Her sister
was called Tatiana.13 For the first time a novel's tender pages
4 with such a name we willfully shall grace.
What of it? It is pleasing, sonorous,
but from it, I know, is inseparable
the memory of ancientry
8 or housemaids' quarters. We must all
admit that we have very little
taste even in our names
(to say nothing of verses);
12 enlightenment does not suit us,
and what we have derived from it
is affectation — nothing more.
XXV
So she was called
Tatiana. Neither with her sister's beauty
nor with her [sister's] rosy freshness
4 would she attract one's eyes.
Sauvage, sad, silent,
as timid as the sylvan doe,
in her own family
8 she seemed a strangeling.
She knew not how to snuggle up
to her father or mother;
a child herself, among a crowd of children,
12 she never wished to play and skip,
and often all day long, alone,
she sat in silence by the window.
XXVI
Pensiveness, her companion,
even from cradle days,
adorned for her with dreams
4 the course of rural leisure.
Her delicate fingers
knew needles not; over the tambour bendin
with a silk pattern she
8 did not enliven linen.
Sign of the urge to domineer:
the child with her obedient doll
prepares in play
12 for etiquette, law of the monde, and gravely to her doll repeats the lessons
of her mamma;
XXVII
but even in those years Tatiana
did not take in her hands a doll;
about town news, about the fashions,
4 did not converse with it;
and childish pranks
to her were foreign; grisly tales
in winter, in the dark of nights,
8 charmed more her heart.
Whenever nurse assembled
for Olga, on the spacious lawn,
all her small girl companions,
12 she did not play at barleybreaks,
dull were to her both ringing laughter
and noise of their giddy diversions.
XXVIII
She on the balcony
liked to prevene Aurora's rise,
when, in the pale sky, disappears
4 the choral dance of stars,
and earth's rim softly lightens,
and, morning's herald, the wind whiffs,
and rises by degrees the day.
8 In winter, when night's shade
possesses longer half the world,
and longer in the idle stillness,
by the bemisted moon,
12 the lazy orient sleeps,
awakened at her customary hour
she would get up by candles.
XXIX
She early had been fond of novels;
for her they replaced all;
she grew enamored with the fictions
4 of Richardson and of Rousseau.
Her father was a kindly fellow
who lagged in the precedent age
but saw no harm in books;
8 he, never reading,
deemed them an empty toy,
nor did he care
what secret tome his daughter had
12 dozing till morn under her pillow.
As to his wife, she was herself
mad upon Richardson.
XXX
The reason she loved Richardson
was not that she had read him,
and not that Grandison
4 to Lovelace she preferred;14 but anciently, Princess Alina,
her Moscow maiden cousin,
would often talk to her about them.
8 Her husband at that time still was
her fiancé, but against her will.
She sighed after another
whose heart and mind
12 were much more to her liking;
that Grandison was a great dandy,
a gamester, and an Ensign in the Guards.
XXXI
Like him, she always
dressed in the fashion and becomingly;
but without asking her advice
4 they took the maiden to the altar;
and to dispel her grief
the sensible husband repaired
soon to his countryseat, where she,
8 God knows by whom surrounded, tossed
and wept at first,
almost divorced her husband, then
got occupied with household matters, grew
12 habituated, and became content.
Habit to us is given from above:
it is a substitute for happiness.15