Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (545 page)

As for my mother, Tatyana Pavlovna had kept her till the age of eighteen in her house, although the steward had urged that the girl should be sent to Moscow to be trained.  She had given the orphan some education, that is, taught her sewing and cutting out clothes, ladylike deportment, and even a little reading.  My mother was never able to write decently.  She looked upon this marriage with Makar Ivanovitch as something settled long ago, and everything that happened to her in those days she considered very good and all for the best.  She went to her wedding looking as unmoved as anyone could on such an occasion, so much so that even Tatyana Pavlovna called her a fish.  All this about my mother’s character at that time I heard from Tatyana Pavlovna herself.  Versilov arrived just six months after this wedding.

5

I only want to say that I have never been able to find out or to guess to my own satisfaction what led up to everything between him and my mother.  I am quite ready to believe, as he himself assured me last year with a flushed face, though he talked of all this with the most unconstrained and flippant air, that there was no romance about it at all, that it had just happened.  I believe that it did just happen, and that little phrase JUST HAPPENED is delightful, yet I always wanted to know how it could have come about.  I have always hated that sort of nastiness all my life and always shall.  It’s not simply a disgraceful curiosity on my part, of course.  I may remark that I knew absolutely nothing of my mother till a year ago.  For the sake of Versilov’s comfort I was sent away to strangers, but of that later, and so I can never picture what she looked like at that time.  If she had not been at all pretty, what could a man such as Versilov was then have found attractive in her?  This question is of importance to me because it throws a light on an extremely interesting side of that man’s character.  It is for that reason I ask it and not from depravity.  Gloomy and reserved as he always was, he told me himself on one occasion, with that charming candour which he used to produce (from the devil knows where — it seemed to come out of his pocket when he saw it was indispensable) that at that time he was a “very silly young puppy”; not that he was exactly sentimental, but just that he had lately read “Poor Anton” and “Polinka Sachs,” two literary works which exerted an immense, humanizing influence on the younger generation of that day.  He added that it was perhaps through “Poor Anton” that he went to the country, and he added it with the utmost gravity.  How did that “silly puppy” begin at first with my mother?  I have suddenly realized that if I had a single reader he would certainly be laughing at me as a most ridiculous raw youth, still stupidly innocent, putting himself forward to discuss and criticize what he knows nothing about.  It is true that I know nothing about it, though I recognize that not at all with pride, for I know how stupid such inexperience is in a great dolt of twenty; only I would tell such a gentleman that he knows nothing about it himself, and I will prove it to him.  It is true that I know nothing about women, and I don’t want to either, for I shall always despise that sort of thing, and I have sworn I will all my life.

But I know for certain, though, that some women fascinate by their beauty, or by anything you like, all in a minute, while you may ruminate over another for six months before you understand what is in her; and that to see through and love such a woman it is not enough to look at her, it is not enough to be simply ready for anything, one must have a special gift besides.  Of that I am convinced, although I do know nothing about it: and if it were not true it would mean degrading all women to the level of domestic animals, and only keeping them about one as such; possibly this is what very many people would like.

I know from several sources that my mother was by no means a beauty, though I have never seen the portrait of her at that age which is in existence.  So it was impossible to have fallen in love with her at first sight.  Simply to “amuse himself” Versilov might have pitched on some one else, and there was some one else in the house, an unmarried girl too, Anfisa Konstantinovna Sapozhkov, a housemaid.  To a man who had brought “Poor Anton” with him to the country it must have seemed shameful to take advantage of his seignorial rights to violate the sanctity of a marriage, even that of his serf, for I repeat, he spoke with extreme seriousness of this “Poor Anton” only a few months ago, that is, twenty years after the event.  Why, “Poor Anton” only had his horse taken from him, but this was a wife!  So there must have been something peculiar in this case, and Mlle. Sapozhkov was the loser by it (or rather, I should say, the gainer).  I attacked him with all these questions once or twice last year when it was possible to talk to him (for it wasn’t always possible to talk to him).  And, in spite of all his society polish and the lapse of twenty years, I noticed that he winced.  But I persisted.  On one occasion, anyway, although he maintained the air of worldly superciliousness which he invariably thought fit to assume with me, he muttered strangely that my mother was one of those “defenceless” people whom one does not fall in love with — quite the contrary, in fact — but whom one suddenly pities for their gentleness, perhaps, though one cannot tell what for.  That no one ever knows, but one goes on pitying them, one pities them and grows fond of them.  “In fact, my dear boy, there are cases when one can’t shake it off.”  That was what he told me.  And if that was how it really happened I could not look upon him as the “silly puppy” he had proclaimed himself.  That is just what I wanted.

He went on to assure me, however, that my mother loved him “through servility.”  He positively pretended it was because he was her master!  He lied, thinking this was chic!  He lied against his conscience, against all honour and generosity.

I have said all this, of course, as it were to the credit of my mother.  But I have explained already that I knew nothing whatever of her as she was then.  What is more, I know the rigidity of her environment, and the pitiful ideas in which she had become set from her childhood and to which she remained enslaved for the rest of her life.  The misfortune happened, nevertheless.  I must correct myself, by the way.  Letting my fancy run away with me, I have forgotten the fact which I ought to have stated first of all, that is, that the misfortune happened at the very outset (I hope that the reader will not be too squeamish to understand at once what I mean).  In fact, it began with his exercising his seignorial rights, although Mlle. Sapozhkov was passed over.  But here, in self-defence, I must declare at once that I am not contradicting myself.  For — good Lord! — what could a man like Versilov have talked about at that date with a person like my mother even if he had felt the most overwhelming love for her?  I have heard from depraved people that men and women very often come together without a word being uttered, which is, of course, the last extreme of monstrous loathsomeness.  Nevertheless, I do not see how Versilov could have begun differently with my mother if he had wanted to.  Could he have begun by expounding “Polinka Sachs” to her?  And besides, they had no thoughts to spare for Russian literature; on the contrary, from what he said (he let himself go once), they used to hide in corners, wait for each other on the stairs, fly apart like bouncing balls, with flushed cheeks if anyone passed by, and the “tyrant slave-owner” trembled before the lowest scrubbing-maid, in spite of his seignorial rights.  And although it was at first an affair of master and servant, it was that and yet not that, and after all, there is no really explaining it.  In fact, the more you go into it the more obscure it seems.  The very depth and duration of their love makes it more mysterious, for it is a leading characteristic of such men as Versilov to abandon as soon as their object is attained.  That did not happen, though.  To transgress with an attractive, giddy flirt who was his serf (and my mother was not a flirt) was not only possible but inevitable for a depraved young puppy (and they were all depraved, every one of them, the progressives as well as the reactionaries), especially considering his romantic position as a young widower and his having nothing to do.  But to love her all his life is too much.  I cannot guarantee that he did love her, but he has dragged her about with him all his life — that’s certain.

I put a great many questions to my mother, but there is one, most important, which, I may remark, I did not venture to ask her directly, though I got on such familiar terms with her last year; and, what is more, like a coarse, ungrateful puppy, considering she had wronged me, I did not spare her feelings at all.  This was the question: how she after six months of marriage, crushed by her ideas of the sanctity of wedlock, crushed like some helpless fly, respecting her Makar Ivanovitch as though he had been a god — how she could have brought herself in about a fortnight to such a sin?  Was my mother a depraved woman, perhaps?  On the contrary, I may say now at once that it is difficult to imagine anyone more pure- hearted than she was then and has been all her life.  The explanation may be, perhaps, that she scarcely knew what she was doing (I don’t mean in the sense in which lawyers nowadays urge this in defence of their thieves and murderers), but was carried away by a violent emotion, which sometimes gains a fatal and tragic ascendancy when the victim is of a certain degree of simplicity.  There is no telling: perhaps she fell madly in love with . . . the cut of his clothes, the Parisian style in which he parted his hair, his French accent — yes, French, though she didn’t understand a word of it — the song he sang at the piano; she fell in love with something she had never seen or heard of (and he was very handsome), and fell in love with him straight away, once for all, hopelessly, fell in love with him altogether — manners, song, and all.  I have heard that this did sometimes happen to peasant girls in the days of serfdom, and to the most virtuous, too.  I understand this, and the man is a scoundrel who puts it down to nothing but servility.  And so perhaps this young man may have had enough direct power of fascination to attract a creature who had till then been so pure and who was of a different species, of an utterly different world, and to lead her on to such evident ruin.  That it was to her ruin my mother, I hope, realized all her life; only probably when she went to it she did not think of ruin at all; but that is how it always is with these “defenceless” creatures, they know it is ruin and they rush upon it.

Having sinned, they promptly repented.  He told me flippantly that he sobbed on the shoulder of Makar Ivanovitch, whom he sent for to his study expressly for the purpose, and she — she meanwhile was lying unconscious in some little back room in the servants’ quarters. . . .

6

But enough of questions and scandalous details.  After paying Makar Ivanovitch a sum of money for my mother, Versilov went away shortly afterwards, and ever since, as I have mentioned already, he dragged her about with him, almost everywhere he went, except at certain times when he absented himself for a considerable period.  Then, as a rule, he left her in the care of “auntie,” that is, of Tatyana Pavlovna Prutkov, who always turned up on such occasions.  They lived in Moscow, and also in other towns and villages, even abroad, and finally in Petersburg.  Of all that later, though perhaps it is not worth recording.  I will only mention that a year after my mother left Makar Ivanovitch, I made my appearance, and a year later my sister, and ten or eleven years afterwards a sickly child, my younger brother, who died a few months later.  My mother’s terrible confinement with this baby was the end of her good looks, so at least I was told: she began rapidly to grow older and feebler.

But a correspondence with Makar Ivanovitch was always kept up.  Wherever the Versilovs were, whether they lived for some years in the same place, or were moving about, Makar Ivanovitch never failed to send news of himself to the “family.”  Strange relations grew up, somewhat ceremonious and almost solemn.  Among the gentry there is always an element of something comic in such relations, I know.  But there was nothing of the sort in this case.  Letters were exchanged twice a year, never more nor less frequently, and they were extraordinarily alike.  I have seen them.  There was scarcely anything personal in them.  On the contrary, they were practically nothing but ceremonious statements of the most public incidents, and the most public sentiments, if one may use such an expression of sentiments; first came news of his own health, and inquiries about their health, then ceremonious hopes, greetings and blessings — that was all.

I believe that this publicity and impersonality is looked upon as the essence of propriety and good breeding among the peasants.  “To our much esteemed and respected spouse, Sofia Andreyevna, we send our humblest greetings. . . .”  “We send to our beloved children, our fatherly blessing, ever unalterable.”  The children were mentioned by name, including me.  I may remark here that Makar Ivanovitch had so much wit as never to describe “His high-born most respected master, Andrey Petrovitch” as his “benefactor”; though he did invariably, in each letter, send him his most humble greetings, beg for the continuance of his favour, and call down upon him the blessing of God.  The answers to Makar Ivanovitch were sent shortly after by my mother, and were always written in exactly the same style.  Versilov, of course, took no part in the correspondence.  Makar Ivanovitch wrote from all parts of Russia, from the towns and monasteries in which he sometimes stayed for a considerable time.  He had become a pilgrim, as it is called.  He never asked for anything; but he invariably turned up at home once in three years on a holiday, and stayed with my mother, who always, as it happened, had her own lodgings apart from Versilov’s.  Of this I shall have to say more later, here I will only mention that Makar Ivanovitch did not loll on the sofa in the drawing-room, but always sat discreetly somewhere in the background.  He never stayed for long: five days or a week.

I have omitted to say that he had the greatest affection and respect for his surname, “Dolgoruky.”  Of course this was ludicrous stupidity.  And what was most stupid was that he prized his name just because there were princes of the name.  A strange, topsy- turvy idea.