My father disliked evC'ry sort of abandon, every sort of franknC'ss; all this he callPd familiari ty, just as he called every feeling sentimPTitality. He pPrsistently posPd as a man superior to all such pPtty Lrifies ; for the sake of what, with what objPct? \\'hilt was the higher interest to \vhich the heart was sacrificed?-! do not know. And for whom did this haughty old man, who despis('d men so gcnuin('ly <�nd knew them so well, play his part of impartial jwlg('?-for a woman whose will he had broken although she sometimes con tradicted him ; for an invalid who lay
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always at the mercy of the surgeon's knife; for a boy whose high spirits he had developed into disobedience ; for a dozen lackeys whom he did not reckon as human beings!
And how much energy, how much patience were spent on it, how much perseverance; and with what marvellous sureness the part was played through to the end in spite of age and illness.
Truly the soul of man is darkness.
Later on when I was arrested, and afterwards when I was sent into exile, I saw that the old man's heart was more open to love and even to tenderness than I had thought. I never thanked him for it, not knowing how he would take my gratitude.
Of course he was not happy: always on his guard, always dissatisfied, he saw with a pang the hostile feelings he roused in all his household; he saw the smile vanish from the face and the words checked at his entrance; he spoke of it with mockery, with vexation, but made not a single concession and went his way with extreme persistence. Mockery, irony and cold, caustic, utter contempt-these were the tools he wielded like an artist, employing them equally against us and against the servants.
In early youth one can bear many things better than jeers.
Until I went to prison I was actually estranged from my father and joined with the maids and men-servants in waging a little war against him.
Add to everything else the fact that he had persuaded himself that he was dangerously ill, and was continually undergoing treatment; besides our own household doctor he was visited by two or three others and had three or four consultations a year at least. Visitors, seeing his continually unfriendly face and hearing nothing but complaints of his health, which was far from being so bad as he thought, became fewer. He was angry at this but never reproached a single person nor invited one. A terrible dullness reigned in the house, particularly on the endless winter evenings-two lamps lit a whole suite of rooms; wearing high cloth or lamb's-wool boots, a velvet cap and a long, white lambskin coat, bowed, with his hands clasped behind his back, the old man walked up and down, followed by two or three brown dogs, and never uttering a word.
A cautiousness, directed towards objects of no value, grew with his melancholy. He managed the estate badly for himself and badly for his peasants. The head-man and his missi dominici robbed their master and the peasants; yet everything that could be seen was subjected to double supervision: candles were saved and the thin vin de Graves was replaced by sour Crimean wine at the very time when a whole forest was cut down in one
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village, and in another he was sold his own oats. He had his privileged thieves; the peasant whom he made collector of obrok payments in Moscow and whom he sent every summer to inspect the hec.d-man, the kitchen-garden, the forest, and the field work, in ten years bought a house in Moscow. From a child I hated this 'minister without portfolio' ; on one occasion he beat an old peasant in the courtyard in my presence. I was so furious that I clutched him by the beard and almost fainted. From that time until he died in 1 845 I could not look at him calmly. I several times asked my father where did Shkun get the money to buy a house.
'That's what sobriety does,' the old man answered; 'he never takes a drop of liquor.'
To give a full idea of our manner of life I will describe a whole day from the morning; it was just the monotony that was one of the most deadly things: our life went like an English clock regulated to go slowly-quietly, evenly, loudly recording each second.
At nine o'clock in the morning the valet who sat in the room next to the bedroom informed Vera Artamonovna, my ex-nurse, that the master was getting up. She went to prepare the coffee which he always drank alone in his study. Everything in the house assumed a different look: the servants began sweeping the rooms, or at any rate made a show of doing something. The hall, empty until then, filled up, and even the big Newfoundland dog Macbeth sat before the stove and watched the fire without blinking.
Over his coffee the old man read th� Moscow News and the Journal de St PC!ersbourg. I may mention that orders had been given for the l'vloscow News to be warmed, so his hands might not be chilled by the dampness of the paper, and that he read the political news in the French text, finding the Russian obscure. At one time lw used to take in a Hamburg nPwspaper but could not reconcile himself to the fact that Germans printed in the German lPttPrs, and each time pointed out to me the difference between the French print and the German, saying that these f1·cakish Gothic ]PttPrs with their little tails wPakPned the PyPsight. LatPr on hP subsrribcd to the Journal de Franefort, but in thP end he confined himself to the newspapers of his own country.
\Vhen he had finished reading he would observe that Karl
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Ivanovich Sonnenberg was already in the room. When Nick was fifteen Karl Ivanovich had tried setting up a shop but, having neither goods nor customers, after wasting on this profitable undertaking the money he had somehow scraped up, he retired from it with the honourable title of 'merchant of Reval.' He was by then well over forty, and at that agreeable age he led the life of a bird of the air or a boy of fourteen, that is, did not know where he would sleep next day nor on what he would dine. He took advantage of my father's being somewhat well-disposed towards him ; we shall now see what this meant.
In 1 830 my father bought near our house another-bigger, better, and with a garden. The house had belonged to Countess Rostopchin, wife of the celebrated Governor of Moscow. We moved into it; after that he bought a third house which was quite unnecessary, but was next to it. Both these houses stood empty; they were not let for fear of fire (the houses were insured) and disturbance from tenants. Moreover they were not kept in repair, so they were on the sure road to ruin. In one of them the homeless Karl lvanovich was permitted to live on condition that he did not open the gates after ten o'clock (not a difficult condition, since the gates were never closed) , and that he bought his ovm firewood and did not get it from our store supplies (he did indeed buy it-from our coachman), and that he served my father in the capacity of an agent for private errands, that is, he came in the morning to inquire whether there were any orders, appeared for dinner and came in the evening, if there was no one else there, to entertain him with stories and the news.