Because he stammered and had difficulty in pronouncing labials, he changed his coachman’s name from Pyotr to Lev; and my father (who was always a little sharp with him) accused him of a slaveowner’s mentality. Apart from this, his speech was a fastidious combination of French, English and Italian, all of which he spoke with vastly more ease than he did his native tongue. When he resorted to Russian, it was invariably to misuse or garble some extremely idiomatic or even folksy expression, as when he would say at table with a sudden sigh (for there was always something amiss—a spell of hay fever, the death of a peacock, a lost borzoi): “Je suis triste et seul comme une bylinka v pole [as lonesome as a ‘grass blade in the field’].”
He insisted that he had an incurable heart ailment and that, when the seizures came, he could obtain relief only by lying supine on the floor.
Nobody took him seriously, and after he did die of angina pectoris, all alone, in Paris, at the end of 1916, aged forty-five, it was with a quite special pang that one recalled those after-dinner incidents in the drawing room—the unprepared footman entering with the Turkish coffee, my father glancing (with quizzical resignation) at my mother, then (with disapproval) at his brother-in-law spread-eagled in the footman’s path, then (with curiosity) at the funny vibration going on among the coffee things on the tray in the seemingly composed servant’s cotton-gloved hands.
From other, stranger torments that beset him in the course of his short life, he sought relief—if I understand these matters rightly—in religion, first in certain Russian sectarian outlets, and eventually in the Roman Catholic Church. His was the kind of colorful neurosis that should have been accompanied by genius but in his case was not, hence the search for a traveling shadow. In his youth he had been intensely disliked by his father, a country gentleman of the old school (bear hunting, a private theatre, a few fine Old Masters among a good deal of trash), whose uncontrollable temper was rumored to have been a threat to the boy’s very life.
My mother told me later of the tension in the Vyra household of her girlhood, of the atrocious scenes that took place in Ivan Vasilievich’s study, a gloomy corner room giving on an old well with a rusty pumping wheel under five Lombardy poplars. Nobody used that room except me. I kept my books and spreading boards on its black shelves, and subsequently induced my mother to have some of its furniture transferred into my own sunny little study on the garden side, and therein staggered, one morning, its tremendous desk with nothing upon its waste of dark leather but a huge curved paper knife, a veritable scimitar of yellow ivory carved from a mammoth’s tusk.
When Uncle Ruka died, at the end of 1916, he left me what would amount nowadays to a couple of million dollars and his country estate, with its white-pillared mansion on a green, escarped hill and its two thousand acres of wildwood and peatbog. The house, I am told, still stood there in 1940, nationalized but aloof, a museum piece for any sightseeing traveler who might follow the St. Petersburg-Luga highway running below through the village Rozhestveno and across the branching river. Because of its floating islands of water lilies and algal brocade, the fair Oredezh had a festive air at that spot. Farther down its sinuous course, where the sand martins shot out of their holes in the steep red bank, it was deeply suffused with the reflections of great, romantic firs (the fringe of our Vyra); and still farther downstream, the endless tumultuous flow of a water mill gave the spectator (his elbows on the handrail) the sensation of receding endlessly, as if this were the stern of time itself.
5
The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.
My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who “hates the Reds” because they “stole” his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:
… Beneath the sky
Of my America to sigh
For one locality in Russia.
The general reader may now resume.
6
I was nearing eighteen, then was over eighteen; love affairs and verse-writing occupied most of my leisure; material questions left me indifferent, and, anyway, against the background of our prosperity no inheritance could seem very conspicuous; yet, upon looking back across the transparent abyss, I find queer and somewhat unpleasant to reflect that during the brief year that I was in the possession of that private wealth, I was too much absorbed by the usual delights of youth—youth that was rapidly losing its initial, non-usual fervor—either to derive any special pleasure from the legacy or to experience any annoyance when the Bolshevik Revolution abolished it overnight.
This recollection gives me the sense of having been ungrateful to Uncle Ruka; of having joined in the general attitude of smiling condescension that even those who liked him usually took toward him. It is with the utmost repulsion that I force myself to recall the sarcastic comments that Monsieur Noyer, my Swiss tutor (otherwise a most kindly soul), used to make on my uncle’s best composition, a romance, both the music and words of which he had written.
One day, on the terrace of his Pau castle, with the amber vineyards below and the empurpled mountains in the distance, at a time when he was harassed by asthma, palpitations, shiverings, a Proustian excoriation of the senses, se débattant, as it were, under the impact of the autumn colors (described in his own words as the “chapelle ardente de feuilles aux tons violents”), of the distant voices from the valley, of a flight of doves striating the tender sky, he had composed that one-winged romance (and the only person who memorized the music and all the words was my brother Sergey, whom he hardly ever noticed, who also stammered, and who is also now dead).
“L’air transparent fait monter de la plaine.…” he would sing in his high tenor voice, seated at the white piano in our country house—and if I were at that moment hurrying through the adjacent groves on my way home for lunch (soon after seeing his jaunty straw hat and the black-velvet-clad bust of his handsome coachman in Assyrian profile, with scarlet-sleeved outstretched arms, skim rapidly along the rim of the hedge separating the park from the drive) the plaintive sounds
Un vol de tourterelles strie le ciel tendre,
Les chrysanthèmes se parent pour la Toussaint
reached me and my green butterfly net on the shady, tremulous trail, at the end of which was a vista of reddish sand and the corner of our freshly repainted house, the color of young fir cones, with the open drawing-room window whence the wounded music came.
7
The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait. There was a certain spot in the forest, a footbridge across a brown brook, where my father would piously pause to recall the rare butterfly that, on the seventeenth of August, 1883, his German tutor had netted for him. The thirty-year-old scene would be gone through again. He and his brothers had stopped short in helpless excitement at the sight of the coveted insect poised on a log and moving up and down, as though in alert respiration, its four cherry-red wings with a pavonian eyespot on each. In tense silence, not daring to strike himself, he had handed his net to Herr Rogge, who was groping for it, his eyes fixed on the splendid fly. My cabinet inherited that specimen a quarter of a century later. One touching detail: its wings had “sprung” because it had been removed from the setting board too early, too eagerly.
In a villa which in the summer of 1904 we rented with my uncle Ivan de Peterson’s family on the Adriatic (the name was either “Neptune” or “Apollo”—I can still identify its crenelated, cream-colored tower in old pictures of Abbazia), aged five, mooning in my cot after lunch, I used to turn over on my stomach and, carefully, lovingly, hopelessly, in an artistically detailed fashion difficult to reconcile with the ridiculously small number of seasons that had gone to form the inexplicably nostalgic image of “home” (that I had not seen since September
