My father was seldom cheerful; as a rule he was dissatisfied with everyone and everything. He was a man of unusual intelligence and powers of observation, who had seen and heard a great deal and remembered it; he was a finished man of the world and could be exceedingly pleasant and interesting; but he did not choose to be so, and sank deeper and deeper into a state of morbid solitude.
What precisely it was that infused so much bile and bitterness into his blood, it is hard to say. No period of passion, of great misfortunes, mistakes, and losses, had ever taken place in his life. I could never fully understand the source of that bitter scorn and irritation which filled his heart, of his distrust and avoidance of mankind, and of the disgust that preyed upon him. Perhaps he took with him to the grave some recollection which he never confided to any ear; perhaps it was merely due to the combination of two things so incongruous as the eighteenth century and Russian life; and there was a third factor, the traditional idleness of his class, which had a terrible power of producing unreasonable tempers.
§2
In Europe, especially in France, the eighteenth century produced an extraordinary type of man, which combined all the weaknesses of the Regency with all the strength of Spartans or Romans. Half like Faublas and half like Regulus, these men opened wide the doors of revolution and were the first to rush into it, jostling one another in their haste to pass out by the “window” of the guillotine. Our age has ceased to produce those strong, complete natures; but last century evoked them everywhere, even in countries where they were not needed and where their development was bound to be distorted. In Russia, men who were exposed to the influence of this powerful European current, did not make history, but they became unlike other men. Foreigners at home and foreigners abroad, spoilt for Russia by European prejudices and for Europe by Russian habits, they were a living contradiction in terms and sank into an artificial life of sensual enjoyment and monstrous egoism.
Such was the most conspicuous figure at Moscow in those days, Prince Yusúpov, a Tatar prince, a grand seigneur of European reputation, and a Russian grandee of brilliant intellect and great fortune. He was surrounded by a whole pleiad of grey-haired Don Juans and freethinkers—such men as Masalski, Santi, and the rest. They were all men of considerable mental development and culture; but they had nothing to do, and they rushed after pleasure, loved and petted their precious selves, genially gave themselves absolution for all transgressions, exalted the love of eating to the height of a Platonic passion, and lowered love for women into a kind of gluttonous epicureanism.
Old Yusúpov was a sceptic and a bon-vivant; he had been the friend of Voltaire and Beaumarchais, of Diderot and Casti; and his artistic taste was beyond question. You may convince yourself of this by a single visit to his palace outside Moscow and a glance at his pictures, if his heir has not sold them yet by auction. At eighty, this luminary was setting in splendour, surrounded by beauty in marble and colour, and also in flesh and blood. Púshkin, who dedicated a noble Epistle to him,[[38]] used to converse with Yusúpov in his country-house; and Gonzaga, to whom Yusúpov dedicated his theatre, used to paint there.
[38]. To a Great Man (1830).
§3
By his education and service in the Guards, by his birth and connexions, my father belonged to the same circle; but neither temperament nor health allowed him to lead a life of dissipation to the age of seventy, and he went to the opposite extreme. He determined to secure a life of solitude, and found it intensely tedious—all the more tedious because he had sought it merely for his own sake. A strong will was degraded into stubborn wilfulness, and unused powers spoilt his temper and made it difficult.
At the time of his education European civilisation was so new in Russia that a man of culture necessarily became less of a Russian. To the end of his life he wrote French with more ease and correctness than Russian, and he literally never read a Russian book, not even the Bible. The Bible, indeed, he did not read even in other languages; he knew, by hearsay and from extracts, the matter of Holy Scripture in general, and felt no curiosity to examine further. He did respect Derzhávin and Krylóv, the first because he had written an ode on the death of his uncle, Prince Meshcherski, and the latter, because they had acted together as seconds in a duel. When my father heard that the Emperor Alexander was reading Karamzín’s History of the Russian Empire, he tried it himself but soon laid it aside: “Nothing but old Slavonic names! Who can take an interest in all that?”—such was his disparaging criticism.