Interrupted Stories

younger brother. They would never have dared to send Stepushka into service or hand him over to strangers; Levushka, on the contrary, was not spared by his parents, and as soon as he finished his course of education—that is, learned to read in Russian and write in defiance of all rules of orthography—he was sent to Petersburg. Having served for ten years in the Guards, he moved to the civil service, was a councilor, and later president of some college, and on very close terms with one of the temporary favorites refers to influential court favorites of the 18th century. His patron, who for a long time knew how to skillfully maintain his power in the classical time of falls and successes, accessions and overthrows, from Peter I to Catherine II, finally lost his balance and vanished into his Little Russian estates. His assistant and protégé, Lev Stepanovich, wisely and in time knew how to separate his fate from that of his patron; wisely managed to marry the niece of another favorite whom the latter did not know what to do with; and finally, what was wisest of all, Lev Stepanovich, having received the Order of St. Anna, retired and set off for Moscow to organize his estate, respected by all as an honest, kind, solid, and businesslike man.

One should not think that there was only calculation or diplomacy in his retirement; a reason just as strong called him to return to a more familiar environment. In Petersburg, despite his success in the service, for him

everything was somehow awkward, as if he were a guest; he wanted peace in the honorable expanse of landowner life, he wanted to live according to his own will; his parents had long since died, Stepushka had been separated, the estate that fell to Lev Stepanovich was one of the wealthiest near Moscow, about a hundred versts approx. 66 miles from the city along the Mozhaysk road. How could he not go to his birch and linden groves, to his old father's house, where the obsequious household servants and the frightened village were ready to meet him with fear and trembling, bow to the ground, and come to kiss his hand.

In Moscow, he did not remain long; he laid the foundation for stone mansions on the Yauza River, in place of the wooden house, and went off to Lipovka, visiting rarely to keep an eye on the construction. Lev Stepanovich set to work on his household with zeal; he had not ruined his estate even while in service, but on the contrary, to the hereditary thousand souls, he bought another thousand and a half; but now, without going into agronomic reasoning, he suddenly became a shrewd landlord, with the same knack with which he had become a businesslike councilor in a year's time after being a Life Guards captain. While doubling his income, he improved the condition of the peasants. He would help with grain, provide oats for sowing, and give a cow or horse in exchange for one that had died—well, but afterwards, you must keep your ears open. Suddenly, when no one was thinking or expecting it, the master would appear in the yard with the headman and the village elders: "Hey you, Akulka, show us your milk pots," if they were not clean, the peasant woman would get a thrashing, "And you, Nefed, show me your plow and the harrow, bring out the horse." In a word, he taught them like irrational children, and the peasants would recount long after his death "about the ways of the old master," adding "it was as if he never gave anyone a break, but he was a clever man, he knew our peasant business thoroughly and would not touch an innocent man; that is to say, he was a teacher."