§7
And so, at last, the doors of my prison were opened, and I was free. The solitude of my smallish room and the quiet half-secret interviews with my one friend, Ogaryóv, were now exchanged for a noisy family of six hundred members. In a fortnight, I was more at home there than I had ever been, from the day I was born, in my father’s house.
But even here my father’s house pursued me, in the shape of a footman whom my father sent with me to the University, especially when I walked there. I spent a whole term in trying to dodge this escort, and was formally excused from it at last. I say “formally,” because my valet Peter, who was entrusted with this duty, very soon realised, first, that I disliked being escorted, and secondly, that he himself would be much better off in various places of amusement than in the entrance-hall of my lecture-room, where he had no occupation except to exchange gossip and pinches of snuff with the two porters. What was the motive of this precaution? Was it possible that Peter, who had been liable all his life to drinking-bouts that lasted for days, could keep me straight? I don’t suppose my father believed that; but, for his own peace of mind, he took measures—ineffective, indeed, but still measures—much in the way that freethinkers keep Lent. This is a characteristic feature of the old system of education in Russia. Till I was seven, I was not allowed to come downstairs alone—the flight was rather steep; and Vyéra Artamónovna went on bathing me till I was eleven. It was of a piece with this system that I should have a servant walking behind me to College, and should not be allowed, before I was twenty-one, to be out later than half-past ten. I was never really free and independent till I was banished; but for that incident, the system would probably have gone on till I was twenty-five or thirty-five.