Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Part I · Chapter 1 8 (2/2)

A misfortune befell her: she realized that she would soon be a mother. She told all to our stepmother, who burst into reproaches: “I will not have that creature in my house any longer. I will not permit such a shame in my house! oh, the shameless creature!” and so on. The tears of Hélène made no difference. Pólya had her hair cut short, and was exiled to the dairy; but as she was just embroidering an extraordinary skirt, she had to finish it at the dairy, in a dirty cottage, at a microscopical window. She finished it, and made many more fine embroideries all in the hope of obtaining her pardon. But pardon did not come.

The father of her child, a servant of one of our neighbors, implored permission to marry her; but as he had no money to offer, his request was refused. Pólya’s “too gentlewoman-like manners” were taken as an offense, and a most bitter fate was kept in reserve for her. There was in our household a man employed as a postilion, on account of his small size; he went under the name of “bandy-legged Fílka.” In his boyhood a horse had kicked him terribly, and he did not grow. His legs were crooked, his feet were turned inward, his nose was broken and turned to one side, his jaw was deformed. To this monster it was decided to marry Pólya⁠—she was married by force. The couple were sent to become peasants at my father’s estate in Ryazán.

Human feelings were not recognized, not even suspected, in serfs, and when Turgenev published his little story “Mumú,” and Grigoróvich began to issue his trilling novels, in which he made his readers weep over the misfortunes of the serfs, it was to a great number of persons a startling revelation. “They love just as we do; is it possible?” exclaimed the sentimental ladies who could not read a French novel without shedding tears over the troubles of the noble heroes and heroines.

The education which the owners occasionally gave to some of their serfs was only another source of misfortune for the latter. My father once picked out in a peasant house a clever boy, and sent him to be educated as a doctor’s assistant. The boy was diligent, and after a few years’ apprenticeship made a decided success. When he returned home, my father bought all that was required for a well-equipped dispensary, which was arranged very nicely in one of the side houses of Nikólskoye. In summer time, Sasha the Doctor⁠—that was the familiar name under which this young man went in the household⁠—was busy gathering and preparing all sorts of medical herbs, and in a short time he became most popular in the region round Nikólskoyde. The sick people among the peasants came from the neighboring villages, and my father was proud of the success of his dispensary. But this condition of things did not last. One winter, my father came to Nikólskoye, stayed there for a few days, and left. That night Sasha the Doctor shot himself⁠—by accident, it was reported; but there was a love-story at the bottom of it. He was in love with a girl whom he could not marry, as she belonged to another landowner.

The case of another young man, Gherásim Kruglov, whom my father educated at the Moscow Agricultural Institute, was almost equally sad. He passed his examinations most brilliantly, getting a gold medal, and the director of the Institute made all possible endeavors to induce my father to give him freedom and to let him go to the university⁠—serfs not being allowed to enter there. “He is sure to become a remarkable man,” the director said, “perhaps one of the glories of Russia, and it will be an honor for you to have recognized his capacities and to have given such a man to Russian science.”

“I need him for my own estate,” my father replied to the many applications made on the young man’s behalf. In reality, with the primitive methods of agriculture which were then in use, and from which my father would never have departed, Gherásim Kruglov was absolutely useless. He made a survey of the estate, but when that was done he was ordered to sit in the servants’ room and to stand with a plate at dinner time. Of course Gherásim resented it very much; his dreams carried him to the university, to scientific work. His looks betrayed his discontent, and our stepmother seemed to find an especial pleasure in offending him at every opportunity. One day in the autumn, a rush of wind having opened the entrance gate, she called out to him, “Garáska, go and shut the gate.”

That was the last drop. He answered, “You have a porter for that,” and went his way.

My stepmother ran into father’s room, crying, “Your servants insult me in your house!”

Immediately Gherásim was put under house arrest and chained, to be sent away as a soldier. The parting of his old father and mother with him was one of the most heartrending scenes I ever saw.

This time, however, fate took its revenge. Nicholas I died, and military service became more tolerable. Gherásim’s great ability was soon remarked, and in a few years he was one of the chief clerks, and the real working force in one of the departments of the ministry of war. Meanwhile, my father, who was absolutely honest, and, at a time when almost everyone was receiving bribes and making fortunes, had never let himself be bribed, departed once from the strict rules of the service, in order to oblige the commander of the corps to which he belonged, and consented to allow an irregularity of some kind. It nearly cost him his promotion to the rank of general; the only object of his thirty-five years’ service in the army seemed on the point of being lost. My stepmother went to St. Petersburg to remove the difficulty, and one day, after many applications, she was told that the only way to obtain what she wanted was to address herself to a particular clerk in a certain department of the ministry. Although he was a mere clerk, he was the real head of his superiors and could do everything. This man’s name was⁠—Gherásim Ivánovich Kruglov!

“Imagine, our Garáska!” she said to me afterward. “I always knew that he had great capacity. I went to see him, and spoke to him about this affair, and he said, ‘I have nothing against the old prince, and I will do all I can for him.’ ”

Gherásim kept his word: he made a favorable report, and my father got his promotion. At last he could put on the long-coveted red trousers and the red-lined overcoat, and could wear the plumage on his helmet.

These were things which I myself saw in my childhood. If, however, I were to relate what I heard of in those years, it would be a much more gruesome narrative: stories of men and women torn from their families and their villages, and sold, or lost in gambling, or exchanged for a couple of hunting dogs, and then transported to some remote part of Russia for the sake of creating a new estate; of children taken from their parents and sold to cruel or dissolute masters; of flogging “in the stables,” which occurred every day with unheard-of cruelty; of a girl who found her only salvation in drowning herself; of an old man who had grown gray-haired in his master’s service, and at last hanged himself under his master’s window; and of revolts of serfs, which were suppressed by Nicholas I’s general by flogging to death each tenth or fifth man taken out of the ranks, and by laying waste the village, whose inhabitants, after a military execution, went begging for bread in the neighboring provinces. As to the poverty which I saw during our journeys in certain villages, especially in those which belonged to the imperial family, no words would be adequate to describe the misery to readers who have not seen it.

To become free was the constant dream of the serfs⁠—a dream not easily realized, for a heavy sum of money was required to induce a landowner to part with a serf.

“Do you know,” my father said to me once, “that your mother appeared to me after her death? You young people do not believe in these things, but it was so. I sat one night very late in this chair, at my writing-table, and slumbered, when I saw her enter from behind, all in white, quite pale, and with her eyes gleaming. When she was dying she begged me to promise that I would give liberty to her maid, Másha, and I did promise; but then, what with one thing and another, nearly a whole year passed without my having fulfilled my intention. Then she appeared, and said to me in a low voice, ‘Alexis, you promised me to give liberty to Másha; have you forgotten it?’ I was quite terrified; I jumped out of my chair, but she had vanished. I called the servants, but no one had seen anything. Next morning I went to her grave and had a litany sung, and immediately gave liberty to Másha.”

When my father died, Másha came to his burial, and I spoke to her. She was married, and quite happy in her family life. My brother Alexander, in his jocose way, told her what my father had said, and we asked her what she knew of it.

“These things,” she replied, “happened a long time ago, so I may tell you the truth. I saw that your father had quite forgotten his promise, so I dressed up in white and spoke like your mother. I recalled the promise he had made to her⁠—you won’t bear a grudge against me, will you?”

“Of course not!”

Ten or twelve years after the scenes described in the early part of this chapter, I sat one night in my father’s room, and we talked of things past. Serfdom had been abolished, and my father complained of the new conditions, though not very severely; he had accepted them without much grumbling.

“You must agree, father,” I said, “that you often punished your servants cruelly, and even without reason.”

“With the people,” he replied, “it was impossible to do otherwise;” and, leaning back in his easy-chair, he remained plunged in thought. “But what I did was nothing worth speaking of,” he said, after a long pause. “Take that same Sablev: he looks so soft, and talks in such a thin voice; but he was really terrible with his serfs. How many times they plotted to kill him! I, at least, never took advantage of my maids, whereas that old devil T⁠⸺ went on in such a way that the peasant women were going to inflict a terrible punishment upon him⁠ ⁠… Goodbye, bonne nuit!”