Russka (96 page)

‘You are fortunate,’ the priest remarked to them when he came. ‘His name day is the feast of St Sergius.’ Sergei it was therefore.

That gave a name and patronymic of Sergei Alexandrovich, since he was the official father. Not bad.

‘Sergei.’ Tatiana smiled. And then, looking at the child, she called to him, using the diminutive of Sergei: ‘Seriozha, come to your mother.’

‘Of course,’ Alexander said to her calmly, ‘this one will not inherit anything of mine. When I die, you will receive a widow’s portion. You can provide for him out of that. Meanwhile, I’ll provide for his education.’

Tatiana inclined her head. The subject was not mentioned again.

And so Sergei Alexandrovich Bobrov came into the world.

Six months later, Alexander resumed relations with his wife. In 1803, a daughter was born. They called her Olga.

What a tumultuous time this was, these days of war and peace. Who would have guessed that out of the fire of the French Revolution – the fire of liberty, equality, fraternity – would emerge this astounding conqueror who made the whole world tremble? Napoleon: hero to some, ogre to others. Did he mean, like Julius Caesar or even Genghis Khan, to rule the world? Probably. And though the enlightened Tsar Alexander – the Angel, they still called him – had tried to preserve Russia from the horrors of these European wars, it seemed now, in the early spring of 1812, that Napoleon and his formidable Grand Army were preparing to invade from the west.

All Russia trembled. The Orthodox Church declared that Napoleon was the Antichrist. The Tsar called the country to arms. And if there had been some amongst the gentry who felt that
the golden age of Alexander had not lived up to its promise, that the expected reforms had been few and unimportant, all this was suddenly forgotten as, in drawing rooms all over the empire, they rallied to ‘The Angel’.

It was a chilly, overcast day before the start of spring. The snow still lay hard upon the ground, and the Bobrov family were sitting in the salon of their country house, waiting for news.

The house was typical of its kind: a narrow, two-storey wooden structure about eighty feet long. The walls had been painted green; the windows picked out in white. The centre boasted a simple classical portico with four pillars, all in wood and painted white, which provided a spacious verandah. Two little single-storey wings that Tatiana had added, of two rooms each, extended from the ends. From the house’s position near the top of the wooded slope, the village was hidden by some trees, but there was a pleasant view down to the river. Behind it were various outbuildings. A little to the left was a wooden hut, half-submerged into the ground; this was the ice house, where ice from the frozen river in winter was stored through the warm summer months. On the right of the house was the bath house: another squat building made of huge, unpainted logs. So peaceful did this ensemble appear, that one might have supposed it had always been there. In fact, however, there had been nothing before Alexander’s father and it represented a profound change in the life of the family and of the village.

For the notion of a country house was still new to Russia. The knight’s manor and the magnate’s castle, so much the rule in England or France, could be found as far east as Poland – but in old Muscovy they had been completely unknown. As for the country villa of the Renaissance, with its cultivated pursuit of leisure – the idea would have been unimaginable. Until the eighteenth century, when the Bobrovs visited their estates, they had always stayed in houses within the walled town of Russka. Though a noble who was very poor might find himself living in a village, in a house almost indistinguishable from the peasants’, only after the reign of Peter the Great did landowners even begin to live like European squires.

Their country houses were nearly always modest. While Russian rulers and their favourites had palaces that might rival those of Germany or France, the houses of men like Bobrov would
have seemed makeshift to an English gentleman. Indeed, their construction and scale were far closer to those of the landowners in the newly freed colonies of America.

Only one thing had spoiled the tranquillity of the Bobrovs – the name of their village: Dirty Place. When they had lived in Russka it had not mattered, but when he came to live on the estate, Alexander had found the name offensive and absurd. He had toyed with various new names before inclining towards one derived from that of his own family: Bobrovo. Bobrovo, therefore, was now the official designation of the village and estate, though some of the older peasants still referred to it as Dirty Place.

Today there was a sense of expectancy in the house. In the area around Moscow, new regiments were nastily being raised. The previous afternoon, Bobrov had received a personal letter from the military governor of Vladimir asking him to supply more serfs as recruits. The peasants in the village had been drawing lots that very morning and shortly he would hear who had been chosen.

His own second son, Alexis, though only nineteen, was proudly serving as an infantry officer. Every time anyone approached the house, Tatiana would rush to the door, hoping they might be bringing a letter from him. Patriotism, excitement, seemed to be in the air.

And yet, in all these preparations, there was one great problem that filled Alexander Bobrov with a special sense of foreboding.

‘For it’s not Napoleon’s troops I fear so much,’ he told Tatiana. ‘It’s our own people.’ The serfs.

When the story of Napoleon’s great invasion of Russia is told, it is often forgotten that, in the months leading up to it, a great many Russian landowners feared an internal revolution more than they feared the invader. And for this view there was good reason. All over Europe, the conquering emperor of the French had claimed to be liberating people from their rulers in the name of the Revolution: to many of them he was a hero. Indeed, of the huge force who were to march with him into Russia in 1812 – the legendary Grand Army – less than half were French at all. And of all these European contingents, none fought more eagerly than those from the next-door Polish territories – formerly grabbed by Austria and Prussia when unhappy Poland was partitioned – whom Napoleon had indeed liberated. No wonder then if Russian leaders feared that their own subjugated Poles, and their
oppressed Russian serfs, might rise in sympathy with this liberating army. ‘He’ll do what Pugachev failed to do, and give us a real revolution,’ Bobrov had predicted gloomily.

If the outside world was full of danger, however, the salon where the Bobrovs were sitting was a scene of quiet, domestic calm. There were several pieces of rather stiff English furniture, two ancestral pictures and some sombre classical landscapes, all brought from St Petersburg. But the general impression of the room was still one of friendly disorder.

Alexander and Tatiana were sitting in armchairs. He wore an old blue English coat, cravat and silk stockings; she wore a long, high-waisted pink dress, with a bright shawl draped over her shoulders. In her hands was a piece of embroidery. Near the fire sat their eldest surviving son, twenty-two-year-old Ilya. He had his mother’s round face and fair hair. He was reading a book. In Alexander’s opinion, the young man should have been away fighting, like his brother. But perhaps because, back in ’89, she had so nearly lost him at birth, Tatiana had always kept him at home, insisting he was delicate. ‘He doesn’t look delicate to me,’ Alexander would grumble. ‘He just looks fat and lazy.’ It was a pity he had let Tatiana spoil the boy, because Ilya was intelligent. But Alexander could not be bothered to do anything about it now.

And then there was little Sergei. It would have surprised Alexander to know that his face lightened into a smile whenever he looked at this ten-year-old. Yet what a bright little fellow he was, with his black hair, his laughing brown eyes – the other Bobrov children’s eyes were blue – and his merry ways. He was sitting by the window now, with his sister Olga, inseparable as usual, drawing funny pictures to make her laugh.

Lastly, close by the children, sat a plump peasant woman in her early forties. This was the children’s nanny, Arina. A few minutes before, she had been telling the children one of her inexhaustible fund of fairy stories and Alexander, too, had half-listened, marvelling as he always did at the richness of the Slav folk tradition.

On the nanny’s lap sat a baby girl of one, an orphaned niece that the Bobrovs had allowed her to bring to live in the house, and to whom she had given her own name: Arina.

It was a pleasant scene. On a table in the centre of the room, in woven baskets, were rice and egg
pirozhki
and other pastries; on a
plate, some cinnamon crescents; on another, an apple pie. In a little bowl was some raspberry syrup, with which Tatiana liked to flavour her tea, and slices of lemon for everyone else. For Alexander there was also a little flask of rum. And on a side table stood the most important item of all: the samovar.

It was a splendid one. Alexander had bought the samovar in Moscow and was very proud of it. It stood some two feet high, was silver, and shaped rather like a grecian urn. Heated by charcoal, the water in the samovar was always boiling hot, and from time to time Tatiana herself would go to fill the teapot with a fresh supply from the samovar’s tap.

So, on that cold, snowy day, the family quietly awaited news from the outside world.

It was little Sergei who, glancing out of the window, suddenly stood up and said: ‘Look, Papa. Visitors.’

Several things were striking about Ivan and Savva Suvorin. The first was that, at twenty, Savva was as tall as his father, so there were now two giants in the village. The second was that, unlike most Russian peasants who wore felt or bast shoes, the Suvorins both wore stout leather boots, which proclaimed their wealth. The third was that each wore a huge hat: the father’s shaped like a bulbous dome, the son’s high and rounded, with a large brim – almost like an old English Puritan’s hat – so that as they walked along they resembled nothing so much as a tall wooden church and belltower.

Both wore heavy black coats. From the older man’s belt hung a bag of coins. He made no secret of the fact that he had money. What was concealed, however, was the equal quantity of coins that was sewn into the inside of the other’s clothing. ‘God knows if we shall need it,’ Ivan remarked. ‘You can never tell with that greedy wolf.’

For the rich serf was going to see his master Bobrov; and the money was to save his son’s life.

‘Cheer up, Savva,’ he added, ‘you drew the lot – it was fate – but I can save you. It may be expensive, but better a serf than dead, eh?’ To which his son did not reply.

Savva very seldom smiled: he could not see the point. Though he was only twenty, something in his square young face suggested that on this matter, as upon most, his opinion had long ago been
formed. With his black hair, huge nose and black, watchful eyes, he was already as formidable as his father. His mouth was usually pursed into a thin line of silent defiance, and his firm, determined walk somehow suggested that, wherever he was going, it was because he didn’t much care for the place he was coming from.

It was in silence, therefore, that they completed their walk up the slope to the house.

Alexander Bobrov could scarcely believe it had happened. Fate, for once, must have decided to smile upon him. As he gazed at the two Suvorins who now stood before him in his study, he had to fight to suppress a grin.

For this could only mean one thing: money. The question was, how much?

Bobrov was not a greedy man. Though he had once dreamed of riches, he had always rather despised money grubbing as such. But time, failure, and children to provide for had left their mark, so that it might be said that, nowadays, he was sporadically greedy.

‘So, Suvorin, your son doesn’t want to be a soldier?’ he remarked pleasantly. He turned to Savva. ‘You would get your freedom, you know,’ he added.

Since the time of Peter the Great, when a fixed proportion of all the souls in Russia became liable for military service, it was the rule that the serfs chosen – usually, as at Bobrovo, by lot – were granted their freedom upon discharge. But what was that worth when the twenty-five-year service was usually a sentence of death? Men had been known to mutilate themselves to avoid this fate. And now young Savva had drawn the unlucky lot, and Alexander Bobrov could hardly believe his luck.

For though the Suvorins were owned by Bobrov, they had money. Their achievements in the last ten years had been considerable. Not only did they turn out large quantities of silk ribbons, but they now ran a whole network of other serfs, taking their cloth to Vladimir market in return for a cut of the profits. Suvorin had a dozen looms working for him these days, and was adding more all the time.

All of which suited the landowner very well. For whatever he does, he told himself, Suvorin still belongs to me.

The rich serf was profitable to Alexander for a very simple reason. For while the serfs down on the Riazan estate still paid
their dues with three days’
barshchina
labour, he nowadays made all the Bobrovo serfs give him a cash
obrok
: and the amount of the
obrok
to be paid was set, at any figure he pleased, by the landowner! Twice in the last three years he had raised Suvorin’s
obrok
; both times the fellow had grumbled but paid. ‘God knows what he’s still hiding from me,’ Alexander had complained. Now was the chance to find out.

For there could be only one reason for this visit. Bobrov knew it very well, and intended to enjoy every moment of it. He leaned back in his chair, half-closed his eyes, mildly enquired: ‘So, what can I do for you?’ and waited. And just as Bobrov had known he would, Suvorin bowed low, and announced: ‘I have come, Alexander Prokofievich, to buy a serf.’

Then Alexander Bobrov smiled. For he had serfs to sell.

It had taken many centuries, but by the turn of the nineteenth century the legal position of the Russian peasant had finally reached its lowest point. Peasants now – whether serfs owned by a landlord or state peasants bound to crown land; whether well-off like the Suvorins or semi-starving – were all virtually slaves. A serf had almost no rights at all. Bobrov knew one landowner who insisted on a first night with every serf girl when she was married. He had heard of an old lady who had sent two serfs to Siberia because they forgot to bow to her carriage as it passed. The landlord was employer, judge and executioner. Indeed, even the one right he did not have – that of sentencing a serf to death – was easily circumvented by whipping the offender until, by accident, he died.