‘All right, let’s begin,’ said Liza.
The first adagio went fairly smoothly, although Panshin made more than one mistake. He played his own compositions and whatever he had studied very nicely, but he was bad at reading music at first sight. Consequently the second part of the Sonata – a fairly fast allegro – was a disaster: at the twentieth bar Panshin, already two bars behind, gave up and pushed his chair back with a laugh.
‘No, I can’t play today!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s a good thing Lemm didn’t hear us – he’d’ve had a fit.’
Liza stood up, closed the piano and turned to Panshin.
‘What shall we do now?’ she asked.
‘I knew you’d ask that! You can never sit about with your arms folded. Well, if you like, let’s do some drawing while it’s still light enough. Maybe another muse, the muse of drawing – what was she called? I forget – will be kinder to me. Where’s your album? I remember my landscape’s not yet done.’
Liza went into the next room to find her album while Panshin, left alone, drew a cambric handkerchief out of his pocket, rubbed his nails and scrutinized his hands. They were very beautiful and white; on his left thumb he wore a spiral gold ring. Liza returned. Panshin sat down by the window and opened the album.
‘Aha!’ he exclaimed. ‘I see you’ve begun to copy my landscape – and splendidly. Very good indeed! It’s just that here – please let me have a pencil – the shadows aren’t filled in strongly enough. Look.’
And Panshin made several brisk long strokes. He always drew one and the same landscape: in the foreground were large dishevelled trees and in the background fields with jagged mountains on the horizon. Liza looked over his shoulder as he worked.
‘In drawing, as generally in life,’ said Panshin, bending his head to right and left, ‘the main thing is dexterity and daring.’
At that moment Lemm entered the room and, giving a drily formal bow, tried to withdraw, but Panshin threw the album and pencil to one side and barred his exit.
‘Where are you off to, my dear Christopher Fyodorych? Aren’t you going to stay for tea?’
‘I am going home,’ said Lemm in a gloomy voice. ‘My head aches.’
‘Well, that’s nothing. You stay here. We’ll discuss Shakespeare.’
‘My head aches,’ the old man repeated.
‘In your absence we tried the Beethoven Sonata,’ Panshin went on, amiably taking him by the waist and smiling brightly, ‘but the whole thing was hopeless. Just imagine it, I couldn’t play two notes in a row correctly.’
‘You would besser your romance haf played again,’ Lemm retorted, removing Panshin’s hands, and went out of the room.
Liza ran after him. She caught up with him at the porch.
‘Christopher Fyodorych, please listen,’ she said in German, accompanying him to the gate across the short green grass of the yard, ‘I’m to blame for hurting you. Forgive me.’
Lemm did not answer.
‘I showed Vladimir Nikolaich your cantata because I was sure he would appreciate it – and he did really like it very much.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said in Russian, and then added in his own language: ‘But he cannot understand anything; can’t you see that? He’s a dilettante – that’s all there is to it!’
‘You’re being unfair to him,’ Liza replied. ‘He understands everything, and he can do almost everything.’
‘Yes, if it’s second-rate, lightweight stuff, all done in a hurry. What he does is liked and he’s liked and he’s pleased with himself – well, good luck to him! But I’m not annoyed; this cantata and I are both old fools. I’m a little ashamed, but it doesn’t matter.’
‘Forgive me, Christopher Fyodorych,’ Liza repeated.
‘It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,’ he repeated, again in Russian. ‘You’re a kind girl…. But here’s someone coming to see you. Good-bye. You’re a very kind girl.’
And Lemm set off with hurried step towards the gate, through which there had just entered a gentleman who was unknown to him dressed in a grey overcoat and wide straw hat. Bowing courteously to him (he bowed to all the new faces he saw in the town of O…, but made it a rule of his to turn his back on those he knew), Lemm walked past and disappeared beyond the fence. The newcomer stared after him in astonishment and then, glancing in Liza’s direction, went straight up to her.
VII
‘YOU won’t recognize me,’ he said, taking off his hat, ‘but I’ve recognized you even though ten years have passed since I last saw you. You were a child then. I’m Lavretsky. Isyour mother at home? May I see her?’
‘Mother will be very glad,’ Liza replied. ‘She’s heard about your arrival.’
‘It seems to me you’re called Elizaveta, aren’t you?’ Lavretsky asked, climbing the porch steps.
‘Yes.’
‘I remember you well. Even then you had a face one does not easily forget. In those days I used to bring you sweets.’
Liza blushed and thought what a strange person he was. Lavretsky stopped for a moment in the hall. Liza went into the drawing-room, where Panshin’s voice and laugh resounded as he related some town gossip to Marya Dmitrievna and Gedeonovsky who had just returned from their walk in the garden, and Panshin himself laughed loudly at what he was telling. At Lavretsky’s name Marya Dmitrievna became quite flustered, grew pale and walked across to meet him.
‘Hello, hello, my dear cousin!’ she exclaimed in a traily and almost tearful voice. ‘How glad I am to see you!’
‘How do you do, my kind cousin,’ Lavretsky responded and affectionately pressed her outstretched hand. ‘Is the good Lord treating you kindly?’
‘Sit down, do sit down, my dear Fyodor Ivanych. Ah, how glad I am! Let me first of all introduce you to my daughter Liza…’
‘I have already introduced myself to Lizaveta Mikhay-lovna,’ Lavretsky interrupted her.
‘Monsieur Panshin… Sergey Petrovich Gedeonovsky…. Do please sit down. I look at you and, you know, I can hardly believe my eyes! How are you keeping?’
‘As you can see, I am flourishing. And you, cousin, I would say – at the risk of offending you – have looked after yourself in the last eight years.’
‘To think we haven’t seen each other for such a time,’ Marya Dmitrievna mused. ‘Where have you just come from? Where have you left… That’s to say, I mean,’ she hurriedly corrected herself, ‘I mean, will you be staying with us long?’
‘I’ve just come from Berlin,’ Lavretsky replied, ‘and tomorrow I’ll be going off to the country – probably for a long time.’
‘You will be living in Lavriki, of course?’
‘No, not in Lavriki. I have a little village about fifteen miles from here; that’s where I’ll be going.’
‘Is that the village you received from Glafira Petrovna?’
‘It is.’
‘Forgive me, Fyodor Ivanych, but at Lavriki you have such a delightful house!’
Lavretsky’s brows knit very slightly.
‘True…. But there’s a small place in that village, and I don’t need anything more at present. That’ll be the most suitable place for me now.’
Marya Dmitrievna was again so put out that she straightened herself in her chair and spread her hands wide. Panshin came to her aid and engaged Lavretsky in conversation. Marya Dmitrievna grew calmer, sank back into her armchair and only made occasional contributions to the conversation; but all the while she looked so pityingly at her guest, sighed so meaningfully and gave such despondent shakes of the head that he could finally stand it no longer and asked her fairly sharply whether she was all right.
‘Yes, thank God,’ Marya Dmitrievna answered. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘It seemed to me you were not yourself, that’s all.’
Marya Dmitrievna assumed a dignified and slightly injured look. ‘If that’s how things are,’ she thought, ‘then I’m past caring. To you, my good man, it’s obviously just like water off a duck’s back; some ot
her person would have wasted away with grief, but you’re plumper than ever.’ When she talked to herself, Marya Dmitrievna did not stand on ceremony; aloud she was more refined.
In fact, Lavretsky bore no resemblance to a victim of fate. His red-cheeked, very Russian face, with the large white forehead, slightly thick nose and broad regular lips, literally exuded the healthy life of the steppes and a powerful, durable strength. He had a magnificent build, and his fair hair curled on his head like a boy’s. Only in his blue, protruding and rather immobile eyes could be discerned a cross between pensiveness and tiredness, and his voice somehow sounded a little too smooth.
Panshin meanwhile continued to keep the conversation going. He raised the topic of sugar refining, about which he had recently read a couple of French pamphlets, and with quiet modesty he undertook to expound their contents without, however, mentioning a single word about them.
‘It must be Fedya!’ Marfa Timofeyevna’s voice was suddenly heard to exclaim beyond the half-open door of the next room. ‘It is Fedya!’ And the old woman rushed into the drawing-room. Lavretsky did not succeed in rising from his chair before she had embraced him. ‘Let me see how you look, let me see,’ she said, drawing back from his face. ‘Ah, splendid! A little older but not a whit less handsome. Now don’t you go kissing my hands – you give me a real kiss, if my wrinkled old cheeks don’t repel you! I don’t suppose you asked whether your old aunt was alive or not, did you? But you were a new-born baby in my very arms, you rascal! Still, that doesn’t matter: you’ve no reason to remember me all that well! Only you’ve done the right thing in coming back. Well, mother,’ she added, turning to Marya Dmitrievna, ‘have you offered him anything?’
‘I don’t need a thing,’ Lavretsky hastened to answer.
‘Well, at least have some tea, my dear. Good heavens, he’s come from God knows where and they won’t even give him a cup of tea! Liza, go and see about it, quick as you can. I remember that when he was little he had a voracious appetite, and I don’t doubt he still likes his food even now.’
‘My respects to you, Marfa Timofeyevna,’ said Panshin, approaching the agitated old lady from one side and bowing low to her.
‘Forgive me, my good sir,’ responded Marfa Timofeyevna, ‘I didn’t notice you in my state of elation. You’ve begun to look like your mother, the darling child,’ she continued, addressing herself again to Lavretsky, ‘only your nose was your father’s and your father’s it’s remained. Well now, have you come to visit us for long?’
‘I am leaving tomorrow, auntie.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To my own estate, to Vasilyevskoye.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Very well, if it’s to be tomorrow, tomorrow it is. God be with you – you know best. Only you make sure to come and say good-bye.’ The old lady tapped him on the cheek. ‘I didn’t think I’d live to see you back here. And that doesn’t mean I was getting ready to die – oh, no, I’ve got a good ten years to go yet: all we Pestovs are long-livers; your late grandfather used to call us double-lifers. But God alone knew how long you’d go on wasting your time abroad. Well, anyhow, you’re looking fine, really fine. I suppose you can still lift ten stone with one hand as you used to? Your late father, foolish though he was – you must forgive me for saying so – did well to engage that Swiss for you. Do you remember how you used to have fist fights with him? It’s called gymnastics, isn’t it? But I mustn’t go on chattering so; all I’m doing is preventing Mr Panshín’ (she never called him Pánshin, as she should have done) ‘from continuing what he was saying. Besides, it would be better if we had some tea. Let’s go out on the terrace to have it, my dear. We have wonderful cream, not the sort of stuff in your Londons and Parises. Let’s go, let’s go, and you, my dear Fedya, give me your hand. Oh, such a big one. No one’ll fall down with you holding them!’
They all rose and withdrew to the terrace with the exception of Gedeonovsky, who made his way out of the house on the quiet. During the whole of the conversation between Lavretsky and the mistress of the house, Panshin and Marfa Timofeyevna, he had sat in his corner blinking attentively and pouting his lips in childish amazement: now he hurried off to spread news of it all about the town.
On that day, at eleven o’clock in the evening, this is what was happening in Mrs Kalitin’s house. Downstairs, on the threshold of the drawing-room, having seized a suitable moment, Vladimir Nikolaich was saying good-bye to Liza and telling her as he held her by the hand: ‘You know what makes me come here; you know why I am always coming to your house; there’s no point in putting it into words when it’s all so clear.’ Liza said nothing in reply and unsmilingly stared at the floor, slightly raising her eyebrows and blushing, but without withdrawing her hand; meanwhile upstairs, in Marfa Timofeyevna’s room, by the light of a lamp hanging in front of the ancient lacklustre icons, Lavretsky was sitting in an armchair with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands; the old lady, standing in front of him, from time to time silently stroked his hair. He had spent more than an hour with her, after saying good-bye to the mistress of the house; he had said practically nothing to his kind old friend and she had not asked him anything.… For what was there to say, what was there to ask? She literally understood everything, literally felt all the things with which his heart was overflowing.
VIII
FYODOR IVANOVICH LAVRETSKY(we must ask the reader’s permission to break the thread of our story for a while) came of ancient gentry stock. The founder of the Lavretsky line came from Prussia during the reign of Basil the Blind and was granted eight hundred acres of land in the Upper Bezhetsk region. Many of his descendants were numbered among those who served in various posts under princes and men of title in remote provinces, but not one of them rose above chancery rank or amassed a significant fortune. The richest and most remarkable of all the Lavretskys was Fyodor Ivanovich’s great-grandfather Andrey, a cruel, bold, intelligent and crafty man. To this day there is still talk of his arbitrariness, his fiery disposition, his wild generosity and insatiable greed. He was very corpulent and tall in stature, beardless and swarthy of face, spoke with a drawl and seemed half-asleep; but the more quietly he spoke, the more those around him trembled. He took as his wife a woman to match him. With protrading eyes, a hawk’s nose, round yellowish face, of gipsy origin, quick-tempered and vindictive, she never for a moment gave in to her husband, who was darned near the death of her and whom she did not survive even though she was incessantly badgering him. Andrey’s son Pyotr, Fyodor’s grandfather, did not take after his father: he was a simple country squire, fairly devil-may-care, loud-mouthed and slow-witted, rude but not malicious, fond of entertaining and following the hounds. He was over thirty when he inherited from his father two thousand souls in perfect condition, but he soon dispersed them, sold part of the estate and over-indulged his house-serfs. Like cockroaches, various nonentities, both friends and strangers, crawled from all sides into his spacious, warm and dowdy manor house; the whole lot of them ate their fill of whatever came their way, drank themselves tipsy and pilfered what they could, praising and glorifying their gracious host as they did so; and the host, when he was in low spirits, also glorified his guests with such titles as spongers and scoundrels, but grew bored without them. Pyotr Andreyich’s wife was a mild creature; he had taken her from a neighbouring family by his father’s choice and ordinance; she was called Anna Pavlovna. She never interfered in anything, received guests affably and gladly made calls of her own, although to be powdered, she would say, was death to her. In her old age she used to describe how they would put a felt head-band on you, comb all the hair upwards, smear it with grease, sprinkle flour on it and insert iron pins – and you couldn’t wash it out afterwards! But people would take offence if you paid visits without being powdered: it was sheer murder! She loved to go out driving with fast horses, was ready to play cards from morning to night and would always conceal with her hand the place where she had note
d down her tiny winnings whenever her husband approached the card table; but she handed over all her dowry and money into his undisputed keeping. She bore him two children: a son Ivan, Fyodor’s father, and a daughter Glafira. Ivan was not educated at home, but in the house of a rich old aunt, Princess Kubenskaya, who had made him her heir (without this his father would not have let him go). She dressed him up like a doll, hired every kind of teacher for him and placed him in the charge of a tutor, a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles, a Frenchman, former abbé and disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a sly, refined smoothy – the very, as she used to express it, fine fleur of the emigration – and ended, when she was almost seventy, by marrying this very same fine fleur. She transferred to his name all her wealth and possessions and soon afterwards, made up to the eyebrows and perfumed with scent à la Richelieu, surrounded by little Negro pages, short-legged dogs and shrieking parrots, died on a bent little Louis XV silk divan, with an enamelled snuffbox by Petitot in her hand – died, what is more, abandoned by her husband; the ingratiating M. Courtin had preferred to withdraw to Paris along with her money. Ivan was only just twenty when this unexpected blow (we refer to the Princess’s marriage, not her death) broke over him; he had no further desire to remain in his aunt’s house, where he had suddenly been transformed from a rich heir into a hanger-on; in St Petersburg the society in which he had grown up closed its doors to him; he felt an aversion to working his way up the difficult and obscure rungs of the civil service (all this occurred at the very beginning of Alexander I’s reign)1; despite himself, he was obliged to return to the country, to his father. His ‘nest of the gentry’ appeared dirty, impoverished and unkempt to him; the stagnation and squalor of provincial life insulted him at every turn; he fell prey to a gnawing boredom; and, to crown it all, everyone in the house except his mother gave him unfriendly looks. His father took a dislike to his city ways, his frock-coats, ruffles, his books, his flute and his punctilious neatness, in which he sensed blatant disgust; and every so often he complained and railed at his son. ‘Nothing’s to his taste here,’ he would say. ‘He picks at his food at table, doesn’t eat, can’t stand honest human smells or a bit of stuffiness, gets upset by the sight of drunkenness, won’t have me knocking the servants about and yet he won’t do any work of his own because – would you believe it? – his health’s not strong enough! You’re a mother’s darling, that’s what you are! And all because you’ve got your head crammed full of Voltaire!’2 The old man was particularly scathing about Voltaire and that ‘barbarous’ Diderot, although he had never read a line of their works: reading was not his speciality. Pyotr Andreyich was not mistaken: it was precisely Diderot and Voltaire who were crammed into his son’s head, and not only them – Rousseau and Raynal and Helvétius, and many others like them, were also there. But they were only in his head. Ivan Petrovich’s former instructor, the retired abbé and encyclopaedist, had contented himself with pouring the undiluted wisdom of the eighteenth century into his pupil, and the pupil went about filled to the brim with it; but it dwelt in him without mixing with his blood, without penetrating his soul, without assuming the form of strong convictions…. Indeed, how could one demand convictions of a young man fifty years ago when we haven’t grown up sufficiently to have them even today? Ivan Petrovich was also an embarrassment to his father’s guests; he found them repugnant and they feared him, while with his sister Glafira, who was twelve years his senior, he did not get on at all. This Glafira was a strange creature: unbeautiful round-shouldered, thin as a stick, with severe, wide-open eyes and a delicate, pinched mouth, she took after her grandmother, the gipsy, Andrey’s wife, in her looks, her voice and her brisk angular movements. Insisting on having things her own way, loving her own authority, she would not hear of marriage. Ivan Petrovich’s return did not appeal to her one little bit. So long as Princess Kubenskaya had kept him with her, she had hoped to receive at least half her father’s estate: she took after her grandmother in her miserliness as well. What is more, Glafira envied her brother for his education and for being able to speak French so well, with a Parisian accent, while she could scarcely say ‘bonjour’ or ‘comment vous portez-vous?’ True, her parents had no knowledge of French, but that was little comfort to her. Ivan Petrovich was bored stiff and did not know where to turn; he had hardly spent a year in the country, but that one year seemed to him like ten. He opened his heart only to his mother and would sit with her for hours at a time in her low-ceilinged rooms, listening to her inconsequent, kind-hearted chatter and eating his fill of jam preserves. It so happened that among Anna Pavlovna’s maid-servants there was one very pretty girl with lucid, gentle eyes and delicate features, by name Malanya, of intelligent and modest character. From the very beginning she had caught Ivan Petrovich’s eye, and he fell in love with her: he fell in love with her shy movements, her bashful answers, her quiet little voice and placid smile; she seemed to grow nicer and nicer with each day. And she was attracted to Ivan Petrovich with all the strength of her soul, as only Russian girls know how to be attracted – and she gave herself to him. In a country house of the gentry no secret can be kept for long: soon everyone knew about the young master’s affair with Malanya; finally news of the affair reached Pyotr Andreyich. At another time he would probably have paid no attention to such an unimportant matter; but he had long had a bone to pick with his son and was overjoyed at the opportunity of putting the St Petersburg wiseacre and dandy to shame. All hell broke loose: Malanya was locked in a store-room and Ivan Petrovich was ordered to see his father. Anna Pavlovna also rushed in to see what the noise was all about. She was on the point of trying to soothe her husband’s feelings, but he was already beyond listening to reason. He swooped on his son like a hawk and heaped imprecations on him for his immorality, atheism and hypocrisy; he also took the opportunity of wreaking upon him all his accumulated anger at Princess Kubenskaya and showered him with insults. To start with Ivan Petrovich braced himself and kept silent, but when his father took it into his head to threaten him with a shameful punishment he could stand it no longer. ‘That barbarous Diderot’s going to put in an appearance again,’ he thought. ‘Very well, then, I’ll well and truly make use of him – I’ll surprise the lot of you.’ And there and then in a calm, level voice, although shivering inwardly in every limb, Ivan Petrovich declared to his father that he was mistaken in blaming him for immorality, that although he did not intend to justify his guilt he was ready to put things right, and all the more willingly since he felt himself to be above all prejudices – he was ready, in fact, to marry Malanya, In uttering these words Ivan Petrovich had indisputably achieved his object: he so startled Pyotr Andreyich that the latter stared goggle-eyed and was momentarily rendered speechless; but he instantly recovered himself and, dressed just as he was, in his jacket lined with squirrel fur and with no more than slippers on his bare feet, literally flung himself, fists flying, at his son who had that day, as if by intention, given himself a hair-do à la Titus3 and decked himself in a new English blue frock-coat, boots with little tassels on them and fancy buckskin breeches of skin-tight fit. Anna Pavlovna emitted a mighty wail and covered her face with her hands, while her son ran right through the house, jumped out into the yard, dashed into the kitchen garden and through the garden proper and took flight towards the road and went on running without a backward glance until he finally ceased to hear the heavy tramp of his father’s footsteps and his strenuous, intermittent shouts – ‘Stop, you scoundrel! Stop! I’ll put a curse on you!’ Ivan Petrovich took refuge at the house of a neighbouring smallholder and Pyotr Andreyich returned home utterly worn-out and pouring with sweat to declare, scarcely able to draw breath as he did so, that he was depriving his son of his blessing and his inheritance, that all his idiotic books were to be burnt and the girl Malanya was to be packed off to a distant village without delay. Kind people were found who sought out Ivan Petrovich and told him of all this. Humiliated and infuriated, he swore to avenge himself on his father and that very same night, ha
ving waylaid the peasant cart in which Malanya was being carried off, forcibly abducted her, galloped with her into the nearest town and married her. Money had been supplied him by a neighbour, an eternally drunk but most kind-hearted retired sailor who took a huge delight in any, as he expressed it, ‘noble exploit’. The next day Ivan Petrovich wrote a caustically chilly and polite letter to his father and then set off for the village where his cousin Dmitri Pestov lived with his sister Marfa Timofeyevna, who is already familiar to the reader. He told them everything, declared that he intended to go to St Petersburg to seek a place for himself and begged them to look after his wife, at least for a time. At the word ‘wife’ he burst into bitter tears and, despite all his city upbringing and philosophy, humbly prostrated himself at his relatives’ feet like any wretched peasant supplicant and even struck his forehead against the floor. The Pestovs, commiserative and tender-hearted people, gladly agreed to his request; he spent three weeks or so with them in secret expectation of an answer from his father; but no answer came, nor could one come. Pyotr Andreyich, having learned of his son’s marriage, took to his bed and forbade anyone to mention the name of Ivan Petrovich in his presence; save that his mother, without her husband’s knowledge, borrowed five hundred roubles in notes from the archdeacon and sent them to his wife, together with a little icon; she feared to write, but ordered that Ivan Petrovich be told by the spare little muzhik sent as messenger, who could walk as much as fifty miles a day, that he must not be too downcast, that, God grant it so, everything would turn out all right and his father would put aside his anger in favour of forgiveness; that she would have preferred another daughter-in-law, but it was evident that God was pleased to arrange things as they were and so she would send Malanya Sergeyevna her parental blessing. The spare little muzhik received a rouble, asked permission to see the new mistress (he happened to be her godfather), kissed her little hand and dashed off home.