Like the older sons, the older daughters attended boarding school only briefly—of the five only two, as I recall, finished school. The two last ones, whose upbringing fell to my mother, finished the public gimnazium for women with honors.
There were no children from my mother’s first marriage. In her second they came one after another—five boys. The births were painful. And so the “toil and suffering” which fell to her were great. Her single reward was the fact that she was able to take care of her mother: my grandmother and my aunt lived quietly and peacefully in a little apartment, on the pennies given to them by my mother. And these pennies were really half-pennies, compared to the work which my mother bore in that alien, endless family. But even these pennies elicited reproaches from the stepsons and stepdaughters! My father, on the other hand, loved and respected his new mother-in-law.
Surveying my mother’s life, I often thought that it would have been hard to come up with two more striking opposites than her first and second husbands.
Sergei Sergeevich was young and handsome, a wit, carelessly trying out all the experiences of easy living, one after another, never thinking about the final end. He loved my mother, and she loved him. There was lot of glamour in him, along with that specific quality which can be designated by the untranslatable French word charme. He loved merrymaking, the theatre, thor-
Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love
21
oughbred horses, wine, and women. He had friends and foes, companions and enemies. He burned his own candle (and those of others) at both ends. My mother had no children with him. And his love in her life was like a dream— at the beginning luminous and happy, like a lilac evening, then, at the end, sorrowful to the point of tears, to the bitterness of wormwood.
My father was the complete opposite of Sergei Sergeevich in everything. He was brought up in the school of hard knocks. The only son of an old merchant family which went bankrupt during his early childhood, he lived as a servant-boy in the home of the miserly and cruel silk merchant Kaptsov, a veritable Scrooge, where he received more than his share of beatings. Sergei Sergeevich would go to the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair riding the train first class, while my father would walk there on foot with the carts carrying Kaptsov’s goods. Sergei Sergeevich was rich, while my father was barely making enough to feed a family of twenty people.
My father never had a drop of wine in his life. He was a homebody; his only treats were red whortleberry preserve and almond spice cake. He visited taverns only with customers, and would take only tea with a bit of sugar. He was not lacking in true, kindhearted folk humor. But the style of the life that he led and that he wanted his children to lead was strict and proper. He didn’t like anything new. My entire childhood and boyhood were spent in candlelight, when houses everywhere already had kerosene lamps, and some even had electricity. Life for him was work and ritual, not chance and play. There was no merrymaking in him—at most, a smile. I don’t remember him ever laughing. “Sinful” was a strict and harsh word coming from him. It hardly needs to be said that he was a proper, irreproachably proper, family man.
And my mother, who had married him, a fifty-year-old, without love, had five sons by him, and knew all the joys and sorrows of motherhood that the one she had loved before didn’t give her.
First she gave birth to a son, named Nikolai in honor of his father. He was one of those children who can be best described in the words of Lermontov:
Of purest ether, in His wisdom The Lord once wove their living strings; The world will never mingle with them, Nor will they mix with worldly things!2
The common folk would call such children “not of this world.” The ones who were “of this world” were those who fit the narrow, crude measure of “base earthly existence.” Fedor Sologub liked to write of those “not of this world”—children with large, pensive eyes which early on showed an orphan’s fear of the cold misery of existence. Kolia was not of this world. He
22
Chapter Two
was a starry-eyed boy. His big, brown, wide and sorrowfully open eyes were striking, evident even in a Moebius photograph. These were not ordinary eyes, but something more deep and penetrating. The child amazed everyone with his meekness, with his early understanding of people and things, with his glowing abundance of love for everyone. Important and high-ranking clergy of the Church of the Epiphany in Elokhovo called him a “blessed child.” “He is not of this world,” his nanny Pelageia Sergeevna marveled in sad adoration. His half-brothers and half-sisters loved him.
I don’t know what his godfather—“Brother Kolia,” as we called him— gave him on the occasion of the cutting of his first tooth. My mother selected him as the godfather in order to strengthen the connection between the new brother and his half-brother. My miserly grandmother Olga Vasilievna celebrated the first tooth with generosity; my mother kept grandmother’s gifts of heavy golden ten-ruble pieces from the age of Catherine the Great (two or three of them) until times of dire need. My father fell in love with his namesake, his first-born son by his second wife. And my mother just adored him: he was the joy of joys that bloomed for her in a family of strangers. I was the second child after him—and both I and the next brother, Georgii, had it hard: we were expected to measure up to Kolia’s radiance and lovingness, but we were only of this world. For better or worse, we adapted ourselves to this “shadow of our times,” which fell on those of this world but did not darken Kolia’s existence.
For my godfather my mother chose her second stepson, Alexander Niko-laevich, wishing to strengthen our blood-bond. For godmother she chose her own mother, and she named me in honor of her beloved.
Kolia died at the age of three from diphtheria. My mother gave birth to a third son, Georgii, a handsome, curly-haired boy who was much loved by his godmother, my father’s third daughter, Elizaveta Nikolaevna. But my mother was not to be consoled. Kolia’s death was a blow from which she never completely recovered. I think that had Kolia lived, he would have helped her find a path to the heart of her new family. Without him this path was never found.
How cruel life is—or perhaps how mercifuclass="underline" it was not meant for her to be at the funerals of either her beloved mother or her beloved son. She was terribly ill and was nearly at death’s door herself when those two left this earth. Life in the new family was fourteen years of daily hard work for my mother. It was one long continuous workday.
She had to feed and clothe a house of thirty people, including children, relatives, and servants. Before that my mother had never been in charge of a household. However, when she harnessed herself to my father’s household affairs, she handled everything so well, so ably fulfilled the offices of minister
Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love
23
of internal affairs, minister of provisions, and minister of education in my father’s domain that she never received anything but well-deserved praise from my father. I remember our family dinner table, fourteen feet long, packed with place settings. At the table would be my father, my mother, four brothers (we were fed separately), six or seven sisters, the governess Olga Ivanovna, two distant female relatives of my father’s first wife, who lived at our house. These fifteen or sixteen people were family, but dinner never proceeded without guests: we invariably had one or another aunt (my father’s sisters), or one of the Tarasovs (my sisters’ cousins). And we mustn’t forget to add one of my sisters’ girlfriends or my brothers’ buddies who would stay for dinner. But even that’s not all. Either my father or one of my older brothers would bring someone else from town to dinner—some customer or just a friend—and having brought him, would simply ask my mother: