In the year 1812 I was taken to Moscow and placed in Karl Ivanovich Meyer’s boarding school, where I spent no more than three months, for we were disbanded before the enemy entered, and I returned to the country.4 Once the twelve nations were driven out, they wanted to take me to Moscow again, to see if Karl Ivanovich had returned to his former hearth and home, or, in the contrary case, to place me in another school, but I persuaded my dear mother to keep me in the country, my health preventing me from getting up at seven, as is the custom in all boarding schools. Thus I reached the age of sixteen, remaining with my primary education and playing ball with my playmates, the only science of which I acquired sufficient knowledge during my stay in boarding school.
At that time I enlisted as a cadet in the * * * infantry regiment, in which I remained until this past year of 18––. My term in the regiment left me with few pleasant impressions apart from being promoted to officer and winning 245 roubles at a time when I had only one rouble and sixty kopecks left in my pocket. The death of my beloved parents forced me to resign my commission and return to my paternal seat.
This epoch of my life is so important for me that I intend to enlarge upon it, begging the kindly reader’s pardon beforehand if I am making ill use of his indulgent attention.
The day was autumnal and bleak. Having reached the station where I had to turn off to Goryukhino, I hired a private coach and drove down the country road. Though I am of mild temperament by nature, I was so gripped by impatience to see again the places where I had spent my best years that I kept urging my coachman on, now promising him a tip, now threatening him with a beating, and since it was more convenient for me to nudge him in the back than to take out and undo my purse, I confess I struck him two or three times, something that had never happened to me in all my life, for, though I don’t know why myself, the coachman’s estate has always been especially dear to me. The coachman urged his troika on, but it seemed to me that, as is usual with coachmen, while talking to the horses and waving his whip, he kept tightening the reins. At last I glimpsed the Goryukhino grove, and ten minutes later we drove into the courtyard. My heart was beating hard—I looked around me with indescribable emotion. I had not seen Goryukhino for eight years. The little birches that had been planted by the fence when I was there had grown and were now tall, branchy trees. The courtyard, in former times adorned by three regular flowerbeds with wide, sand-strewn paths between them, had been turned into an unmowed meadow on which a brown cow grazed. My britzka stopped at the front porch. My servant went to open the door, but it was boarded up, though the shutters were open and the house seemed inhabited. A woman came out of the servants’ cottage and asked whom I wanted. Learning that the master had arrived, she ran back to the cottage, and soon the domestics surrounded me. I was touched to the bottom of my heart, seeing familiar and unfamiliar faces, and I exchanged friendly kisses with them all: the boys I had played with were grown men, and the girls who used to sit on the floor waiting for errands were married women. The men wept. To the women I said unceremoniously: “How you’ve aged!” And they replied with feeling: “And how plain you’ve grown, dear master!” They took me to the back porch, where I met my wet nurse, who embraced me with tears and sobs as a much-enduring Odysseus. They ran to heat up the bathhouse. The cook, who in his current inactivity had grown a beard, offered to prepare dinner for me, or supper—for it was already getting dark. The rooms in which the wet nurse and my late mother’s maids had been living were cleared for me at once, and I found myself in my humble ancestral abode and fell asleep in the same room I had been born in twenty-three years earlier.
I spent some three weeks in all sorts of business—dealing with assessors, marshals, and provincial officials of every description. At last I came into my inheritance and took possession of my ancestral seat: I calmed down, but soon the boredom of inactivity began to torment me. I was not yet acquainted with my good and estimable neighbor * * *. Running an estate was an occupation entirely foreign to me. The conversation of my wet nurse, whom I had promoted to housekeeper and steward, consisted of exactly fifteen family anecdotes, very interesting for me, but always recounted in the same way, so that she became for me another
