Our meeting at Victoria Station in 1919 is a vivid vignette in my mind: my father marching up to his prim brother with an unfolding bear hug; he, backing away and repeating: “Mï v Anglii, mï v Anglii [we are in England].” His charming little flat was full of souvenirs from India such as photographs of young British officers. He is the author of The Ordeal of a Diplomat (1921), easily obtainable in large public libraries, and of an English version of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov; and he is portrayed, goatee and all (together with Count Witte, the two Japanese delegates and a benevolent Theodore Roosevelt), in a mural of the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty on the left side of the main entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History—an eminently fit place to find my surname in golden Slavic characters, as I did the first time I passed there—with a fellow lepidopterist, who said “Sure, sure” in reply to my exclamation of recognition.
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Diagrammatically, the three family estates on the Oredezh, fifty miles south of St. Petersburg, may be represented as three linked rings in a ten-mile chain running west-east across the Luga highway, with my mother’s Vyra in the middle, her brother’s Rozhestveno on the right, and my grandmother’s Batovo on the left, the links being the bridges across the Oredezh (properly Oredezh’) which, in its winding, branching and looping course, bathed Vyra on either side.
Two other, much more distant, estates in the region were related to Batovo: my uncle Prince Wittgenstein’s Druzhnoselie situated a few miles beyond the Siverski railway station, which was six miles northeast of our place; and my uncle Pïhachev’s Mityushino, some fifty miles south on the way to Luga: I never once was there, but we fairly often drove the ten miles or so to the Wittgensteins and once (in August 1911) visited them at their other splendid estate, Kamenka, in the Province of Podolsk, S.W. Russia.
The estate of Batovo enters history in 1805 when it becomes the property of Anastasia Matveevna Rïleev, born Essen. Her son, Kondratiy Fyodorovich Rïleev (1795–1826), minor poet, journalist, and famous Decembrist, spent most of his summers in the region, addressed elegies to the Oredezh, and sang Prince Aleksey’s castle, the jewel of its banks. Legend and logic, a rare but strong partnership, seem to indicate, as I have more fully explained in my notes to Onegin, that the Rïleev pistol duel with Pushkin, of which so little is known, took place in the Batovo park, between May 6 and 9 (Old Style), 1820. Pushkin, with two friends, Baron Anton Delvig and Pavel Yakovlev, who were accompanying him a little way on the first lap of his long journey from St. Petersburg to Ekaterinoslav, had quietly turned off the Luga highway, at Rozhestveno, crossed the bridge (hoof-thud changing to brief clatter), and followed the old rutty road westward to Batovo. There, in front of the manor house, Rïleev was eagerly awaiting them.
He had just sent his wife, in her last month of pregnancy, to her estate near Voronezh, and was anxious to get the duel over—and, God willing, join her there. I can feel upon my skin and in my nostrils the delicious country roughness of the northern spring day which greeted Pushkin and his two seconds as they got out of their coach and penetrated into the linden avenue beyond the Batovo platbands, still virginally black. I see so plainly the three young men (the sum of their years equals my present age) following their host and two persons unknown, into the park. At that date small crumpled violets showed through the carpet of last year’s dead leaves, and freshly emerged Orange-tips settled on the shivering dandelions. For one moment fate may have wavered between preventing a heroic rebel from heading for the gallows, and depriving Russia of Eugene Onegin; but then did neither.
A couple of decades after Rïleev’s execution on the bastion of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in 1826, Batovo was acquired from the state by my paternal grandmother’s mother, Nina Aleksandrovna Shishkov, later Baroness von Korff, from whom my grandfather purchased it around 1855. Two tutor-and-governess-raised generations of Nabokovs knew a certain trail through the woods beyond Batovo as “Le Chemin du Pendu,” the favorite walk of The Hanged One, as Rïleev was referred to in society: callously but also euphemistically and wonderingly (gentlemen in those days were not often hanged) in preference to The Decembrist or The Insurgent.
I can easily imagine young Rïleev in the green skeins of our woods, walking and reading a book, a form of romantic ambulation in the manner of his era, as easily as I can visualize the fearless lieutenant defying despotism on the bleak Senate Square with his comrades and puzzled troops; but the name of the long, “grown-up” promenade looked forward to by good children, remained throughout boyhood unconnected in our minds with the fate of the unfortunate master of Batovo: my cousin Sergey Nabokov, who was born at Batovo in la Chambre du Revenant, imagined a conventional ghost, and I vaguely surmised with my tutor or governess that some mysterious stranger had been found dangling from the aspen upon which a rare hawkmoth bred.
That Rïleev may have been simply the “Hanged One” (poveshennïy or visel’nik) to the local peasants, is not unnatural; but in the manorial families a bizarre taboo prevented, apparently, parents from identifying the ghost, as if a specific reference might introduce a note of nastiness into the glamorous vagueness of the phrase designating a picturesque walk in a beloved country place. Still, I find it curious to realize that even my father, who had so much information about the Decembrists and so much more sympathy for them than his relatives, never once, as far as I can recall, mentioned Kondratiy Rïleev during our rambles and bicycle rides in the environs. My cousin draws my attention to the fact that General Rïleev, the poet’s son, was a close friend of Tsar Alexander II and of my grandfather, D. N. Nabokov, and that on ne parle pas de corde dans la maison du pendu.
From Batovo, the old rutty road (which we have followed with Pushkin and now retrace) ran east for a couple of miles to Rozhestveno. Just before the main bridge, one could either turn north in open country toward our Vyra and its two parks on each side of the road, or else continue east, down a steep hill past an old cemetery choked with raspberry and racemosa and cross the bridge toward my uncle’s white-pillared house aloof on its hill.
The estate Rozhestveno, with a large village of the same name, extensive lands, and a manor house high above the Oredezh River, on the Luga (or Warsaw) highway, in the district of Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin), about fifty miles south from St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), had been known before the eighteenth century as the Kurovitz domain, in the old Koporsk district. Around 1715 it had been the property of Prince Aleksey, the unfortunate son of that archbully, Peter the First. Part of an escalier dérobé and something else I cannot recollect were preserved in the new anatomy of the building.
I have touched that banister and have seen (or trod on?) the other, forgotten, detail. From that palace, along that highway leading to Poland and Austria, the prince had escaped only to be lured back from as far south as Naples to the paternal torture house by the Tsar’s agent, Count Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy, one-time ambassador in Constantinople (where he had obtained for his master the little blackamoor whose great-grandson was to be Pushkin). Rozhestveno later belonged, I believe, to a favorite of Alexander the First, and the manor had been partly rebuilt when my maternal grandfather acquired the domain around 1880, for his eldest son Vladimir who died at sixteen a few years later. His brother Vasiliy inherited it in 1901 and spent there ten summers out of the fifteen that still remained to him. I particularly remember the cool and sonorous quality of the place, the checkerboard flagstones of the hall, ten porcelain cats on a shelf, a sarcophagus and an organ, the skylights and the upper galleries, the colored dusk of mysterious rooms, and carnations and crucifixes everywhere.
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In his youth Carl Heinrich Graun had a fine tenor voice; one night, having to sing in an opera written by Schurmann, chapel-master of Brunswick, he got so disgusted with some airs in it that he replaced them by others of his own composition. Here I feel the shock of gleeful kinship; yet I prefer two other ancestors of mine, the young explorer already mentioned and that great pathologist, my mother’s maternal grandfather, Nikolay Illarionovich Kozlov (1814–1889), first president of the Russian Imperial
