The very corpulence and middle-age of Tchichikoff are calculated to injure him from the very outset: corpulence is unpardonable in a hero, and many fair ladies will turn away in disgust, and say, "Fie! how ugly, how very uninteresting!" Alas! all this is but too well known to the author, for the more he has looked about him, the more he has found it the case that perfect heroes are the only ones that meet with success in this world.
On glancing at all the productions of foreign genius, he has never met with any but fair and perfect heroes and heroines, and even in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" he was astonished at finding none but youthful, fair, and virtuous sufferers.
These, then, are the characters that have met, and still seem to meet with unbounded success in the reading world, though they have been, in our humble opinion, hunted down as it were with a Russian knout, ever since romance became fashionable. Our task, as a Russian author, is a very difficult one indeed, and especially so at the present moment; and unless we can lay before our reader something unmistakeably original, we ought not to have ventured on it. However, trusting in indulgence, and boldly asserting that the perfect and virtuous heroes are completely used up, we beg to introduce an imposing hero.
Dark and humble is the origin of our friend Tchichikoff. His parents he knew belonged to a lower degree of nobility, but whether of hereditary or acquired rank, he was profoundly ignorant; there was no family resemblance between them; at least, such was the opinion of a near relative of his mother's, a woman who was present at his birth. She exclaimed, as she took the new born babe in her arms, "He has not at all turned out what I expected he would be! He ought at least to have resembled his mother," which would have been even better, but he was born simply as the proverb says, "not like his father nor like his mother, but like a passing stranger."
His early life presented but acid-tasteing incidents and recollections, as if regarded through a pane of glass frozen over and covered with snow; he had no friend, no play companion in his early youth. He greeted the world in a country-house with low windows, which were never opened either in winter or summer; his father was a sickly-looking man, who wore a long kaftan or surtout, felt shoes on his bare feet, kept continually heaving deep sighs, walked up and down his room with evident preoccupation, and used to spit frequently into a spittoon standing in a corner; he also sat often uninterruptedly upon a wooden chair before a table with a pen in his hand and some ink on his fingers, and even upon his lips, his eyes fatigued by eternal copyings.
"Never tell a falsehood, fear God and pray for the Emperor, respect your superiors and cherish your benefactors," were the sentences and exhortations to which our hero had to listen while still a child and incapable of judging their importance; the continual and uniform noise of his father's feet clad in their felt shoes, and dragging across the floor, accompanied by the well-known but harsh voice of his parent, saying, "You are noisy again, you little rogue!" This is the triste picture of his early childhood, of which he had now scarcely preserved a faint recollection.
But in life all changes unexpectedly; on a fine and sunshiny morning in the spring, when snow had disappeared from the fields and the roads, the father took his son and seated himself with him in a modest telega, drawn by a small horse of the race called 'the hawk' by Russian horse dealers; this open equipage was guided by a little hunchbacked coachman, the only representative of his family and the only serf Tchichikoff's father possessed, as he was also the only servant to do all the work in his master's house. This hawk-race horse dragged them along the high road for more than two days and a half; they slept on the road, crossed the brooks and rivers, fed on cold fish pies and roast mutton, and arrived only late on the third day in the small town of Bobruisk, their destination.
Before the eyes of the little boy, glittered in unexpected magnificence the houses, shops, and streets of the little town, and so much was he at first bewildered by what he saw that he involuntarily opened his mouth widely, and kept it so for some time. His ecstacy was, however, interrupted by the quadruped hawk, falling with the telega into a deep hole, which was the entrance into a narrow lane, which led, as they advanced, down a steep declivity and was buried in mud on either side; for a long time the poor hawk-horse kept exerting itself and kicking about on all fours, assisted by both the hunchbacked coachman and the master himself, until at last the strength of all three combined brought the vehicle out of the hole, and before a small modest-looking house, with two scrubby poplars before and a small insignificant garden behind.
This house was inhabited by a relation of Tchichikoff's mother, an old trembling woman much advanced in years, and who, notwithstanding her age, went every morning to market, and on her return from there, used to dry her wet stockings by holding them up and close to the samovar! When she beheld the little boy, she took him on her knees, clapped his rosy cheeks with both her hands, and seemed exceedingly pleased with his childish corpulence. With this original and affectionate woman he was to remain for the future, and go daily to the parish-school of the town of Bobruisk.
After passing the night with them, his father left them the next morning and started at once on his road home again. At their separation no tears flowed from the parental eyes, but he presented his son with half a rouble, a few caresses and what is more valuable still, with the following exhortations: