City Folk and Country Folk

Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, Nora Seligman Favorov

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544504
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura russa

" This scathingly funny comedy of manners" by the rediscovered female Russian novelist "will deeply satisfy fans of 19th-century Russian literature " ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). City Folk and Country Folk is a seemingly gentle yet devastating satire of the aristocratic and pseudo-intellectual elites of 1860s Russia. Translated into English for the first time, the novel weaves a tale of manipulation, infatuation, and female assertiveness that takes place one year after the liberation of the empire's serfs. Upending Russian literary clichés of female passivity and rural gentry benightedness, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya centers her story on a common-sense, hardworking noblewoman and her self-assured daughter living on their small rural estate. Throwing off the imposed sense of duty toward their "betters", these two women ultimately triumph over the urbanites' financial, amorous, and matrimonial machinations. Sofia Khvoshchinskaya and her writer sisters closely mirror Britain's Brontës, yet Khvoshchinskaya's work contains more of Jane Austen's wit and social repartee, as well as an intellectual engagement reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell's condition-of-England novels. Written by a woman under a male pseudonym, this exploration of gender dynamics in post-emancipation Russian offers a new and vital point of comparison with the better-known classics of nineteenth-century world literature.

PART I

Nastasya Ivanovna Chulkova, a fifty-five-year-old widow and the mistress of fifty souls, who were by then working on her Snetki estate under temporary obligation, might have called last summer the most remarkable summer of her life and described it as such in her memoirs, if only she had kept memoirs.¹ First, above her, through the very air of her home, new currents of education had blown through in a gust, that same education that is wafting from every corner of our native land; second, her home had been the site of a struggle between old and new ideas, and Nastasya Ivanovna had taken part in this struggle and, without realizing it, had even achieved a victory; and third, to her own amazement and the envy of the ladies of the neighboring small estates, she had come within a hair’s breadth of developing into an enlightened woman herself. And can you imagine? Not only did the ingrate fail to rejoice, she called the whole affair a calamity.

Nastasya Ivanovna did not appreciate the value of the enlightenment that had been generously placed into her hands, just as she did not appreciate the value of Saxon porcelain, naively preferring teacups produced in Gzhel,² and was unable to understand the taste for truffles, which she had eaten only once in her life, privately concluding that the mushrooms of Snetki’s grove were far superior. She did not admit her unsophisticated tastes to just anyone, but, humble and frank, in the presence of people with whom she felt at ease, she repented these sins. Nobody forced her—she confessed them freely. Surely this suggests that she was capable of self-improvement. It is therefore a shame that fate did not earlier, before the events of last summer, send Nastasya Ivanovna someone who could have prepared her for these events, who could have warned her, for instance, that proclaiming a fight for one’s convictions to be a calamity and a punishment from God is far more shameful than blurting out a preference for local mushrooms over truffles. Then Nastasya Ivanovna would not have suffered such a total loss of esteem in the eyes of those lamenting her native district’s poor moral development. They are truly weary of leading a movement the rear of which is standing stock-still.

Indeed both her native district and Nastasya Ivanovna herself were making little headway down the road of progress, despite being quite close to the provincial capital, a mere twenty versts³ down the highway from Snetki. This was no backwoods. Nastasya Ivanovna made frequent trips to town, where she had relatives among the low-ranking civil servants. They knew better than their high-ranking superiors what was happening in government offices: all the new directives, all the administrative changes. As the ones who carried out orders, strict or otherwise, it was they, the hound dogs of the operation, who first and most often peered into the dark corners inevitably touched by investigations, trials, verdicts, or changes in the way of life. They were better able than their superiors to observe how new joys and misfortunes, new gains and losses, echoed through the firmly set life of town and country. Neither domestic rejoicing nor cursing were held in check in the presence of these obscure and impecunious men. It is little wonder, therefore, that they knew and told many anecdotes—pages torn from real life, pages hidden from the observer of exalted rank, pages that at times got to the crux of the matter better than thousands of ink-laden documents and other papers.

Nastasya Ivanovna was constantly hearing such anecdotes and occasioned anecdotes herself, both during her married life and as a widow, being someone, as the mistress of an estate, who had been through good times and bad, lawsuits, disputes with neighbors, land surveys, serf conscription and the raising of wartime militias, fires, investigations involving the district police and dead bodies, years of good harvest and bad, and, finally, emancipation.⁴ Nastasya Ivanovna herself knew and told many anecdotes, but she related them as simple fact, no more. She did not delve deeply into them, did not derive their moral significance. In other words, she did not engage in the work that, they say, leads to enlightenment. It can be stated with certainty that not the slightest penetration and desire to analyze had yet been awakened in this woman, the representative of an ancient line of the nobility.

Her mother and father were not given to analysis either. Ivan Terentyevich and Malanya Kuzminishna were masters of their land, farmers of their land, and, in the truest sense, lovers of their land. They lived and died without setting foot in the provincial capital. Only once were they uprooted from Snetki’s soil: their flight at the first sight of a Frenchman took them to a neighboring province for a month.⁵ Nastasya Ivanovna was born and raised in Snetki. Here, she married and was widowed by her Nikolai Demyanovich, her parents’ choice and the heir to ten souls. He ran the estate extraordinarily well and possessed one of the gentlest souls in all the world. Here, after the untimely deaths of eight infants, after much anticipation, Nastasya Ivanovna’s daughter, Olenka, was born, survived, and grew up.

But Olenka had turned seventeen this past year; in other words, she had come of age in our time, that is, a time both euphoric and restless, and not one to be spent sitting around a place like Snetki. Nastasya Ivanovna saw that such a time had come, although she did not try to think through what was special about it. Instinctively, to the best of her abilities, she kept an eye on what was happening. She expanded their circle of acquaintances among the neighbors and began to make frequent trips to town. She even made a point of traveling the twenty versts to town with Olenka on Sundays, when there was music on the boulevard. She dressed her daughter up like a doll, taught her what she could, prayed to God for her, loved her relatives and friends, sympathized with the suffering of her fellow man, and thought that was enough.

But last summer certain people showed her that that was not nearly enough.

Last summer a visitor came to stay with Nastasya Ivanovna.

Erast Sergeyevich Ovcharov did not travel abroad last year to take the waters, as was his annual custom. He remained in Russia despite the fact that Moscow physicians found his rheumatism had intensified and despite the orders of the foreign physicians with whom he corresponded that he return to take the waters. Erast Sergeyevich insisted that in view of the agricultural reforms, however precious one’s health might be, this was no time to be away from home. Furthermore, he was short of funds after a winter in Moscow, and credit…credit, as everyone knows, had started to dry up all over Russia. Ovcharov decided that he would spend the summer on his estate. In order not to waste a season of great potential benefit to his health and to make what little use he could of our abominable climate, Ovcharov intended to drink whey while living in the country.

His estate, Beryozovka, was only two versts from Nastasya Ivanovna’s. He had not looked in on his property for many years, and upon arriving he discovered that he could not possibly live there. The manor house had long since been sold and carted off to town. There would have been room in the steward’s house, but not peace from his half-dozen children. He could have rented one of the huts, but the peasants, despite having lived contentedly since days of yore, were not very well housed. Ovcharov had thought that having calves, cows, and other farm animals nearby would perhaps benefit his weak lungs, but his sense of cleanliness rebelled against this idea. In the end, he was at a loss. He spent the first night in his Viennese carriage, but the light rain and cold that by dawn had chilled him to the bone (it was early May) plunged him into a state of dread: he recalled his rheumatism. Upon rising in the morning, despite the magnificent spring sunshine, he dressed himself in flannels and a shaggy coat. He had made up his mind to leave for the provincial capital and complain to anyone who would listen that it was fate and not his own fault if he was unable to fulfill his decided desire to take part in the reforms that were getting underway.

Suddenly, all this changed. While his man was busy readying the horses and the steward’s wife made chicken broth for his breakfast, Ovcharov went for a walk. After a night of shivering it was essential that he warm up with some exercise in the sun. Within half an hour he had traversed the Beryozovka pasture and continued down a small road into a hollow beyond it. Three versts farther this rural road joined the old main road near where it intersected the provincial highway. After crossing the hollow, the wayfarer was no longer on his own land. Here was the border with Snetki. Its rye extended up the near side of a small hill, beyond which, after about a verst, the road entered the Snetki woods and curled behind the estates’ threshing barns.

Ovcharov was soon approaching these barns and did not yet feel fatigue.

“How near!” he mused. And suddenly a fortuitous thought struck him. Perhaps he could find shelter here rather than go to town? If the owners were away, he could rent the manor house…Beryozovka was a mere stone’s throw away, it made no difference where he drank his whey, and he would be able to settle into comfortable lodgings.

His fancy nearly whispered the notion that it would be as easy as renting a chalet in Interlaken, but Ovcharov was still sufficiently Russian that this dream vanished instantly. In another minute he offered up even more resounding proof of his Russianness by pronouncing out loud and even joyously: “Hey, I know this village!”

Of course he knew it. He had spent time there twenty years earlier, toward the end of his school days. Back then, his parents had lived at Beryozovka for two years and brought their son there from Moscow for his vacations. He had spent even more time in Snetki when he was younger and less aware: he had lived next door in Beryozovka until he turned eight. But how much water had flowed under the bridge since then! And in recent years such a multitude of German, French, and various other villages had flashed before his eyes through train windows, it was hardly surprising that he had forgotten the village of Snetki and its residents.

A minute later, however, he had even recalled these residents. In his time, three landowning families had lived there: the Toporishchevs, the Malinnikovs and a third family…Ovcharov could not remember their name, although this was the only family with which he had been acquainted. He recalled visiting them with his mother as a child, and their hosts had treated these visits as an exceptional indulgence. He and his mother h...