Because he employed energetic measures, Erast Sergeyevich settled in very quickly. From his steward’s house, where he spent the first half of the day poring over various accounts, he sent a man on horseback to Snetki with a note to the lady of the house requesting her terms. The man waited. Never before had poor Nastasya Ivanovna’s mind been so taxed as it was that morning. She cloistered herself in Olenka’s attic where, together with her daughter and in secret from Anna Ilinishna, she tried to come up with prices. Nastasya Ivanovna could not find a way to reconcile with her own selflessness. After being consulted a hundred times, Olenka was finally fed up.
“Just charge that man-of-the-world five hundred in silver,” Olenka pronounced, throwing herself on her bed, where she began to unravel and redo her disheveled braid.
“That’s what you get when you ask a goat for advice!” her mother exclaimed as she walked out with her mathematical scribblings.
She sent off the terms, even though she had not yet settled on a price for the whey. Because this price was missing and some others were suspiciously low, the man was forced to return again, and then again. Finally, at Nastasya Ivanovna’s request, Ovcharov wrote out a prix fixe for the therapeutic nutriment—one that was quite proper and reflected neither magnanimous sacrifice nor undue burden on his finances. Toward evening another horse appeared in Snetki, this time pulling a droshky loaded with Ovcharov’s possessions. At first glance, there was not much to them, but how surprised the uninitiated would be to see that “not much.” Ovcharov’s many visits to Europe’s industrial exhibitions had paid off, and his enthusiasm for the ingenuity of the New World had served him particularly well. He took advantage of anything that met the tourist’s needs, and this fleeting visitor to his native land, knowing what life in Rus is like, had brought along valuable resources. While he may not have possessed a coat that could be transformed, at its owner’s command, into a rowboat, a mattress, a pillow, an umbrella, or perhaps even a hat, he certainly came close.
By the following morning the bathhouse was unrecognizable. The floor had been covered with American oilcloth, English rugs, and the fluffy pelt of some sort of wild animal. An English tapestry depicting a perfectly lifelike deer adorned one wall, along with various hunting accessories; beneath the tapestry stood a collapsible bed. Arranged around the bed were a collapsible table and chair and a tall writing stand, all of it sturdy, comfortable, refined, and elegant, every item breveté and garanti,1 every item having earned an exhibition medal. A magnificent trunk stood proudly in the corner bearing the venerable mark of railway labels from every European line and traces of foreign and native dirt. This trunk was some sort of magician. A hundred items emerged from it, and each of these multiplied itself a hundredfold: the finest linens and outer garments, a variety of accoutrements designed to warm and protect (all recommended by hygiene experts), a toiletries case equipped with a mirror, a silverware case, steam cookers, a lamp, candlesticks, and finally, from a special compartment, pamphlets and books. There was another bale of books still waiting to be unpacked.
Ovcharov’s sprightly servant left for the provincial capital at dawn. He returned with an iron stove, a large leather easy chair, green taffeta curtains for the windows, and a large quantity of canvas. The servant had brought along two workmen. The stove was installed in an instant, and the bathhouse walls were covered with canvas. When the sun burst through the window and green-and-white curtains onto the clean canvas—and onto the English steel, the colorful rugs, the bronze, the lamps, and the inkwell, onto the blanket of crimson silk, and, finally, onto two photographic portraits that had appeared on the wall—it was a sight to behold. Ovcharov himself arrived to take a look and was satisfied. He then ordered that work begin on the final refurbishment, and as quickly as possible, so that everything would be ready by the following day: a canopy was added to the bathhouse. It was needed to provide a place to rest after bathing and to work when the baking sun made the bathhouse uncomfortably warm. He had asked Nastasya Ivanovna’s permission to make this addition to his accommodations in one of his notes the day before.
No sooner had the canopy been ordered than it was already in place, and Ovcharov moved in.
He arrived on foot and carrying his briefcase, which he did not entrust into servants’ hands, and placed it on his writing stand. This briefcase had been fashioned from magnificent leather by Paris’s finest craftsman, but was ancient, scratched, and ink-stained in many spots, the casualty of time—a venerable briefcase. This is where Ovcharov kept all his writing.
After his many exertions and three sleepless nights, it was a pleasure to rest. Ovcharov relished being in bed. Sleep, however, did not come, not because of the unfamiliarity of his surroundings—he had experienced thousands of different living quarters in his life—but from the sort of fatigue that often drives away sleep rather than promoting it. He lay there thinking, and little by little the proximity of his native fields aroused in him recollections of the distant past, of the first years of his youth.
Back then, Beryozovka and the Ovcharovs’ Moscow household were run in what they thought of as the European way, provoking the envy of the poor and smirks from the sons of the truly wealthy. Behind the scenes there was squalor, and the idea that might makes right held full sway. In the salon, old-fashioned hospitality had been replaced by dîners fixes2 and caricatures of maîtres d’hôtel. In the country, landowners with twenty to forty souls reacted with reverential dismay. This is what many naive people called “Europe.”
Ovcharov felt a sense of disgust when he recalled his home life and his own inability to grasp its ridiculousness. His mother spent much of her time at cards, and played high-stakes games with skill and luck rarely found in a woman. The card play attracted many high-ranking and distinguished men to their Moscow home, according the Ovcharovs a certain prestige. In the country, cards brought all the neighbors without exception into their home, which gave the Ovcharovs a reputation for kindness and unpretentiousness, especially as they fed their guests well. Food was his father’s primary interest. After a short time in government service, he began devoting himself to accommodating the whims of his stomach. He immersed himself in the breeding of flavorful animals, consumed them with relish, and as a result developed a reputation as an experienced husbandman. At one time, without batting an eye, he nearly ate himself out of an entire village and was only saved from the auction block by his wife’s winnings. He was completely submissive to his wife, but caroused on the side under an impenetrable shroud of secrecy, protected by the friends he had acquired with his lavish dinners. His indiscretions rarely came out. There were no family quarrels, and, for the most part, only their common interest in culinary affairs brought the spouses together for intimate conversation.
Ovcharov entered the university. This was a time when students were very much the vogue in Moscow and the university enjoyed tremendous prestige and took pride in its representatives—this was a time when, as a wealthy student, Ovcharov led a life of the greatest variety. From the garret of a toiling comrade to the study of a princely comrade; from a ball at the governor-general’s, to hot rum punch drunk sitting on a student greatcoat—Ovcharov was everywhere, and everywhere he was equally welcome. The breadth of his parents’ social circle contributed to the variety of his own. The Ovcharovs’ acquaintances numbered in the hundreds, and these hundreds each afforded him hundreds more, so by the time Ovcharov left the university he could claim to know all of Moscow. His mother and father passed away shortly thereafter. Ovcharov remained in Moscow, took a position in the governor’s chancellery, and proceeded to look in there once a year. Well provided for and unfettered, he stepped out into the wide world to experience all it had to offer.
And it cannot be said that he saw and experienced little. Rides and walks through Moscow, picnics, fireworks, elegant balls, small-scale costume balls, modest balls given by the bourgeoisie, masquerades, theaters, clubs, taverns, riding parties, concerts for the nobility, concerts for non-nobles, gypsies, merchant weddings, aristocratic weddings, charity bazaars, family dinners, bachelor dinners, pilgrimages to fashionable churches and monasteries, and visits—visits to everyone from high-ranking men and women of the clergy, senators, various His and Her Highnesses, right down to his deaf-and-dumb great-aunt who lived behind Devichi Field—parties and pre-party gatherings of the family sort, of the intimate sort, or the artistic sort, evening gatherings of learned men, circles devoted to excessive eating and drinking, English-style hunting, Hegelianism, and Slavophilism, edifying circles presided over by the patronesses of various societies, and, finally and especially, the ladies’ literary and poetry circles of those years—all this, Ovcharov experienced. Throughout Moscow—from Rogozhskaya to Dorogomilovskaya—everyone who knew Ovcharov proclaimed him a fine fellow. He earned this appellation through his deference to the ladies, amenability, tidiness, indefatigability, and his enthusiasm for all of society’s amusements, along with his customary readiness to expound on absolutely anything and equal readiness to listen to absolutely anything. But whatever society Ovcharov appeared in throughout his wandering life, he was never anything more than a fine fellow. Nowhere did he leave a strong impression; he was easily liked and easily forgotten. With women, in love and hate, he played only an incidental role; among serious people his presence brought on a slight sense of boredom; and through his entire life he had failed to attain a single devoted friend.
Of course Ovcharov (just like all us sinners endowed, for better or worse, with a degree of blindness) never noticed how little people valued him. And now, as his colorful past flashed before his mind’s eye, he pronounced, almost out loud and cheerfully clasping his hands behind his head, “What an extraordinary life! And what richness of character, to be able to sample it all!”
The thought that his life had now become even more extraordinary and his nature even richer further raised his spirits. He had long since, with the passage of time, begun to gradually abandon former tastes and pursuits; many he had repudiated, condemned, and even denounced—denounced, without taking into account either his youth or the spirit of the times. Such was the judgment he rendered against his frenzied affair with the Viennese dancer, Fanny Elsler, from whom he nearly contracted consumption; the boyar costumes he wore at aristocratic balls; the visits to Ivan Yakovlevich, which he made to please several pious ladies; his ecstasy over the verse of certain Russian poetesses and his own lines written in their albums—and there was much, much more that he denounced.3 It was even hard for him to accept that he had done these things—what in the world could have possessed him? He only thanked heaven that in the past he had denied himself nothing and could approach his mature years able to assign every manifestation of life its true worth.
This realization, ever-present in the back of Ovcharov’s mind, now came to the forefront, giving his repose particular sweetness.
He then recalled how he had finally developed, focused his attention, acquired fortitude, become more serious, refined his circle of acquaintances, and determined his vocation. He began to write novels, sketches, theatrical reviews, dramas, comedies, bits of verse tales, and short satirical pieces. This work took time away from visits, and his desire to share his work with others further limited his social circle. Everything he wrote was read in salons where literature was valued. Nothing was burned as worthless.
Looking back on the early days of his literary career, Ovcharov felt a sense of satisfaction. Of course he found much of what he had written to be extremely naive, but the overall picture pleased him even now. One half of these works had appeared in print; he held onto the other half, which had been returned by the editors because of concerns over censorship. Knowing by heart every word he had written, Ovcharov had come to the conclusion that, in all probability, he really had wanted to use his pen to castigate the prevailing order during those difficult years and spoke the bitter truth about it almost unconsciously, not thinking; he even discussed the Moscow drama troupe of 1854–1855 in his theatrical notices. Then he recalled the arrival of our time of “social awakening” and reflected with pride on the fact that he, for one, had already been “awake.” The era found him full of vigor and ahead of the times, his mental efforts having endowed him with knowledge of his surroundings and ample strength. From this time forward he began to travel abroad; from this time forward he considered himself a fully enlightened man. He was highly satisfied with his travels. Visits to all of Europe’s universities and academies, parliamentary debates, assemblies of the most diverse groups, meetings of manufacturers, meetings of artists, and even Hamburg’s roulette tables and the Bal Mabille—Ovcharov drank it all in, like a tourist, not permitting himself a moment’s rest.4 By then, he was no longer drawn to bad influences and, like a sage, gave into temptation with prudent moderation. Moreover, he had long since damaged his health and was eager to mend it. It was then that Ovcharov decided that the time was ripe and he was prepared to be useful—whether he was regarding his native land from afar or making one of his periodic visits to it. He began by undertaking serious labor and applying himself to practical endeavors.
And now, as he rested, the thought of this labor, a thought that rarely left Ovcharov, suddenly stirred in his mind. He thought, came up with many ideas, and finally fell into a kind of semi-slumber. Only toward morning did he fall deeply asleep.
