Authors, Russian -- Biography
_Do not expect from me long accounts of my inner life of that period.... Terrible events, troubles of all sorts, are more easily put upon paper than quite bright and cloudless memories.... Can happiness be described?_
_Do not expect from me long accounts of my inner life of that period.... Terrible events, troubles of all sorts, are more easily put upon paper than quite bright and cloudless m...
9. Chapter 19When I was five or six years old and was very naughty, Vera Artamonovna used to say: ‘Very well, very well, you wait a bit, I’ll tell the princess as soon as she comes.’ I was a...
10. Chapter 20In the middle of 1825 ‘the Chemist,’ who found his father’s affairs in great confusion, sent his brothers and sisters from Petersburg to the Shatskoye estate; he assigned them t...
11. Chapter 21How dear ‘my sister’ was then to me and how continually in my thoughts is clear from the fact that I wrote to her from Nizhni, and from Perm on the very day after my arrival the...
12. Chapter 22My peaceful life in Vladimir was soon troubled by news from Moscow which reached me now from all sides and deeply distressed me. To make this intelligible I must go back to 1834.
13. Chapter 23[12In the morning I wrote letters; when I had finished we sat down to dinner. I could not eat, we said nothing, I felt unbearably oppressed—it was between four and five, at seven t...
14. Chapter 24One long, winter evening towards the end of 1838 we were sitting, as always, alone, reading and then not reading, talking and then being silent, and in silence continuing the ta...
15. Chapter 25At the beginning of 1840 we left Vladimir and the poor, narrow Klyazma. With anxiety and an aching heart I left the little town where we were married. I foresaw that the same si...
16. Chapter 26Though we were so comfortable in Moscow, we had to move to Petersburg. My father insisted upon it. Count Strogonov, Minister of Home Affairs, commanded me to enter his secretari...
17. Chapter 27Before I went away Count Strogonov told me that the military governor of Novgorod, Elpidifor Antihovitch Zurov was in Petersburg, that he had spoken to him about my appointment,...
18. Chapter 28Our life in Novgorod had not been a happy one. I had gone there not in a spirit of self-sacrifice and determination, but with my heart full of annoyance and exasperation. This s...
19. Chapter 29With our visit to Pokrovskoe and the quiet summer we spent there begins the harmonious, mature, and active part of our Moscow life, which lasted till my father’s death and perha...
20. Chapter 30‘_Yes, we were their opponents, but very strange ones. We had the same love, but not the same way of loving—and like Janus or the two-headed eagle we looked in opposite directio...
21. Chapter 31From the end of the year 1845, my father’s strength grew steadily less; he changed unmistakably after the loss of the Senator, whose death was completely in keeping with his who...
22. Chapter 32After the reconciliation with Byelinsky in 1840 our little group of friends went on without any important disagreement: there were shades of opinion, personal views, but what wa...
23. ill. His death and all the worries and business that followed distractedOgaryov, who had not seen me for four years, was absolutely of the same tendency as I was. We had moved over the same ground by different paths and found ourselves together. Nat...
24. Chapter 33A few months before my father’s death Count Orlov was appointed to succeed Benckendorf. I wrote at the time to Olga Alexandrovna to ask whether she could procure me a passport f...