The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

I was sorry that I had untied the scarlet ribbon that had at one time held together this pile of old letters. I felt sorrow, pain, distress. But when I think that everything was covered with love, when I remember that my mother never, to my knowledge, reproached the person who gave her so little happiness and so much suffering—when I once again imagine with how much love she would always remember his love, and how joyful she perceived her first love to be, and how thankful she was to him for this love, I thank my mother for this pile of letters from years long gone. She gave me, an old man, a great lesson of a great love, one which “suffers quietly” and forgives all. And I’m glad that I bear the first name of this unhappy, kind, and noble man, whose burden (and not his fault) was that he lived by “a single law declaring / The passions’ arbitrary cues.”1

After the death of Sergei Sergeevich, my mother remained at her mother’s-in-law. Her life was difficult. Childless, she couldn’t take root in the family, and without those roots she couldn’t become a true member of it. Her mother-in-law respected her, but this imperious woman, fortune’s favorite, harbored neither love nor warm feeling for anyone.

Olga Vasilievna needed my mother. She was bringing up orphans, a boy and a girl, the children of her deceased daughter. She did not entrust their upbringing to their father. My mother raised them. They were difficult children who nonetheless made out well for themselves.

My mother lived on Bolvanovka Street as the widow of the favorite son of Olga Vasilievna, but she never received so much as pocket money from her. And all the while her heart was being torn apart by troubles: her father, Vasily Alekseevich, couldn’t support his family and soon died. My grandmother and my aunt were left without any means. My mother had to make up her mind to do something, so as not to leave her mother without bread. And make up her mind she did: she married my father.

This was a heroic deed in the true sense of the word. She did it for her mother.

My father was a widower, twenty years older than my mother. She didn’t marry him out of love; she only knew that she was marrying an honest and good person. She took upon herself a huge family—by today’s standards, ridiculously huge: my father had eleven children, of which only the eldest daughter was married. All the rest—six daughters and four sons—lived with their father. The older ones could have been my mother’s younger brothers and sisters, and the youngest one was four years old. The heavy burden of raising and managing this enormous family, which took up two floors of a spacious house in Pleteshki, carried with it the no-less-difficult burden of managing a house that was almost the size of an estate. And my mother

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Chapter Two

entered into all of this at the age of thirty, in the bloom of her youth, which was cut off at the root. Here too she carried her burden with honor.

Of my father’s marriageable daughters only one had been given away in marriage, and unsuccessfully at that: the husband drank, leaving her without any means, and she came back to her father’s house, so that all of my father’s eleven children wound up in my mother’s care after all. During my father’s life my mother married off three daughters, all into happy marriages and even wealth. When the children from the first marriage left my father after he went broke, only one of the three remaining marriageable daughters managed to get married. The dowry for the oldest of them had already been prepared by my mother, and her stepdaughter took it with her.

My father’s older sons did not receive an education. The eldest son, Nikolai Nikolaevich, was at business trade school just long enough to get his feet wet, and the second son didn’t even get into the water at some boarding school. I remember my father saying that kids only needed to be taught “readin,’ ‘ritin,’ and ‘rithmetic,” and then—off to business, to trade! My mother vehemently protested this and insisted that the two younger sons, whom she had raised, not only finish high school, but also university. One was an assistant to the famous Plevako [a leading jurist], and the other, an engineer.

Like the older sons, the older daughters attended boarding school only briefly—of the five only two, as I recall, finished school. The two last ones, whose upbringing fell to my mother, finished the public gimnazium for women with honors.