The Russian Century

by George Pahomov

  For my godfather my mother chose her second stepson, Alexander Niko-laevich, wishing to strengthen our blood-bond. For godmother she chose her own mother, and she named me in honor of her beloved.

  Kolia died at the age of three from diphtheria. My mother gave birth to a third son, Georgii, a handsome, curly-haired boy who was much loved by his godmother, my father’s third daughter, Elizaveta Nikolaevna. But my mother was not to be consoled. Kolia’s death was a blow from which she never completely recovered. I think that had Kolia lived, he would have helped her find a path to the heart of her new family. Without him this path was never found.

  How cruel life is—or perhaps how merciful: it was not meant for her to be at the funerals of either her beloved mother or her beloved son. She was terribly ill and was nearly at death’s door herself when those two left this earth. Life in the new family was fourteen years of daily hard work for my mother. It was one long continuous workday.

  She had to feed and clothe a house of thirty people, including children, relatives, and servants. Before that my mother had never been in charge of a household. However, when she harnessed herself to my father’s household affairs, she handled everything so well, so ably fulfilled the offices of minister

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  23

  of internal affairs, minister of provisions, and minister of education in my father’s domain that she never received anything but well-deserved praise from my father. I remember our family dinner table, fourteen feet long, packed with place settings. At the table would be my father, my mother, four brothers (we were fed separately), six or seven sisters, the governess Olga Ivanovna, two distant female relatives of my father’s first wife, who lived at our house. These fifteen or sixteen people were family, but dinner never proceeded without guests: we invariably had one or another aunt (my father’s sisters), or one of the Tarasovs (my sisters’ cousins). And we mustn’t forget to add one of my sisters’ girlfriends or my brothers’ buddies who would stay for dinner. But even that’s not all. Either my father or one of my older brothers would bring someone else from town to dinner—some customer or just a friend—and having brought him, would simply ask my mother:

  “Mother,” (if my father was asking) or “Nastasia Vasilievna” (if my brothers were asking), “Ivan Ivanovich is having dinner with us. Do you have something to feed him?”

  And my mother would always give one and the same response, “Yes,” and would only afterwards lament that she never received advance warning. In order to “feed the visitor,” who was sometimes the very picky Ivan Ivanovich, she had to add two fancy dishes and good appetizers and wine to the usual simple but filling family meal. And for all this she would only have half an hour, for my father himself would hurry her: “Mother, it’s time to eat. We’re hungry.”

  And this visitor, Ivan Ivanovich from Gluttonville, rich in black soil, hogs, and grain, would eat and praise to the skies the appetizers, the first course, the second course, the third course, the homemade plum brandy, the St. John’s Wort liqueur, the marinated sturgeon, and the pickled and marinated apples, grapes, plums, cherries, and lingonberries.

  At the same time she had to feed the small children and make sure that the broth and the cutlets were prepared to the exact specifications of the military doctor von Reson.

  And she had to look after a third table (the third table in the same house at the same time!), to make sure that the sales clerks in the employees’ room were full and satisfied.

  Of course, she couldn’t forget about the fourth table: she had to make sure that the “servants’ cook” Arina would make rich, filling shchi [cabbage soup] and thick porridge [traditionally of buckwheat] for the servants: the kitchen staff, the caretaker, the maids, and the nanny.

  Sometimes there was also a fifth table, in the same house at the same time: if an infant had a wet-nurse, then the doctor prescribed a special diet for her.

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  Chapter Two

  But the family was large: either one or another member would be sick, and then a sixth table would be added with a special menu. And this just on the workdays—from day to day.

  But in addition to the workdays there were namedays [holidays celebrating the patron saint bearing the same name as the celebrant] and birthdays, and there were plenty of those in a family which had 13–14 children, not to speak of the rest! What a great number of pies to be baked! And all with particular favorite fillings—otherwise there would be hurt feelings and tears. And the nanny, and the wet-nurse, and the sales clerk Ivan Stepanych—all had to have pies for their namedays. And those were just the namedays within the household—what of all the others? My fathers’ sisters—there you had three more namedays, whose demanding celebrants knew all of the virtues and shortcomings of the pies, made with rice, sturgeon, sauteed cabbage, mushrooms, liver, carrots, and so on and so forth.

  Holidays presented a different kind of toil. And what an abundance of food was necessary for this huge family: kulichi [tall, cylindrical baked Easter cakes] and paskha [cheese cake], made from sweet cream cheese, butter, and sour cream [often with a combination of raisins, nuts and candied fruit]. Here exact calculation was necessary: the “sacramental” paskha and the “sacramental” kulich, which were taken to be blessed at [Saturday] morning services before Easter, had to be of such a size that there would be enough for each person in the family to have a serving during every day of Bright Week [the week after Easter Sunday]. This was not only a complex culinary problem, but a mathematical one as well. Besides the “sacramental” paskha, it was necessary to make paskha “for eating.” Paskha was so delicious and tender, so aromatic and sweet (oh, the vanilla, almonds, sugar, candied fruit, and candied orange peel that went into it!) that it was eaten like pastry, like whipped cream, or double-rich ice cream. But the difference was that while there would usually be a small portion of dessert only at the end of dinner, paskha was eaten in varying amounts during morning and afternoon tea for seven days. But not only that; the “unblessed” paskha would be made and eaten during the entire six weeks after Easter right up to the Feast of the Ascension. It’s difficult to fathom how much paskha mother and Petrovna [the cook] had to make! Paskha was made according to different recipes and with different ingredients: they were both cooked and uncooked, made of sour cream or sweet cream cheese, with chocolate and pistachios. This was a difficult art, demanding focused attention and skill.

  But the distribution of the paskha was not limited to the household. My father would often ask about three or four days before the holiday, “Mother, you didn’t forget that Katerina Ivanovna needs a paskha and a kulich?” “No, I

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  didn’t.” “And what about the poorhouse?” “I remember.” “And for Serafima Pavlovna?” “I remember.”

  But sometimes he didn’t ask anything in advance, but would simply inquire on the first day of the holiday, “Was a paskha and a kulich sent to Serafima Pavlovna?” “Yes, it was.” But in order to be able to answer thus, she had to keep in mind not only the family of thirty people, but all the Serafima Pavlov-nas, all the Katerina Ivanovnas, all the poor relations, inhabitants of the poor-house, and just other people and families whom my father helped secretly, and send them paskhi, kulichi, and Easter eggs on time.

  The same thing would happen at Christmas. And the same thing would happen at other times. In the fall, father would say: “Mother, we should send some pickled apples to Ustin’ia Petrovna at the home.” (Ustin’ia Petrovna was the mother of my sister’s governess, a respected noblewoman who had seen Pushkin in person.) “The apples really came out well this year. We should do something nice for the old lady.”

  “The nanny visited her three days ago with the children, and took her some,” my mother would answer. Mention of the nanny would remind him of the nanny’s aunt Elena Demanovna [sic], a wonderful old lady.

  “Oh, by the way, we should send some to Elena Demanovna. Their poor-ho
use is short on money. I bet they feed them salt-cured fish.”

  And she would have an answer ready: “On Sunday the nanny asked for a day off. She’s going to the poorhouse for craftsmen. I already told Arina to fill a jar with a dozen of the larger apples.”

  To feed and care for everyone, providing them all with an Easter egg, a pickled apple, a Christmas goose, or a nameday pie, required unending labor, care, and constant attention. And truly, the care devoted to the airiness and wafting smells of these pies, a care which some might find ridiculous, indicated a caring for people, something that was not ridiculous at all but worthy of great praise. And the care with which all those pies were baked, and all those Antonov apples pickled with cardamon, was taken seriously by my mother and father, and taught to us.

  All summer our house would be humming with activity—my mother’s activity, of course—according to the old proverb: “Make hay while the sun shines.”

  Not a single apple that fell in our garden was wasted. Round apple slices were strung on twine in bountiful garlands (we loved this task) and hung under the beams of our spacious attic. Our braziers glowed unendingly with golden coals in the garden on the path near the house; basin after basin of preserves were being simmered. Sour cherries were marinated in vinegar in a special way.

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  Chapter Two

  Closer to autumn the “pickling” season began: plums, grapes, and then apples. Crates of Antonov apples were purchased at the Boloto Market. The smell of apples—wonderful, cheerful as a September morning, clear as crystal— would reign for several days throughout the house. Amber-golden hay was laid down in the dining room, where the apples were sorted, the hearty ones separated from the weaker, paler apples. The cellar would become inhabited by tubs of apples. After that came the turn of the lingonberries, my father’s favorite. We stocked them in tubs as well. We pickled whole vats of cucumbers, and they were unusually tasty and wonderfully strong.

  We would pickle, marinate, and dry mushrooms. This was an art in itself and presented its own difficulties. After the cucumbers came the cabbage. The chopping of the cabbage passed quickly and merrily. Everyone took part. Everyone crunched on cabbage cores. But my mother had the most important task: she had to calculate how much cabbage to chop, how much to slice up, and how much to leave unchopped. It was important to choose the most auspicious time for the cabbage: when it was cheap and in season, just begging to be pickled.

  The cabbage cares of autumn would come to an end, and then we had to salt the corned beef for the coming year, stock the year’s salted fish, and also think of marinating the sturgeon and cod for appetizers for our guests. The supply of wine was renewed with only the guests in mind; hence, the amount wasn’t large, but still highly varied. I remember the difficult process of preparing the plum brandy, which would take my mother several days. I remember the flavoring of all sorts of vodkas in rounded bottles and broad-shouldered decanters. All of this was selfless and even unpleasant work for my mother: neither she nor my father would taste even a drop of all these riches, since they couldn’t stand alcohol. The only commonly consumed drink in our house was kvas, wonderful kvas made from bread that every member of the household would drink in all amounts at all times. [A kind of beer made by fermenting rye bread or rye flour, yeast, malt, and sugar; served chilled.]

  Much more pleasing for my mother and for us children was the work involved in preparing other foods: all sorts of fruit spreads from figs, black currants, apples, cherries, and plums—all these were favorite victuals of ours.

  All of this prodigious labor was in preparation for the winter. But there was also the labor of winter itself, and for the family, and for the house of thirty people and its large number of guests, and for those being helped on the side. And all this demanded unending work from my mother.

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  NOTES

  A quotation from Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s 1831 novel-in-verse (Chapter Eight, third stanza, lines 1–2). Translation by Walter Arndt, in Pushkin Threefold: Narrative, Lyric, Polemic, and Ribald Verse (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1972), p. 160.

  From Lermontov’s narrative poem “The Demon,” Part XVI. Translation by Anatoly Liberman in Mikhail Lermontov: Major Poetical Works (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 411.

  Chapter Three

  Sofiia Kovalevskaia, A Thief in the House

  Sofiia Kovalevskaia (1850–1891) wrote an engaging memoir of her youth. Well received, the book was translated into eight languages. Autobiographical works by women were not an uncommon feature of the Russian literary landscape. Kovalevskaia’s case was unique because she was an internationally renowned mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of Stockholm. The introduction to the English language edition of her memoir cites mathematical circles proclaiming her as “the most important woman mathematician prior to the twentieth century.” Her talented life was cut short by pneumonia at the age of forty-one. Taken from Sofiia Ko-valevskaia, A Russian Childhood. Trans. Beatrice Stillman. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1978.

  When I was about six years old my father retired from Army service and settled in his family estate of Palibino, in the province of Vitebsk. At that time persistent rumors of an imminent “emancipation of the serfs” were already making the rounds, and these rumors impelled my father to occupy himself more seriously with farming, which up to that time had been given over to a steward.

  Soon after our arrival in the country an episode occurred in our household which remained vividly in my memory. Moreover, its effect on everyone else in the house was so strong that it was often recalled afterward. And so my own impressions became intermingled with the subsequent stories about it, and I was no longer able to distinguish one from the other. Therefore, I shall describe this episode as I understand it now.

  Various articles suddenly began vanishing from our nursery: now one thing, now another. Whenever Nanny forgot about some article over a period

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  Sofiia Kovalevskaia, A Thief in the House

  29

  of time and then needed it later, it was nowhere to be found, although she was ready to swear that she herself, with her own two hands, had laid it away in the cupboard or the bureau. These disappearances were treated rather calmly at first but when they began to occur more and more often and to include articles of ever increasing value, when a silver spoon, a gold thimble and a mother-of-pearl penknife suddenly vanished in succession, an alarm was raised. It was clear that we had a thief in our house. Nanny, who considered herself responsible for keeping the children’s belongings safe, was more upset than anyone, and she resolved to unmask the thief at all costs.

  It was natural that suspicion should fall first of all on poor Feklusha, the girl who had been appointed to serve in the nursery. True, Feklusha had been with us for about three years, and Nanny had never noticed anything of the sort in all that time. In her opinion, however, this fact didn’t prove a thing.

  “Before this, the girl was little and didn’t understand the value of things,” Nanny reasoned. “But now she’s older and smarter. And on top of that, her family lives in the village. So she must be snitching the master’s property for them.”

  Reasoning in this fashion, Nanny reached such a deep inner conviction of Feklusha’s guilt that she began behaving toward her with ever greater harshness and severity. And the hapless, intimidated Feklusha, feeling instinctively that she was under suspicion, began to acquire an ever more guilty air.

  But no matter how stealthily Nanny watched over Feklusha, she was not able to put her finger on anything specific for a long time. And meanwhile the missing articles did not turn up, and new items kept disappearing. One day Aniuta’s money-box, which always stood in Nanny’s cupboard and contained about forty rubles (if not more), was gone. The news of this last disappearance reached even my father. He summoned Nanny and gave strict orders that the thief must be found without fail. At this poin
t we all realized that the matter was no joke.

  Nanny was desperate. But then one night she woke up and heard something: a peculiar munching sound was coming from Feklusha’s corner. Already inclined to suspicion, she stealthily, noiselessly stretched out her hand to a box of matches and lit the candle all of a sudden. And what did she see? There was Feklusha squatting on her heels and holding a huge jam jar between her knees, stuffing jam into both her cheeks and even wiping up the jar with a crust of bread. I should add that our housekeeper had complained a few days before that jam was disappearing from her pantry cupboard. To jump out of bed and grab the criminal by her pigtail was, it goes without saying, the work of a single second for Nanny.

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  Chapter Three

  “Aha! Caught you, you no-good! Speak up—where did you get that jam?” she shouted in a voice like thunder, mercilessly pulling the girl about by the hair.

  “Nanny dear! I didn’t do anything wrong, and that’s the truth!” Feklusha implored. “It was the seamstress, Maria Vasilievna, it was her gave me the jam last night. But she ordered me not to show it to you.”

  This explanation appeared to Nanny implausible in the highest degree.

  “Well, my dear, anybody can see you don’t even know how to tell a lie,” she said with contempt.

  “A likely story . . . when did Maria Vasilievna take it into her head to start treating you to jam?”

  “Nanny dear, I’m not lying! It’s the God’s honest truth. You can ask her yourself. I was heating up her irons for her yesterday, and that’s why she treated me to the jam. But she ordered me, ‘Don’t show it to Nanny, or else she’ll scold me for pampering you.’ ”