A Russian Gentleman - The Original Classic Edition. Aksakov S

The rest of the transaction followed a regular fashion. The customer began with the shrewdness native to your true Russian: he assured the Bashkir that he did not want anything at all; but, having heard that the Bashkirs were exceedingly kind people, he had come to Ufa on purpose to form a friendship with them, and so on. Then the conversation would somehow come round to the vast extent of the Bashkir territory and the unsatisfactory ways of the present tenants, who might pay their rent for a year or two and then pay no more and yet continue to live on the land, as if they were its rightful owners; it was rash to evict them, and a lawsuit became unavoidable. These remarks, which were true enough to the facts, were followed up by an obliging offer to relieve the kind Bashkirs of some part of the land which was such a burden to them; and in the end whole districts were bought and sold for a mere song. The bargain was clinched by a legal document, but the amount of land was never stated in it, and could

       not be, as it had never been surveyed. As a rule, the boundaries were settled by landmarks of this kind: "from the mouth of such and such a stream as far as the dead beech-tree on the wolf-track, and from the dead beech-tree in a bee-line to the watershed, and from the watershed to the fox-earths, and from the fox-earths to the hollow tree at Soltamratka," and so on. So precise and permanent

       were the boundaries enclosing ten or twenty or thirty thousand dessyatines3 of land! And the price of all this might be about one hundred roubles4 and presents worth another hundred, not including the cost of the entertainments.

       Stories of this kind had a great attraction for my grandfather. As a man of strict integrity, he disapproved of the deception practised on the simple Bashkirs; but he considered that the harm lay, not in the business itself, but in the method of transacting it, and believed that it was possible to deal fairly and yet to buy a great stretch of land at a low price. In that case he could migrate with his family and transfer half of his serfs to the new estate; and thus he would secure the main object of this design. For the fact was, that for some time past he had been so much worried by unending disputes over the management of the land--disputes between himself and the relations who owned a small part of it--that his desire to leave the place where his ancestors had lived and he himself was born, had become a fixed idea. There was no other means of securing a quiet life; and to him, now that his youth was past, a quiet

       life seemed more desirable than anything else.

       So he scraped together several thousand roubles, and said good-bye to his wife, whom he called Arisha when he was in a good humour and Arina when he was not; he kissed his children and gave them his blessing--his four young daughters and the infant son who was the single scion and sole hope of an ancient and noble family. The daughters he thought of no importance: "What's

       the good of them? They look out of the house, not in; if their name is Bagroff5 to-day, it may be anything on earth to-morrow; my

       hopes rest entirely on my boy, Alexyei"--such were my grandfather's parting words, when he started to cross the Volga on his way to

       the district of Ufa.

       But perhaps I had better begin by telling you what sort of a man my grandfather was.

       Stepan Mihailovitch Bagroff--this was his name--was under the middle height; but his prominent chest, uncommonly broad shoulders, sinewy arms, and wiry muscular frame, gave proof of his extraordinary strength. When it happened, in the rough-and-tumble amusements of young men, that a number of his brother-officers fastened on him at once, he would hurl them from him, as a sturdy oak hurls off the rain-drops, when its branches rock in the breeze after a shower. He had fair hair and regular features; his eyes were large and dark-blue, quick to light up with anger but friendly and kind in his hours of composure; his eyebrows were thick and the lines of his mouth pleasant to look at. The general expression of his features was singularly frank and open: no one could help trust-ing him; his word or his promise was better than any bond, and more sacred than any document guaranteed by Church or State. His natural intelligence was clear and strong. All landowners of that time were ignorant men, and he had received no sort of education; indeed he could hardly read and write his native language. But, while serving in the Army, and before he was promoted from the ranks, he had mastered the elementary rules of arithmetic and the use of the reckoning-board--acquirements of which he liked to speak even when he was an old man. It is probable that his period of service was not long; for he was only quarter-master of the regiment when he retired. But in those days even nobles served for long in the ranks or as non-commissioned officers, unless indeed they passed through this stage in their cradles, first enrolled as sergeants in the Guards and then making a sudden appearance as captains in line regiments. Of the career of Stepan Mihailovitch in the Army I know little; but I have been told that he was often em-ployed in the capture of the highwaymen who infested the Volga, and always showed good sense in the formation of his plans and reckless courage in their execution; that the outlaws knew him well by sight and feared him like fire. On retiring from the Army, he

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       lived for some years on his hereditary estate of Bagrovo6 and became very skilful in the management of land. It was not his way to

       be present from morning to night where his labourers were at work, nor did he stand like a sentry over the grain, when it was coming in and going out; but, when he was on the spot, he looked to some purpose, and, if he noticed anything amiss, especially any attempt to deceive him, he never failed to visit the offender with a summary form of punishment which may rouse the displeasure of my readers. But my grandfather, while acting in accordance with the spirit of his age, reasoned in a fashion of his own. In his view, to punish a peasant by fines or by forced labour on the estate made the man less substantial and therefore less useful to his owner; and to separate him from his family and banish him to a distant estate was even worse, for a man deprived of family ties was sure to go downhill. But to have recourse to the police was simply out of the question; that would have been considered the depth of disgrace and shame; every voice in the village would have been raised to mourn for the offender as if he were dead, and he would have considered himself as disgraced and ruined beyond redemption. And it must be said for my grandfather, that he was never severe except when his anger was hot; when the fit had passed away, the offence was forgotten. Advantage was often taken of this: sometimes the offender had time to hide, and the storm passed by without hurting any one. Before long, his people became so satisfactory that

       none of them gave him any cause to lose his temper.

       After getting his estate into good order, my grandfather married; his bride was Arina Vassilyevna Nyeklyoodoff, a young lady of little fortune but, like himself, of ancient descent. This gives me an opportunity to explain that his pedigree was my grandfather's foible:

       he was moderately well-to-do, owning only 180 serfs, but his descent, which he traced back, by means of Heaven knows what docu-

       ments, for six hundred years all the way to a Varyag7 prince called Shimon, he valued far more than any riches or office in the State. At one time he was much attracted by a rich and beautiful girl, but he would not marry her, merely because her great-grandfather was not a noble.

       After this account of Stepan Mihailovitch, let us go back to the course of the narrative.

       My grandfather first crossed the Volga by the ferry near Simbirsk, and then struck across the steppe on the further side, and travelled

       on till he came to Sergievsk, which stands on a hill at the meeting of two rivers and gives a name to the sulphur springs twelve versts8 from the town. The deeper he plunged into the district of Ufa, the more he was impressed by the spaciousness and fertility of that country. The first place where he found trees growing was the district of Boogoorooslan; and in the town of that name, perched on a high hill above the river, he made a halt, wishing to make inquiries and learn more particulars of the lands that were for sale. Of land belonging to the Bashkirs there was little left in this district: some of the occupiers were tenants of the Crown,

       whom the Government had settled on lands confiscated for rebellion, though later they granted a general pardon and restored their

       territory to the Bashkir owners; part of the land had been let to tenants by the Bashkirs themselves; and part had been bought up

       by migrating landowners. Using Boogoorooslan as a centre, my grandfather made expeditions to the surrounding districts and spent