... We were a party of eight in the room, and
we were talking of contemporary affairs and men.
‘I don’t understand these men!’
observed A.: ’they’re such desperate
fellows.... Really desperate.... There has
never been anything like it before.’
‘Yes, there has,’ put in P., a man getting
on in years, with grey hair, born some time in the
twenties of this century: ’there were desperate
characters in former days too, only they were not like
the desperate fellows of to-day. Of the poet
Yazikov some one has said that he had enthusiasm,
but not applied to anything—an enthusiasm
without an object. So it was with those people—their
desperateness was without an object. But there,
if you’ll allow me, I’ll tell you the story
of my nephew, or rather cousin, Misha Poltyev.
It may serve as an example of the desperate characters
of those days.
He came into God’s world, I remember, in 1828,
at his father’s native place and property, in
one of the sleepiest corners of a sleepy province
of the steppes. Misha’s father, Andrei Nikolaevitch
Poltyev, I remember well to this day. He was
a genuine old-world landowner, a God-fearing, sedate
man, fairly—for those days—well
educated, just a little cracked, to tell the truth—and,
moreover, he suffered from epilepsy.... That
too is an old-world, gentlemanly complaint....
Andrei Nikolaevitch’s fits were, however, slight,
and generally ended in sleep and depression.
He was good-hearted, and of an affable demeanour, not
without a certain stateliness: I always pictured
to myself the tsar Mihail Fedorovitch as like him.
The whole life of Andrei Nikolaevitch was passed in
the punctual fulfilment of every observance established
from old days, in strict conformity with all the usages
of the old orthodox holy Russian mode of life.
He got up and went to bed, ate his meals, and went
to his bath, rejoiced or was wroth (both very rarely,
it is true), even smoked his pipe and played cards
(two great innovations!), not after his own fancy,
not in a way of his own, but according to the custom
and ordinance of his fathers—with due decorum
and formality. He was tall, well built, and stout;
his voice was soft and rather husky, as is so often
the case with virtuous people in Russia; he was scrupulously
neat in his dress and linen, and wore white cravats
and full-skirted snuff-coloured coats, but his noble
blood was nevertheless evident; no one could have
taken him for a priest’s son or a merchant!
At all times, on all possible occasions, and in all
possible contingencies, Andrei Nikolaevitch knew without
fail what ought to be done, what was to be said, and
precisely what expressions were to be used; he knew
when he ought to take medicine, and just what he ought
to take; what omens were to be believed and what might
be disregarded ... in fact, he knew everything that
ought to be done.... For as everything had been
provided for and laid down by one’s elders, one
had only to be sure not to imagine anything of one’s
self.... And above all, without God’s blessing
not a step to be taken!—It must be confessed
that a deadly dulness reigned supreme in his house,
in those low-pitched, warm, dark rooms, that so often
resounded with the singing of liturgies and all-night
services, and had the smell of incense and Lenten dishes
almost always hanging about them!
