The vicinity of Bogucharovo consisted mainly of large villages belonging either to the crown or to absentee owners with quit-rent peasants. Very few landowners actually lived there, so there were not many house serfs and literacy was low, and so the peasants of this locality were especially prone to these mysterious undercurrents of Russian country life which have origins and meanings that baffle the modern mind. This had shown up about twenty years ago in a movement that caused the peasants of this district to uproot themselves and move off to a place with warm rivers. Hundreds of peasants, including those from Bogucharovo, had suddenly started selling off their cattle and moving away with their families down to the south-east. Like birds flying out across the ocean these men, women and children set off for the south-east, where none of them had ever been before. They bought their freedom one by one, or just ran away. They formed up in cavalcades, and away they went on foot or in wagons, bound for the land where the warm rivers flowed. Many were caught and sent to Siberia, many others died of cold and hunger on the road, many came back of their own accord, and the movement petered out just as it had begun – for no obvious reason. But the undercurrents still flowing deep down among the people were now welling up into some new elemental force waiting to erupt just as weirdly and unexpectedly, yet with primitive simplicity and power. In 1812 anyone living close to the peasants must have been aware that the undercurrents were boiling up, ready to burst forth very soon.
Alpatych, who had come over to Bogucharovo shortly before the old prince’s death, soon became aware of mounting agitation among the peasants, and he noticed that, unlike the Bald Hills district, where all the peasants within a forty-mile radius had moved away, abandoning their villages to destruction at the hands of the Cossacks, in the steppe country of Bogucharovo the peasants were said to have made contact with the French, accepted leaflets from them and passed them round, and then stayed on in their homes. He had learnt through some of his trusty serfs that only a day or two before, a peasant called Karp, whose voice counted for something in village politics, had returned from a trip away as an official driver with the news that the Cossacks were destroying the deserted villages, whereas the French weren’t going to touch them. He knew that only yesterday another peasant had come over from Visloükhovo, a nearby hamlet occupied by the French, with a proclamation from the French general that the inhabitants would come to no harm, and anything taken from them would be paid for, if they stayed on. As proof of this, the peasant brought with him from Visloükhovo a one-hundred-rouble note (counterfeit money, but he didn’t know that), which he had received as a deposit for hay.
Last but not least, Alpatych knew that on the day when he had ordered the village elder to collect some carts and move the princess out of Bogucharovo, a village meeting had been held at which a decision was taken to stay there and wait. Meanwhile, time was pressing. On the day of the prince’s death, the 15th of August, the marshal had urged Princess Marya to move on immediately because things were getting dangerous. He had told her he wouldn’t be responsible for anything that happened after the 16th. He had driven away the same evening, with a promise to come back next morning for the funeral. But next day he could not come because he was suddenly informed that the French were on the move, and he only just managed to get his own family and their valuables moved out.
For the best part of thirty years Bogucharovo village affairs had been handled by the elder, Dron, known to the old prince as Dronushka.
Dron was one of those peasants strong in body and mind who grow a big beard as soon as they can and don’t look any different at sixty or seventy, when they still have no grey hair, all their teeth and the straightness and strength of a thirty-year-old.
Shortly after the warm rivers trek, in which he took part with everybody else, Dron was appointed village elder and overseer of Bogucharovo, and he had carried out his duties fastidiously for twenty-three years. The peasants were more scared of him than they were of the master. He commanded the respect of both princes, old and young, as well as the steward, and they jokingly called him ‘the minister’. During his period of office Dron had never got drunk or had a day’s illness. Even after a sleepless night or any amount of hard labour he had never shown a flicker of fatigue, and although he could not read or write he never forgot a monetary item or an ounce of flour, though he sold it in great wagonloads, nor did he miss a single wheatsheaf anywhere on the fields of Bogucharovo.
