The Gift

a transformed St. Petersburg, Ch. was hungry for any news, the which we undertook to give him plenty of, mixed with our outrageous fabrications. To the question, for instance, was Pushkin alive and what was he writing, I blasphemously replied, “Why, he came out with a new poem the other day.” That night we took our guest to the theater. It did not turn out too well, however. Instead of treating him to a new Russian comedy we showed him Othello with the famous black tragedian Aldridge. At first our American planter seemed to be highly amused by the appearance of a genuine Negro on the stage. But he remained indifferent to the marvelous power of his acting and was more taken up with examining the audience, especially our St. Petersburg ladies (one of whom he soon afterwards married), who were devoured at that moment with envy for Desdemona.

“Look who’s sitting next to us,” my brother suddenly said to Ch. in a low voice, “There, to our right.”

In the neighboring box there sat an old man…. Of shortish stature, in a worn tailcoat, with a sallow and swarthy complexion, disheveled ashen side-whiskers, and sparse, gray-streaked tousled hair, he was taking a most eccentric delight in the acting of the African: his thick lips twitched, his nostrils were dilated, and at certain bits he even jumped up and down in his seat and banged with delight on the parapet, his rings flashing.

“Who’s that?” asked Ch.

“What, don’t you recognize him? Look closer.”

“I don’t recognize him.”

Then my brother made big eyes and whispered, “Why, that’s Pushkin!”

Ch. looked again… and after a minute became interested by something else. It seems funny now to recall what a strange mood came upon me then: the prank, as happens from time to time, rebounded, and this frivolously summoned ghost did not want to disappear: I was quite incapable of tearing myself away from the neighboring box; I looked at those harsh wrinkles, that broad nose, those large ears… shivers ran down my back, and not all of Othello’s jealousy was able to drag me away. What if this is indeed Pushkin, I mused, Pushkin at sixty, Pushkin spared two decades ago by the bullet of the fatal coxcomb, Pushkin in the rich autumn of his genius…. This is he; this yellow hand grasping those lady’s opera glasses wrote Anchar, Graf Nulin, The Egyptian Nights…. The act finished; applause thundered. Gray-haired Pushkin stood up abruptly, and still smiling, with a bright sparkle in his youthful eyes, quickly left his box.

Suhoshchokov errs in depicting my grandfather as an empty-headed rake. It was simply that the latter’s interests were situated on a different plane from the intellectual habitus of a young dilettante, member of the St. Petersburg literary set which our memoirist was then. Even if Kirill Ilyich had been pretty wild in his youth, once married he not only settled down but also entered government service, simultaneously doubling his inherited fortune by successful operations and later retiring to his country place, where he manifested extraordinary skill in farming, produced a new sort of apple on the side, left a curious “Discours” (the fruit of winter leisure) on the “Equality Before the Law in the Animal Kingdom” plus a proposal for a clever reform under the kind of intricate title that was fashionable then, “Visions of an Egyptian Bureaucrat,” and as an old man accepted an important consular post, in London. He was kind, brave and truthful, and had his quirks and passions—what more could be needed? A tradition has subsisted in the family that, having sworn not to game, he was physically incapable of remaining in a room where there was a pack of cards. An ancient Colt revolver that had served him well and a medallion with the portrait of a mysterious lady attracted indescribably my boyhood dreams. His life, which had retained to the end the freshness of its stormy beginning, ended peacefully. He returned to Russia in 1883, no longer a Louisiana duelist but a Russian dignitary, and on a July day, on the leather sofa in the little blue corner room where I later kept my collection of butterflies, he expired without suffering, talking all the while in his deathbed delirium about a big river and the music and lights.

My father was born in 1860. A love of lepidoptera was inculcated into him by his German tutor. (By the way: what has happened to those originals who used to teach natural history to Russian children—green net, tin box on a sling, hat stuck with pinned butterflies, long, learned nose, candid eyes behind spectacles—where are they all, where are their frail skeletons—or was this a special breed of Germans, for export to Russia, or am I not looking properly?) After completing early (in 1876) his schooling in St. Petersburg, he received his university education in England, at Cambridge, where he studied biology under Professor Bright. His first journey, around the world, he made while my grandfather was still alive, and from then until 1918 his whole life consisted of traveling and the writing of scientific works. The main ones among them are: Lepidoptera Asiatica (8 volumes published in parts from 1890 to 1917), The Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire (the first four out of six proposed volumes came out 1912–1916) and, best known to the general public, The Travels of a Naturalist (7 volumes 1892–1912). These works were unanimously recognized as classics and he was still a young man when his name occupied one of the first places in the study of the Russo-Asiatic fauna, side by side with the names of its pioneers, Fischer von Waldheim, Menetries, Eversmann.

He worked in close touch with his remarkable Russian contemporaries. Kholodkovski calls him “the conquistador of Russian entomology.” He collaborated with Charles Oberthur, Grand Duke Nikolai Mihailovich, Leech and Seitz. Scattered throughout entomological journals are hundreds of his papers, of which the first—“On the peculiarities of the occurrence of certain butterflies in the Province of St. Petersburg” (Horae Soc. Ent. Ross.)—is dated 1877, and the last—“Austautia simonoides n. sp., a Geometrid Moth Mimicking a Small Parnassius” (Trans. Ent. Soc. London)—is dated 1916. He conducted a weighty and acrimonious polemic with Staudinger, author of the notorious Katalog. He was vice-president of the Russian Entomological Society, Full Member of the Moscow Soc. of Investigators of Nature, Member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Soc, and Honorary Member of a multitude of learned societies abroad.

Between 1885 and 1918 he covered an incredible amount of territory, making surveys of his route on a three-mile scale for a distance of many thousands of miles and forming astounding collections. During these years he completed eight major expeditions which in all lasted eighteen years; but between them there was also a multitude of minor journeys, “diversions” as he called them, considering as part of these minutiae not only his trips to the less-well-investigated countries of Europe but also the journey around the world he had made in his youth. Tackling Asia in earnest he investigated Eastern Siberia, Altai, Fergana, the Pamirs, Western China, “the islands of the Gobi Sea and its coasts,” Mongolia, and “the incorrigible continent” of Tibet—and described his travels in precise, weighty words.

Such is the general scheme of my father’s life, copied out of an encyclopedia. It still does not sing, but I can already hear a living voice within it. It remains to be said that in 1898, at thirty-eight years of age, he married Elizaveta Pavlovna Vezhin, the twenty-year-old daughter of a well-known statesman; that he had two children by her; that in the intervals between his journeys….

An agonizing, somehow sacrilegious question, hardly expressible in words: was her life with him happy, together and apart? Shall we disturb this inner world or shall we limit ourselves to a mere description of routes— arida quaedam viarum descripto? “Dear Mamma, I now have a great favor to ask of you. Today is the 8th of July, his birthday. On any other day I could never bring myself to ask you. Tell me something about you and him. Not the sort of thing I can find in our shared memories but the sort of thing you alone have gone through and preserved.” And here is part of the reply:

…imagine—a honeymoon trip, the Pyrenees, the divine bliss of everything, of the sun, the brooks, the flowers, the snowy summits, even the flies in the hotels—and of being every moment together. And then, one morning, I had a headache or something, or the heat was too much for me. He said he would go for a half hour’s stroll before lunch. With odd clearness I remember sitting on a hotel balcony (around me peace, the mountains, the wonderful cliffs of Gavarnie) and reading for the first time a book not intended for young girls, Une Vie by Maupassant. I remember I liked it very much at the time. I look at my little watch and I see that it is already lunchtime, more than an hour has passed since he left. I wait. At first I am a little cross, then I begin to worry. Lunch is served on the terrace and I am unable to eat. I go out onto the lawn in front of the hotel, I return to my room, I go outside again. In another hour I was in an indescribable state of terror, agitation, God knows what. I was traveling for the first time, I was inexperienced and easily frightened, and then there was Une Vie…. I decided that he had abandoned me, the most stupid and terrible thoughts kept getting into my head, the day was passing, it seemed to me that the servants were gloating at me—oh, I cannot convey to you what it was like! I had even begun to thrust some dresses into a suitcase in order to return immediately to Russia, and then I suddenly decided he was dead, I ran out and began to babble something crazy