Foma Fomich is now resting in his grave next to the General’s Lady; it is marked by a magnificent tombstone of white marble emblazoned with lachrymose inscriptions and laudatory epitaphs. Every now and then, whilst out walking, Uncle and Nastenka will turn into the churchyard to pay homage to Foma Fomich. To this day they cannot speak of him but in tones of deep feeling, lovingly recalling his every word, his favourite meals, his likes and dislikes. His personal belongings are preserved and treasured. In their bereavement, my uncle and Nastenka have grown all the closer to each other. God has not blessed them with children; although this grieves them in the extreme, they never think of complaining. Sashenka was married a good while ago to a splendid young man. Ilyusha is studying in Moscow. Thus Uncle and Nastenka have ended up living on their own, and they are blissfully happy in each other’s company. Their anxiety for each other is almost morbid. Nastenka spends all her time in prayer. I think that if one of them were to die first, the other would hardly survive a week. But may God grant them a long life! All who come to see them are welcomed with open arms, and they are ready to share all they possess with anyone suffering misfortune. Nastenka is fond of reading the lives of the saints, and maintains with remorse that good deeds alone are not enough, that really they ought to distribute everything to the destitute and seek happiness in poverty. Had it not been for the need to provide for Sashenka and Ilyusha, Uncle would have done just that, since he readily agrees with his wife in all things. Praskovya Ilyinichna continues to live with them and delights in indulging them to the full; she is also responsible for managing the household. Mr Bakhcheyev proposed to her not long after Uncle’s marriage, but she turned him down flat. It was consequently assumed that she would enter a nunnery, but this did not happen either. One peculiar trait in Praskovya Ilyinichna’s character is that she is utterly self-effacing as regards those she has chosen to love: she will be totally unobtrusive in their presence, look into their eyes, submit to all their caprices, follow in their footsteps, and wait upon them in all things. Now that her mother is dead, she feels duty bound to stay close to her brother and to pamper Nastenka to the full. Old Yezhevikin is still alive, and has lately been coming to see his daughter more and more regularly. At first he thoroughly exasperated Uncle by totally disassociating himself and his small fry (as he calls his children) from Stepanchikovo. None of Uncle’s invitations seemed to have any effect upon him; he was not so much proud as touchy and sensitive to a degree. This sensitivity, indeed, sometimes verged on the pathological. The very thought that he, a pauper, might be tolerated in a well-to-do household out of charity and thus be considered obtrusive and tiresome, thoroughly mortified him; sometimes he would not even accept assistance from Nastenka unless it was in the bare necessities. As for being helped by Uncle, he would not even hear of it. Nastenka had been quite mistaken in telling me that time in the garden that her father acted the fool for her benefit. True, he was most anxious to marry her off, but his clowning was to a much greater extent the result of an inner compulsion to find an outlet for his own pent-up spleen. Mockery and ridicule were in his blood. He would portray himself, for example, as the most obsequious and despicable of flatterers; but he always made it clear that he was play-acting; in fact, the lower he stooped in his obsequiousness, the more pointed and extreme became his mockery. Such was his nature and he could not help it. All his children were placed in the best educational establishments in Moscow and Petersburg, but only after Nastenka had made it clear to him that this would be entirely at her own expense, that is, paid for out of the thirty thousand given to her by Tatyana Ivanovna. As a matter of fact, they had never actually taken this thirty thousand from Tatyana Ivanovna; but so as not to hurt or offend her they had assured her that if ever there was an urgent family need her help would be sought first. And that was exactly what was done; to placate her, two fairly substantial loans were negotiated from her on two separate occasions. But Tatyana Ivanovna died three years ago, and so Nastenka received her thirty thousand in any case. Poor Tatyana Ivanovna died very suddenly. The whole family was preparing to go to a ball given by one of the neighbouring landowners and she had just put on her evening-gown and adorned her hair with a charming wreath of white roses, when she suddenly felt a nausea, sat down in her chair and died. She was buried still wearing the wreath. Nastenka was desperate. Tatyana Ivanovna had been cherished and cared for in the house as though she were a child. To everybody’s surprise she left a remarkably sensible will: Nastenka’s thirty thousand apart, all the rest, nearly three hundred thousand rubles in cash, went towards the upbringing of orphaned girls and cash gratuities on completion of their education. The same year that Tatyana Ivanovna died saw the marriage of Miss Perepelitsyna, who had stayed on in the house after the death of the General’s Lady in the hope of inveigling herself into the wealthy spinster’s favour. The erstwhile clerk and present landowner in Mishino, the little village which had seen the episode with Tatyana Ivanovna, Obnoskin and his Mamma, had in the meantime become a widower. This man, an incorrigible litigant, had a family of six by his first wife. Suspecting Perepelitsyna of having money, he began to ply her with offers of marriage, and she immediately accepted. But Perepelitsyna was as poor as a church mouse: three hundred rubles in silver was all she could claim to possess, and even these were out of Nastenka’s pocket, given her to help with the wedding expenses. Husband and wife are now at each other’s throat all day long. She pulls his children about by the hair and boxes their ears; he himself has his face clawed (or so people claim) and is constantly reminded that her father was a Lieutenant-Colonel. Mizinchikov too has now settled down. After prudently abandoning all his designs on Tatyana Ivanovna, he began to show an interest in agriculture. Uncle recommended him to a wealthy Count, a landowner, who would occasionally come to review his estate, which had three thousand serfs and which was situated about eighty versts from Stepanchikovo. Having identified Mizinchikov’s abilities and considered my uncle’s recommendation, the Count offered him the management of his estate, dismissing on the spot his German predecessor, who, in spite of the much-vaunted German honesty, had been swindling his master at every step and turn. Five years later the estate was unrecognizable: the peasants had prospered; new ventures had been initiated which had not previously been considered viable; profits had nearly doubled — in short, the new manager had excelled himself and word of his unique business acumen spread throughout the province. The Count’s bewilderment and mortification may be imagined when at the end of five years Mizinchikov, despite all pleas and inducements, firmly resolved to leave his post and announced his retirement! The Count believed that his employee had been enticed away by the other landowners of the neighbourhood, or even to another province. But what was everybody’s surprise when two months after his retirement Mizinchikov suddenly turned out to be the proud possessor of an excellent estate of his own of a hundred serfs, situated at a distance of precisely forty versts from the Count’s property, and purchased from a former friend of his, a hussar, who had frittered away his money and found himself totally destitute. He at once mortgaged the hundred serfs, and a year later acquired sixty more from the district. Now he is an established landowner and his estate is unrivalled. People cannot stop wondering how he came into possession of the necessary capital in the first place, others merely shake their heads in total disbelief. But Ivan Ivanovich is quite unperturbed and feels perfectly within his rights. He has brought his sister over from Moscow, the one who parted with her last three rubles to enable him to purchase his boots when he was setting out for Stepanchikovo — as sweet a soul as ever one could wish to meet, no longer in her prime, but very meek, loving and well educated, though extremely subdued. She previously eked out a living in Moscow as a paid companion to a rich patroness; now she worships her brother, runs the house for him, complies with his every whim, and is perfectly contented with life. Her brother does not indulge her overmuch. In fact he is rather repressive to her, but she does not seem to mind. They have taken a great liking to her in Stepanchikovo, and rumour has it that Bakhcheyev is quite partial to her. He would surely have proposed by now but for his fear of being turned down. As for Mr Bakhcheyev, it is our intention to say a good deal more of him in another story.

  That, then, should be all … No! I nearly forgot: Gavrila has grown very old and completely forgotten all his French. Falaley has turned into a very capable coachman, but poor Vidoplyasov was put in a madhouse a long time ago, and there I understand he met his end … I shall be going to Stepanchikovo shortly and must remember to ask Uncle about him.

  Notes

  Page 34: Ivan Yakovlevich Koreysha … A ‘holy man’ in Moscow who was particularly famous 1820–30. Semyon Yakovlevich in Devils is based on this figure.

  Page 40: The Liberation of Moscow, Ataman Storm, Filial Love — or Russians in 1104 … Popular pseudo-historical adventure novels of 1830–40. Of Ataman Storm Belinsky wrote in a review published in 1835 that it ‘belongs to that particular category of works, the initial idea for which is born in the market-place.’

  Page 40: Baron Brambeus. Pen-name of O. I. Senkovsky (1800–51), a clever, witty but superficial critic who delighted in reviewing and ridiculing insignificant works.

  Page 41: Thirty thousand people will throng every month to attend my lectures. A reference to Gogol’s appointment in 1834 as assistant professor in history at St Petersburg University. The appointment lasted one year only and proved a disastrous failure. His lectures were often dull and consisted of nothing more than a catalogue of bare facts.

  Page 41: he, Foma, was destined one day to perform a great feat … Cf. Gogol’s letter to the writer S. T. Aksakov of 13 June 1841 (first published in 1857): ‘My work is great, my endeavour salutary. I am dead now to everything that is trivial …’

  Page 41: he was to compose a profoundly searching magnum opus of a spiritually edifying nature that would shake the world and stun all Russia. In Gogol’s ‘Testament’ in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, we read of a ‘Farewell Novel’: ‘… the best to come from my pen and that I have been carrying in my heart a long time as my greatest treasure.’

  Page 41: Foma, scorning glory, would withdraw to a monastery … for the salvation of his motherland. Cf. Gogol’s statement in Selected Passages: ‘I shall be praying at the tomb of Our Saviour for all my compatriots excluding no one.’

  Page 44: You’ve got to be doubly considerate to someone in your debt … A similar sentiment is expressed in Dostoyevsky’s letter of 14 August 1855 to A. E. Vrangel: ‘… I know very well that you appreciate better than anyone perhaps how one must treat a person beholden to you. I know you will be twice, three times more considerate with him; a person in debt must be treated with care; he is apprehensive; he is forever imagining that in treating him carelessly and familiarly people are trying to make him repay his debts’ (Dostoyevsky’s italics.)

  Page 45: on Foma’s express orders my uncle was compelled to shave off his splendid red-brown side whiskers. Nicholas I in a special ukase of 2 April 1837 forbade civil servants to wear beards or moustaches.

  Page 46: Foma Fomich invariably adopted this tone when conversing with the ‘shrewd Russian peasant’. In the letter ‘Russian Landowner’ in Selected Passages, Gogol gives the following advice on how to address a negligent peasant: ‘You unwashed mug! Look at you covered in soot to your eyeballs and still refusing to pay homage!’ Belinsky quotes these words with indignation in his letter to Gogol of 15 July 1847.

  Page 78: Frol Silin, a charitable man … See note to page 131.

  Page 93: The Simpleton … A popular novel by A. F. Pisemsky first published in 1850. The narrator here identifies himself with Pisemsky’s hero, Pavel Vasilyevich Beshmetev, a young nobleman of good education, but clumsy, ungainly and with no experience of life, which eventually leads to his downfall.

  Page 103: the Kholmsky family. The title of a long novel running into six parts by D. N. Begichev published in 1832, relating the life-story of four sisters belonging to a large family of the Russian nobility.

  Page 104: My dear sir and benefactor! The simple man is the one I’m afraid of most of all! In a letter of 22 February 1854 to his brother Mikhail, Dostoyevsky writes: ‘It’s the simple man I’m afraid of more than the complex one.’

  Page 108: (the young man is a notary in Malinov now, a brilliant fellow with a universal education!) … The town of Malinov is the setting for the second part of A. I. Herzen’s amusing sketch ‘Notes of a Young Man’ published in 1841. Malinov is referred to as ‘the worst city in the world, because one cannot imagine anything worse for a city than its total non-existence … Malinov lies not within the pale of the world, but somewhere outside it.’ Rostanev’s reference to the legendary city of Malinov, ‘which you will not discover on any map of either the ancient or the new world’, indicates his confused and abstracted state of mind.

  Page 118: I’ve stuffed myself with pie like Martin full of soap! One of the numerous expressions used by Dostoyevsky in The Village of Stepanchikovo which are recorded in his Siberian Notebook.

  Page 121: The band consisted of two balalaikas, a guitar, a fiddle and a tambourine … Cf. the band described in Notes from the House of the Dead, part I, chapter 11. The repertoire is similar too: dance tunes ending invariably with the komarinsky.

  Page 125: Only a stupid society dim-wit could conceive of such senseless niceties. An almost verbatim quote from the third of the ‘Four Letters to Various People apropos “Dead Souls”’ in Gogol’s Selected Passages: ‘only a stupid society dimwit could think of anything so stupid.’

  Page 127: Was he a manorial peasant, a crown peasant, a free peasant, a bonded or economical peasant? ‘Manorial peasants’ belonged to the landowner; ‘Crown’ or ‘State peasants’ to the Tsar or the State. ‘Bonded peasants’ were those who had negotiated with their owners a certain titled right to the land allotted to them, which effectively made them part landowners. This was done on the strength of a special ukase of 2 April 1842. ‘Economical peasants’ were a category of State peasants formed in the eighteenth century as a result of the secularization of Church property and its transfer to the State.

  Page 129: What have all these Pushkins, Lermontovs, Borozdnas been doing up to now? In 1852 a collection of poems came out in St Petersburg entitled ‘Forget-me-not. A Lady’s Album Containing the Best Examples of Russian Poetry …’ The poets featured ranged from Pushkin and Lermontov to such obscurities as I. P. Kreshnev, I. P. Borozdna and K. I. Korenev. Opiskin and the compilers of ‘Forget-me-not’ were happy to lump all poets into the same category.

  Page 129: People are dancing the komarinsky, this apotheosis of drunkenness … The music critic F. Tolstoy (pen-name Rostislav) complained bitterly about the contemporary trends in art which sacrificed aesthetic taste to the demands of naturalism. In an article on A. Rubinstein’s opera Fomka the Fool published in 1854 he wrote: ‘What pleasure is there in the contortions of a dishevelled, stupid muzhik? The drinking-house and all that it entails is, of course, a matter of considerable significance, but is it worth depicting it in an aesthetic work?’ Dostoyevsky was rather impatient with such arch-conservatism.

  Page 129: I know Russia and Mother Russia knows me … Quotation from N. A. Polevoy’s foreword to his historical novel Solemn Vow at the Tomb of Our Lord (1832), for which he was frequently held up to ridicule, notably by Belinsky.

  Page 129: Let them portray this peasant … glorifying his poverty and indifferent to the gold of the wealthy. Cf. Gogol’s advice in ‘Topics for a Contemporary Lyric Poet’ in his Selected Passages: ‘Depict their glorious poverty so that it shine forth in everybody’s eyes like an object of sanctity and induce each one of us to wish he were poor.’

  Page 131: the immortal Karamzin … Frol Silin … N. M. Karamzin’s History of the Russian State was published in eleven volumes in 1816–24, an unfinished twelfth volume appearing posthumously in 1829. The tale Frol Silin, a Charitable Man first appeared in 1791 and was reissued in 1848. Frol Silin is an industrious settler in the Simbirsk Province who in times of hardship distributes bread and alms to the poor and needy. Dostoyevsky was impatient with Karamzin’s cloying sentimentality and in his article ‘Bookishness and Literacy’ exhorted his readers ‘not to judge’ of the spirit of the nation ‘by Karamzin’s novels and their bone china landscapes.’

  Page 131: The Mysteries of Brussels … A very inferior imitation by an anonymous author of Marie-Joseph (Eugène) Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris. It appeared in translation in St Petersburg in 1847.

  Page 131: “The Scribe” … A reference to the pen-name of the writer and critic A. V. Druzhinin who in 1849–52 wrote articles in the journal Sovremennik, under the heading ‘Letters of an out-of-town subscriber’, representing the views of an enlightened landowner who kept abreast of all the current literary events.

  Page 138: Monsieur Chematon … From the French chomer — to cease work, hence ‘Mr Ne’er-do-well’.

  Page 162: Why is it I am always happy, always content, in spite of all my anguish; calm in spirit and a burden to no one … Cf. Gogol’s ‘Testament’ in Selected Passages: ‘weak though I be and insignificant, I have always heartened my friends, and no one who has associated with me lately, no one in his moment of gloom and despondency has observed on me a dejected aspect, although I too have had my moments of difficulty and suffered no less than others …’

  Page 162: For all he knew, it might have been Machiavelli or Mercadante sitting before him … Foma mentions at random two similar-sounding names which have nothing in common. Mercadante’s operas and vocal pieces were frequently performed in the 1830s and 1840s in St Petersburg theatres and his name was therefore well known. It is more likely that Foma meant Mirandola, the fifteenth-century Italian philosopher whose claim to erudition was far greater. It was said of Pico della Mirandola that he knew everything there is to know and much else besides.