Rakhmétof belonged to a family which has been known since the thirteenth century; that is, it is one of the most ancient, not only in Russia, but anywhere in Europe. In the number of the Tartar prisoners, tribal chiefs who were massacred in Tver, according to the words of the chroniclers, on account of their intention of converting the people to Mohammedanism (an intention which they probably did not have), but simply out of brutality, was a certain Rakhmet. The young son of this Rakhmet by a Russian wife, who was the niece of a nobleman of Tver—that is, the oberhōf-marshal or field-marshal—whom Rakhmet married by force, was saved on his mother’s account, and he was baptized Mikhaïl instead of Latuif. From this Latuif-Mikhaïl Rakhmétovitch sprang a good many Rakhmétofs. In Tver they were boyars; in Moscow they were crown-officers;64 in Petersburg, during the last century, they were generals-in-chief; of course not all of them: the family branched out very widely, so that there would not have been enough positions of general-in-chief to give them all. Our Rakhmétof’s great-great-grandfather was a friend of Ivan Ivanovitch Shuválof’s,65 and he put him on his feet again after his failure, which was caused by his friendship for Muennich.
His great-grandfather was a contemporary of Rumiantsof; he served till he reached the rank of general-in-chief, and he was killed at the battle near Novo. His grandfather escorted Alexander to Tilsit, and would have risen higher than any of them, but he early ruined his career by his friendship with Speransky. His father served without any success, and without any failures; at the age of forty he resigned with the rank of general-lieutenant, and made his home at one of his estates which were scattered about over the sources of the Medvyedítsa River.66 The estates were, however, not very large, all in all, probably about two thousand five hundred souls (serfs), and during the leisure which came to him in his country retirement, he had eight children; our Rakhmétof was the next to the youngest; he had one younger sister, and consequently our Rakhmétof did not have a large estate; he received about four hundred souls, and seven thousand desyatins of land.67 How he managed with his serfs, and his five thousand five hundred desyatins of land is not known to anybody, nor was it known that he kept for himself one thousand five hundred desyatins, and, moreover, generally it was not known, as long as he lived among us, that he was a proprietor,68 or that the land retained for himself gave him about three thousand rubles income. This we learned afterwards, but at that time we supposed, of course, that he was of the same family as those Rakhmétofs, many of whom were rich proprietors, and who, together bearing the same name, possessed about seventy-five thousand souls around the sources of the Medvyedítsa, Khoper, Sura, and Tsna rivers, who forever were the district marshals69 of those places, and one or the other of them is constantly the marshal of one or the other of the governmental cities through which run their feudatory rivers. And we knew that our friend Rakhmétof used to spend four hundred rubles a year; for a student of that time that was not very bad, but for a proprietor from among the Rakhmétofs it was too little; and so every one of us, though we cared really very little for such investigations, decided for himself, without making any inquiries, that our Rakhmétof must be from some impoverished or estateless branch of the Rakhmétofs, maybe the son of some kind of a governmental officer,70 who left his children a small fortune; but we did not bother ourselves about these things.
Now he was twenty-two years old, and he had been a student since he was sixteen; but for nearly three years he had given up the University. He left the second class, went to his estate, took charge of it, after defeating his guardian’s resistance, and winning the anathemas of his brothers, and succeeding in making his sister’s husbands forbid them to mention his name; then he wandered all over Russia in different guises, both by land and by water, and by one or the other, in a common and an uncommon way; for instance, by foot, and on rafts, and in slow boats; he had a good many adventures, which he brought upon himself. Among other things that he did, he sent two men to the University of Kazan, and five to the University of Moscow; these were his stipendiaries; but to Petersburg, where he, himself, intended to live, he had no students at his expense, and therefore no one of us knew that, instead of four hundred, he had three thousand rubles income. This became known only later on, but all we knew was that he often disappeared for some time, and two years before the time that he is sitting in Kirsánof’s library, with Newton’s Commentaries on the Apocalypse, he returned to Petersburg, entered the philological faculty; before he had been in the department of
