Liza; Or, "A Nest of Nobles"

by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

At first Ivan Petrovich kept silence, and maintained his hold over himself; but when his father thought fit to threaten him with a disgraceful punishment, he could bear it no longer. "Ah!" he thought, "the infidel Diderot is going to be brought forward again. Well, then, I will put his teaching in action." And so with a quiet and even voice, although with a secret shuddering in all his limbs, he told his father that it was a mistake to accuse him of immorality; that he had no intention of justifying his fault, but that he was ready to make amends for it, and that all the more willingly, inasmuch as he felt himself superior to all prejudices; and, in fact—that he was ready to marry Malania. In uttering these words Ivan Petrovich undoubtedly attained the end he had in view. Peter Andreich was so confounded that he opened his eyes wide, and for a moment was struck dumb; but he immediately recovered his senses, and then and there, just as he was, wrapped in a dressing-gown trimmed with squirrels' fur, and with slippers on his bare feet, he rushed with clenched fists at his son, who, as if on purpose, had dressed his hair that day a la Titus, and had put on a blue dress-coat, quite new and made in the English fashion, tasselled boots, and dandified, tight-fitting buckskin pantaloons. Anna Pavlovna uttered a loud shriek, and hid her face in her hands; meanwhile her son ran right through the house, jumped into the court-yard, threw himself first into the kitchen garden and then into the flower garden, flew across the park into the road, and ran and ran, without once looking back, until at last he ceased to hear behind him the sound of his father's heavy feet, the loud and broken cries with which his father sobbed out, "Stop, villain! Stop, or I will curse you!"

Ivan Petrovich took refuge in the house of a neighbor,[A] and his father returned home utterly exhausted, and bathed in perspiration. There he announced, almost before he had given himself time to recover breath, that he withdrew his blessing and his property from his son, whose stupid books he condemned to be burnt; and he gave orders to have the girl Malania sent, with out delay, to a distant village. Some good people found out where Ivan Petrovich was, and told him everything. Full of shame and rage, he swore vengeance upon his father; and that very night, having lain in wait for the peasant's cart on which Malania was being sent away, he carried her off by force, galloped with her to the nearest town, and there married her. He was supplied with the necessary means by a neighbor, a hard-drinking, retired sailor, who was exceedingly good-natured, and a very great lover of all "noble histories," as he called them.

[Footnote A: Literally, "of a neighboring Odnodvorets." That word signifies one who belongs by descent to the class of nobles and proprietors, but who has no serfs belonging to him, and is really a moujik, or peasant. Some villages are composed of inhabitants of this class, who are often intelligent, though uneducated.]

The next day Ivan Petrovich sent his father a letter, which was frigidly and ironically polite, and then betook himself to the estate of two of his second cousins,—Dmitry Pestof, and his sister Marfa Timofeevna, with the latter of whom the reader is already acquainted. He told them everything that had happened, announced his intention of going to St. Petersburg to seek an appointment, and begged them to give shelter to his wife, even if only for a time. At the word "wife" he sobbed bitterly; and, in spite of his metropolitan education, and his philosophy, he humbly, like a thorough Russian peasant, knelt down at the feet of his relations, and even touched the floor with his forehead.

The Pestofs, who were kind and compassionate people, willingly consented to his request. With them he spent three weeks, secretly expecting an answer from his father. But no answer came; no answer could come. Peter Andreich, when he received the news of the marriage, took to his bed, and gave orders that his son's name should never again be mentioned to him; but Ivan's mother, without her husband's knowledge, borrowed five hundred paper roubles from a neighboring priest,[A] and sent them to her son, with a little sacred picture for his wife. She was afraid of writing, but she told her messenger, a spare little peasant who could walk sixty versts in a day, to say to Ivan that he was not to fret too much; that please God, all would yet go right, and his father's wrath would turn to kindness—that she, too, would have preferred a different daughter-in-law; but that evidently God had willed it as it was, and that she sent her paternal benediction to Malania Sergievna. The spare little peasant had a rouble given him, asked leave to see the new mistress, whose gossip[B] he was, kissed her hand, and returned home.

[Footnote A: Literally, "from the Blagochinny" an ecclesiastic who exercises supervision over a number of churches or parishes, a sort of Rural Dean.]

[Footnote A: The word is used in its old meaning of fellow-sponsor.]

So Ivan Petrovich betook himself to St. Petersburg with a light heart. An unknown future lay before him. Poverty might menace him; but he had broken with the hateful life in the country, and, above all, he had not fallen short of his instructors; he had really "put into action," and indeed done justice to, the doctrines of Rousseau, Diderot, and the "Declaration of the Rights of Man." The conviction of having accomplished a duty, a sense of pride and of triumph, filled his soul; and the fact of having to separate from his wife did not greatly alarm him; he would far sooner have been troubled by the necessity of having constantly to live with her. He had now to think of other affairs. One task was finished.

In St. Petersburg, contrary to his own expectations, he was successful. The Princess Kubensky—whom M. Courtin had already flung aside, but who had not yet contrived to die—in order that she might at least to some extent, make amends for her conduct towards her nephew, recommended him to all her friends, and gave him five thousand roubles—almost all the money she had left—and a watch, with his crest wrought on its back surrounded by a wreath of Cupids.

Three months had not gone by before he received an appointment on the staff of the Russian embassy in London, whither he set sail (steamers were not even talked about then) in the first homeward bound English vessel he could find. A few months later he received a letter from Pestof. The kind-hearted gentleman congratulated him on the birth of a son, who had come into the world at the village of Pokrovskoe, on the 20th of August, 1807, and had been named Fedor, in honor of the holy martyr Fedor Stratilates. On account of her extreme weakness, Malania Sergievna could add only a few lines. But even those few astonished Ivan Petrovich; he was not aware that Marfa Timofeevna had taught his wife to read and write.