I know Natalya Savishna, too. She’s our old Avdotya Matveyevna, Grandmother’s former serf. She too has a trunk with pictures glued to the top. Only she’s not as good-natured as Natalya Savishna. She likes to grumble. “Nor was there anything in nature he ever wished to praise.” So my older brother used to sum her up, quoting from Pushkin’s “The Demon”.
Nevertheless, the resemblance is so pronounced that every time I read about Natalya Savishna, I picture Avdotya Matveyevna.
Every one of these people is near and dear to me.
Even the grandmother—peering with stern, questioning eyes from under the ruching of her cap, a bottle of eau de cologne on the little table beside her chair—even the grandmother is near and dear to me.
The only alien element is the tutor, Saint-Jérôme, whom Nikolenka and I both hate. Oh, how I hate him! I hate him even more and longer than Nikolenka himself, it seems, because Nikolenka eventually buries the hatchet, but I go on hating him for the rest of my life.
Childhood became part of my own childhood and girlhood, merging with it seamlessly, as though I wasn’t just reading but truly living it.
But what pierced my heart in its first flowering, what pierced it like a red arrow was another work by Tolstoy—War and Peace.
I remember…
I’m thirteen years old.
Every evening, at the expense of my homework, I’m reading one and the same book over and over again—War and Peace.
I’m in love with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. I hate Natasha, first because I’m jealous, second because she betrayed him.
“You know what?” I tell my sister. “I think Tolstoy got it wrong when he was writing about her. How could anyone possibly like her? How could they? Her braid was ‘thin and short’, her lips were puffy. No, I don’t think anyone could have liked her. And if Prince Andrei was going to marry her, it was because he felt sorry for her.”
It also bothered me that Prince Andrei always shrieked when he was angry. I thought Tolstoy had got it wrong here, too. I felt certain the Prince didn’t shriek.
And so every evening I was reading War and Peace.
The pages leading up to the death of Prince Andrei were torture to me.
I think I always nursed a little hope of some miracle. I must have done, because each time he lay dying I felt overcome by the same despair.
Lying in bed at night, I would try to save him. I would make him throw himself to the ground along with everyone else when the grenade was about to explode. Why couldn’t just one soldier think to push him out of harm’s way? That’s what I’d have done. I’d have pushed him out of the way all right.
Then I would have sent him the very best doctors and surgeons of the time.
Every week I would read that he was dying, and I would hope and pray for a miracle. I would hope and pray that maybe this time he wouldn’t die.
But he did. He died. And died again.
A living person dies once, but Prince Andrei was dying forever, forever.
My heart ached. I couldn’t do my homework. And in the morning… Well, you know what it’s like in the morning when you haven’t done your homework!
Finally, I hit upon an idea. I decided to go and see Tolstoy and ask him to save Prince Andrei. I would even allow him to marry the Prince to Natasha. Yes, I was even prepared to agree to that—anything to save him from dying!
I asked my governess whether a writer could change something in a work he had already published. She said she thought he probably could—sometimes writers make amendments in later editions.
I conferred with my sister. She said that when you called on a writer you had to bring a small photograph of him and ask him to autograph it, or else he wouldn’t even talk to you. Then she said that writers didn’t talk to juveniles anyway.
It was very intimidating.
Gradually I worked out where Tolstoy lived. People were telling me different things—one person said he lived in Khamovniki, another said he’d left Moscow, and someone else said he would be leaving any day now.
I bought the photograph and started to think about what to say. I was afraid I might just start crying. I didn’t let anyone in the house know about my plans—they would have laughed at me.
Finally, I took the plunge. Some relatives had come for a visit and the household was a flurry of activity—it seemed a good moment. I asked my elderly nanny to walk me “to a friend’s house to do some homework” and we set off.
Tolstoy was at home. The few minutes I spent waiting in his foyer were too short to orchestrate a getaway. And with my nanny there it would have been awkward.
I remember a stout lady humming as she walked by. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. She walked by entirely naturally. She wasn’t afraid, and she was even humming. I had thought everyone in Tolstoy’s house would walk on tiptoe and speak in whispers.
Finally he appeared. He was shorter than I’d expected. He looked at Nanny, then at me. I held out the photograph and, too scared to be able to pronounce my “R”s, I mumbled, “Would you pwease sign your photogwaph?”
He took it out of my hand and went into the next room.
At this point I understood that I couldn’t possibly ask him for anything and that I’d never dare say why I’d come. With my “pwease” and “photogwaph” I had brought shame on myself. Never, in his eyes, would I be able to redeem myself. Only by the grace of God would I get out of here in one piece.
He came back and gave me the photograph. I curtsied.
“What can I do for you, madam?” he asked Nanny.
“Nothing, sir, I’m here with the young lady, that’s all.”
Later on, lying in bed, I remembered my “pwease” and “photogwaph” and cried into my pillow.
At school I had a rival named Yulenka Arsheva. She, too, was in love with Prince Andrei, but so passionately that the whole class knew about it. She, too, was angry with Natasha Rostova and she, too, could not believe that the Prince shrieked.
I was taking great care to hide my own feelings. Whenever Yulenka grew agitated, I tried to keep my distance and not listen to her so that I wouldn’t betray myself.
And then, one day, during literature class, our teacher was analysing various literary characters. When he came to Prince Bolkonsky, the class turned as one to Yulenka. There she sat, red-faced, a strained smile on her lips and her ears so suffused with blood that they even looked swollen.
Their names were now linked. Their romance evoked mockery, curiosity, censure, intense personal involvement—the whole gamut of attitudes with which society always responds to any romance.
I alone did not smile—I alone, with my secret, “illicit” feeling, did not acknowledge Yulenka or even dare look at her.
In the evening I sat down to read about his death. But now I read without hope. I was no longer praying for a miracle.
I read with feelings of grief and suffering, but without protest. I lowered my head in submission, kissed the book and closed it.
There once was a life. It was lived out, and it ended.
THE MEREZHKOVSKYS
A dead man can’t be flattered.
People who knew Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius well do not write very warmly of them in their memoirs.