My brother Alexander’s fate, also, was decided next year. The jubilee of the Izmáylovsk regiment, to which my father had belonged in his youth, was celebrated about this time in St. Petersburg. One night while all the household was plunged in deep sleep, a three-horse carriage, ringing with bells attached to the harness, stopped at our gate. A man jumped out of it, loudly shouting, “Open! An ordinance from his majesty the Emperor.”
One can easily imagine the terror which this nocturnal visit spread in our house. My father, trembling, went down to his study. “Court-martial, degradation as a soldier,” were words which rang then in the ears of every military man; it was a terrible epoch. But Nicholas simply wanted to have the names of sons of all the officers who had once belonged to the regiment, in order to send the boys to military schools, if that had not yet been done. A special messenger had been dispatched for that purpose from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and was now calling day and night at the houses of ex-Izmáylovsk officers.
With a shaking hand, my father wrote that his eldest son, Nicholas, was already in the first corps of cadets at Moscow; that his youngest son, Peter, was a candidate for the corps of pages; and that there remained only his second son, Alexander, who had not yet entered the military career. A few weeks later came a paper informing father of the “monarch’s favor.” Alexander was ordered to enter a corps of cadets in Orel, a small provincial town. It cost my father a deal of trouble and a large sum of money to get Alexander sent to a corps of cadets at Moscow. This new “favor” was obtained only in consideration of the fact that our elder brother was in that corps.
And thus, owing to the will of Nicholas I, we had both to receive a military education, though, before we were many years older, we simply hated the military career for its absurdity. But Nicholas was watchful that none of the sons of the nobility should embrace any other profession than the military one, unless they were of infirm health; and so we had all three to be officers, to the great satisfaction of my father.
VI
Wealth was measured in those times by the number of “souls” that a landed proprietor owned. So many “souls” meant so many male serfs: women did not count. My father, who owned nearly twelve hundred souls, in three different provinces, and who had, in addition to his peasants’ holdings, large tracts of land which were cultivated by these peasants, was accounted a rich man. He lived up to his reputation, which meant that his house was open to any number of visitors, and that he kept a very large household.
We were a family of eight, occasionally of ten or twelve; but fifty servants at Moscow, and half as many more in the country, were considered not one too many. Four coachmen to attend a dozen horses, three cooks for the masters and two more for the servants, a dozen men to wait upon us at dinnertime (one man, plate in hand, standing behind each person seated at the table), and girls innumerable in the maidservants’ room—how could anyone do with less than this?
Besides, the ambition of every landed proprietor was that everything required for his household should be made at home, by his own men.
“How nicely your piano is always tuned! I suppose Herr Schimmel must be your tuner?” perhaps a visitor would remark.
To be able to answer, “I have my own piano-tuner” was in those times the correct thing.
“What beautiful pastry!” the guests would exclaim, when a work of art, composed of ices and pastry, appeared toward the end of the dinner. “Confess, prince, that it comes from Tremblé” (the fashionable pastry-cook).
“It is made by my own confectioner, a pupil of Tremblé, whom I have allowed to show what he can do,” was a reply which elicited general admiration.
To have embroideries, harnesses, furniture—in fact, everything—made by one’s own men was the ideal of the rich and respected landed proprietor. As soon as the children of the servants attained the age of ten, they were sent as apprentices to the fashionable shops, where they were obliged to spend five or seven years chiefly in sweeping, in receiving an incredible number of thrashings, and in running about town on errands of all sorts. I must own that few of them became masters of their respective arts. The tailors and the shoemakers were found only skillful enough to make clothes or shoes for the servants, and when a really good pastry was required for a dinner-party it was ordered at Tremblé’s, while our own confectioner was beating the drum in the band.
That band was another of my father’s ambitions, and almost every one of his male servants, in addition to other accomplishments, was a bass-viol or a clarinet in the band. Makár, the piano-tuner, alias under-butler, was also a flutist; Andréi, the tailor, played the French horn; the confectioner was first put to beat the drum, but he misused his instrument to such a deafening degree that a tremendous trumpet was bought for him, in the hope that his lungs would not have the power to make the same noise as his hands; when, however, this last hope had to be abandoned, he was sent to be a soldier. As to “spotted Tikhon,” in addition to his numerous functions in the household as lamp-cleaner, floor-polisher, and footman, he rendered himself useful in the band, today as a trombone, tomorrow as a bassoon, and occasionally as second violin.
The two first violins were the only exceptions to the rule: they were “violins,” and nothing else. My father had bought them, with their large families, for a handsome sum of money, from his sisters (he never bought serfs from nor sold them to strangers). In the evenings when he was not at his club, or
