CHAPTER II

Gossip of Nurses and Conversation of Generals—A False Position—Boredom—The Servants’ Hall—Two Germans—Lessons and Reading—Catechism and the Gospel.

UNTIL I was ten, I noticed nothing strange or peculiar in my position.[15]To me it seemed simple and natural that I was living in my father’s house, where I had to be quiet in the rooms inhabited by him, though in my mother’s part of the house I could shout and make a noise to my heart’s content. The Senator gave me toys and spoilt me; Calot was my faithful slave; Vyéra Artamónovna bathed me, dressed me, and put me to bed; and Mme. Provo took me out for walks and spoke German to me. All went on with perfect regularity; and yet I began to feel puzzled.

15.Herzen’s parents were never married with the Russian rites, and he bore throughout life a name which was not his father’s.

My attention was caught by some casual remarks incautiously dropped. Old Mme. Provo and the household in general were devoted to my mother, but feared and disliked my father. The disputes which sometimes took place between my parents were often the subject of discussionbetween my nurses, and they always took my mother’s side.

It was true that my mother’s life was no bed of roses. An exceedingly kind-hearted woman, but not strong-willed, she was utterly crushed by my father; and, as often happens with weak characters, she was apt to carry on a desperate opposition in matters of no importance. Unfortunately, in these trifles my father was almost always in the right, and so he triumphed in the end.

Mme. Provo would start a conversation in this style: “In her place, I declare I would be off at once and go back to Germany. The dulness of the life is fit to kill one; no enjoyment and nothing but grumbling and unpleasantness.”

“You’re quite right,” said Vyéra Artamónovna; “but she’s tied hand and foot by someone”—and she would point her knitting-needles at me. “She can’t take him with her, and to leave him here alone in a house like ours would be too much even for one not his mother.”

Children in general find out more than people think. They are easily put off, and forget for a time, but they persist in returning to the subject, especially if it is mysterious or alarming; and by their questions they get at the truth with surprising perseverance and ingenuity.

Once my curiosity was aroused, I soon learned all the details of my parents’ marriage—how my mother made up her mind to elope, how she was concealed in the Russian embassy at Cassel by my uncle’s connivance, and then crossed the frontier disguised as a boy; and all this I found out without asking a single question.

The first result of these discoveries was to lessen my attachment to my father, owing to the disputes of whichI have spoken already. I had witnessed them before, but had taken them as a matter of course. The whole household, not excluding the Senator, were afraid of my father, and he spared no one his reproofs; and I was so accustomed to this, that I saw nothing strange in these quarrels with my mother. But now I began to take a different view of the matter, and the thought that I was to some extent responsible threw a dark shadow sometimes over my childhood.

A second thought which took root in my mind at that time was this—that I was much less dependent on my father than most children are on their parents; and this independence, though it existed only in my own imagination, gave me pleasure.

Two or three years after this, two old brother-officers of my father’s were at our house one evening—General Essen, the Governor of Orenburg, and General Bakhmétyev, who lost a leg at Borodino and was later Lieutenant-Governor of Bessarabia. My room was next the drawing-room where they were sitting. My father happened to mention that he had been speaking to Prince Yusúpov with regard to my future; he wished me to enter the Civil Service. “There’s no time to lose,” he added; “as you know, he must serve a long time before he gets any decent post.”

“It is a strange notion of yours,” said Essen good-humouredly, “to turn the boy into a clerk. Leave it to me; let me enroll him in the Ural Cossacks; he will soon get his commission, which is the main thing, and then he can forge ahead like the rest of us.”

But my father would not agree: he said that everything military was distasteful to him, that he hoped in time to get me a diplomatic post in some warm climate, where he would go himself to end his days.

Bakhmétyev had taken little part in the conversation; but now he got up on his crutches and said:

“In my opinion, you ought to think twice before you reject Essen’s advice. If you don’t fancy Orenburg, the boy can enlist here just as well. You and I are old friends, and I always speak my mind to you. You will do no good to the young man himself and no service to the country by sending him to the University and on to the Civil Service. He is clearly in a false position, and nothing but the Army can put that right and open up a career for him from the first. Any dangerous notions will settle down before he gets the command of a regiment. Discipline works wonders, and his future will depend on himself. You say that he’s clever; but you don’t suppose that all officers in the Army are fools? Think of yourself and me and our lot generally. There is only one possible objection—that he may have to serve some time before he gets his commission; but that’s the very point in which we can help you.”

This conversation was as valuable to me as the casual remarks of my nurses. I was now thirteen; and these lessons, which I turned over and over and pondered in my heart for weeks and months in complete solitude, bore their fruit. I had formerly dreamt, as boys always do, of military service and fine uniforms, and had nearly wept because my father wished to make a civilian of me; but this conversation at once cooled my enthusiasm, and by degrees—for it took time—I rooted out of my mindevery atom of my passion for stripes and epaulettes and aiguillettes. There was, it is true, one relapse, when a cousin, who was at school in Moscow and sometimes came to our house on holidays, got a commission in a cavalry regiment. After joining his regiment, he paid a visit to Moscow and stayed some days with us. My heart beat fast, when I saw him in all his finery, carrying his sabre and wearing the shako held at a becoming angle by the chin-strap. He was sixteen but not tall for his age; and next morning I put on his uniform, sabre, shako, and all, and looked at myself in the glass. How magnificent I seemed to myself, in the blue jacket with scarlet facings! What a contrast between this gorgeous finery and the plain cloth jacket and duck trousers which I wore at home!

My cousin’s visit weakened for a time the effect of what the generals had said; but, before long, circumstances gave me a fresh and final distaste for a soldier’s uniform.

By pondering over my “false position,” I was brought to much the same conclusions as by the talk of the two nurses. I felt less dependence on society (of which, however, I knew nothing), and I believed that I must rely mainly on my own efforts. I said to myself with childish arrogance that General Bakhmétyev and his brother-officers should hear of me some day.

In view of all this, it may be imagined what a weary and monotonous existence I led in the strange monastic seclusion of my home. There was no encouragement for me, and no variety; my father, who showed no fondness for me after I was ten, was almost always displeased with me; I had no companions. My teachers came andwent; I saw them to the door, and then stole off to play with the servants’ children, which was strictly forbidden. At other times I wandered about the large gloomy rooms, where the windows were shut all day and the lights burnt dim in the evening; I either did nothing or read any books I could lay hands on.

My only other occupation I found in the servants’ hall and the maids’ room; they gave me real live pleasure. There I found perfect freedom; I took a side in disputes; together with my friends downstairs, I discussed their doings and gave my advice; and though I knew all their secrets, I never once betrayed them by a slip of the tongue in the drawing-room.

This is a subject on which I must dwell for a little. I should say that I do not in general mean to avoid digressions and disquisitions; every conversation is full of them, and so is life itself.

As a rule, children are attached to servants. Parents, especially Russian parents, forbid this intimacy, but the children do not obey orders, because they are bored in the drawing-room and happy in the pantry. In this case, as in a thousand others, parents don’t know what they are doing. I find it impossible to imagine that our servants’ hall was a worse place for children than our morning-room or smoking-room. It is true that children pick up coarse expressions and bad manners in the company of servants; but in the drawing-room they learn coarse ideas and bad feelings.

The mere order to keep at a distance from people with whom the children are in constant relations, is in itself revolting.

Much is said in Russia about the profound immorality of servants, especially of serfs. It is true that they are not distinguished by exemplary strictness of conduct. Their low stage of moral development is proved by the mere fact that they put up with so much and protest so seldom. But that is not the question. I should like to know what class in Russia is less depraved than the servant class. Certainly not the nobles, nor the officials. The clergy, perhaps?

What makes the reader laugh?

Possibly the peasants, but no others, might have some claim to superiority.

The difference between the class of nobles and the class of servants is not great. I hate, especially since the calamities of the year 1848, democrats who flatter the mob, but I hate still more aristocrats who slander the people. By representing those who serve them as profligate animals, slave-owners throw dust in the eyes of others and stifle the protests of their own consciences. In few cases are we better than the common people, but we express our feelings with more consideration, and we are cleverer at concealing selfish and evil passions; our desires are not so coarse or so obvious, owing to the easiness of satisfying them and the habitual absence of self-restraint; we are merely richer, better fed, and therefore more difficult to please. When Count Almaviva named to the barber of Seville all the qualifications he required in a servant, Figaro said with a sigh, “If a servant must possess all these merits, it will be hard to find masters who are fit for a servant’s place.”

In Russia in general, moral corruption is not deep. It might truly enough be called savage, dirty, noisy, coarse,disorderly, shameless; but it is mainly on the surface. The clergy, in the concealment of their houses, eat and drink to excess with the merchant class. The nobles get drunk in the light of day, gamble recklessly, strike their men-servants and run after the maids, mismanage their affairs, and fail even worse as husbands and fathers. The official class are as bad in a dirtier way; they curry favour, besides, with their superiors and they are all petty thieves. The nobles do really steal less: they take openly what does not belong to them, though without prejudice to other methods, when circumstances are favourable.

All these amiable weaknesses occur in a coarser form among servants—that class of “officials” who are beneath the fourteenth grade—those “courtiers” who belong, not to the Tsar, but to the landowners.[16]But how they, as a class, are worse than others, I have no idea.

16.In Russia civil-service officials (chinóvniki) are divided into fourteen classes. Nobles are calleddvoryáne, and servants attached to a landowner’s housedvoróvië; Herzen plays on the likeness of the two names.

When I run over my recollections on the subject—and for twenty-five years I was well acquainted, not only with our own servants, but with those of my uncle and several neighbours—I remember nothing specially vicious in their conduct. Petty thefts there were, no doubt; but it is hard to pass sentence in this case, because ordinary ideas are perverted by an unnatural status: the human chattel is on easy terms with the chattels that are inanimate, and shows no particular respect for his master’s property. One ought, in justice, to exclude exceptional cases—casual favourites, either men or women, who bask in their master’s smiles and carry tales against the rest; and besides,theirbehaviour is exemplary, for they neverget drunk in the daytime and never pawn their clothes at the public-house.

The misconduct of most servants is of a simple kind and turns on trifles—a glass of spirits or a bottle of beer, a chat over a pipe, absence from the house without leave, quarrels which sometimes proceed as far as blows, or deception of their master when he requires of them more than man can perform. They are as ignorant as the peasants but more sophisticated; and this, together with their servile condition, accounts for much that is perverted and distorted in their character; but, in spite of all this, they remain grown-up children, like the American negroes. Trifles make them laugh or weep; their desires are limited and deserve to be called simple and natural rather than vicious.

Spirits and tea, the public-house and the tea-shop—these are the invariable vices of a servant in Russia. For them he steals; because of them he is poor; for their sake he endures persecution and punishment and leaves his wife and children to beggary. Nothing is easier than to sit, like Father Matthew,[17]in the seat of judgement and condemn drunkenness, while you are yourself intoxicated with sobriety; nothing simpler than to sit at your own tea-table and marvel at servants, because theywillgo to the tea-shop instead of drinking their tea at home, where it would cost them less.

17.An Irish priest who preached temperance in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Strong drink stupefies a man and makes it possible for him to forget; it gives him an artificial cheerfulness, an artificial excitement; and the pleasure of this state is increased by the low level of civilisation and the narrowempty life to which these men are confined. A servant is a slave who may be sold, a slave condemned to perpetual service in the pantry and perpetual poverty: how can such a man do otherwise than drink? He drinks too much when he gets the chance, because he cannot drink every day; this was pointed out by Senkovsky in one of his books fifteen years ago. In Italy and the south of France, there are no drunkards, because there is abundance of wine. And the explanation of the savage drunkenness among English workmen is just the same. These men are broken in a hopeless and ill-matched struggle against hunger and beggary; after all their efforts, they have found everywhere a leaden vault above their heads, and a sullen opposition which has cast them down into the nether darkness of society and condemned them to a life of endless toil—toil without an object and equally destructive of mind and body. What wonder that such a man, after working six days as a lever or wheel or spring or screw, breaks out on Saturday night, like a savage, from the factory which is his prison, and drinks till he is dead drunk? His exhaustion shortens the process, and it is complete in half an hour. Moralists would do better to order “Scotch” or “Irish” for themselves, and hold their tongues; or else their inhuman philanthropy may evoke formidable replies.

To a servant, tea drunk in a tea-shop is quite a different thing. Tea at home is not really tea: everything there reminds him that he is a servant—the pantry is dirty, he has to put thesamovár[18]on the table himself, his cuphas lost its handle, his master’s bell may ring at any moment. In the tea-shop he is a free man, a master; the table is laid and the lamps lit forhim; forhimthe waiter hurries in with the tray, the cups shine, and the teapot glitters; he gives orders, and other people obey him; he feels happy and calls boldly for some cheap caviare or pastry to eat with his tea.

18.An urn with a central receptacle to hold hot charcoal: tea in Russia is regularly accompanied by a samovár.

In all this there is more of childlike simplicity than of misconduct. Impressions take hold of them quickly but throw out no roots; their minds are continually occupied—if one can call it occupation—with casual objects, trifling desires, and petty aims. A childish belief in the marvellous turns a grown man into a coward, and the same belief consoles him in his darkest hours. I witnessed the death of several of my father’s servants, and I was astonished. One could see then that their whole life had been spent, like a child’s, without fears for the future, and that no great sins lay heavy on their souls; even if there had been anything of the kind, a few minutes with the priest were enough to put all to rights.

It is on this resemblance between children and servants that their mutual attachment is based. Children resent the indulgent superiority of grown-up people; they are clever enough to understand that servants treat them with more respect and take them seriously. For this reason, they enjoy a game of bézique with the maids much more than with visitors. Visitors play out of indulgence and to amuse the child: they let him win, or tease him, and stop when they feel inclined; but the maid plays just as much for her own amusement; and thus the game gains in interest.

Servants have a very strong attachment to children;and this is not servility at all—it is a mutual alliance, with weakness and simplicity on both sides.

In former days there existed—it still exists in Turkey—a feudal bond of affection between the Russian landowner and his household servants. But the race of such servants, devoted to the family as a family, is now extinct with us. The reason of this is obvious. The landowner has ceased to believe in his own authority; he does not believe that he will answer, at the dreadful Day of Judgement, for his treatment of his people; and he abuses his power for his own advantage. The servant does not believe in his inferiority; he endures oppression, not as a punishment or trial inflicted by God, but merely because he is defenceless.

But I knew, in my young days, two or three specimens of that boundless loyalty which old gentlemen of seventy sometimes recall with a sigh: they speak of the wonderful zeal and devotion of their servants, but they never mention the return which they and their fathers made to that faithfulness.

There was Andréi Stepánov, whom I knew as a decrepit old man, spending his last days, on very short commons, on an estate belonging to my uncle, the Senator.

When my father and uncle were young men in the Army, he was their valet, a kind, honest, sober man, who guessed what his young masters wanted—and they wanted a good deal—by a mere look at their faces; I know this from themselves. Later he was in charge of an estate near Moscow. The war of 1812 cut him off at once from all communications; the village was burnt down, and helived on there alone and without money, and finally sold some wood, to save himself from starvation. When my uncle returned to Russia, he went into the estate accounts and discovered the sale of wood. Punishment followed: the man was disgraced and removed from his office, though he was old and burdened with a family. We often passed through the village where he lived and spent a day or two there; and the old man, now paralysed and walking on crutches, never failed to visit us, in order to make his bow to my father and talk to him.

I was deeply touched by the simple devotion of his language and by his miserable appearance; I remember the tufts of hair, between yellow and white, which covered both sides of his bare scalp.

“They tell me, Sir,” he said once to my father, “that your brother has received another Order. I am getting old,bátyushka, and shall soon give back my soul to God; but I wish God would suffer me to see your brother wearing his Order; just once before I die, I would like to see him with his ribbon and all his glory.”

My eyes were on the old man, and everything about him showed that he was speaking the truth—his expression as frank as a child’s, his bent figure, his crooked face, dim eyes, and feeble voice. There was no falsehood or flattery there: he did really wish to see, once more before he died, the man who, for fourteen years, had never forgiven him for that wood! Should I call him a saint or a madman? Are there any who attain to sanctity, except madmen?

But this form of idolatry is unknown to the rising generation; and, if there are cases of serfs who refuse emancipation, it is due either to mere indolence or selfish considerations.This is a worse condition of things, I admit, but it brings us nearer the end. The serfs of to-day may wish to see something round their master’s neck; but you may feel sure that it is not the ribbon of any Order of Chivalry!

This seems an opportunity to give some general account of the treatment shown to servants in our household.

Neither my father nor my uncle was specially tyrannical, at least in the way of corporal punishment. My uncle, being hot-tempered and impatient, was often rough and unjust to servants; but he thought so little about them and came in contact with them so seldom, that each side knew little of the other. My father wore them out by his fads: he could never pass over a look or a word or a movement without improving the occasion; and a Russian often resents this treatment more than blows or bad language.

Corporal punishment was almost unknown with us; and the two or three cases in which it was resorted to were so exceptional, that they formed the subject of conversation for whole months downstairs; it should also be said that the offences which provoked it were serious.

A commoner form of punishment was compulsory enlistment in the Army, which was intensely dreaded by all the young men-servants. They preferred to remain serfs, without family or kin, rather than carry the knapsack for twenty years. I was strongly affected by those horrible scenes: at the summons of the landowner, a file of military police would appear like thieves in the night and seize their victim without warning; the bailiff would explain that the master had given orders the night beforefor the man to be sent to the recruiting office; and then the victim, through his tears, tried to strike an attitude, while the women wept, and all the people gave him presents, and I too gave what I could, very likely a sixpenny necktie.

I remember too an occasion when a village elder spent some money due from peasants to their master, and my father ordered his beard to be shaved off, by way of punishment. This form of penalty puzzled me, but I was impressed by the man’s appearance: he was sixty years old, and he wept profusely, bowing to the ground and offering to repay the money and a hundredroublesmore, if only he might escape the shame of losing his beard.

While my uncle lived with us, there were regularly about sixty servants belonging to the house, of whom nearly half were women; but the married women might give all their time to their own families; there were five or six house-maids always employed, and laundry-maids, but the latter never came upstairs. To these must be added the boys and girls who were being taught housework, which meant that they were learning to be lazy and tell lies and drink spirits.

As a feature of those times, it will not, I think, be superfluous to say something of the wages paid to servants. They got fiveroublesa month, afterwards raised to six, for board-wages; women got aroubleless, and children over ten half the amount. The servants clubbed together for their food, and made no complaint of insufficiency, which proves that food cost wonderfully little. The highest wages paid were 100roublesa year; others got fifty, and some thirty. Boys under eighteen got no wages. Then our servants were supplied with clothes,overcoats, shirts, sheets, coverlets, towels, and mattresses of sail-cloth; the boys who got no wages received a sum of money for the bath-house and to pay the priest in Lent—purification of body and soul was thus provided for. Taking everything into account, a servant cost about 300roublesa year; if we add his share of medical attendance and drugs and the articles of consumption which came in carts from the landlord’s estates in embarrassing amount, even then the figure will not be higher than 350roubles. In Paris or London a servant costs four times as much.

Slave-owners generally reckon “insurance” among the privileges of their slaves,i.e., the wife and children are maintained by the master, and the slave himself, in old age, will get a bare pittance in some corner of the estate. Certainly this should be taken into account, but the value of it is considerably lessened by the constant fear of corporal punishment and the impossibility of rising higher in the social scale.

My own eyes have shown me beyond all doubt, how the horrible consciousness of their enslaved condition torments and poisons the existence of servants in Russia, how it oppresses and stupefies their minds. The peasants, especially those who payobrók,[19]are less conscious of personal want of freedom; it is possible for them not to believe, to some extent, in their complete slavery. But in the other case, when a man sits all day on a dirty bench in the pantry, or stands at a table holding a plate, there is no possible room for doubt.

19.Obrókis money paid by a serf to his master in lieu of personal service; such a serf might carry on a trade or business of his own and was liable to no other burdens than theobrók.

There are, of course, people who enjoy this life as if it were their native element; people whose mind has never been aroused from slumber, who have acquired a taste for their occupation, and perform its duties with a kind of artistic satisfaction.

Our old footman, Bakai, an exceedingly interesting character, was an instance of this kind. A tall man of athletic build, with large and dignified features, and an air of the profoundest reflexion, he lived to old age in the belief that a footman’s place is one of singular dignity.

This respectable old man was constantly out of temper or half-drunk, or both together. He idealised the duties of his office and attributed to them a solemn importance. He could lower the steps of a carriage with a peculiarly loud rattle; when he banged a carriage-door he made more noise than the report of a gun. He stood on the rumble surly and straight, and, every time that a hole in the road gave him a jolt, he called out to the coachman, “Easy there!” in a deep voice of displeasure, though the hole was by that time five yards behind the carriage.

His chief occupation, other than going out with the carriage, was self-imposed. It consisted in training the pantry-boys in the standard of manners demanded by the servants’ hall. As long as he was sober, this went well enough; but when he was affected by liquor, he was severe and exacting beyond belief. I sometimes tried to protect my young friends, but my authority had little weight with the Roman firmness of Bakai: he would open the door that led to the drawing-room, with the words: “This is not your place. I beg you will go, or I shall carryyou out.” Not a movement, not a word, on the part of the boys, did he let pass unrebuked; and he often accompanied his words with a smack on the head, or a painful fillip, which he inflicted by an ingenious and spring-like manipulation of his finger and thumb.

When he had at last driven the boys from the room and was left alone, he transferred his attentions to his only friend, a large Newfoundland dog called Macbeth, whom he fed and brushed and petted and loved. After sitting alone for a few minutes, he would go down to the court-yard and invite Macbeth to join him in the pantry. Then he began to talk to his friend: “Foolish brute! What makes you sit outside in the frost, when there’s warmth in here? Well, what are you staring at? Can’t you answer?” and the questions were generally followed by a smack on the head. Macbeth occasionally growled at his benefactor; and then Bakai reproved him, with no weak fondness: “Do what you like for a dog, a dog it still remains: it shows its teeth at you, with never a thought of who you are. But for me, the fleas would eat you up!” And then, hurt by his friend’s ingratitude, he would take snuff angrily and throw what was left on his fingers at Macbeth’s nose. The dog would sneeze, make incredibly awkward attempts to get the snuff out of his eyes with his paw, rise in high dudgeon from the bench, and begin scratching at the door. Bakai opened the door and dismissed the dog with a kick and a final word of reproach. At this point the pantry-boys generally came back, and the sound of his knuckles on their heads began again.

We had another dog before Macbeth, a setter called Bertha. When she became very ill, Bakai put her on his bed and nursed her for some weeks. Early one morningI went into the servants’ hall. Bakai tried to say something, but his voice broke and a large tear rolled down his cheek—the dog was dead. There is another fact for the student of human nature. I don’t at all suppose that he hated the pantry-boys either; but he had a surly temper which was made worse by drinking bad spirits and unconsciously affected by his surroundings.

Such men as Bakai hugged their chains, but there were others: there passes through my memory a sad procession of hopeless sufferers and martyrs. My uncle had a cook of remarkable skill in his business, a hard-working and sober man who made his way upwards. The Tsar had a famous Frenchchefat the time and my uncle contrived to secure for his servant admission to the imperial kitchens. After this instruction, the man was engaged by the English Club at Moscow, made money, married, and lived like a gentleman; but, with the noose of serfdom still round his neck, he could never sleep easy or enjoy his position.

Alexyéi—that was his name—at last plucked up courage, had prayers said to Our Lady of Iberia, and called on my uncle and offered 5,000roublesfor his freedom. But his master was proud of the cook as his property—he was proud of another man, a painter, for just the same reason—and therefore he refused the money, promising the cook to give him his freedom in his will, without any payment.

This was a frightful blow to the man. He became depressed; the expression of his features changed; his hair turned grey; and, being a Russian, he took to the bottle. He became careless about his work, and the English Club dismissed him. Then he was engaged by the PrincessTrubetskoi, and she persecuted him by her petty meanness. Alexyéi was a lover of fine phrases; and once, when he was insulted by her beyond bearing, he drew himself up and said in his nasal voice, “What a stormy soul inhabits Your Serene Highness’s body!” The Princess was furious: she dismissed the man and wrote, as a Russian great lady would, to my uncle to complain of his servant. My uncle would rather have done nothing, but, out of politeness to the lady, he sent for the cook and scolded him, and told him to go and beg pardon of the Princess.

But, instead of going there, he went to the public-house. Within a year he was utterly ruined: all the money he had saved for his freedom was gone, and even his last kitchen-apron. He fought with his wife, and she with him, till at last she went into service as a nurse away from Moscow. Nothing was heard of him for a long time. At last a policeman brought him to our house, a wild and ragged figure. He had no place of abode and wandered from one drink-shop to another. The police had picked him up in the street and demanded that his master should take him in hand. My uncle was vexed and, perhaps, repentant: he received the man kindly enough and gave him a room to live in. Alexyéi went on drinking; when he was drunk, he was noisy and fancied he was writing poetry; and he really had some imaginative gift but no control over it. We were in the country at the time, and my uncle sent the man to us, fancying that my father would have some control over him. But the man was too far gone. His case revealed to me the concentrated ill-feeling and hatred which a serf cherishes in his heart against his masters: he gnashed his teeth as he spoke, and used gestures which, especially as coming from a cook, were ominous. Mypresence did not prevent him from speaking freely; he was fond of me, and often patted my shoulder as he said, “This is a sound branch of a rotten tree!”

When my uncle died, my father gave Alexyéi his freedom at once. But this was too late: it only meant washing our hands of him, and he simply vanished from sight.

There was another victim of the system whom I cannot but recall together with Alexyéi. My uncle had a servant of thirty-five who acted as a clerk. My father’s oldest brother, who died in 1813, intending to start a cottage hospital, placed this man, Tolochanov, when he was a boy, with a doctor, in order to learn the business of a dresser. The doctor got permission for him to attend lectures at the College of Medicine; the young man showed ability, learned Latin and German, and practised with some success. When he was twenty-five, he fell in love with the daughter of an officer, concealed his position from her, and married her. The deception could not be kept up for long: my uncle died, and the wife was horrified to discover that she, as well as her husband, was a serf. The “Senator,” their new owner, put no pressure on them at all—he had a real affection for young Tolochanov—but the wife could not pardon the deception: she quarrelled with him and finally eloped with another man. Tolochanov must have been very fond of her: he fell into a state of depression which bordered on insanity; he spent his nights in drunken carouses, and, having no money of his own, made free with what belonged to his master. Then, when he saw he could not balance his accounts, he took poison, on the last day of the year 1821.

My uncle was away from home. I was present when Tolochanov came into the room and told my father he had come to say good-bye; he also gave me a message for my uncle, that he had spent the missing money.

“You’re drunk,” said my father; “go and sleep it off.”

“My sleep will last a long time,” said the doctor; “I only ask you not to think ill of my memory.”

The man’s composure frightened my father: he looked at him attentively and asked: “What’s the matter with you? Are you wandering?”

“No, Sir; I have only swallowed a dose of arsenic.”

The doctor and police were summoned, milk and emetics were administered. When the vomiting began, he tried to keep it back and said: “You stop where you are! I did not swallow you, to bring you up again.” When the poison began to work more strongly, I heard his groans and the agonised voice in which he said again and again, “It burns, it burns like fire!” Someone advised that the priest should be sent for; but he refused, and told Calot that he knewtoo much anatomyto believe in a life beyond the grave. At twelve at night he spoke to the doctor: he asked the time, in German, and then said, “Time to wish you a Happy New Year!” and then he died.

In the morning I went hastily to the little wing, used as a bath-house, where Tolochanov had been taken. The body was lying on a table in the attitude in which he died; he was wearing a coat, but the necktie had been removed and the chest was bare; the features were terribly distorted and even blackened. It was the first dead body I had ever seen; and I ran out, nearly fainting. The toys and picture-book which I had got as New Year’s presents could not comfort me: I still saw before me the blackenedfeatures of Tolochanov, and heard his cry, “It burns like fire!”

To end this sad subject, I shall say only one thing more: the society of servants had no really bad influence on me. On the contrary, it implanted in me, in early years, a rooted hatred for slavery and oppression in all their manifestations. When I had been naughty as a child and my nurse, Vyéra Artamónovna, wished to be very cutting, she used to say, “Wait a bit, and you will be exactly like the rest, when you grow up and become a master!” I felt this to be a grievous insult. Well, the old woman may rest in peace—whatever I became, I did not become “exactly like the rest.”

I had one other distraction, as well as the servants’ hall, and in this I met at least with no opposition. I loved reading as much as I disliked my lessons. Indeed, my passion for desultory reading was one of the main difficulties in the way of serious study. For example, I detested, then as now, the theoretical study of languages; but I was very quick in making out the meaning more or less and acquiring the rudiments of conversation; and there I stopped, because that was all I needed.

My father and my uncle had a fairly large library, consisting of French books of the eighteenth century. The books lay about in heaps in a damp unused room on the ground-floor of the house. Calot kept the key and I was free to rummage as much as I pleased in this literary lumber-room. I read and read with no interruptions. My father approved for two reasons: in the first place, I would learn French quicker; and besides I was kept occupied,sitting quietly in a corner. I must add that I did not display all the books I read openly on the table: some of them I kept secreted in a cupboard.

But what books did I read? Novels, of course, and plays. I read through fifteen volumes, each of which contained three or four plays, French or Russian. As well as French novels, my mother had novels by Auguste Lafontaine and Kotzebue’s comedies; and I read them all twice over. I cannot say that the novels had much effect on me. As boys do, I pounced on all the ambiguous passages and disorderly scenes, but they did not interest me specially. A far greater influence was exercised over my mind by a play which I loved passionately and read over twenty times, though it was in a Russian translation—The Marriage of Figaro. I was in love with Cherubino and the Countess; nay more, I myself was Cherubino; I felt strong emotion as I read it and was conscious of some new sensation which I could not at all understand. I was charmed with the scene where the page is dressed up as a woman, and passionately desired to have a ribbon belonging to someone, in order to hide it in my breast and kiss it when no one was looking. As a matter of fact, no female society came in my way at that age.

I only remember two school-girls who paid us occasional Sunday visits. The younger was sixteen and strikingly beautiful. I became confused whenever she entered the room; I never dared to address her, or to go beyond stolen glances at her beautiful dark eyes and dark curls. I never spoke a word of this to anyone, and my first love-pangs passed off unknown even to her who caused them.

When I met her years afterwards, my heart beat fastand I remembered how I had worshipped her beauty at twelve years old.

I forgot to say thatWertherinterested me almost as much asThe Marriage of Figaro; half of the story I could not understand and skipped, in my eagerness to reach the final catastrophe; but over that I wept quite wildly. When I was at Vladímir in 1839, the same book happened to come into my hands, and I told my wife how I used to cry over it as a boy. Then I began to read the last letters to her; and when I reached the familiar passage, the tears flowed fast and I had to stop.

I cannot say that my father put any special pressure upon me before I was fourteen; but the whole atmosphere of our house was stifling to a live young creature. Side by side with complete indifference about my moral welfare, an excessive degree of importance was attached to bodily health; and I was terribly worried by precautions against chills and unwholesome food, and the fuss that was made over a trifling cold in the head. In winter I was kept indoors for weeks at a time, and, if a drive was permitted, I had to wear warm boots, comforters, and so on. The rooms were kept unbearably hot with stoves. This treatment must have made me feeble and delicate, had I not inherited from my mother the toughest of constitutions. She, on her part, shared none of these prejudices, and in her part of the house I might do all the things which were forbidden when I was with my father.

Without rivalry and without encouragement or approval, my studies made little progress. For want of proper system and supervision, I took things easy and thought to dispense with hard work by means of memory and a lively imagination. My teachers too, as a matterof course, were under no supervision; when once the fees were settled, provided they were punctual in coming to the house and leaving it, they might go on for years, without giving any account of what they were doing.

One of the queerest incidents of my early education was when a French actor, Dalès, was invited to give me lessons in elocution.

“People pay no attention to it nowadays,” my father said to me, “but your brother Alexander practisedle recit de Théramène[20]every evening for six months with Aufraine, the actor, and never reached the perfection which his teacher desired.”

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