Before I left Vyatka, the Department of Imperial Domains was committing such impudent thefts that a commission of enquiry was appointed; and this commission sent out inspectors into all the provinces. A new system of control over the Crown tenants was introduced after that time.
Our Governor at that time was Kornilov; he had to nominate two subordinates to assist the inspectors, and I was one of the two. I had to read a multitude of documents, sometimes with pain, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with disgust. The very headings of the subjects for investigation struck me with astonishment—
(1) The loss and total disappearance of a police-station, and the destruction of the plan by the gnawing of mice.
(2) The loss of twelve miles of arable land.
(3) The transference of the peasant’s son Vasili to the female sex.
The last item was so remarkable that I read the details at once from beginning to end.
There was a petition to the Governor from the father of the child. The petitioner stated that fifteen years ago a daughter had been born to him, whom he wished to call Vasilissa; but the priest, not being sober, christened the girl Vasili, and entered the name thus on the register. This fact apparently caused little disturbance to the father; but when he found he would soon be required to provide a recruit for the Army and pay the poll-tax for the child, he informed the police. The police were much puzzled. They began by refusing to act, on the ground that he ought to have applied earlier. The father then went to the Governor, and the Governor ordered that this boy of the female sex should be formally examined by a doctor and a midwife. But at this point, matters were complicated by a correspondence with the ecclesiastical authorities; and the parish priest, whose predecessor, under the influence of drink, had been too prudish to recognise differences of sex, now appeared on the scene; the matter went on for years, and I rather think the girl was never cleared of the suspicion of being a boy.
The reader is not to suppose that this absurd story is a mere humorous invention of mine.
During the Emperor Paul’s reign a colonel of the Guards, making his monthly report, returned as dead an officer who had gone to the hospital; and the Tsar struck his name off the lists. But unfortunately the officer did not die; he recovered instead. The colonel induced him to return to his estates for a year or two, hoping to find an opportunity of putting matters straight; and the officer agreed. But his heirs, having read of his death in the Gazette, positively refused to recognise him as still alive; though inconsolable for their loss, they insisted upon their right of succession. The living corpse, whom the Gazette had killed once, found that he was likely to die over again, by starvation this time. So he travelled to Petersburg and handed in a petition to the Tsar.
This beats even my story of the girl who was also a boy.