‘Ah, here’s lunch. Will you have something first? Victor, uncork the bottle. That’s your specialty.’
‘It is, it is,’ Sitnikov muttered and again gave his shrill laugh.
‘Are there any attractive women here?’ Bazarov asked, drinking down his third glass.
‘There are,’ Yevdoksiya answered, ‘but they’re all so empty-headed. For example, mon amie8 Odintsova isn’t bad. A pity her reputation is a bit… However, it wouldn’t matter, but there is no freedom of opinion, no breadth, none… of that kind of thing. We’ve got to change the whole system of education. I’ve already been thinking about that. Our women are very badly educated.’
‘You won’t be able to do anything with them,’ said Sitnikov. ‘One should despise them, and I do despise them, utterly and completely!’ (The ability to despise and to voice that scorn Sitnikov found a most agreeable feeling; he was given to attacking women in particular, without suspecting that in a few months his fate would be to crawl before his wife just because she had been born a Princess Durdoleosova.) ‘There’s not one who would be capable of understanding our conversation. There’s not one worthy of being the subject of discussion by serious men like us!’
‘But they absolutely don’t have to understand our conversation,’ said Bazarov.
‘Who are you talking about?’ asked Yevdoksiya.
‘Attractive women.’
‘What! That means you share Proudhon’s9 view.’
Bazarov proudly drew himself up.
‘I don’t share anybody’s views. I have my own.’
‘Down with authority!’ shouted Sitnikov, delighted at the opportunity of expressing himself forcibly in front of a man he idolized.
‘But Macaulay10 himself…’ Kukshina began.
‘Down with Macaulay!’ Sitnikov thundered. ‘Are you standing up for those pathetic women?’
‘No, I’m not standing up for them, but for the rights of women, which I’ve sworn to defend to the last drop of my blood.’
‘Down with…’ Here Sitnikov stopped. ‘But I don’t deny them,’ he added.
‘No, I can see you’re a Slavophile!’11
‘No, I’m not a Slavophile, although of course…’
‘You are, you are! You are a Slavophile. You’re a disciple of the Domostroy.12 You only need a whip in your hand!’
‘A whip’s a good thing,’ commented Bazarov, ‘only we’ve just come to the last drop…’
‘Of what?’ Yevdoksiya interrupted.
‘Of champagne, dear Avdotya Nikitishna – not of your blood.’
‘I can’t listen calmly when people attack women,’ Yevdoksiya continued. ‘It’s terrible, terrible. Instead of attacking them you’d do better to read Michelet’s De l’Amour.13 It’s a wonder. Gentlemen, let’s talk of love,’ Yevdoksiya went on, languidly letting her arm fall on to a squashed sofa cushion.
A sudden silence fell.
‘No, why talk about love?’ said Bazarov. ‘But you just mentioned Odintsova… I think that was the name? Who is this lady?’
‘An absolute charmer!’ chirped Sitnikov. ‘I’ll introduce you. Clever, rich and a widow. Sadly she’s not yet very progressive. She ought to get to know our Yevdoksiya better. Eudoxie, I drink your health! Chin-chin! “Et toc, et toc, et tin-tin-tin! Et toc, et toc, et tin-tin-tin!”’14
‘Victor, you’re a naughty boy.’
Lunch went on for a long time. The first bottle of champagne was followed by a second, a third and even a fourth… Yevdoksiya spouted without drawing breath. Sitnikov kept up with her. They talked a lot: is marriage a prejudice or a crime; are all people born the same, or not; what exactly is personality. It all ended with Yevdoksiya, red in the face from the wine she had drunk, striking the keys of an out-of-tune piano with her stumpy nails. She started singing in a hoarse voice, first gipsy songs, then Seymour Schiff’s romance ‘Drowsy Granada slumbers’.15 And Sitnikov wrapped a scarf round his head and acted the dumbstruck lover as she sang:
‘And join my lips to thine
With burning kisses.’
Eventually Arkady could stand no more. ‘Gentlemen, this has become some kind of Bedlam,’ he said aloud.
Bazarov, who had only occasionally contributed a sarcastic remark to the conversation – he was more interested in the champagne – yawned loudly, got up and went out with Arkady without saying goodbye to the hostess. Sitnikov rushed after them.
‘Well, well, what do you think?’ he asked them, darting obsequiously from one to the other. ‘I told you, she’s a remarkable personality! That’s the kind of woman we need more of! In her own way she’s a phenomenon of high morality.’
‘And is that establishment of your pa’s another phenomenon of high morality?’ said Bazarov, calling Sitnikov ‘thou’ for the first time and pointing at a tavern they passed at that moment.
Sitnikov again gave his shrill laugh. He was very ashamed of his background and didn’t know whether to feel flattered or offended by Bazarov’s unexpected mode of address.
XIV
The governor’s ball took place some days later. Matvey Ilyich was indeed the ‘hero of the feast’. The marshal of the nobility told all and sundry that he had come especially out of respect for him. As for the governor, even at the ball and even standing still, he nonetheless continued to be ‘in charge of things’. Matvey Ilyich’s affability was only matched by the stateliness of his manners. He flattered everyone – some with a hint of superciliousness, others with a hint of deference. He showered compliments on the ladies ‘en vrai chevalier français’1 and kept repeating a powerful, booming laugh – as befits a great man. He patted Arkady on the back and loudly addressed him as ‘dear nephew’, and bestowed on Bazarov, dressed up in a rather old tail coat, a distracted but well-meaning sideways look and a vague but friendly roar, in which one could only make out ‘I’ and ‘-stremely’. He gave Sitnikov a finger and smiled at him, although he was already turning away his head. He even gave Kukshina an ‘Enchanté!’2 – she had appeared at the ball without a crinoline3 and wearing dirty gloves, but with a bird of paradise in her hair. There were masses of people and no lack of partners for the ladies. The civilians tended to crowd along the walls, but the officers were keen dancers, especially one of them who had spent some six months in Paris and there had learnt various exciting exclamations like ‘Zut’, ‘Ah fichtrrre’, ‘Pst, pst, mon bibi’ and so forth. He pronounced them perfectly, with true Parisian chic, and at the same time said ‘si j’aurais’ instead of ‘si j’avais’ and ‘absolument’ in the sense of ‘certainly’4 – in a word he expressed himself in that Russo-French dialect which the French laugh at so when they don’t feel the need to reassure our fellow countrymen that we speak their language like angels, ‘comme des anges’.
As we know Arkady danced badly and Bazarov didn’t dance at all. They both installed themselves in a corner, where they were joined by Sitnikov. He looked around him insolently with a scornful smile, making malicious comments. Suddenly his expression changed and, turning to Arkady, he said with a kind of embarrassment, ‘Odintsova is here.’
Arkady looked round and saw a tall woman in a black dress standing in the door of the ballroom. He was struck by the dignity of her bearing. Graceful was the way she held her bare arms beside her slender figure, and graceful the light sprays of fuchsia that drooped from her lustrous curls on to the slope of her shoulders. The brilliant eyes below a white and slightly prominent forehead were serene and intelligent, serene but not pensive, and a barely perceptible smile played around her lips.
‘Do you know her?’ Arkady asked Sitnikov.
‘Intimately. Do you want me to introduce you?’
‘Please… after this quadrille.’
Bazarov too noticed Odintsova. ‘Who is that person?’ he said. ‘She doesn’t look like the other women.’
When the quadrille was over, Sitnikov took Arkady up to Odintsova. But he couldn’t have known her that intimately. He stumbled over his words, and she looked
at him with some amazement. However, her expression became welcoming when she heard Arkady’s surname. She asked him if he was the son of Nikolay Petrovich.
‘I am indeed.’
‘I’ve seen your father a couple of times and have heard a great deal about him,’ she went on. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’
At that moment an aide-de-camp rushed up to her and invited her to dance a quadrille. She accepted.
‘Do you dance?’ Arkady asked her politely.
‘I do. And why do you think I don’t? Or do you think I’m too old?’
‘I’m sorry, how could you imagine… In that case may I book you for the mazurka?’
Odintsova gave him an indulgent smile.
‘Certainly,’ she said and looked at Arkady, without condescension but as married sisters look at their very young brothers.
Odintsova was only slightly older than Arkady. She was twenty-eight, but in front of her he felt himself a schoolboy, a student, as if the difference in years between them was much greater. Matvey Ilyich came majestically towards her and made a speech of compliments. Arkady withdrew but continued to watch her. He didn’t take his eyes off her during the quadrille. She talked just as easily with her partner as with the great man, gently moving her head and eyes from side to side and a couple of times laughing quietly. Her nose was a little thick, like most Russians’, and her complexion wasn’t quite clear. For all that Arkady decided he had never encountered such a lovely woman. He kept on hearing the sound of her voice, he thought the very folds of her dress fell differently from those of the other ladies, more gracefully and more fully, and all her movements were extraordinarily fluid and at the same time natural.
When the first sounds of the mazurka struck up and Arkady sat down beside his partner, he felt a bit shy inside himself and, as he tried to make conversation, he just stroked his hair and couldn’t come up with a single word. But his shyness and confusion didn’t last long. Odintsova’s calm communicated itself to him. In less than a quarter of an hour he was freely talking about his father, his uncle, life in St Petersburg and in the country. Odintsova listened to him with polite interest, slightly opening and closing her fan. His talk was interrupted when her partners called her out. (Sitnikov asked her twice.) She came back, sat down again and took up her fan, not even out of breath, and Arkady resumed his chatter, full of the happiness of being near her, of talking to her, looking into her eyes, at her noble brow, at her whole attractive, serious and intelligent face. She herself didn’t say much, but her words showed a certain knowledge of life. From a number of her remarks Arkady concluded that this young woman had managed to acquire a great deal of experience in her emotions and her thoughts…
‘Who were you standing with,’ she asked him, ‘when Mr Sitnikov brought you up to me?’
‘Did you notice him?’ Arkady asked in his turn. ‘Don’t you find he has a fine face? That’s Bazarov, my friend.’
Arkady started to talk about his ‘friend’.
He talked about him in such detail and with such passion that Odintsova turned towards him and looked at him searchingly. The mazurka was now coming to a close. Arkady was sorry to leave his partner. He had happily spent with her something like an hour! It’s true that the whole time he constantly felt that she was being nice to him, that he ought to be grateful to her… but young hearts aren’t humiliated by such a feeling.
The music stopped.
‘Merci,’ said Odintsova, getting up. ‘You promised to visit me. Do bring your friend too with you. I’ll be very curious to see a man who is bold enough to believe in nothing.’
The governor came up to Odintsova, announced that dinner was ready and gave her his arm with an anxious expression. As she left, she turned and gave Arkady a final smile and nod. He bowed low and followed her with his eyes (how elegant he found her waist, encased in the silvery sheen of black silk!), and, as he thought, ‘At this moment she’s already forgotten about my existence,’ he felt in his heart a kind of pleasing resignation.
‘Well then?’ Bazarov asked as soon as Arkady returned to him in their corner. ‘Did you enjoy yourself? A gentleman was just telling me that lady’s a bit of oh-ho-ho. However, I think that gentleman’s an idiot. But do you think she really is a bit of oh-ho-ho?’
‘I don’t quite understand what that means,’ answered Arkady.
‘Come on! What an innocent!’
‘If it’s that, I don’t understand your gentleman. I agree Odintsova is very nice – but her manner is so cold and severe that…’
‘Still waters… you know!’ said Bazarov. ‘You say she’s cold. That’s what makes her tasty. Don’t you like ice-cream?’
‘Maybe,’ Arkady stammered. ‘I can’t judge of that. She wants to meet you and asked me to bring you to see her.’
‘I can imagine the portrait you gave of me! But you did well. Take me. Whatever she is, provincial star or progressive woman like Kukshina, she’s got a pair of shoulders like I haven’t seen for ages.’
Bazarov’s cynicism grated on Arkady, but, as often happens, he took up with his friend something different from what had actually displeased him…
‘Why won’t you admit of freedom of opinion in women?’ he said in a low voice.
‘Because, my friend, I’ve observed that the women who think freely are hideous.’
The conversation ended on that. The two young men left immediately after supper. Kukshina gave them a nervous and angry laugh (even if it was rather a timid one). Her vanity was deeply wounded by the fact that neither had paid her any attention. She stayed at the ball later than anyone and danced a Parisian-style polka-mazurka with Sitnikov after 3 a.m. That edifying spectacle closed the governor’s ball.
XV
‘… Let’s see what species of mammal this person belongs to,’ Bazarov said to Arkady the next day as together they were climbing the stairs of the hotel where Odintsova was staying. ‘My nose tells me something here’s not quite right.’
‘I’m surprised at you,’ exclaimed Arkady. ‘What’s this? You – you Bazarov – supporting the kind of narrow morality which…’
‘What a funny fellow you are!’ Bazarov interrupted coolly. ‘Surely you know that in our language – our language – “not quite right” means the opposite? It means there’s gain to be had here. Didn’t you yourself say today that she made a strange marriage, although in my view marrying a rich old man isn’t at all strange but, on the contrary, very sensible. I don’t believe town gossip, but I like to think, in the words of our learned governor, that it is justified.’
Arkady made no reply and knocked on the door of the apartment. A young footman in livery led the two friends into a big room, poorly furnished, like all Russian hotel rooms, but full of flowers. Odintsova herself soon appeared, wearing a simple morning dress. In the spring sunshine she looked even younger. Arkady introduced Bazarov to her and was secretly surprised to observe that he was awkward, whereas Odintsova remained quite calm, as she had been the day before. Bazarov himself was aware of his awkwardness, and he was cross. ‘Just look at you! You’re scared of this bloody woman!’ he thought and, sprawled in his chair like a Sitnikov, he began to speak with exaggerated assurance. Odintsova didn’t take her bright eyes from his face.
Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova was the daughter of Sergey Nikolayevich Loktev, a man celebrated for his speculations, his gambling and his looks, who, after maintaining a very public existence in St Petersburg and Moscow for about fifteen years, finally lost everything at the tables and had to go to live in the country, where he soon died. He left a minute inheritance to his two daughters, Anna, who was twenty, and Katerina, who was twelve. Their mother, who came from the impoverished princely family of Kh–, had died in St Petersburg while her husband was still going strong. Anna’s situation after her father’s death was very hard. Her brilliant Petersburg education hadn’t prepared her for coping with estate and domestic chores, or for the boredom of country life. She knew absolutely no one in the whole
neighbourhood, and she had no one from whom to take advice. Her father had tried to avoid contact with the neighbours; he despised them and they despised him, each in their own way. However, she didn’t lose her head and at once wrote and sent for her mother’s sister, Princess Avdotya Stepanovna Kh–ya, a proud and ill-tempered old woman who, as soon as she had settled in her niece’s house, took all the best rooms for herself. She groused and grumbled from morning till night and even on her walks in the garden she was always accompanied by her only serf, a glum footman in a worn pea-green livery with blue braid and a tricorne hat. Anna patiently put up with all her aunt’s caprices, occupied herself in the meantime with her sister’s education and seemed to have already reconciled herself to the thought of fading away in the depths of the country… But fate had decreed for her otherwise. She happened to catch the eye of one Odintsov, a very wealthy man of forty-six or so, an eccentric and hypochondriac, fat, heavy and depressive, but for all that far from stupid and a good man. He fell in love with her and offered her his hand. She consented to be his wife – and he lived with her for about six years and, dying, left her all his fortune. Anna Sergeyevna didn’t leave the estate for about a year after his death; then she and her sister went off abroad. But she went only to Germany. She missed home and came back to live in her beloved Nikolskoye, which was about twenty-five miles from the town of ***. There she had a magnificent, richly furnished house and a beautiful garden with hothouses: her late husband had denied himself nothing. Anna Sergeyevna went to the town very seldom, mostly on business and then only for short visits. She wasn’t liked in the province; her marriage to Odintsov had given rise to a terrible amount of talk; people told all manner of silly stories about her, averring that she had helped her father in his swindles, that she had gone abroad for a very good reason, out of the necessity of concealing the unfortunate consequences of… ‘You know what of, don’t you?’ the indignant gossips would conclude. It was said of her, ‘She’s been through fire and water’; and a famous wit in the province would usually add, ‘And through copper piping too.’ All these rumours reached her, but she let them flow past her: she was a free spirit and quite strong-minded.
Fathers and Sons Page 10