To end this sad subject, I shall say only one thing more : the society of servants had no really had influence on me. On the contrary, it implanted in me, in early years, a rooted hatred for slavery and oppression in all their manifestations. When I had been naughty as a child and my nurse, Vera Artamonovna, wished to he very cutting, she used to say, 'Wait a hit, and you will he exactly like the rest, when you grow up and become a master ! ' I felt this to he a grevious insult. Well, the old woman may rest in peace - whatever I became, I did not become 'exactly like the rest'.
9
I had one other distraction, as well as the servants' hall, and in this I met at least with no opposition. I loved reading as much as I disliked my lessons. Indeed, my passion for desultory reading was one of the main difficulties in the way of serious study. For example, I detested, then as now, the theoretical study of languages ; hut I was very quick in making out the meaning more or less and acquiring the rudiments of conversation ; and there I stopped, because that was all I needed.
My father and my uncle had a fairly large library, consisting of French books of the eighteenth century. The hooks lay about C.Y.E .-4.
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in heaps i n a damp unused room on the ground floor o f the house. Calot kept the key and I was free to rummage as much as I pleased in this literary lumber-room. I read and read with no interruptions. My father approved for two reasons : in the first place, I would learn French quicker ; and besides I was kept occupied, sitting quietly in a comer. I must add that I did not display all the books I read openly on the table : some of them I kept secreted in a cupboard.
But what books did I read ? Novels, of course, and plays. I read through fifteen volumes, each of which contained three or four plays, French or Russian. As well as French novels, my mother had novels by Auguste Lafontaine and Kotzebue's comedies ; and I read them all twice over. I cannot say that the novels had much effect on me. As boys do, I pounced on all the ambiguous passages and disorderly scenes, but they did not interest me specially.
A far greater influence was exercised over my mind by a play which I loved passionately and read over twenty times, though it was in a Russian translation - The Marriage of Figaro. I was in love with Cherubino and the Countess ; nay more, I myself was Cherubino ; I felt strong emotion as I read it and was conscious of some new sensation which I could not at all understand. I was charmed with the scene where the page is dressed up as a woman, and passionately desired to have a ribbon belonging to someone, in order to hide it in my breast and kiss it when no one was looking. As a matter of fact, no female society came in my way at that age.
I only remember two schoolgirls who paid us occasional Sunday visits. The younger was sixteen and strikingly beautiful. I became confused whenever she entered the room ; I never dared to address her, or to go beyond stolen glances at her beautiful dark eyes and dark curls. I never spoke a word of this to anyone, and my first love-pangs passed off unknown even to her who caused them.
When I met her years afterwards, my heart beat fast and I remembered how I had worshipped her beauty at twelve years old.
I forgot to say that Werther interested me almost as much as The Marriage of Figaro ; half of the story I could not understand and skipped, in my eagerness to reach the final catastrophe ; but over that I wept quite wildly. When I was at Vladimir in 1839•
the same book happened to come into my hands, and I told my
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37
wife how I used to cry over it as a boy. Then I began to read the last letters to her; and when I reached the familiar passage, the tears flowed fast and I had to stop.
I cannot say that my father put any special pressure upon me before I was fourteen; but the whole atmosphere of our house was stifling to a live young creature. Side by side with complete indifference about my moral welfare, an excessive degree of importance was attached to bodily health ; and I was terribly worried by precautions against chills and unwholesome food, and the fuss that was made over a trifling cold in the head. In winter I was kept indoors for weeks at a time, and, if a drive was permitted, I had to wear warm boots, comforters, and so on. The rooms were kept unbearably hot with stoves. This treatment must have made me feeble and delicate, had I not inherited from my mother the toughest of constitutions. She, on her part, shared none of these prejudices, and in her part of the house I might do all the things which were forbidden when I was with my father.
Without rivalry and without encouragement or approval, my studies made little progress. For want of proper system and supervision, I took things easy and thought to dispense with hard work by means of memory and a lively imagination. My teachers too, as a matter of course, were under no supervision ; when once the fees were settled, provided they were punctual in coming to the house and leaving it, they might go on for years, without giving any account of what they were doing.
10
One of the queerest incidents of my early education was when a French actor, Dales, was invited to give me lessons in elocution.
'People pay no attention to it nowadays,' my father said to me,
'but your brother Alexander practised Le Recit de Theramene 6
every evening for six months with Aufraine, the actor, and never reached the perfection which his teacher desired.'
So I began to learn elocution.
'I suppose, M. Dales,' my father once said to him, 'you could give lessons in dancing too.'
Dales was a stout old gentleman of over sixty ; with a profound consciousness of his own merits but an equally profound sense of modesty, he answered that he could not judge of his own 6. From Racine's Phedre.
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talents, but that h e often gave hints to the ballet-dancers a t the Opera.
'Just as I supposed,' remarked my father, offering him his snuffbox open - a favour he would never have shown to a Russian or German tutor. 'I should be much obliged if you would make him dance a little after the declamation ; he is so stiff.'
'Monsieur le comte peut disposer de moi.'
And then my father, who was a passionate lover of Paris, began to recall the foyer of the Opera-house as it was in 1810, the debut of Mile George and the later years of Mile Mars/ and asked many questions about cafes and theatres.
And now you must imagine my small room on a dismal winter evening, with the water running down the frozen windows over the sandbags, two tallow candles burning on the table, and us two face to face. On the stage Dales spoke in a fairly natural voice, but, in giving a lesson, he thought himself bound to get away as far as possible from nature. He recited Racine in a sing·
song voice, and made a parting, like the parting of an English·