Novels, Tales, Journeys

A Russian Pelham

CHAPTER ONE

My memories begin from the most tender age, and here is a scene that is vividly preserved in my imagination.1

Nanny brings me to a big room, dimly lit by a candle under a shade. On a bed under green curtains lies a woman all in white: my father takes me in his arms. She kisses me and weeps. My father sobs loudly, I get frightened and cry out. Nanny takes me away, saying, “Mama wants to go bye-bye.” I also remember great turmoil, a lot of guests, servants running from room to room. The sun shines through all the windows, and I’m very cheerful. A monk with a golden cross on his chest blesses me; a long red coffin is carried through the door. That is all that my mother’s funeral left in my heart. She was a woman of extraordinary mind and heart, as I learned later from the stories of people who knew how priceless she was.

Here my memories become confused. I cannot give a clear account of myself before I reached my eighth year. But first I must talk about my family.

My father was awarded the rank of sergeant while my grandmother was still pregnant with him. He was educated at home until he was eighteen. His tutor, Monsieur Décor, was a simple and kind old man, who had a very good knowledge of French orthography. It is not known whether my father had any other instructors, but, apart from French orthography, my father had no thorough knowledge of anything. He married against his parents’ will a girl who was several years older than he, retired that same year and went to Moscow. Old Savelyich, his valet, told me that the first years of their marriage were happy. My mother managed to reconcile her husband with his family, in which she came to be loved. But my father’s frivolous and inconstant character did not allow her to enjoy peace and happiness. He entered into a liaison with a woman known in society for her beauty and her amorous adventures. For him she divorced her husband, who yielded her to my father for ten thousand roubles and afterwards used to dine with us quite frequently. My mother knew it all, and kept silent. Inner suffering ruined her health. She took to her bed and never left it again.

My father owned five thousand souls. Consequently, he was one of those gentlemen whom the late Count Sheremetev called petty landowners, wondering in all honesty how they were able to live!2—The thing was that my father lived no worse than Count Sheremetev, though he was exactly twenty times poorer. Muscovites still remember his dinners, his private theater, and his horn music. Two years after my mother’s death, Anna Petrovna Virlatskaya, the cause of that death, moved into his house. She was, as they say, a fine figure of a woman, though no longer in the first bloom of youth. They brought me a boy in a red jacket with cuffs and told me he was my little brother. I gazed at him all eyes. Mishenka scraped to the right, scraped to the left, and wanted to play with my toy gun; I tore it from his hands, Mishenka began to cry, and my father stood me in the corner and gave my little brother my gun.

Such a beginning did not bode well for me. And indeed my sojourn under the paternal roof left nothing pleasant in my memory. My father loved me, of course, but he did not bother himself about me at all and abandoned me to the care of French tutors, who were constantly being hired and fired. My first tutor turned out to be a drunkard; the second, who was no fool and not lacking in knowledge, had such a violent temper that he nearly killed me with a log because I spilled ink on his waistcoat; the third, who spent a whole year with us, was mad, and the household only realized it when he came to complain to Anna Petrovna that Mishenka and I had incited all the bedbugs in the house to give him no peace and that moreover a little devil had taken to nesting in his nightcap. Other Frenchmen could not get along with Anna Petrovna, who gave them no wine at dinner or horses on Sunday; moreover she paid them very irregularly. I was to blame: Anna Petrovna decided that none of my tutors could manage such an insufferable boy. However, it was also true that there was not one of them that I had not turned into a household laughingstock within two weeks of their entering into their duties. I remember with particular satisfaction Monsieur Groget, a respectable fifty-year-old Genevan, whom I persuaded that Anna Petrovna was in love with him. You should have seen his chaste horror, with a certain admixture of sly coquetry, when Anna Petrovna, glancing sidelong at him at the table, would say in a half whisper: “What a glutton!”

I was frisky, lazy, and hot-tempered, but sentimental and ambitious, and one could get anything from me by kindness; unfortunately, everybody meddled in my education, but nobody knew the right way of dealing with me. I laughed at the teachers and pulled tricks; with Anna Petrovna I fought tooth for tooth; with Mishenka I had incessant quarrels and scuffles. With my father things often went as far as stormy exchanges, which ended with tears on both sides. Finally Anna Petrovna persuaded him to send me to one of the German universities…I was then fifteen.

CHAPTER TWO

My university life left me with pleasant memories, which, if you look into them, refer to insignificant, and sometimes unpleasant, events; but youth is a great sorcerer: I would pay dearly to sit again over a mug of beer in a cloud of tobacco smoke, with a cudgel in my hand and a greasy velvet cap on my head. I would pay dearly for my room, eternally filled with people, and God knows what people; for our Latin songs, student duels, and quarrels with the philistines!3

The freedom of university studies was of greater benefit to me than lessons at home, but in general the only things I learned properly were fencing and making punch. I received money from home at irregular intervals. That accustomed me to debts and insouciance. Three years went by, and I received an order from my father in Petersburg to leave the university and enter government service in Russia. A few words about disordered circumstances, extra expenses, a change of life seemed odd to me, but I did not pay much attention to them. On my departure I gave a farewell banquet, at which I swore to be eternally faithful to friendship and to mankind and never to take the job of censor, and the next day, with a headache and heartburn, I set out on my way.