At fifty the father, for no reason at all, married an old maid who had been a pupil in the Smolny Convent.19 Such a complete, perfect type of the Petersburg boarding-school mistress it has never been my lot to meet. She had been one of the best pupils, and afterwards had become dame de classe in the school ; thin, fair, and short-sighted, there was something didactic and edifying in her very appearance. Not at all stupid, she was full of an icy exaltation in her speech, talked in hackneyed phrases of virtue and devotion, knew chronology and geography by heart, spoke French with a revolting correctness and concealed within her an egotism that bordered on the factitious modesty of a Jesuit. In addition to these traits of the 'seminarists in yellow shawls'20 she had others which '.Vere purely Nevsky or Smolny characteristics. She used to raise to heaven eyes full of tears as she spoke of the visits of their common mother (the Empress Marya Fedorovna ) , was in love with the Emperor Alexander and, I remember, used to wear a locket, or a signet ring, with an extract in it of a letter from the Empress Elizabeth, 'll a repris son sourire de bienveillance!'
The reader can picture the harmonious trio: the father a gam-19 Originally a convent, this was a famous girls' school founded by Catherine II. (Tr.) The Bolsheviks gave "Srnolny" an incongruous historical resonance when they commandeered the school buildings for their putsch, sometimes called a revolution, in October 1917. (D.M.) 20 A. S. Pushkin: Y evgeny One gin, III, 28. (A.S.)
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bler, passionately devoted to horses, gypsies, noise, carousaL;, races and trotting matches; the daughter brought up in a complete independence, accustomed to do what she liked in the house ; and the learned lady who, from an elderly schoolmistress, had been turned into a young wife. Of course, she did r:ot like her stepdaughter, and of course her stepdaughter did not like her; as a rule great affection can only exist between women of five-and-thirty and girls of seventeen when the former, with resolute self-sacrifice, determine to have no sex.
I am not at all surprised at the usual hostility between stepdaughters and stepmothers: it is natural and it is morally right.
The new person put into the mother's place excites aversion in the children; the second marriage is for them like a second funeral. The children's love is vividly expressed in this feeling and it whispers to the orphans: 'Your father's wife is not your mother at all.' At first Christianity understood that with the conception of marriage which it developed, with the immortality of the soul which it preached, a second marriage was altogether incongruous; but, making continual concessions to the world, the Church was too artful by half and was confronted with the implacable logic of life, with the simple childish heart that in practice revolts against the pious absurdity of regarding its father's companion as i ts mother.
On her side, too, the woman, who comes to her new home from her wedding and finds a ready-made family awaiting her, is in an awkward position; she has nothing to do \Vith them, she must affect feelings vvhich she cannot have, she must persuade herself and others that another woman's children are as dear to her as if they were her own.
And therefore I do not in the least blame the lady from the convent nor my cousin for their mutual dislike, but I understand how the young girl, unaccustomed to discipline, was fretting to escape to freedom, wherever that might be, out of the parental home. Her father was beginning to get old and was more and more under the thumb of his learned wife. Her brother, the Uhlan, was going from bad to worse and, in fact, life was not pleasant at home; at last she persuaded her stepmother to let her come for some months, possibly even for a year, to us.
The day after her arrival my cousin turned the whole order of my life, except my lessons, upside down, arbitrarily fixed hours for our reading together, advised me not to read novels, but recommended Segur's Universal History and the Travels of Anacharsis. Her stoical ideals led her to oppose my marked inclination for smoking in secret, which I did by rolling the
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tobacco i n paper (cigarettes did not exist in those days) ; in general, she liked preaching morality to me, and if I did not obey her teaching at least I listened meekly. Luckily she could not keep up to her own standards and, forgetting her rules, she read Zschokke's21 tales with me instead of an archaeological novel, and secretly sent a boy out to buy, in winter, buckwheat cakes and pease-pudding with vegetable oil, and in summer gooseberries and currants.
I think my cousin's influence over me was very good; a Warm element came with her into the cell-like seclusion of my youth ; it fostered and perhaps, indeed, preserved the scarcely developed feelings which might very well have been completely crushed by my father's irony. I learnt to be observant, to be wounded by a word, to care about my friends, to love; I learnt to talk about my feelings. She supported my political aspirations, predicted for me an unusual future and fame, and I, with childish vanity, believed her that I was a future 'Brutus or Fabricius.'
To me alone she confided the secret of her love for an officer in the Alexandriinsky Regiment of Hussars, in a black pelisse and black dolman; it was a genuine secret, for the hussar himself, as he commanded his squadron, never suspected what a pure flame was glowing for him in the bosom of a girl of eighteen. I do not know whether I envied his lot-probably I did a little-but I was proud of having been chosen as her confidant, and imagined (after Werther) that this was one of those tragic passions, which would have a great denouement a ccompanied by suicide, poison, and a dagger, and the idea even oc<::urred to me that I might go to him and tell him all about it.
My cousin had brought shuttlecocks from Korcheva, and in one of the shuttlecocks there was a pin ; she would never play with any other, and whenever it fell to me or anyone else she would take i t, saying she was used to playing with it. The demon of mischief, which was always my evil tempter, prompted me to change the pin, that is, to stick it in another shuttlecock.
The trick succeeded perfectly: my cousin always took the one with the pin in it. A fortnight later I told her ; her face changed, she dissolved into tears and went off to her own room. I was frightened and unhappy and, after waiting for half an hour, 21 Heinrich Zschokke ( 1 771-1848) wrote in German Tales of Swiss Life, in five vols., and also dramas-as well as a religious work Stunden der Andacht, in eight vols., which was widely read up to the middle of the nineteenth century and was attacked for ascribing more importance to religious feeling than to orthodox belief. (Tr. )