels energetic, earnest, impassioned women, who take
the lead in action, whilst they are but the man’s modest pupils in the
domain of ideas. Only later on, in _Fathers and Children_, does Turgenev
show us in Bazarov a man essentially masculine. But of this interesting
peculiarity of Russian intellectual life, in the years 1840 to 1860,
I will speak more fully when analysing another of Turgenev’s novels in
which this contrast is most conspicuous.
I will say nothing of the minor characters of the story before us:
Lezhnyov, Pigasov, Madame Lasunsky, Pandalevsky, who are all excellent
examples of what may be called miniature-painting.
As to the novel as a whole, I will make here only one observation, not
to forestall the reader’s own impressions.
Turgenev is a realist in the sense that he keeps close to reality,
truth, and nature. But in the pursuit of photographic faithfulness to
life, he never allows himself to be tedious and dull, as some of the
best representatives of the school think it incumbent upon them to be.
His descriptions are never overburdened with wearisome details; his
action is rapid; the events are never to be foreseen a hundred pages
beforehand; he keeps his readers in constant suspense. And it seems
to me in so doing he shows himself a better realist than the gifted
representatives of the orthodox realism in France, England, and America.
Life is not dull; life is full of the unforeseen, full of suspense. A
novelist, however natural and logical, must contrive to have it in his
novels if he is not to sacrifice the soul of art for the merest show of
fidelity.
The plot of Dmitri Rudin is so exceedingly simple that an English
novel-reader would say that there is hardly any plot at all. Turgenev
disdained the tricks of the sensational novelists. Yet, for a Russian at
least, it is easier to lay down before the end a novel by Victor Hugo or
Alexander Dumas than Dmitri Rudin, or, indeed, any of Turgenev’s great
novels. What the novelists of the romantic school obtain by the charm
of unexpected adventures and thrilling situations, Turgenev succeeds in
obtaining by the brisk admirably concentrated action, and, above all, by
the simplest and most precious of a novelist’s gifts: his unique command
over the sympathies and emotions of his readers. In this he can be
compared to a musician who works upon the nerves and the souls of his
audience without the intermediary of the mind; or, better still, to a
poet who combines the power of the word with the magic spell of harmony.
One does not read his novels; one lives in them.
Much of this peculiar gift of fascination is certainly due to Turgenev’s
mastery over all the resources of our rich, flexible, and musical
language. The poet Lermontov alone wrote as splendid a prose as
Turgenev. A good deal of its charm is unavoidably lost in translation.
But I am happy to say that the present one is as near an approach to the
elegance and poetry of the original as I have ever come across.
S. STEPNIAK.
BEDFORD PARK, April 20, 1894.
THE NAMES OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE BOOK
DMITRI NIKOLA’ITCH RU’DIN.
DAR-YA MIHA’ILOVNA LASU’NSKY.
NATA’L-YA ALEX-YE’VNA.
MIHA’ILO MIHA’ILITCH LE’ZH-NYOV (MISHA).
ALEXANDRA PA’VLOVNA LI’PIN (SASHA).
SERGEI (pron, Sergay) PA’VLITCH VOLI’NT-SEV (SEREZHA).
KONSTANTIN DIOMIDITCH PANDALE’VSKY.
AFRICAN SEME’NITCH PIGA’SOV.
BASSI’STOFF.
MLLE. BONCOURT.
In transcribing the Russian names into English--
a has the sound of a in father. er,, air. i,, ee. u,, oo. y is always
consonantal except when it is the last letter of the word. g is always
hard.
I
IT was a quiet summer morning. The sun stood already pretty high in the
clear sky but the fields were still sparkling with dew; a fresh breeze
blew fragrantly from the scarce awakened valleys and in the forest,
still damp and hushed, the birds were merrily carolling their morning
song. On the ridge of a swelling upland, which was covered from base
to summit with blossoming rye, a little village was to be seen. Along
a narrow by-road to this little village a young woman was walking in a
white muslin gown, and a round straw hat, with a parasol in her hand. A
page boy followed her some distance behind.
She moved without haste and as though she were enjoying the walk. The
high nodding rye all round her moved in long softly rustling waves,
taking here a shade of silvery green and there a ripple of red; the
larks were trilling overhead. The young woman had come from her own
estate, which was not more than a mile from the village to which she
was turning her steps. Her name was Alexandra Pavlovna Lipin. She was
a widow, childless, and fairly well off, and lived with her brother, a
retired cavalry officer, Sergei Pavlitch Volintsev. He was unmarried and
looked after her property.
Alexandra Pavlovna reached the village and, stopping at the last hut,
a very old and low one, she called up the boy and told him to go in and
ask after the health of its mistress. He quickly came back accompanied
by a decrepit old peasant with a white beard.
‘Well, how is she?’ asked Alexandra Pavlovna.
‘Well, she is still alive,’ began the old man.
‘Can I go in?’
‘Of course; yes.’
Alexandra Pavlovna went into the hut. It was narrow, stifling, and smoky
inside. Some one stirred and began to moan on the stove which formed the
bed. Alexandra Pavlovna looked round and discerned in the half
darkness the yellow wrinkled face of the old woman tied up in a checked
handkerchief. Covered to the very throat with a heavy overcoat she was
breathing with difficulty, and her wasted hands were twitching.
Alexandra Pavlovna went close up to the old woman and laid her fingers
on her forehead; it was burning hot.
‘How do you feel, Matrona?’ she inquired, bending over the bed.
‘Oh, oh!’ groaned the old woman, trying to make her out, ‘bad, very bad,
my dear! My last hour has come, my darling!’
‘God is merciful, Matrona; perhaps you will be better soon. Did you take
the medicine I sent you?’
The old woman groaned painfully, and did not answer. She had hardly
heard the question.
‘She has taken it,’ said the old man who was standing at the door.
Alexandra Pavlovna turned to him.
‘Is there no one with her but you?’ she inquired.
‘There is the girl--her granddaughter, but she always keeps away. She
won’t sit with her; she’s such a gad-about. To give the old woman a
drink of water is too much trouble for her. And I am old; what use can I
be?’
‘Shouldn’t she be taken to me--to the hospital?’
‘No. Why take her to the hospital? She would die just the same. She has
lived her life; it’s God’s will now seemingly. She will never get up
again. How could she go to the hospital? If they tried to lift her up,
she would die.’
‘Oh!’ moaned the sick woman, ‘my pretty lady, don’t abandon my little
orphan; our master is far away, but you----’
She could not go on, she had spent all her strength in saying so much.
‘Do not worry yourself,’ replied Alexandra Pavlovna, ‘everything shall
be done. Here is some tea and sugar I have brought you. If you can
fancy it you must drink some. Have you a samovar, I wonder?’ she added,
looking at the old man.
‘A samovar? We haven’t a samovar, but we could get one.’
‘Then get one, or I will send you one. And tell your granddaughter not
to leave her like this. Tell her it’s shameful.’
The old man made no answer but took the parcel of tea and sugar with
both hands.
‘Well, good-bye, Matrona!’ said Alexandra Pavlovna, ‘I will come and
see you again; and you must not lose heart but take your medicine
regularly.’
The old woman raised her head and drew herself a little towards
Alexandra Pavlovna.
‘Give me your little hand, dear lady,’ she muttered.
Alexandra Pavlovna did not give her hand; she bent over her and kissed
her on the forehead.
‘Take care, now,’ she said to the old man as she went out, ‘and give her
the medicine without fail, as it is written down, and give her some tea
to drink.’
Again the old man made no reply, but only bowed.
Alexandra Pavlovna breathed more freely when she came out into the
fresh air. She put up her parasol and was about to start homewards, when
suddenly there appeared round the corner of a little hut a man about
thirty, driving a low racing droshky and wearing an old overcoat of
grey linen, and a foraging cap of the same. Catching sight of Alexandra
Pavlovna he at once stopped his horse and turned round towards her.
His broad and colourless face with its small light grey eyes and almost
white moustache seemed all in the same tone of colour as his clothes.
‘Good-morning!’ he began, with a lazy smile; ‘what are you doing here,
if I may ask?’
‘I have been visiting a sick woman... And where have you come from,
Mihailo Mihailitch?’
The man addressed as Mihailo Mihailitch looked into her eyes and smiled
again.
‘You do well,’ he said, ‘to visit the sick, but wouldn’t it be better
for you to take her into the hospital?’
‘She is too weak; impossible to move her.’
‘But don’t you intend to give up your hospital?’
‘Give it up? Why?’
‘Oh, I thought so.’
‘What a strange notion! What put such an idea into your head?’
‘Oh, you are always with Madame Lasunsky now, you know, and seem to be
under her influence. And in her words--hospitals, schools, and all that
sort of things, are mere waste of time--useless fads. Philanthropy
ought to be entirely personal, and education too, all that is the soul’s
work... that’s how she expresses herself, I believe. From whom did she
pick up that opinion I should like to know?’
Alexandra Pavlovna laughed.
‘Darya Mihailovna is a clever woman, I like and esteem her very much;
but she may make mistakes, and I don’t put faith in everything she
says.’
‘And it’s a very good thing you don’t,’ rejoined Mihailo Mihailitch, who
all the while remained sitting in his droshky, ‘for she doesn’t put much
faith in what she says herself. I’m very glad I met you.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s a nice question! As though it wasn’t always delightful to meet
you? To-day you look as bright and fresh as this morning.’
Alexandra Pavlovna laughed again.
‘What are you laughing at?’
‘What, indeed! If you could see with what a cold and indifferent face
you brought out your compliment! I wonder you didn’t yawn over the last
word!’
‘A cold face.... You always want fire; but fire is of no use at all. It
flares and smokes and goes out.’
‘And warms,’... put in Alexandra Pavlovna.
‘Yes... and burns.’
‘Well, what if it does burn! That’s no great harm either! It’s better
anyway than----’
‘Well, we shall see what you will say when you do get nicely burnt one
day,’ Mihailo Mihailitch interrupted her in a tone of vexation and made
a cut at the horse with the reins, ‘Good-bye.’
‘Mihailo Mihailitch, stop a minute!’ cried Alexandra Pavlovna, ‘when are
you coming to see us?’
‘To-morrow; my greetings to your brother.’
And the droshky rolled away.
Alexandra Pavlovna looked after Mihailo Mihailitch.
‘What a sack!’ she thought. Sitting huddled up and covered with dust,
his cap on the back of his head and tufts of flaxen hair straggling from
beneath it, he looked strikingly like a huge sack of flour.
Alexandra Pavlovna turned tranquilly back along the path homewards. She
was walking with downcast eyes. The tramp of a horse near made her stop
and raise her head.... Her brother had come on horseback to meet her;
beside him was walking a young man of medium height, wearing a light
open coat, a light tie, and a light grey hat, and carrying a cane in his
hand. He had been smiling for a long time at Alexandra Pavlovna, even
though he saw that she was absorbed in thought and noticing nothing, and
when she stopped he went up to her and in a tone of delight, almost of
emotion, cried:
‘Good-morning, Alexandra Pavlovna, good-morning!’
‘Ah! Konstantin Diomiditch! good-morning!’ she replied. ‘You have come
from Darya Mihailovna?’
‘Precisely so, precisely so,’ rejoined the young man with a radiant
face, ‘from Darya Mihailovna. Darya Mihailovna sent me to you; I
preferred to walk.... It’s such a glorious morning, and the distance
is only three miles. When I arrived, you were not at home. Your brother
told me you had gone to Semenovka; and he was just going out to the
fields; so you see I walked with him to meet you. Yes, yes. How very
delightful!’
The young man spoke Russian accurately and grammatically but with a
foreign accent, though it was difficult to determine exactly what accent
it was. In his features there was something Asiatic. His long hook
nose, his large expressionless prominent eyes, his thick red lips,
and retreating forehead, and his jet black hair,--everything about him
suggested an Oriental extraction; but the young man gave his surname as
Pandalevsky and spoke of Odessa as his birthplace, though he was brought
up somewhere in White Russia at the expense of a rich and benevolent
widow.
Another widow had obtained a government post for him. Middle-aged ladies
were generally ready to befriend Konstantin Diomiditch; he knew well how
to court them and was successful in coming across them. He was at
this very time living with a rich lady, a landowner, Darya Mihailovna
Lasunsky, in a position between that of a guest and of a dependant. He
was very polite and obliging, full of sensibility and secretly given to
sensuality, he had a pleasant voice, played well on the piano, and had
the habit of gazing intently into the eyes of any one he was speaking
to. He dressed very neatly, and wore his clothes a very long time,
shaved his broad chin carefully, and arranged his hair curl by curl.
Alexandra Pavlovna heard his speech to the end and turned to her
brother.
‘I keep meeting people to-day; I have just been talking to Lezhnyov.’
‘Oh, Lezhnyov! was he driving somewhere?’
‘Yes, and fancy; he was in a racing droshky, and dressed in a kind of
linen sack, all covered with dust.... What a queer creature he is!’
‘Perhaps so; but he’s a capital fellow.’
‘Who? Mr. Lezhnyov?’ inquired Pandalevsky, as though he were surprised.
‘Yes, Mihailo Mihailitch Lezhnyov,’ replied Volintsev. ‘Well, good-bye;
it’s time I was off to the field; they are sowing your buckwheat. Mr.
Pandalevsky will escort you home.’ And Volintsev rode off at a trot.
‘With the greatest of pleasure!’ cried Konstantin Diomiditch, offering
Alexandra Pavlovna his arm.
She took it and they both turned along the path to her house.
Walking with Alexandra Pavlovna on his arm seemed to afford Konstantin
Diomiditch great delight; he moved with little steps, smiling, and his
Oriental eyes were even be-dimmed by a slight moisture, though this
indeed was no rare occurrence with them; it did not mean much for
Konstantin Diomiditch to be moved and dissolve into tears. And who would
not have been pleased to have on his arm a pretty, young and graceful
woman? Of Alexandra Pavlovna the whole of her district was unanimous
in declaring that she was charming, and the district was not wrong. Her
straight, ever so slightly tilted nose would have been enough alone
to drive any man out of his senses, to say nothing of her velvety dark
eyes, her golden brown hair, the dimples in her smoothly curved cheeks,
and her other beauties. But best of all was the sweet expression of her
face; confiding, good and gentle, it touched and attracted at the same
time. Alexandra Pavlovna had the glance and the smile of a child; other
ladies found her a little simple.... Could one wish for anything more?
‘Darya Mihailovna sent you to me, did you say?’ she asked Pandalevsky.
‘Yes; she sent me,’ he answered, pronouncing the letter _s_ like the
English _th_. ‘She particularly wishes and told me to beg you very
urgently to be so good as to dine with her to-day. She is expecting a
new guest whom she particularly wishes you to meet.’
‘Who is it?’
‘A certain Muffel, a baron, a gentleman of the bed-chamber from
Petersburg. Darya Mihailovna made his acquaintance lately at the Prince
Garin’s, and speaks of him in high terms as an agreeable and cultivated
young man. His Excellency the baron is interested, too, in literature,
or more strictly speaking----ah! what an exquisite butterfly! pray look
at it!----more strictly speaking, in political economy. He has written
an essay on some very interesting question, and wants to submit it to
Darya Mihailovna’s criticism.’
‘An article on political economy?’
‘From the literary point of view, Alexandra Pavlovna, from the literary
point of view. You are well aware, I suppose, that in that line Darya
Mihailovna is an authority. Zhukovsky used to ask her advice, and
my benefactor, who lives at Odessa, that benevolent old man, Roxolan
Mediarovitch Ksandrika----No doubt you know the name of that eminent
man?’
‘No; I have never heard of him.’
‘You never heard of such a man? surprising! I was going to say that
Roxolan Mediarovitch always had the very highest opinion of Darya
Mihailovna’s knowledge of Russian!
‘Is this baron a pedant then?’ asked Alexandra Pavlovna.
‘Not in the very least. Darya Mihailovna says, on the contrary, that you
see that he belongs to the best society at once. He spoke of Beethoven
with such eloquence that even the old prince was quite delighted by it.
That, I own, I should like to have heard; you know that is in my line.
Allow me to offer you this lovely wild-flower.’
Alexandra Pavlovna took the flower, and when she had walked a few steps
farther, let it drop on the path. They were not more than two hundred
paces from her house. It had been recently built and whitewashed, and
looked out hospitably with its wide light windows from the thick foliage
of the old limes and maples.
‘So what message do you give me for Darya Mihailovna?’ began
Pandalevsky, slightly hurt at the fate of the flower he had given her.
‘Will you come to dinner? She invites your brother too.’
‘Yes; we will come, most certainly. And how is Natasha?’
‘Natalya Alexyevna is well, I am glad to say. But we have already passed
the road that turns off to Darya Mihailovna’s. Allow me to bid you
good-bye.’
Alexandra Pavlovna stopped. ‘But won’t you come in?’ she said in a
hesitating voice.
‘I should like to, indeed, but I am afraid it is late. Darya Mihailovna
wishes to hear a new étude of Thalberg’s, so I must practise and have
it ready. Besides, I am doubtful, I must confess, whether my visit could
afford you any pleasure.’
‘Oh, no! why?’
Pandalevsky sighed and dropped his eyes expressively.
‘Good-bye, Alexandra Pavlovna!’ he said after a slight pause; then he
bowed and turned back.
Alexandra Pavlovna turned round and went home.
Konstantin Diomiditch, too, walked homewards. All softness had vanished
at once from his face; a self-confident, almost hard expression came
into it. Even his walk was changed; his steps were longer and he trod
more heavily. He had walked about two miles, carelessly swinging his
cane, when all at once he began to smile again: he saw by the roadside a
young, rather pretty peasant girl, who was driving some calves out of an
oat-field. Konstantin Diomiditch approached the girl as warily as a cat,
and began to speak to her. She said nothing at first, only blushed and
laughed, but at last she hid her face in her sleeve, turned away, and
muttered:
‘Go away, sir; upon my word...’
Konstantin Diomiditch shook his finger at her and told her to bring him
some cornflowers.
‘What do you want with cornflowers?--to make a wreath?’ replied the
girl; ‘come now, go along then.’
‘Stop a minute, my pretty little dear,’ Konstantin Diomiditch was
beginning.
‘There now, go along,’ the girl interrupted him, ‘there are the young
gentlemen coming.’
Konstantin Diomiditch looked round. There really were Vanya and Petya,
Darya Mihailovna’s sons, running along the road; after them walked their
tutor, Bassistoff, a young man of two-and-twenty, who had only just left
college. Bassistoff was a well-grown youth, with a simple face, a large
nose, thick lips, and small pig’s eyes, plain and awkward, but kind,
good, and upright. He dressed untidily and wore his hair long--not from
affectation, but from laziness; he liked eating and he liked sleeping,
but he also liked a good book, and an earnest conversation, and he hated
Pandalevsky from the depths of his soul.
Darya Mihailovna’s children worshipped Bassistoff, and yet were not in
the least afraid of him; he was on a friendly footing with all the
rest of the household, a fact which was not altogether pleasing to
its mistress, though she was fond of declaring that for her social
prejudices did not exist.
‘Good-morning, my dears,’ began Konstantin Diomiditch, ‘how early you
have come for your walk to-day! But I,’ he added, turning to Bassistoff,
‘have been out a long while already; it’s my passion--to enjoy nature.’
‘We saw how you were enjoying nature,’ muttered Bassistoff.
‘You are a materialist, God knows what you are imagining! I know
you.’ When Pandalevsky spoke to Bassistoff or people like him, he grew
slightly irritated, and pronounced the letter _s_ quite clearly, even
with a slight hiss.
‘Why, were you asking your way of that girl, am I to suppose?’ said
Bassistoff, shifting his eyes to right and to left.
He felt that Pandalevsky was looking him straight in the face, and this
fact was exceedingly unpleasant to him. ‘I repeat, a materialist and
nothing more.’
‘You certainly prefer to see only the prosaic side in everything.’
‘Boys!’ cried Bassistoff suddenly, ‘do you see that willow at the
corner? let’s see who can get to it first. One! two! three! and away!’
The boys set off at full speed to the willow. Bassistoff rushed after
them.
‘What a lout!’ thought Pandalevsky, ‘he is spoiling those boys. A
perfect peasant!’
And looking with satisfaction at his own neat and elegant figure,
Konstantin Diomiditch struck his coat-sleeve twice with his open hand,
pulled up his collar, and went on his way. When he had reached his own
room, he put on an old dressing-gown and sat down with an anxious face
to the piano.
II
Darya Mihailovna’s house was regarded as almost the first in the whole
province. It was a huge stone mansion, built after designs of Rastrelli
in the taste of last century, and in a commanding position on the summit
of a hill, at whose base flowed one of the principal rivers of central
Russia. Darya Mihailovna herself was a wealthy and distinguished lady,
the widow of a privy councillor. Pandalevsky said of her, that she
knew all Europe and all Europe knew her! However, Europe knew her very
little; even at Petersburg she had not played a very prominent part;
but on the other hand at Moscow every one knew her and visited her. She
belonged to the highest society, and was spoken of as a rather eccentric
woman, not wholly good-natured, but excessively clever. In her youth
she had been very pretty. Poets had written verses to her, young men
had been in love with her, distinguished men had paid her homage. But
twenty-five or thirty years had passed since those days and not a trace
of her former charms remained. Every one who saw her now for the first
time was impelled to ask himself, if this woman--skinny, sharp-nosed,
and yellow-faced, though still not old in years--could once have been a
beauty, if she was really the same woman who had been the inspiration of
poets.... And every one marvelled inwardly at the mutability of earthly
things. It is true that Pandalevsky discovered that Darya Mihailovna
had preserved her magnificent eyes in a marvellous way; but we have seen
that Pandalevsky also maintained that all Europe knew her.
Darya Mihailovna went every summer to her country place with her
children (she had three: a daughter of seventeen, Natalya, and two sons
of nine and ten years old). She kept open house in the country, that is,
she received men, especially unmarried ones; provincial ladies she could
not endure. But what of the treatment she received from those ladies in
return?
Darya Mihailovna, according to them, was a haughty, immoral, and
insufferable tyrant, and above all--she permitted herself such liberties
in conversation, it was shocking! Darya Mihailovna certainly did not
care to stand on ceremony in the country, and in the unconstrained
frankness of her manners there was perceptible a slight shade of
the contempt of the lioness of the capital for the petty and obscure
creatures who surrounded her. She had a careless, and even a sarcastic
manner with her own set; but the shade of contempt was not there.
By the way, reader, have you observed that a person who is exceptionally
nonchalant with his inferiors, is never nonchalant with persons of a
higher rank? Why is that? But such questions lead to nothing.
When Konstantin Diomiditch, having at last learnt by heart the _etude_
of Thalberg, went down from his bright and cheerful room to the
drawing-room, he already found the whole household assembled. The salon
was already beginning. The lady of the house was reposing on a wide
couch, her feet gathered up under her, and a new French pamphlet in her
hand; at the window behind a tambour frame, sat on one side the daughter
of Darya Mihailovna, on the other, Mlle. Boncourt, the governess, a
dry old maiden lady of sixty, with a false front of black curls under a
parti-coloured cap and cotton wool in her ears; in the corner near the
door was huddled Bassistoff reading a paper, near him were Petya and
Vanya playing draughts, and leaning by the stove, his hands clasped
behind his back, was a gentleman of low stature, with a swarthy face
covered with bristling grey hair, and fiery black eyes--a certain
African Semenitch Pigasov.