Fathers and Sons (31 page)

‘You are leaving us… you are leaving us, dear Brother,’ he began, ‘however, not for long; but still I can’t tell you what
I… what we… how much I… how much we… The problem is, we don’t know how to make speeches! Arkady, you speak.’

‘No, Papa, I haven’t prepared anything.’

‘And you think I’m well prepared! Brother, let me simply embrace you and give you our best wishes – and come back to us very
soon!’

Pavel Petrovich exchanged kisses with everyone, naturally including Mitya. He also kissed Fenechka’s hand – which she didn’t
yet know how to offer properly – and, drinking from his
refilled glass, with a deep sigh he uttered the words, ‘Be happy, my friends!
Farewell!
’
³
This little English flourish went unnoticed; but all were touched.

‘To Bazarov’s memory,’ Katya whispered in her husband’s ear and clinked glasses with him. In response Arkady pressed her hand
hard but he wasn’t brave enough to propose that toast.

This surely would seem to be the end. But perhaps some of our readers would like to know what each of the characters I have
portrayed is doing now, at this moment.
⁴
I am ready to satisfy their curiosity.

Anna Sergeyevna has recently married, out of principle rather than love, one of our future Russian statesmen, a very clever
man, a legal brain, with a powerful practical sense, a firm will and a remarkable gift for words – a man still young, amiable
and cold as ice. They live together very harmoniously and one day perhaps they will find happiness together… perhaps even
love. Princess Kh–aya is dead, forgotten the day she died. The Kirsanovs, father and son, have settled in Marino. Their business
is beginning to improve. Arkady has become a keen landlord and the ‘farm’ is already bringing in a significant income. Nikolay
Petrovich has been made an arbitrator
⁵
and is working extremely hard. He never stops travelling round his district and makes long speeches (his view is that we
must get the muzhiks to ‘hear the voice of reason’, namely, reduce them to a state of exhaustion by the frequent repetition
of the same words). And yet, to tell the truth, he isn’t altogether to the taste either of the educated gentry, with their
fashionable or glum talk of
mancipation
(pronounced with a nasal French
an
), or their uneducated fellows who roundly swear at
thut muncipation
. Both sides find him too soft. Yekaterina Sergeyevna has had a son, Kolya, and Mitya is now a splendid little boy running
about and chattering away. Fenechka – now Fedosya Nikolayevna – adores her ‘daughter-in-law’ only less than her husband and
Mitya, and when Katya sits down at the piano, she will happily stay with her all day. A word now about Pyotr. He has become
quite rigid with stupidity and self-importance and is so refined he pronounces all his
e
’s as
u
’s,
⁶
but he too has married and got a sizeable dowry with his bride, the daughter of the town market gardener, who had turned down
two decent suitors just because they didn’t have watches: whereas Pyotr didn’t just have a watch, he had patent leather boots.

On the Brühl Terrace
⁷
in Dresden, between two and four o’clock, at the most fashionable time for the promenade, you can meet a man of about fifty,
now gone completely grey and limping as if he has gout, but still handsome, elegantly dressed and with that special mark given
to a man only by a long sojourn in the highest society. It is Pavel Petrovich. From Moscow he went abroad for his health and
took up residence in Dresden, where he associates mainly with the English and with visiting Russians. With the English he
behaves simply, almost modestly, but not without dignity. They find him a little dull but admire him as ‘a perfect gentleman’.
⁸
With Russians he is more open, he gives vent to his bile and mocks himself and them but he does it all very endearingly,
with easy good manners. He holds Slavophile
⁹
opinions: that is well known to be thought
très distingué
¹⁰
in the highest circles. He reads nothing Russian but has on his writing table a silver ashtray in the shape of a muzhik’s
bast shoe.
¹¹
Our Russian tourists pay great court to him. Matvey Ilyich Kolyazin, finding himself ‘temporarily in opposition’,
¹²
has paid him a state visit on his way to take the waters in Bohemia.
¹³
And the local inhabitants, of whom incidentally Pavel Petrovich doesn’t see much, almost worship him. No one can get a ticket
for the Court choir, for the theatre and so forth as easily and speedily as
der Herr Baron von Kirsanoff
. He still does some good, to the extent he is able to; he still causes a bit of a sensation in society – he really had been
a lion once; but life is hard for him… harder than he himself suspects… One only needs to look at him in the Russian church
leaning against a wall to one side. For a long time he stands motionless, lost in thought, and bites his lips with a bitter
expression, then he suddenly remembers where he is and almost imperceptibly begins to cross himself…

Kukshina too has gone abroad. She is now in Heidelberg, no
longer studying the natural sciences but architecture, a subject in which she claims to have discovered new laws. She still
makes friends with students, especially with young Russian physicists and chemists. Heidelberg is full of them. They first
amaze the naive German professors with their sober view of life, and go on to amaze those same professors with their total
inertia and absolute sloth. Sitnikov is in St Petersburg. There he goes around with two or three chemists of that sort, unable
to distinguish oxygen from nitrogen but full of rebellion and self-esteem. He also keeps company with the great Yelisevich
¹⁴
– since he himself aspires to greatness. In all this he professes to be continuing Bazarov’s ‘work’. There’s a rumour he
was recently beaten up, but he’s got his own back – with an obscure little piece printed in an obscure little journal: in
it he hints that his assailant is a coward. He calls that irony. His father is still ordering him about, and his wife thinks
him an idiot… and a man of letters.

There is a small village graveyard in a remote corner of Russia. Like almost all of our graveyards it has a sad look. The
ditches round it are long overgrown. The grey wooden crosses are leaning and rotting under their gables, which once had a
coat of paint. The stone slabs have all shifted as if being pushed them up from beneath. Two or three wretched trees barely
give meagre shade. Sheep wander freely over the graves… But among them is one grave untouched by man, untrodden by beast:
only birds rest there and sing at daybreak. It is surrounded by iron railings and two young fir trees are planted at either
end. Yevgeny Bazarov is buried in that grave. Two old people often come to it from a little village near by – a husband and
wife, now infirm. Supporting each other and with heavy steps, they go up to the railings, fall down on their knees and weep
long and bitterly, and long and fixedly they look at the mute stone, under which their son lies. They exchange a few words,
they wipe the dust from the stone and adjust a fir branch, and they say another prayer, unable to leave this place, where
they feel nearer to their son and their memories of him… Are their prayers and tears really in vain? Has love, holy, devoted
love, really lost its power over all? No, no! The grave may hold
a passionate, sinful, rebellious heart, but the flowers growing on it gaze serenely at us with their innocent eyes. They do
not only speak to us of everlasting peace, of that great peace of ‘indifferent’ nature. They also speak of eternal reconciliation
and of life without end
¹⁵
…

1
  
BELINSKY
: V. G. Belinsky (1811–48), the leading Russian literary critic of the first half of the nineteenth century. His radical,
Westernizing views were extremely influential and remained so after his death. He had given a very positive review to Turgenev’s
first book,
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
, and had become a close personal friend. The text was also originally preceded by an epigraph, which Turgenev subsequently
dropped:

‘
Young man to middle-aged man
: You had substance but no strength.

Middle-aged man
: And you have strength without substance.

(
From a modern conversation.
)’

1
  
20 May 1859
: Among other things Turgenev’s novel is placed very exactly in recent time, almost two years before the momentous Emancipation
of the Serfs in February 1861.

2
  
souls
: Estates before Emancipation in 1861 were traditionally measured in the numbers of ‘souls’ of (male) serfs owned.

3
  
War of 1812
: ‘The Patriotic War’ against Napoleon after his invasion of Russia.

4
  
Agathe
: Young girls of good family would speak as much (often bad) French as Russian and would be known by French versions of their
name.

5
  
dacha
: Suburban villa, usually of wood and for summer use.

6
  
1848
: That year saw revolution in many European countries, including the German states, the Austrian Empire and France.

7
  
tarantas… trio of carriage horses
: A four-wheeled Russian carriage
without springs. This
tarantas
uses a traditional arrangement of carriage or sleigh horses harnessed as a
troika
or trio.

1
  
Vasilyev
: The usual Russian combination of Christian name and father’s or patronymic, the latter often abbreviated as here from Vasilyevich
to the more plebeian Vasilyev.

2
  
shaft-horse
: The control horse of the
troika
, harnessed between the shafts.

1
  
quit-rent
: Under the quit-rent system peasants farmed a landowner’s land in return for an annual rent in money or kind.

2
  
bailiff
: A bailiff or steward, often a liberated serf, would run an estate for a landowner.

3
  
house serfs
: Serfs attached to household duties as opposed to outdoor or agricultural ones.

4
  
Il est libre, en effet
: He is indeed free (French).

5
  
townsman
: Or
meshchanin
, one of the historic and legally defined ‘classes’ in Russian society at the level below merchants.

6
  
roubles
: 250 roubles, presumably the more valuable silver rather than paper currency, would be approximately £750 or US $1,500 in
modern terms. But it is probably more useful to give a few examples of contemporary value. The poll tax a peasant paid in
1861 was one silver rouble p.a.; the
obrok
or quit-rent paid by peasants to landowners (outside the wealthier black-earth areas) was 10.5 silver roubles per male p.a.
And a ‘bucket’ (
vedro
, a measure of something like 2½ gallons) of vodka was supposed by law to cost three roubles.

7
  
Catherine the Great
: The Empress Catherine II reigned 1762–96.

8
  
Pushkin…Eugene Onegin
: A. S. Pushkin’s famous novel in verse (1825–31). The quotation is from the second stanza of chapter VII.

1
  
new silver
: This is meaningful if one knows that Russian silver, though polished, is traditionally not cleaned of its dark oxidization.

2
  
shake hands
: In English, thus, in the original.

3
  
s’est dégourdi
: Has lost his rough edges (French).

4
  
Gambs
: For two generations the Alsatian Gambs (more properly Hambs) firm had been the most fashionable cabinet-makers in St Petersburg,
supplying furniture to among others the imperial family and Pushkin.

5
  
Galignani
:
Galignani’s Messenger
, a liberal English-language daily newspaper published in Paris.

1
  
settled boundaries
: Part of the preliminary reorganization of land leading up to Emancipation.

2
  
Vous avez changé tout cela
: You have changed all that (French).

3
  
God… rank
: A slightly misquoted line from
Woe from Wit
, A. S. Griboyedov’s comedy of 1824 (Act II, Scene 5).

4
  
Hegelists
: The idealism of the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was very popular with the Russian intelligentsia of the
1830s and 1840s, Turgenev’s own generation.

5
  
Aesop
: Sixth-century
BC
Greek author of fables, here meaning ‘a character’.

1
  
Liebig
: Justus Liebig (1803–73), German chemist.

1
  
Corps des Pages
: Founded in 1697 and housed in the Vorontsov Palace in St Petersburg, the Corps of Pages was socially the most exclusive
of Russian military schools. Its cadets acted as pages at court ceremonies.

2
  
Baden
: Baden-Baden, the famous spa in the German Black Forest, frequented by many fashionable Russians including Turgenev himself,
who settled there for a while.

3
  
Marino… in honour of his wife
: I.e. Marino after Mariya.

4
  
Wellington… Louis-Philippe
: The Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), victor over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo and British Tory politician; Louis-Philippe
(1773–1850), King of the French (1830–48).