‡‡‡ Ibid. Letter to A. G. Dostoyevskaya, vol. 7, p. 70.

  §§§ See M. N. Stroyeva, Rezhissyorskiye iskaniya Stanislavskogo 1898–1917, Moscow, 1973, pp. 348–50.

  PART I

  1

  Introductory

  After his retirement from military service, my uncle, Colonel Yegor Ilyich Rostanev, moved to his inherited estate of Stepanchikovo and settled down there so readily that one would have supposed he had been born and bred on the estate and never left it. Some natures are completely satisfied with everything and are readily adaptive to all circumstances; such a nature was the retired Colonel’s. It would be difficult to imagine a man more benign and compliant. If one had asked him for a ride on his back for a distance of say two versts, the Colonel would probably not have refused. His generosity was such that on occasion he would have been ready to part with everything on the spot, down to his last shirt, and hand it to any needy person he chanced to meet. He was very powerfully built: tall and well-proportioned, with a fresh complexion, ivory-white teeth, a full, reddy-brown moustache, and a rich sonorous voice which rang pleasantly when he laughed. His manner of speaking was hurried and uneven. At the time of his retirement, he was around forty; from about the age of sixteen he had spent all his life in the hussars. He had married very young and loved his wife dearly. When she died, he was left with a host of tender and grateful memories. Finally, after inheriting Stepanchikovo, which increased his estate to six hundred serfs, he decided to forsake military life and settle in the country with his children — eight-year-old Ilyusha (whose birth had cost his mother her life) and his elder daughter Sashenka, a girl of about fifteen who had been attending boarding-school in Moscow since her mother’s death. But soon my uncle’s house was to become a veritable Noah’s Ark, and this is how it came about.

  At the same time as he inherited his estate and retired from the army, his mother, the wife of General Krakhotkin, lost her husband. This had been her second marriage, contracted sixteen years earlier, when my uncle was only a second lieutenant and was himself thinking of taking a wife. For a long time his mother had refused to countenance such a union — she wept bitter tears, reproached him with selfishness, ingratitude, and disrespect; tried to prove that his estate — two hundred and fifty serfs in all — was barely sufficient to support his family as it was (that is, her own self with her establishment of hanger-ons, pug and spitz dogs, Chinese cats, and so on); and then suddenly, quite unexpectedly, in the midst of all her reproaches, accusations and screaming, even before her son, and notwithstanding her forty-two years, entered into matrimony herself. But even now she was able to find a pretext for directing further reproaches at my poor uncle, maintaining that the only reason she had taken a husband was to provide herself with a refuge in her old age — a refuge which her disrespectful, egotistical son had denied her by taking the outrageous step of setting up his own home.

  It has always been a mystery to me why such an apparently level-headed person as the late General Krakhotkin should have chosen to marry a forty-two-year-old widow. It must be assumed that he suspected she had money. Some were of the opinion that he simply needed a nurse, as even at that time he probably foresaw the succession of maladies which were to plague him in old age. It is certain, however, that the old General had no respect for his wife during the entire period of their married life, and mocked her mercilessly at every available opportunity. He was a strange person. Semi-educated but by no means a fool, he hated all and sundry, submitted to no authority, took perverse pleasure in ridicule and mockery, and in old age, from ill-health that resulted from a none too regular or virtuous way of life, grew short-tempered, irritable and stony-hearted. His service career had been successful until, in consequence of some ‘unpleasant incident’, he had been obliged to tender his resignation in undignified haste, narrowly escaping court martial and having to forego his pension. He became embittered. Almost completely without means, this owner of a hundred-odd impoverished serfs turned his back on the world, and for the rest of his life, twelve years or so, never bothered to enquire how or by whom he was being maintained; at the same time he insisted on enjoying all of life’s comforts, refused to limit his expenses, and kept a carriage. Before long he lost the use of his legs and spent the remaining ten years of his life in a wheel-chair, attended by two seven-foot tall manservants upon whom he heaped every kind of abuse. Carriage, servants and wheelchairs were provided and maintained by the disrespectful son, who supplied his mother with cash borrowed on security several times over, denying himself necessities, incurred debts which he had practically no hope of settling from his meagre income, and who for all that remained in her eyes an ungrateful and hard-bitten egotist of a son. My uncle’s character, however, was such that finally he too began to believe in his own egotism, and, in self-punishment and an attempt to prove he was otherwise, sent his mother more and more money.

  The General’s wife worshipped her husband. But her greatest pleasure was derived from the fact that he was a general, and that she could therefore rejoice in the title of ‘General’s Lady’. She had her own suite of rooms in the house where, during the whole period of her husband’s semi-existence, she flourished in the company of numerous hangers-on, gossips and lap-dogs. In the little provincial town she was a person to be reckoned with. Invitations to weddings and christenings, kopeck-stake card games and all-round adulation more than compensated for her domestic frustrations. Gossips called on her regularly with their latest reports; everywhere she went she was accorded a place of honour; in short, she exploited to the full all the privileges that her husband’s title afforded. The General did not interfere in any of this, but he taunted her mercilessly in public. He would ask out loud, for instance, “Whyever did I marry that sanctimonious hag?” and no one dared to argue with him. One after another all his acquaintances turned their backs on him — a treatment ill-suited to his desperate dependence on society, for he loved to talk and argue, he simply loved to have a listener permanently seated before him. As a freethinker and old-style atheist, he had a need to discourse from time to time on lofty matters.

  But the listeners of the town of N** had little time for lofty matters and came to see him less and less regularly. To humour him, an attempt was made to introduce members of the household to preference; but the game would normally end in disaster, with the General having such fits that his terror-stricken spouse and her retinue would be driven to lighting candles to the saints, offering prayers, divining their fortunes from tea-leaves and cards, even distributing alms at the prison gates, in trepidation at the thought of the afternoon session when they would yet again have to expose themselves, for every mistake, to shouts, howls, cursing and all but physical assault. The General, when displeased, overstepped all bounds of propriety: sometimes he would tear up and scatter the playing cards all over the floor, chase his partners out of the room, and even weep in anger and exasperation, for no other reason than that somebody had put down a jack instead of a nine. Finally his eyesight began to fail, and he needed someone who would read to him. It is at this juncture that Foma Fomich Opiskin first appears on the scene.

  I must confess, it is with more than a little awe that I introduce this new personage. He is undoubtedly one of the principal characters of my tale. But what sort of claim he has on the reader’s attention I shall not presume to judge: the reader will be better able to make up his own mind.

  Foma Fomich joined General Krakhotkin’s household as a pick-thank in dire need — no more, no less. Where exactly he came from is shrouded in mystery. However, I did make a few enquiries about the former circumstances of this remarkable person. First, it was said that he had been in government service but had suffered for a cause — needless to say, a just one. It was also rumoured that he had tried his hand at literature in Moscow. That in itself is not surprising, for however abysmal his ignorance, it could hardly have constituted an obstacle to his literary career. Only one thing was beyond dispute — he was finally obliged to enter martyrdom in the General’s service as a reader. There was no humiliation that he was not obliged to suffer for his keep. Of course, after the General’s death, when Foma quite unexpectedly began to play an important and unique role, he was at pains to assure us all that in agreeing to play the clown, he had made a selfless sacrifice in the name of friendship; that the General, his benefactor, had in fact been an outstanding person, sadly misunderstood by all, and that only to him, Foma, had he confided the innermost secrets of his soul; and furthermore that if he, Foma, had portrayed various animals and tableaux vivants at the General’s behest, it was solely to comfort and amuse a wretched bedridden invalid and a dear friend. However, the protestations of Foma Fomich in this matter are open to grave doubt. Meanwhile, at the same time as serving the General as fool, he came to play a vastly different role in the women’s wing of the house. How he managed to achieve this no one but an expert in such matters could attempt to explain. The General’s Lady held him in a kind of mystical reverence. Why? We do not know. Gradually he gained an astonishing ascendancy over the ladies, reminiscent of that exercised by such prophets and men of vision as Ivan Yakovlevich Koreysha, whom certain ladies are so fond of visiting in lunatic asylums. Foma Fomich would give readings from devotional books and hold forth with eloquent tears on Christian virtues; recount his life story and achievements, attend midday and even morning mass, and even foretell the future; he was particularly adept at analysing dreams, and a past-master at running down his fellow-men. The General had a vague idea of what was going on in the women’s rooms at the rear of the house, and tyrannized his victim all the more. But the martyrdom of Foma Fomich only gained him greater respect in the eyes of the General’s Lady and her companions.

  At last everything changed. The General died. The manner of his death, it must be owned, was original. The erstwhile freethinker and confirmed atheist turned out to be a thorough coward. He wept, repented, kissed icons, summoned priests. Masses were sung, he was anointed. The poor wretch cried that he had no wish to die, and with tears streaming down his face even begged Foma Fomich for forgiveness. This latter act subsequently gave an enormous boost to Foma Fomich’s prestige. However, before the final separation of the General’s soul and body the following incident occurred. The daughter of the General’s Lady by her first marriage, my aunt Praskovya Ilyinichna, who had long before resigned herself to spinsterhood and settled in the General’s house only to become his favourite victim throughout his ten wheelchair-bound years, proving herself an indispensable nurse who alone, in her meek and simple-hearted way, was able to attend to all his whims and caprices — approached his bedside with a tear-sodden face and was about to straighten his pillow when the invalid managed to catch hold of her hair and tug it three times all but foaming at the mouth with venom. Ten minutes later he was dead. The Colonel was duly informed, although the General’s Lady announced that she had no intention of seeing him, and that only over her dead body would he be allowed anywhere near her at such a time. The funeral was a splendid one, needless to say arranged at the expense of the disrespectful son, who himself was forbidden to appear.

  In the bankrupt estate of Knyazyovka, owned jointly by a number of landowners, the General’s share having been about one hundred serfs, stands a white marble mausoleum emblazoned with laudatory inscriptions on the wisdom, talent, probity and military prowess of the departed. Foma Fomich was in large part responsible for these inscriptions.

  For a long time after her husband’s death, the General’s Lady stubbornly resisted any suggestion of relenting towards her disobedient son. Surrounded by her coterie of cronies and lap-dogs, she insisted, weeping and wailing, that she would sooner live on dry crusts — and of course ‘wash them down with her tears’ — she would sooner go out and beg for charity than accept the disobedient one’s invitation to come and settle in Stepanchikovo; that never, never, never would she so much as set foot in his house. The word foot when enunciated in this sense by some ladies has a particularly meaningful quality, and the General’s Lady was a supreme artist in enunciating it … In short, she displayed no end of eloquent indignation on the subject. It ought to be mentioned, however, that amid all the screaming and shouting, preparations were steadily under way for her eventual move to Stepanchikovo. The Colonel nearly flogged his horses to death racing the forty-odd versts from Stepanchikovo to town every day, and yet it was a fortnight after the General’s funeral before he received permission to appear before his outraged parent. Foma Fomich acted as an intermediary in the negotiations. Throughout the two weeks he reproached and scolded the disobedient son for his ‘inhuman’ behaviour and reduced him to tears of shame and abject despair. Thus began Foma Fomich’s extraordinary and inhuman domination of my poor uncle. Foma saw the kind of man he had to deal with, and immediately realized that his days as clown and scapegoat were over, that in the land of the weak he himself could be tsar. And he certainly missed no opportunity to make up for the past.

  ‘What would be your feelings,’ Foma would say to him, ‘if your own mother, the prime source of your existence, as it were, had to stumble about clutching a pauper’s staff with hands trembling and weak from hunger — actually begging? Would it not be monstrous in view of her august title and many personal virtues? Could you describe your feelings if she were suddenly to turn up here — accidentally, of course, but it could happen — on your doorstep, in rags, starving, while you, her own son, were wallowing in the lap of luxury! Dreadful, dreadful! And the worst part of it is — let me tell you frankly, Colonel — that even now you stand before me like a wooden post, with mouth hanging open and eyes popping — it’s positively indecent … whereas the very thought of such an appalling spectacle ought to be making you tear out your hair by the roots and weep floods … What am I saying! Rivers, lakes, seas, oceans of tears! …’

  In short, Foma Fomich would get carried away in the heat of the moment. But that was always the way with his outbursts of eloquence. The upshot of it all was that the General’s Lady, accompanied by her hangers-on, her lap-dogs, Foma Fomich, and her principal confidante, Miss Perepelitsyna, finally graced Stepanchikovo with her arrival. Her sojourn, she announced, would only be long enough to test her son’s devotion. It may be imagined what the Colonel had to go through while his devotion was being put to the test. To begin with, as a result of her recent bereavement, the General’s Lady felt it incumbent upon her at least two or three times a week to indulge in bitter despair at the slightest mention of her departed spouse; and invariably it was the Colonel who, for some reason or other, had to bear the brunt of her displeasure. Often, especially in the presence of visitors, having summoned her little grandson Ilyusha and fifteen-year-old grand-daughter Sashenka and seated them beside her, the General’s Lady would fix on them her sad tormented eyes as on children brought to ruin by such a father, and then, sighing deeply, release a silent and mysterious flood of tears lasting for at least an hour. Woe betide the Colonel if he failed to understand those tears! But the poor man never could, and in his naivety would turn up in her presence at just such tearful moments, and invariably find himself put to the test. His own devotion, however, showed no signs of diminishing, and eventually reached untold proportions. Both the General’s Lady and Foma Fomich now realized that the thundercloud which had loomed over them for so many years in the shape of General Krakhotkin, had finally and irrevocably been dispersed. There were occasions when the General’s Lady, for no apparent reason, would go into a swoon on the sofa, and the whole house would be in turmoil. The Colonel would stand confounded, shaking like an aspen leaf.

  ‘Heartless son!’ the General’s Lady would cry, regaining consciousness, ‘you have rent my entrails … mes entrailles, mes entrailles!’

  ‘Mamma, how could I have done such a thing?’ the Colonel would protest meekly.

  ‘You have! You have! No more of your excuses! The insolence of the man! You cruel creature! I’m dying!’

  The Colonel, of course, would feel utterly crushed.

  Miraculously, however, the General’s Lady would always recover. And half an hour later the Colonel, having button-holed someone, would be heard explaining away his mother’s antics.

  ‘You must understand how it is with her, my dear fellow: une grande dame, wife of a General, you know! She’s the kindest old lady; but you see, she’s used to every refinement in life … it’s different for a ruffian like me. She’s furious with me now. Don’t even know what I’m supposed to have done, my dear fellow, but, of course, it’s clear I’m to blame …’

  Occasionally the old spinster Perepelitsyna, a dried-up creature embittered with all the world, with tiny rapacious eyes devoid of eyebrows, paper-thin lips, hands washed in pickled gherkin juice, and wearing a chignon, would feel duty bound to treat uncle to a lecture:

  ‘It’s all because you’ve no consideration, sir. Because you’re selfish! Shame on you for treating your dear mother so: she’s used to better, sir. You’re still only a Colonel, sir, you ought to have some respect for her title.’

  ‘Miss Perepelitsyna, my friend,’ the Colonel would observe to his listener, ‘is a remarkably fine lady — so protective towards Mamma! A rare lady! No mere hanger-on, God forbid. As a matter of fact, she’s a Lieutenant-Colonel’s daughter herself. Yes, really!’

  Of course, all this was just the beginning. The same General’s Lady who was capable of such antics as these was in her turn like a mouse before her former dependant. Opiskin had bewitched her completely. She doted on him, she heard with his ears, and she saw with his eyes. A distant cousin of mine, also retired from the hussars though still in his prime, but a reckless profligate who had come to the end of his tether and at one time sought shelter in my uncle’s house, declared without ado that the General’s Lady maintained improper relations with Foma Fomich. Naturally, I immediately rejected such a supposition with indignation as altogether too insulting and facile. No, I believed there was another explanation, and this I can only begin to explain to the reader by giving some preliminary account of the character of Foma Fomich Opiskin as I eventually came to understand it.