I have discovered the answer to the question: ‘Russia, where are you striving to?’ But be not afraid: I shall not leave this place. There is nowhere for me to go. It is all the same, everywhere. There’s no getting away from the Aleksandr Petroviches.

Vasily Bogoslovsky

Olgina-Poyma,

3rd August, 185–

At the beginning of December I received another letter. It was from Sviridov, and it informed me that in a day or two’s time he and his wife would be coming to St Petersburg; in the letter he asked me to rent a small, comfortable apartment for them.

Some ten days after my receipt of this second letter, Aleksandr Ivanovich and his wife were sitting in their charming little apartment opposite the Aleksandrinsky Theatre, warming themselves with tea and my heart with their tales of that far-off region

Where golden dreams were dreamt by me.

‘But tell me,’ I said, at last, seizing an opportune moment; ‘How is my Musk-Ox faring?’

‘He’s kicking against the pricks, old chap.’

‘How do you mean – kicking against the pricks?’

‘Carrying on in that wayward way of his. He never comes to see us – I suppose we’re not good enough for him. No, he’s been spending all his time hob-nobbing with the labourers, but now he’s grown tired of that, too: he asked me to send him somewhere else.’

‘What about you?’ I asked Nastasya Petrovna. ‘We’d pinned our hopes on you – that you’d domesticate him.’

‘What’s the good of hope? He runs away from that, too.’

I glanced at Nastasya Petrovna, and she at me.

‘What can you do? I expect he thinks I’m hideous,’ she said.

‘But what’s been going on? Tell me.’

‘What is there to tell?’ said Aleksandr Ivanovich. ‘It’s just that he came to me and said: “Let me go.” “Where will you go?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he replied. “What’s so bad about being here with me?” I said. “Nothing,” he said, “but let me go all the same.” “But what’s the matter?” I asked. He wouldn’t say anything – just kept twirling those forelocks of his. “You ought to tell Nastasya if anyone does anything to upset you,” I said. “No,” he said. “Just send me to do some other kind of work.” I felt too sorry for the poor fellow to be able simply to give him the sack like that, so I sent him to another woodfelling site, in Zhogovo, about thirty versts away. That’s where he is, now,’ Aleksandr Ivanovich added.

‘How did you manage to upset him so badly?’ I asked Nastasya Petrovna.

‘Heaven only knows. I certainly never wanted to upset him.’

‘She looked after him as if she were his own mother,’ Sviridov said, supporting her. ‘She sewed for him, clothed him, shod him. I mean, you know what a warm-hearted soul she is.’

‘Well, and so what happened?’

‘He just took against me,’ Nastasya Petrovna said, laughing.

I settled down to a right royal existence in St Petersburg with the Sviridovs. Aleksandr kept bustling about on business, while Nastasya Petrovna and I did nothing but ‘idle around’. Nastasya Petrovna found the city thoroughly to her liking; she was especially fond of the theatre. Each evening we would visit one of these, and we never grew tired of this diversion. The time passed swiftly and agreeably. During this period I received yet one more letter from Musk-Ox, in which he had some dreadfully bitter things to say about Aleksandr Petrovich. ‘In my opinion,’ he wrote, ‘even brigands and foreigners are to be preferred to these Russian moneybags! Yet everyone is for them, and my entrails heave when I reflect that that’s as it should be – that everyone should be for them. I saw a curious thing. I saw that he, this Aleksandr Ivanov, was in my way, even before I became acquainted with him. That’s who the enemy of the people is – that kind of well-fed brute, a brute who feeds his movable paupers on the crumbs from his table, to prevent them from expiring on the spot and to keep them working for him. That type of Christian is particularly in keeping with our national Russian character, and one day he will conquer us all unless we give him his comeuppance.