renounced his and his son’s throne). No wonder he was also an admirable speaker, an “English style” cool orator, who eschewed the meat-chopping gesture and rhetorical bark of the demagogue, and here, too, the ridiculous cacologist I am, when not having a typed sheet before me, has inherited nothing.

Only recently have I read for the first time his important Sbornik statey po ugolovnomu pravu (a collection of articles on criminal law), published in 1904 in St. Petersburg, of which a very rare, possibly unique copy (formerly the property of a “Mihail Evgrafovich Hodunov,” as stamped in violet ink on the flyleaf) was given me by a kind traveler, Andrew Field, who bought it in a secondhand bookshop, on his visit to Russia in 1961. It is a volume of 316 pages containing nineteen papers. In one of these (“Carnal Crimes,” written in 1902), my father discusses, rather prophetically in a certain odd sense, cases (in London) “of little girls a l’age le plus tendre (v nezhneyshem vozraste), i.e. from eight to twelve years, being sacrificed to lechers (slastolyubtsam).” In the same essay he reveals a very liberal and “modern” approach to various abnormal practices, incidentally coining a convenient Russian word for “homosexual”: ravnopoliy.

It would be impossible to list the literally thousands of his articles in various periodicals, such as Rech or Pravo. In a later chapter I speak of his historically interesting book about a wartime semiofficial visit to England. Some of his memoirs pertaining to the years 1917– 1919 have appeared in the Arhiv russkoy revolyutsii, published by Hessen in Berlin. On January 16, 1920, he delivered a lecture at King’s College, London, on “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future,” which was published a week later in the Supplement to The New Commonwealth, No. 15 (neatly pasted in my mother’s album). In the spring of the same year I learned by heart most of it when preparing to speak against Bolshevism at a Union debate in Cambridge; the (victorious) apologist was a man from The Manchester Guardian; I forget his name, but recall drying up utterly after reciting what I had memorized, and that was my first and last political speech. A couple of months before my father’s death, the emigre review Teatr i zhizn’ (“Theater and Life”) started to serialize his boyhood recollections (he and I are overlapping now—too briefly). I find therein excellently described the terrible tantrums of his pedantic master of Latin at the Third Gymnasium, as well as my father’s very early, and lifelong, passion for the opera: he must have heard practically every first-rate European singer between 1880 and 1922, and although unable to play anything (except very majestically the first chords of the “Ruslan” overture) remembered every note of his favorite operas. Along this vibrant string a melodious gene that missed me glides through my father from the sixteenth-century organist Wolfgang Graun to my son.

2

I was eleven years old when my father decided that the tutoring I had had, and was still having, at home might be profitably supplemented by my attending Tenishev School. This school, one of the most remarkable in St. Petersburg, was a comparatively young institution of a much more modern and liberal type than the ordinary Gymnasium, to which general category it belonged. Its course of study, consisting of sixteen “semesters” (eight Gymnasium classes), would be roughly equivalent in America to the last six years of school plus the first two years of college. Upon my admittance, in January 1911, I found myself in the third “semester,” or in the beginning of the eighth grade according to the American system.

School was taught from the fifteenth of September to the twenty-fifth of May, with a couple of interruptions: a two-week intersemestral gap—to make place, as it were, for the huge Christmas tree that touched with its star the pale-green ceiling of our prettiest drawing room—and a one-week Easter vacation, during which painted eggs enlivened the breakfast table. Since snow and frost lasted from October well into April, no wonder the mean of my school memories is definitely hiemal.

When Ivan the first (who vanished one day) or Ivan the second (who was to see the time when I would send him forth on romantic errands) came to wake me around 8 A.M., the outside world was still cowled in brown hyperborean gloom. The electric light in the bedroom had a sullen, harsh, jaundiced tinge that made my eyes smart. Leaning my singing ear on my hand and propping my elbow on the pillow, I would force myself to prepare ten pages of unfinished homework. On my bed table, next to a stocky lamp with two bronze lion heads, stood a small unconventional clock: an upright container of crystal within which black-numbered, ivory-white, pagelike lamels flipped from right to left, each stopping for a minute the way commercial stills did on the old cinema screen. I gave myself ten minutes to tintype the text in my brain (nowadays it would take me two hours!) and, say, a dozen minutes to tub, dress (with Ivan’s help), scutter downstairs, and swallow a cup of tepid cocoa from the surface of which I plucked off by the center a round of wrinkled brown skin. Mornings were botched, and such things as the lessons in boxing and fencing that a wonderful rubbery Frenchman, Monsieur Loustalot, used to give me had to be discontinued.

He still came, almost daily, however, to spar or fence with my father. I would dash, with my fur coat half on, through the green drawing room (where an odor of fir, hot wax and tangerines would linger long after Christmas had gone), toward the library, from which came a medley of stamping and scraping sounds. There, I would find my father, a big, robust man, looking still bigger in his white training suit, thrusting and parrying, while his agile instructor added brisk exclamations (“Battez!” “Rompez!”) to the click-clink of the foils.

Panting a little, my father would remove the convex fencing mask from his perspiring pink face to kiss me good morning. The place combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves. Fat armchairs stood along the book-lined walls. An elaborate “punching ball” affair purchased in England—four steel posts supporting the board from which the pear-shaped striking bag hung—gleamed at the end of the spacious room. The purpose of this apparatus, especially in connection with the machine-gunlike ra-ta-ta of its bag, was questioned and the butler’s explanation of it reluctantly accepted as true, by some heavily armed street fighters who came in through the window in 1917. When the Soviet Revolution made it imperative for us to leave St. Petersburg, that library disintegrated, but queer little remnants of it kept cropping up abroad. Some twelve years later, in Berlin, I picked up from a bookstall one such waif, bearing my father’s ex libris. Very fittingly, it turned out to be The War of the Worlds by Wells. And after another decade had elapsed, I discovered one day in the New York Public Library, indexed under my father’s name, a copy of the neat catalogue he had had privately printed when the phantom books listed therein still stood, ruddy and sleek, on his shelves.

3

He would replace his mask and go on with his stamping and lunging while I hurried back the way I had come. After the warmth in the entrance hall, where logs were crackling in the large fireplace, the outdoor air gave an icy shock to one’s lungs. I would ascertain which of our two cars, the Benz or the Wolseley, was there to take me to school. The first, a gray landaulet, manned by Volkov, a gentle, pale-faced chauffeur, was the older one. Its lines had seemed positively dynamic in comparison with those of the insipid, noseless and noiseless, electric coupe that had preceded it; but, in its turn, it acquired an old-fashioned, top-heavy look, with a sadly shrunken bonnet, as soon as the comparatively long, black English limousine came to share its garage.

To get the newer car was to start the day zestfully. Pirogov, the second chauffeur, was a very short, pudgy fellow with a russet complexion that matched well the shade of the furs he wore over his corduroy suit and the orange-brown of his leggings. When some hitch in the traffic forced him to apply the brakes (which he did by suddenly distending himself in a peculiar springy manner), or when I bothered him by trying to communicate with him through the squeaky and not very efficient speaking tube, the back of his thick neck seen through the glass partition would turn crimson. He frankly preferred to drive the hardy convertible Opel that we used in the country during three or four seasons, and would do so at sixty miles per hour (to realize how dashing that was in 1912, one should take into account the present inflation of speed): indeed, the very essence of summer freedom—schoolless untownishness—remains connected in my mind with the motor’s extravagant roar that the opened muffler would release on the long, lone highway. When in the second year of World War One Pirogov was mobilized, he was replaced by dark, wild-eyed Tsiganov, a former racing ace, who had participated in various contests both in Russia and abroad and had had several ribs broken in a bad smash in Belgium. Later, sometime in 1917, soon after my father resigned from Kerenski’s cabinet, Tsiganov decided—notwithstanding my father’s energetic protests—to save the powerful Wolseley car from possible confiscation by dismantling it and distributing its parts over hiding places known only to him. Still later, in the gloom of a tragic autumn, with the Bolshevists gaining the upper hand, one of Kerenski’s aides asked my father for a sturdy car the premier might use if forced to leave in a hurry; but our debile old Benz would not do and the Wolseley had embarrassingly vanished, and if I treasure the recollection of that

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