There is much about it that is not what it ought to be; there is S. A.’s money 22 and the subscriptions; there is the relation of those who feed and those who are fed. THERE IS SIN WITHOUT END, but I cannot stay at home and write. I feel the necessity of taking part in it, of doing something.
Six years later I worked again at the same job with my father in Tchornski and Mtsenski districts.
After the bad crops of the two preceding years it became clear by the beginning of the winter of 1898 that a new famine was approaching in our neighborhood, and that charitable assistance to the peasantry would be needed. I turned to my father for help.
By the spring he had managed to collect some money, and at the beginning of April he came himself to see me.
I must say that my father, who was very economical by nature, was extraordinarily cautious and, I may say, even parsimonious in charitable matters. It is of course easy to understand, if one considers the unlimited confidence which he enjoyed among the subscribers and the great moral responsibility which he could not but feel toward them. So that before undertaking anything he had himself to be fully convinced of the necessity of giving aid.
The day after his arrival, we saddled a couple of horses and rode out. We rode as we had ridden together twenty years before, when we went out coursing with our greyhounds; that is, across country, over the fields.
It was all the same to me which way we rode, as I believed that all the neighboring villages were equally distressed, and my father, for the sake of old memories, wanted to revisit Spasskoye Lyutovinovo, which was only six miles from me, and where he had not been since Turgenieff’s death. On the way there I remember he told me all about Turgenieff’s mother, who was famous through all the neighborhood for her remarkable intelligence, energy, and craziness. I do not know that he ever saw her himself, or whether he was telling me only the reports that he had heard.
As we rode across the Turgenieff’s park, he recalled in passing how of old he and Ivan Sergeyevitch had disputed which park was best, Spasskoye or Yasnaya Polyana. I asked him:
“And now which do you think?”
“Yasnaya Polyana IS the best, though this is very fine, very fine indeed.”
In the village we visited the head-man’s and two or three other cottages, and came away disappointed. There was no famine.
The peasants, who had been endowed at the emancipation with a full share of good land, and had enriched themselves since by wage-earnings, were hardly in want at all. It is true that some of the yards were badly stocked; but there was none of that acute degree of want which amounts to famine and which strikes the
eye at once.
I even remember my father reproaching me a little for having sounded the alarm when there was no sufficient cause for it, and for a little while I felt rather ashamed and awkward before him.
Of course when he talked to the peasants he asked each of them if he remembered Turgenieff and eagerly picked up anything they had to say about him. Some of the old men remembered him and spoke of him with great affection.
MY FATHER’S ILLNESS IN THE CRIMEA
IN the autumn of 1901 my father was attacked by persistent feverishness, and the doctors advised him to spend the winter in the Crimea. Countess Panina kindly lent him her Villa Gaspra, near Koreiz, and he spent the winter there.
Soon after his arrival, he caught cold and had two illnesses one after the other, enteric fever and inflammation of the lungs. At one time his condition was so bad that the doctors had hardly any hope that he would ever rise from his bed again. Despite the fact that his temperature went up very high, he was conscious all the time; he dictated some reflections every day, and deliberately prepared for death.
The whole family was with him, and we all took turns in helping to nurse him. I look back with pleasure on the nights when it fell to me to be on duty by him, and I sat in the balcony by the open window, listening to his breathing and every sound in his room. My chief duty, as the strongest of the family, was to lift him up while the sheets were being changed. When they were making the bed, I had to hold him in my arms like a child.
I remember how my muscles quivered one day with the exertion. He looked at me with astonishment and said:
“You surely don’t find me heavy? What nonsense!”
I thought of the day when he had given me a bad time at riding in the woods as a boy, and kept asking, “You’re not tired?”
Another time during the same illness he wanted me to carry him downstairs in my arms by the winding stone staircase.
“Pick me up as they do a baby and carry me.”
He had not a grain of fear that I might stumble and kill him. It was all I could do to insist on his being carried down in an armchair by three of us.
Was my father afraid of death?
It is impossible to answer the question in one word. With his tough
constitution and physical strength, he always instinctively fought not only against death, but against old age. Till the last year of his life he never gave in, but always did everything for himself and even rode on horseback.
To suppose, therefore, that he had no instinctive fear of death is out of the
question. He had that fear, and in a very high degree, but he was constantly
fighting to overcome it.
Did he succeed?
I can answer definitely yes. During his illness he talked a great deal of death and prepared himself for it firmly and deliberately. When he felt that he was getting weaker, he wished to say good-by to everybody, and he called us all separately to his bedside, one after the other, and gave his last words of advice to each. He was so weak that he spoke in a half-whisper, and when he had said good-by to one, he had to rest for a while and collect his strength for the rest.
When my turn came, he said as nearly as I can remember:
“You are still young and strong and tossed by storms of passion. You have not therefore yet been able to think over the chief questions of life. But this stage will pass. I am sure of it. When the time comes, believe me, you will find the truth in the teachings of the Gospel. I am dying peacefully simply because I have come to know that teaching and believe in it. May God grant you this knowledge soon! Good-by.”
I kissed his hand and left the room quietly. When I got to the front door, I rushed to a lonely stone tower, and there sobbed my heart out in the darkness like a child. Looking round at last, I saw that some one else was sitting on the staircase near me, also crying.
So I said farewell to my father years before his death, and the memory of it is dear to me, for I know that if I had seen him before his death at Astapova he would have said just the same to me.
To return to the question of death, I will say that so far from being afraid of it, in his last days he often desired it; he was more interested in it than afraid of it. This “greatest of mysteries” interested him to such a degree that his interest came near to love. How eagerly he listened to accounts of the death of his friends, Turgenieff, Gay, Leskof, 23 Zhemtchuzhnikof 24; and others! He inquired after the smallest matters; no detail, however trifling in appearance, was without its interest and importance to him.
His “Circle of Reading,” November 7, the day he died, is devoted entirely to thoughts on death.
“Life is a dream, death is an awakening,” he wrote, while in expectation of that awakening.
Apropos of the “Circle of Reading,” I cannot refrain from relating a
characteristic incident which I was told by one of my sisters.
When my father had made up his mind to compile that collection of the sayings of the wise, to which he gave the name of “Circle of Reading,” he told one of his friends about it.
A few days afterward this friend came to see him again, and at once told him that he and his wife had been thinking over his scheme for the new book and had come to the conclusion that he ought to call it “For Every Day,” instead of “Circle of Reading.”
To this my father replied that he preferred the title “Circle of Reading” because the word “circle” suggested the idea of continuous reading, which was what he meant to express by the title.
Half an hour later the friend came across the room to him and repeated exactly the same remark again. This time my father made no reply. In the evening, when the friend was preparing to go home, as he was saying good-by to my father, he held his hand in his and began once more:
“Still, I must tell you, Lyoff Nikolaievich, that I and my wife have been thinking it over, and we have come to the conclusion,” and so on, word for word the same.
“No, no, I want to die—to die as soon as possible,” groaned my father when he
