The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

“Young lady, young lady! Come in and see me. Look what a lovely lark I baked for you out of dough!”

It was half dark in the long hall, and no one was there but Maria Vasilievna and myself. Looking at her white face with its great, dark eyes, I suddenly felt an eerie sensation. Instead of answering her, I dashed away headlong.

She called after me. “What is it, young lady? I can see that you don’t like me at all any more. I disgust you!”

Sofiia Kovalevskaia, A Thief in the House

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It wasn’t so much her words as the tone of voice in which she said them that shook me. I didn’t stop, but kept on running. But then, on returning to the classroom and calming down after my fright, I couldn’t forget the sound of that voice—hollow, despondent.

I was not myself all evening. No matter how I tried to suppress the unpleasant gnawing sensation inside of me by playing, by prankishness, I couldn’t make the feeling go away. The thought of Maria Vasilievna wouldn’t leave my mind. And, as always happens with a person one hurts, she suddenly seemed terribly nice to me, and I began to feel drawn to her.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell my governess what had happened. Children are always embarrassed to talk about their feelings. Moreover, since we were forbidden to fraternize with the servants, I knew that the governess would in all likelihood praise me for my behavior. And yet I felt with every instinct that there was nothing praiseworthy about it.

After evening tea, when it was time for me to go to bed, I decided to drop in to see Maria Vasilievna instead of going straight to my room. This was a kind of sacrifice on my part, for it meant running alone down a long, deserted, and by now quite dark hall which I always feared and avoided in the evening. But now a desperate bravery came to the fore. I ran without stopping to take a breath. Puffing and panting, I tore into her room like a hurricane.

Maria Vasilievna had already had her supper. Because of the holiday, she wasn’t working but sitting at the table, covered with a clean white cloth, and reading some religious book. The lamp glimmered in front of the icons. After the frightening dark hall, the little room seemed uncommonly light and cozy, and Maria Vasilievna herself so kind and good!

“I came to ask you to forgive me dear, dear Maria Vasilievna!” I said in one breath. Before I could finish, she had already grabbed me and started covering me with kisses. She kissed me so violently and for such a long time that I felt the eerie sensation once more. I was already trying to figure out how to get out of her grasp without offending her again, when a cruel attack of coughing forced her to release me from her embrace at last.

This dreadful cough tormented her more and more. “I barked like a dog all night,” she would say of herself, with a kind of sullen irony.

With each day that passed she grew paler and more withdrawn, but she stubbornly resisted all my mother’s suggestions that she consult a doctor. She even showed an angry irritation when anyone mentioned her illness. In this way, she dragged out another two or three years. She was on her feet almost to the end. She went to bed only a few days before she died; and her final hours, they said, were horribly painful.

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Chapter Three

My father ordered a very opulent funeral (by village standards) to be arranged for her. Not only all the servants, but all our family attended it as well, even the master himself. Feklusha, too, walked behind the coffin and sobbed bitterly. The only one missing was Filip Matveevich. He did not wait for her to die. He had left us a few months earlier for another and better-paying job, somewhere in the vicinity of Dinaburg.

Chapter Four

Oleg Pantiukhov, A Student’s Summer

Ivan Bunin, Nobel laureate in literature, once wrote: “Our children and grandchildren will be unable to comprehend that Russia in which we once . . . lived, which we appreciated, failed to understand; all that might, complexity, wealth, and happiness.” True or not, our understanding of that Russia is made substantially richer and clearer by the memoirs of Oleg Pantiukhov: Schooling. The cadet corps. Exams. Trips abroad. The Caucasus. Correspondence with parents. A visit to the monasteries on Solovki. The centennial celebrations of Pushkin’s birth. Through all these descriptions we gain insight into distant values and sensibilities. Taken from Oleg Pantiukhov, O dniakh bylykh [Of By-gone Days]. Maplewood, N.J.: Durand Press, 1969.