He took as his wife a woman to match him. With protrading eyes, a hawk’s nose, round yellowish face, of gipsy origin, quick-tempered and vindictive, she never for a moment gave in to her husband, who was darned near the death of her and whom she did not survive even though she was incessantly badgering him. Andrey’s son Pyotr, Fyodor’s grandfather, did not take after his father: he was a simple country squire, fairly devil-may-care, loud-mouthed and slow-witted, rude but not malicious, fond of entertaining and following the hounds. He was over thirty when he inherited from his father two thousand souls in perfect condition, but he soon dispersed them, sold part of the estate and over-indulged his house-serfs. Like cockroaches, various nonentities, both friends and strangers, crawled from all sides into his spacious, warm and dowdy manor house; the whole lot of them ate their fill of whatever came their way, drank themselves tipsy and pilfered what they could, praising and glorifying their gracious host as they did so; and the host, when he was in low spirits, also glorified his guests with such titles as spongers and scoundrels, but grew bored without them. Pyotr Andreyich’s wife was a mild creature; he had taken her from a neighbouring family by his father’s choice and ordinance; she was called Anna Pavlovna. She never interfered in anything, received guests affably and gladly made calls of her own, although to be powdered, she would say, was death to her. In her old age she used to describe how they would put a felt head-band on you, comb all the hair upwards, smear it with grease, sprinkle flour on it and insert iron pins – and you couldn’t wash it out afterwards! But people would take offence if you paid visits without being powdered: it was sheer murder! She loved to go out driving with fast horses, was ready to play cards from morning to night and would always conceal with her hand the place where she had noted down her tiny winnings whenever her husband approached the card table; but she handed over all her dowry and money into his undisputed keeping. She bore him two children: a son Ivan, Fyodor’s father, and a daughter Glafira. Ivan was not educated at home, but in the house of a rich old aunt, Princess Kubenskaya, who had made him her heir (without this his father would not have let him go). She dressed him up like a doll, hired every kind of teacher for him and placed him in the charge of a tutor, a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles, a Frenchman, former abbé and disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a sly, refined smoothy – the very, as she used to express it, fine fleur of the emigration – and ended, when she was almost seventy, by marrying this very same fine fleur. She transferred to his name all her wealth and possessions and soon afterwards, made up to the eyebrows and perfumed with scent à la Richelieu, surrounded by little Negro pages, short-legged dogs and shrieking parrots, died on a bent little Louis XV silk divan, with an enamelled snuffbox by Petitot in her hand – died, what is more, abandoned by her husband; the ingratiating M. Courtin had preferred to withdraw to Paris along with her money. Ivan was only just twenty when this unexpected blow (we refer to the Princess’s marriage, not her death) broke over him; he had no further desire to remain in his aunt’s house, where he had suddenly been transformed from a rich heir into a hanger-on; in St Petersburg the society in which he had grown up closed its doors to him; he felt an aversion to working his way up the difficult and obscure rungs of the civil service (all this occurred at the very beginning of Alexander I’s reign)1; despite himself, he was obliged to return to the country, to his father. His ‘nest of the gentry’ appeared dirty, impoverished and unkempt to him; the stagnation and squalor of provincial life insulted him at every turn; he fell prey to a gnawing boredom; and, to crown it all, everyone in the house except his mother gave him unfriendly looks. His father took a dislike to his city ways, his frock-coats, ruffles, his books, his flute and his punctilious neatness, in which he sensed blatant disgust; and every so often he complained and railed at his son. ‘Nothing’s to his taste here,’ he would say. ‘He picks at his food at table, doesn’t eat, can’t stand honest human smells or a bit of stuffiness, gets upset by the sight of drunkenness, won’t have me knocking the servants about and yet he won’t do any work of his own because – would you believe it? – his health’s not strong enough! You’re a mother’s darling, that’s what you are! And all because you’ve got your head crammed full of Voltaire!’2 The old man was particularly scathing about Voltaire and that ‘barbarous’ Diderot, although he had never read a line of their works: reading was not his speciality. Pyotr Andreyich was not mistaken: it was precisely Diderot and Voltaire who were crammed into his son’s head, and not only them – Rousseau and Raynal and Helvétius, and many others like them, were also there. But they were only in his head. Ivan Petrovich’s former instructor, the retired abbé and encyclopaedist, had contented himself with pouring the undiluted wisdom of the eighteenth century into his pupil, and the pupil went about filled to the brim with it; but it dwelt in him without mixing with his blood, without penetrating his soul, without assuming the form of strong convictions…. Indeed, how could one demand convictions of a young man fifty years ago when we haven’t grown up sufficiently to have them even today? Ivan Petrovich was also an embarrassment to his father’s guests; he found them repugnant and they feared him, while with his sister Glafira, who was twelve years his senior, he did not get on at all. This Glafira was a strange creature: unbeautiful round-shouldered, thin as a stick, with severe, wide-open eyes and a delicate, pinched mouth, she took after her grandmother, the gipsy, Andrey’s wife, in her looks, her voice and her brisk angular movements. Insisting on having things her own way, loving her own authority, she would not hear of marriage. Ivan Petrovich’s return did not appeal to her one little bit. So long as Princess Kubenskaya had kept him with her, she had hoped to receive at least half her father’s estate: she took after her grandmother in her miserliness as well. What is more, Glafira envied her brother for his education and for being able to speak French so well, with a Parisian accent, while she could scarcely say ‘bonjour’ or ‘comment vous portez-vous?’ True, her parents had no knowledge of French, but that was little comfort to her. Ivan Petrovich was bored stiff and did not know where to turn; he had hardly spent a year in the country, but that one year seemed to him like ten. He opened his heart only to his mother and would sit with her for hours at a time in her low-ceilinged rooms, listening to her inconsequent, kind-hearted chatter and eating his fill of jam preserves.