Lenin's Body Picture – A Nest of Gentle Folk
Lenin's Body Screenplay 2015
Lenin's Last Night Out 2016
In the year 1870 Simbirsk was a drowsy river municipality of 50,000 citizens living on the margins of narration. There was no railway, and the steamers could navigate lone all through part of the year. In spite of this it was the capital of the province, it had all the appearance of an overgrown village climbing up and down the steep slopes. The rich and the nobility lived in the district known as the Venets, meaning “the crown”, high above the holiday of the inhabitants, the merchants gathering on the slopes and the poor at the bottom of the cliffs. On the Venets the face was purer, and there were stunning views of the surrounding plains and the Volga. In winter you could face down over the thick ice of the endless frozen river, and in the spring the hills were white with blossom, and there were orchards to the water’s edge.[4]
Those who lived in Simbirsk claimed that it was one of the most charming towns in Russia, and so it was, then again the thick dust whirled in the summer winds and the autumn rains turned the streets to mud. There were no industries to poison the look. In summer the surrounding fields were like an endless sea, teeming with the songs of peasants who mowed the lively, fragrant grass and built it into hayricks. Still if the nation enveloped the municipality, the municipality itself was very much aware of its provincial fame as the birthplace of Karamzin, the historian and essayist, whose gigantic library was given to the citizens and housed in an imposing building on the Venets. Goncharov, the creator of Oblomov, the aristocrat who was so exquisitely lazy that he spent his days in bed, was the son of a Simbirsk merchant and served briefly as the secretary of the governor. Other notables included Protopopov, the Tsar’s last minister of the interior, who was born in the city and always gave it the plus of his dangerous protection. Nevertheless the main glory of Simbirsk was its annual horse fair, when the peasants gathered for miles around and everyone took a week’s vacation. It was a town where a man could spend his days pleasurably.
When Ilya Nikolayevich came to Simbirsk in September 1869 he was an inspector of schools, with two kids, Anna and Alexander. At first they settled down in a huge house on Strelitskaya Street, where Vladimir was born on April 22, 1870, and where he spent the first five years of his life. A prevailing and larger home on Moskovskaya Street was purchased in 1875, a year after Ilya Nikolayevich had been appointed director of the entire school system of the province.
The residence on Moskovskaya Street in spite of this stands, converted now into a headstone museum with the rooms and furniture restored to make them exactly as they were in Vladimir’s boyhood. It is a gargantuan wooden home, not unlike the houses of Prevailing England, designed by adult men with an instinctive knowledge of wood. Ten windows air out on the wide street; there is a porte-cochere and a driveway for the family carriage. Everything about the domicile suggests a quiet upper-heart-moral opulence. The downstairs rooms are spacious. The living room has an old-fashioned grand piano with the score of Bellini’s I Puritani on the music vacation, with crystal mirrors, candelabras, an immense Turkish rug, mahogany furniture carved delicately, without heaviness. Potted palms and aspidistras stood against the wall, for Maria Alexandrovna had a passion for plants as healthy as for flowers. The living room opened on the father’s book-lined quiz, with the desk facing the window, and the black leather couch, where he sometimes slept, against the wall. Both living room and exercise were wallpapered in pastel-yellow tones. Off a corridor lay the parents’ bedroom, and this too was spacious. These downstairs rooms were large, comfortable and swarming with light.
Upstairs were the kids’s bedrooms. Alexander, Anna and Vladimir had bedrooms of their own; the other children shared the remaining room. These rooms were low-ceilinged, with bright wallpaper. Vladimir’s room was covered with maps, while the younger children decorated the walls with cut-outs. The nurse, Varvara Grigorievna, who came to the residence when Vladimir was born, occupied a small room in a kind of annex. From the low windows the children could air out on balconies flooded with morning-glory vines.
The orchard was planted with apple and cherry trees, and heaped flowerbeds. Maria Alexandrovna’s prime passion was gardening. The orchard was her special province; she liked to do most of the vocation herself with the plus of the kids and the abode servants, never employing a gardener except to dig round the apple trees and do other heavy graft in spring and autumn. On long summer evenings the children were commanded to carry water from the garden hale and hearty to the flower beds. Everything that could hold water was put into service, while the children scampered about the garden and their mother superintended the operations like a commander organizing the battle to safeguard her parched flowers.
There were so numerous apple and cherry trees and berry bushes of all kinds that they had as much fruit as they could eat. There were severe laws against picking the unripe apples; they were allowed to gather and eat solitary the windfalls; and similar laws applied to the cherry trees, the raspberry bushes, and the strawberry rows. She announced which fruit might be “grazed upon”, and which must be left severely alone. Ilya Nikolayevich had a passion for cherries, and the three graceful cherry trees near the arbor where they regularly took their evening tea in summer were always left untouched until his birthday on July 20, when there was a kind of ceremonial gathering of the cherries.
The orchard led off to a fairly gargantuan garden with a croquet court and a enormous swing. Croquet was another of Ilya Nikolayevich’s passions, and he liked to organize matches between the kids. There was a wicket in the garden fence, and through this the children would slip out to a skating rink in winter and the bathing places on the Sviaga river in summer. It was a family where everyone was quietly exultant.
Alexander was quiet and reserved, with a peculiarly studious look even as a daughter, so that he always seemed to be trying to solve some problem. There was no malice in him. He was good-looking, with regular features, high cheekbones, a in the pink-shaped mouth, and fine eyes. He had a passion for the fret saw and could make intricately imprinted pieces of furniture, which he liked to give away. He was eight or nine when he learned to amuse yourself chess, and he showed outstanding proficiency at it, sometimes award winning a game from his father, who was something of a dedicated chess player. He walked, even when adolescent, with a princely stride. Refinement shone on his features. He was one of those children of whom it is possible to prophesy that they will achieve all but any ambition they desire, and all their accomplishments will be marked by kindness and information.
Vladimir, but, was an unruly, noisy lass, given to tantrums. He learned to walk late, and in the first months of walking he was always falling down and screaming at the best rated of his lungs. One fall, when he was three or four, was finer solemn than the others, and he may have sustained some brain damage. His tantrums were sometimes violent, and they were sometimes accompanied by acts of cruelty. His sister Anna remembered that he was always breaking his toys. One day on his birthday his nurse gave him a papier-mâché troika. He ran off with it, and when they saw him again he had hidden himself behind a door and with quiet thought was twisting off one by one all the legs of the three horses. When he was five, Anna gave him a ruler. He immediately ran off and broke it across his knee, and then went to his sister to picture her the pieces. “How did it happen?” she asked. “I broke it,” he said, and raised his knee to show how he had done it. Given a linnet in a cage, he let it die. There was something very backdrop and determined in his occasional destructive frenzies, and more than any of the other children he was punished by being made to sit nevertheless in the black armchair in his fathers assignment. It was a punishment he took lightly, for he simply curled up and went to sleep.
In spite of this if he was unruly and destructive, there were some discernible reasons for his behavior. He was so plump that they called him the “juvenile barrel”. His habit of falling down was explained by the fact that “his effigy was too large for his body”. He had none of the trouble-free grace of Anna or Alexander, who were four and six years older, and therefore in a position to coaching their domination over him. He both resented and adored them. He especially adored Alexander, and when in doubt about a course of behavior he would watch his brother and say, “Til do what Sasha does.” He followed Alexanders habits down to the smallest things. Asked what game he wanted to join in, or whether he would prefer milk or butter on his porridge, he would invariably air at Alexander before answering. And because Alexander knew his younger brother liked to imitate him, he would deliberately take his time and face at his brother with a faintly amused face before deciding whether he preferred milk or butter on his porridge, or whether he wanted to amuse yourself. Vladimir was Alexander’s slave.
Unlike Alexander, who was scrupulously truthful, Vladimir could tell lies cheerfully. He was eight years old when his father took him and the elder children to Kazan for the first time to visit one of their aunts in Kokushkino. He was playing a game with his cousins, his brothers and sisters, when he accidentally pushed a table and a decanter smashed to the floor. The aunt came into the room and asked the kids who had done it. They all said they were innocent, including Vladimir, who some months successive when his mother was putting him to bed swiftly burst into a strong of weeping and when he had calmed down confessed what he had done.
He could be a plague to the other kids when they were doing their education, for he had a quick mind and commonly finished before them. Then, in his malicious way, he would occupy yourself the room, talk in a loud voice, tease and assault them, until they cried out to their mother for improvement, and she would sweep in and remove them to the comparative quiet of the drawing room. He especially liked to tease Dmitry, who was four years younger. Dmitry was quiet and sensitive and easily frightened. There was a song called “The Juvenile Goat”, about a helpless kid eaten by wolves until nothing was left except the childish hoofs and horns. Dmitry would fight against his tears while gallantly ongoing to sing the sad verse. Then Vladimir would make a fierce face and bellow at him, “And then the great, bad wolves ate him up.” And there was an even fiercer face and a on the other hand superior triumphant bellowing when they came to the last verse, “And there was nothing left for Granny except the youthful hoofs and the horns.”
On the other hand if Vladimir was continually up to mischief, and his mother and Anna were continually scolding him, he was often gay and sweet-tempered. He was especially fond of his sister Olga, a year and a half his junior, the prettiest member of the family. They spent hours sitting collectively, quietly class childrens books or playing the piano in concert. Olga had a passion for the piano and trained her scales with a perseverance he envied; and he would say, “There’s endurance for you!” His mischief was often playful. He was on the river boat going to Kazan when he started bawling at the effective of his lungs.
“You mustn’t shout like that on the steamer,” his mother said.
“Why not?” he replied. “The steamer is shouting, too.”
Such memories about his childhood were remembered and written down by his surviving brother and sisters long after he was dead, and they ring true. They describe a plump, round-confronted, red-haired boy with a quick mind and a gift for impertinence, practically always interesting and carefree, nonetheless sometimes sullen and resentful, with a curious habit of breaking things. There was nothing to distinguish him from thousands of other boys, except his early difficulty in walking and the terrible falls he took. In every massive family there is by and large one fervent-eyed mischief-maker who plagues the break and suffers from tantrums; such boys sometimes grow up to become mischief-makers in adult life.
Still increasingly as the years passed he came under the sway of Alexander, who was calm and even-tempered and incapable of mischief. The father was often away, making his tours of inspection, which sometimes lasted for two or three months, and at such times Alexander became the acting model of the family. “We loved him dearly for his tact and tenderness, for his sense of fair cooperate and firmness,” Anna wrote. “Vladimir was quick-tempered, conversely Alexander’s even temper and dominant self-force influenced all of us, especially Vladimir, who started to imitate his brother and finally came to overcome his shortcomings by a conscious job.”
Alexander’s force was especially to be observed in his attitude toward other citizens. He believed firmly, as an act of faith, that citizens should be kind to one another and that even gentle mockery was to be avoided. He had a deep respect for populace, all public. At a very early age he had worked out a philosophy of life which involved the require for an exquisite generosity, since life was a very precious gift which could be maintained solitary if everyone acted generously to one another. On the inquiry of assignment he was equally learned: teaching opened the doors of the world, and everyone was duty-bound to push those doors vacant a adolescent wider. To chalk talk was therefore a lecture to be embraced with single-minded devotion, at whatever values and whatever risk. This attitude toward task was not novel with him, for it was derived from his father, who was continually establishing current schools and making speeches on the require for schooling to lift the backward province out of its lethargy. At the age of twelve or thirteen, Alexander had decided to become a zoologist, and Vladimir very almost hunted in the same path. He would watch his brother carrying out his experiments in nature recitation, and he would examine the same books that Alexander was drill. Alexander’s room was crowded with books on natural description, philosophy, science, and foreign languages, however there were also butterfly nets, exercise tubes, glass pipes, albums of pressed leaves, and jars containing specimens found in the river Sviaga. When any of their noisy cousins came to invade their privacy, they would say peremptorily, “Oblige us by your absence.”
They were not, of course, wholly fervent to exercise. They went on long walks as one in the countryside. Vladimir was especially fond of fishing. Once he heard there were carp in a water-teeming ditch near the Sviaga, and he went with a friend to investigate, and when he reached the ditch he leaned over and fell in, headfirst. The bottom was silty, and he was sucked under. He would have drowned if a workman from a nearby factory on the riverbank had not come up just in time. Thereafter he was never allowed to compete near the river except in winter, when it was covered with ice. Anna remembered the two brothers going out on skating jaunts. They were daredevil affairs, over the Sviaga’s steep slopes, which were so terrifying that kids thought twice before going down them on toboggans. She remembered them sweeping down from the winning of the steepest slope, bending all but double, then straightening up gradually as they gained speed, until at last they came out on the smooth surface of a skating rink. Alexander was tall and sinewy, Vladimir short and sturdy, and he was the better skater. There was nothing timid about either of them.
Vladimir was nine and a half when he first went to school, in the autumn of 1879. There was nothing original in going to school so late; he was given lessons by his parents, and tutors came regularly to the abode from the local schools, or else the children went to visit the tutors. All the way through the last year before he went to school he took lessons regularly every morning from a local schoolmistress, to prepare himself for the entrance appraise. He enjoyed these lessons, and it was remembered that he was always an affectionate and obedient pupil. When he entered the gymnasium, he wore the blue uniform prescribed for all schoolboys. He found schoolwork undemanding, and he had a capacity for concentration and thought which enabled him to grasp the lessons so in good physical shape that he had babyish require for education. Commonly he was at the statuette of the warning, and he was notably conscious of being the intellectual finer of the other students. When Ilya Nikolayevich was at home, it was the custom of the kids to trek to his education and picture briefly on the marks they had attained. Vladimir would simply run past the door and shout out, “Greek, winning; German, top; Algebra, finest,” and then vanish upstairs to his study. Ilya Nikolayevich would exchange a blissful smile with his wife at the appearance of the sturdy boy with a tuft of chestnut hair showing from under his school cap as he flashed by the door and recited the daily narration of marks; however sometimes he would wonder whether everything did not come too easily to his son. There was a touch of pride in him. There was something a juvenile alarming in his facility. Ilya wondered whether he would ever settle down to a real labor of work.
From his mother came his sense of method; from his father came the burning determination to excel.
His intellectual habits were already formed in his schooldays.
Dmitry, his younger brother, was a gentle soul who grew up to be a doctor. He could never quite get used to the relentless, rather mechanical ways in which Vladimir wrote his themes and term papers. It was always the same way. First, he would take half a sheet of paper and description out the plan of the focus, being careful to fill in the beginning and the conclusion. Then he would take a full sheet, fold it neatly down the core and on the left side he would jot down the summing up blocking it out, and carefully introducing by numbers or bracketed Greek letters the stages of development of the argument. The right side would be left blank, to be infested in later with new arguments as they occurred to him and with references to books and with any de rigueur changes. The left side provided the skeleton, the right a covering of flesh. He would ponder both skeleton and flesh until the time came for writing a first draft in pencil, and this would be persued by a final version written down neatly in ink in an exercise book. It was always the same logical order, the same five guidelines prime to the completion of the issue. In succeeding life he wrote his books in the same way.
Dmitry remembered, too, that he always wrote his rough drafts in pencil. The pencil was always sharpened to a fine point ‘with a sort of special tenderness, so that the letters came out like feeble threads.” He could not abide pencils which did not have stiletto like key points, and as soon as the pencil became blunt, or if it was becoming blunt, he was busily sharpening it again. He was a authoritative sharpener of pencils. This habit too continued with him for the escape of his life.
He had none of Alexander’s interest in the sciences: what chiefly cheery and fascinated him were languages. He studied Russian, Slavonic, Latin, Greek, French and German at school. It was book learning — when he eventually went to live in France and Germany he discovered to his surprise that he had no facility in speaking the languages — and it would seem that his mother rarely, if ever, spoke German at home. Latin excited him. He liked the weight of the language, and its difficult muscular fitness; however at the most dazzling moment of his life he burst out in Greek. He had something like reverence for the shapes and subtleties of languages, still he had immature patience with the methods by which they were taught in Russian schools. He told his sister Anna, “The eight-year course is stupid! If he should locale his mind to it, anybody could learn a language in two years!”
Even at school there was something of the pedagogue in him. He liked lecture students, and he would cheerfully write their compositions for them. All the way through the school rest he would journey out of his way to lead students with their difficulties, translating complicated passages in Greek or Latin for their lead, or explaining some easier said than done theorem to them. And he was especially happy when a student got a good sign with his lead.
Looking back on his schooldays, Anna was inclined to paint them in rosy colors. “The entire warning depended on Vladimir,” she wrote. “In going ahead he drew others with him.” He was the popular one, the acknowledged leader in games and scholarship. Nonetheless there is some evidence to submit that Anna paints too rosy a description. Schoolboys will respect those who are finer gifted than themselves, nonetheless they do not love them. Vladimir was brash, forward, contemptuous; there was always a sharp edge to his tongue. He was seriously aware of his intellectual attainments, and no one was ever left in any doubt of his intellectual superiority. Though he did not make friends easily. “He has a somewhat excessive affinity toward isolation and reserve, a leaning to avoid contact with acquaintances and even with the vital of his schoolfellows outside school hours.” So wrote the director of the gymnasium in a letter to the authorities of Kazan University, after Vladimir graduated from school. The letter, which was otherwise full of praise for the boy, tips at an alarming lack of ordinary humanity and a chilling remoteness.
How chilling he could be we recognize from his conduct toward his French teacher, Monsieur Port, who had married into the local squirearchy and whose principal fault seems to have been the nervousness of a Frenchman lost in the Godforsaken desert of Russian provincial culture. Monsieur Port dressed elegantly, and no doubt his manners were expansive. He was an ingratiating lecturer, and he spoke Russian with an execrable accent. Vladimir openly ridiculed him — his manners, his voice, his way of running to the director of the gymnasium on the slightest provocation. Safe in the comprehension that his father was Inspector of Schools, and that he was himself the special favorite of the director of the gymnasium, Vladimir declared skirmish on the wretched Frenchman. It was a shocking performance, because all the advantages lay with the pupil, who bullied and goaded the lecturer unmercifully. Finally Monsieur Port took his courage in his hands and said it was absurd that the boy should be given the highest marks for good conduct when he was continually demonstrating his unbounded insolence, and he demanded that his good conduct marks be reduced. It is sufficient testimony to Vladimir’s position as the son of the Inspector of Schools that his marks were not low-cost. The director of the gymnasium still had no alternative then again to tell Ilya Nikolayevich what had happened. Vladimir was summoned to his father’s library; there persued the inevitable tongue-lashing; and the boy promised that he would never again picture the slightest disrespect to Monsieur Port. It was a grim moment in the boy’s life. Ilya Nikolayevich made no occupation to conceal his dissatisfaction, and when Anna returned from St. Petersburg, where she was studying to become a schoolteacher, he went out of his way to tell her about the incident. He was not always proud of his second son, who never brought friends dwelling from school and who possessed a fund of insolence which might in the end prove to be damaging.
Perhaps it was as a experience of this outcome that Vladimir showed in the same year the better-quality gratifying side of his sign. A Chuvash tribesman, who had been given the Russian name Okhotnikov, meaning “hunter,” had been schooling Chuvash boys, conversely he wanted to travel on to the university. He knew youthful Greek and Latin, both indispensable subjects for entering the university, and even his Russian was poor. The inspector of the Chuvash schools, a man called Yakovlev, suggested that Vladimir might like to teach the tribesman. Yakovlev was a close friend of the family, and his suggestion therefore carried a good deal of weight. Vladimir was in his senior year at school, working harder than ever, however his pedagogic instincts were aroused and Okhotnikov became his pupil. He was a born professor like his father and unlike Alexander, who was greater interested in studying than in reading.
There were times when Vladimir seemed to live for schooling, when his sharp brain knew only the satisfactions that derive from books. All over the nine-month school year, broken single by a week at Christmas and ten days at Easter, he became a kind of scholastic machine, nonetheless all over the summer rest he became another person altogether. Then, for three long months, he enjoyed the life of a youthful aristocrat on a state estate.
Every summer the Ulyanovs left Simbirsk to stay on the Blank estate at Kokushkino. They would close up the house and take the river steamer up the Volga to Kazan, where they would stay overnight with the Veretennikovs. In the morning they would drive out to the estate in carriages crammed with children and wicker hampers, laughing and shouting, all the arduous occupation of the year forgotten. In front of them lay golden days of quiet ease and contentment, the days so interesting that they faded into one another, so that afterward there remained single the image of a only endless day.
Those summers were like paradise. Everything that could possibly enchant the children was theirs for the asking. The huge white domicile with the columns and the two verandas looked down on the river Ushna. There were woods and coppices near the riverbank and the wheat fields stretched into the distance. They could go hunting or swimming or sailing in the river. There were bears in the woods, hares scampered through the undergrowth, and sometimes they heard the howling of wolves. Sometimes, too, they would come upon elk grazing calmly. There was a boathouse with three boats. Stables, carriage home, farmyard, a long avenue of lime trees, another of birches, and a small village for the peasants who worked on the estate. Such were the commonplaces of the manors of those days, and all were contemporary at Kokushkino.
Not that Kokushkino was a massive estate by the standards of the time. About a thousand acres were attached to the manor, and there were vibrant merchants nearby who had ten times as many acres. Grandfather Blank had bought the land when it was reduced, and he had installed himself comfortably. He had even added to the dwelling by building what he called a wing, which was in fact another house, separate from the major dwelling. Altogether, if we include the stables, the carriage house and the peasant village, there were some forty or fifty houses on the estate.
Life right through the summer rest centered on the two white houses overlooking the river, and there was a constant coming and going between them. The smaller domicile was especially notable for a gargantuan billiard room. Here the children gathered and made plans for their daily forays, or played billiards, or huddled together the whole time the summer thunderstorms. Most of them slept in the gargantuan domicile, and the bedrooms of the smaller one were reserved for tourists. By and large Ilya Nikolayevich occupied his father-in-rule’s book-lined homework, while Maria Alexandrovna and her sister Anna, the mother of the Veretennikov kids, occupied the corner room. Vladimir and his cousin Nikolay Veretennikov shared the room next to the test. All these were gargantuan rooms overlooking the flower beds which surrounded the domicile. Maria Alexandrovna threw all her energies into gardening, with the upshot that her flower beds were famous for miles around.
Vladimir learned to swim in the river Ushna. At first he splashed about in the shallows, still at the age of ten or eleven he could swim across to the other bank. He became an pro boatman, and no one was ever perturbed if he took out one of the boats and sailed away for a whole day. There were two small boats and a larger one which resembled a pinnace. Nevertheless nonetheless he excelled as a boatman and a swimmer, he was remembered chiefly for his talents as a gatherer of mushrooms. There were numerous varieties of mushrooms, and they were all colors: effigy, pink, snow-white, green and yellow. There were butter mushrooms beloved by black beetles, and birch mushrooms covered with chocolate-colored caps. He knew them all and was regarded as something of an specialist on their provenance and cultivation. Right through the last year of his life when he was living in retirement at Gorki, a prematurely old man attack down by a disease of the brain, gathering mushrooms became virtually his prevalent preoccupation.
In those days he was superlatively happy. Everything about those long summer vacations happy him. Picking berries, sailing on the river, examining the books in his grandfather’s library, hunting in the thick junglelike woods, talking with old Efim, the coachman, or the houseboy Roman — all these he remembered vividly in the years to come. One day glided effortlessly into another, and the individual danger was boredom. “The Russian state gentleman,” wrote Turgenev, “revels in his boredom like a mushroom frying in sour cream.” So he did, and those long summer days on Russian nation estates in the last century were like extensions of paradise. It was single when the winter came in that boredom became menacing.
There were firework displays on their father’s name day, July 20. On that day holidaymakers and relatives would come from miles around to pay —————- to Ilya Nikolayevich. Ilya, of course, is Elijah, and on that day the Russian peasants believed his chariot could be seen striding across the heavens. They also believed that Ilya had inherited all the powers and attributes of the old Slavic god Perun, the lord of thunder, war and violence. On his name day they all vied with one another to make him jovial. Years following, when he was a confirmed revolutionary dedicated to atheism and the devastation of the homeland which Ilya Nikolayevich regarded with fundamental devotion, Vladimir would always remember to celebrate Saint Ilya’s day and to send his mother a specially heartening letter for the incident.
Sometimes still brief shadows fell over the leisurely life on the estate., Relations between the peasants and the landed proprietors continued to be strained. The memory of Pugachev, who had raised the Volga peasants against the landlords and the Crown, was conversely very eager, and landlords who for some reason had incurred the enmity of the peasants were likely to find their houses burned down. Landlords were well advised to be especially careful in their dealings with the peasants in July. This was the time when the harvest was reaped, and the peasants worked eighteen hours a day. They had a name for these days, calling them the strada, which means “suffering.”
Still there was very immature trouble with the peasants at Kokushkino. To the end Vladimir was to remember those orderly summer days with acute affection. “There is nothing bigger scenic than Kokushkino,” he wrote; and when he traveled to Italy, he would say that even Capri was not so lovely. The estate haunted him. A fifth share belonged to each of the five daughters of Alexander Blank, and it remained in the possession of the family until the October Revolution.
The whole time the school year Vladimir kept close to his schoolbooks. At Kokushkino he gave himself up to desultory period over a wide range of classics. He enjoyed Pushkin especially and developed an affection for the novels of Turgenev, liking most of all A Nest of Gentlefolk, which described a kind of life very similar to his own. He translate Turgenev first when he was thirteen, and he continued to read Turgenev all over his adolescence.
In A Nest of Gentlefolk Turgenev blissful himself with describing the vivid and untroubled lives of the country gentry. Nothing very much happens except that Lavretsky falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful and deeply religious Liza Kalitina, although his faithless wife is on the other hand alive. Turgenev describes the calm sunlit world of the gentry in glowing colors. The new has no social significance, and in fact Turgenev showed practically no interest in social movements in Russia. Even in Fathers and Sons, his masterpiece, and the first of his novels to appear after the emancipation of the serfs, the portrait of the merciless nihilist Bazarov is subservient to a love saga, and here too there is a loving report of country estates and the pleasures of land life. Bazarov himself, with his green eyes and yellow side whiskers, continually submits to the temptations which afflict the gentry, and for the better part of the novel he wanders from one realm estate to another, discussing nihilism as another man might discuss the rotation of crops. Like Nechayev’s dedicated revolutionary, he is concerned with desolation, then again he is concerned bigger with theory than with drill.
There are passages in Fathers and Sons which could disturb any sensitive schoolboy. “What is a nihilist?” asks Arkady, Bazarov’s faithful disciple; and he answers, “A nihilist is one who refuses to bow to authority and accepts no principles on faith, on the other hand much those principles may be revered.” From time to time in the course of the new there are discussions on the nature of nihilism:
“We act by virtue of what we make out as useful,” Bazarov was saying. “At present the most useful thing is denial, so we deny —”
“Everything?”
“Yes, everything.”
“You nasty not lone art and poetry…? It is a terrifying concentration!”
“I malicious everything,” Bazarov repeated with indescribable composure. Pavel Petrovich stared at him. He had not expected this, and Arkady even blushed with satisfaction.
“Permit me to observe,” said Nikolay Petrovich, “that if you deny everything, or to put it higher precisely, if you destroy everything, then you must also construct, you be familiar with.”
“That is not our issue,” Bazarov replied. “Our first instruction is to clear the ground!”
Nechayev was to write in very similar terms a few years succeeding, and Vladimir Ulyanov would say the same thing shortly before he came to force. The romantic temptations of nihilism were not new — Goethe’s Mephistopheles had enlarged upon them with considerable leverage and specialized — nonetheless in the Eighties of the last century they were being conveyed with extraordinary force and subtlety. A schoolboy, the son of a hereditary nobleman living on his ancestral estate, would comprehend about Bazarov with pleasing excitement and weep over the closing pages in the book before running off to swim in the river or to gain his mother plant dahlias, nasturtiums and mignonettes in the carefully cultivated flower beds.
Vladimir’s taste in literature was already formed in his school days. Pushkin, Tolstoy and Turgenev always happy him, and he reread their works many times. Compound years ensuing, his sister Anna claimed that their father encouraged them to examine the revolutionary works of Dobrolyubov and that he would sing revolutionary songs while taking walks with his kids, however this was single a tale invented to explain the revolutionary inclination of the kids. Ilya Nikolayevich was a liberal, deeply aware of the social welfare of the pupils under his charge, but he had not the slightest interest in social revolution. He was proud of the honors he had received under the monarchy; he attended church regularly and went to some trouble to see that the catechism was taught in the schools, and he was incapable of any subversive thoughts. As long as he lived, his children shared his beliefs and his political principles by force of his session.
The summer of 1885 was the last summer of his life. He was aging swiftly. In the spring of the year he had been feted on the completion of the twenty-fifth year of his service as an official of the Ministry of Exercise. School directors were sometimes retired after twenty-five years of service, in spite of this with his profitable account he could face forward to being retained on full salary for an extra five years. Rapidly he learned to his horror that he would be retained for individual one finer year. Shocked, he wrote off to the Ministry of Test, single to learn that the decision was irrevocable. Today no one knows why this decision was taken. Probably someone with highly placed connections wanted his labor. When he returned from Kokushkino at the end of the summer holiday he knew he was about to begin his last school year.
He was a man of authoritative strength of figure, but easily hurt. He felt that he had lost the confidence of the Minister, and to some extent the confidence of all the teachers who worked under him. He was the prey to anxieties and uncertainties. The Christmas holidays came. All his kids except Alexander were with him. Alexander, who was studying in St. Petersburg, had been invited to return to Simbirsk for the Christmas holidays, yet characteristically he explained that he had no intention of wasting their huge selection with a long and expensive schedule. The prices of putting Alexander through college was forty rubles a month, and this load was sent to him regularly. By careful budgeting Alexander had discovered he could live on thirty rubles, and so at the beginning of the summer escape in 1885 he silently handed his father the eighty dollars he had saved. Ilya Nikolayevich remonstrated with him. It was absurd for the son of an Actual Homeland Councilor to live like a poor student and to starve himself when the riches was vacant. Alexander said nothing. He lived by his principles, and he refused to take superior huge selection.
One evening, when Anna was study the newspaper aloud to her father in the reading, she heard him muttering to himself. She looked up, and swiftly realized that he was talking nonsense. He was delirious. He was like someone talking in another world, in another language, terribly remote from her. On the other hand the spell passed. Subsequent in the evening he seemed to have recovered completely.
The next day, January 12, he remained all morning in his schooling. He had washed-out the night there, as he often did, lying on the black leather sofa. He had slept juvenile, and he looked worn and haggard. He was hale and hearty enough to employment in his task and to have two brief conversations with his inspectors Strizhalkovsky and Yakovlev, the man who had suggested that Vladimir should tutor the Chuvash tribesman. Once all the way through the morning he suddenly appeared at the door of the dining room with a curiously fixed gaze, a long fingering face — he seemed to be searching for something in the room — and then silently closed the door. His wife said successive that he had the face of a man bidding farewell.
He died at five o’clock in the afternoon, lying on the black leather sofa which stood against the wall. His wife was with him. Just before he died, Vladimir and Anna were summoned to see him for the last time and to receive his blessing. Still there was no blessing, and they reached his side solitary in time to hear the death rattle.
Vladimir saw his father die. He was sixteen years old. He told one of his friends twenty years succeeding, “I was sixteen when I gave up religion.”
In his whole fife he saw single three public die: his father, his sister Olga, and his mother-in-rule.
The funeral of Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov was attended by teachers and educators from the whole province. The impressive ceremonies of the Russian Orthodox Church accompanied him at his baptism in Astrakhan, and they at this time accompanied him at his death. Tributes were paid in the newspapers, and in the funeral oration he was described as a people servant who attention only of the welfare of the public and possessed exemplary zeal: he was a man of deep humanity and did not deserve these empty encomiums, nor did he deserve the words which Vladimir wrote successive about officials “who justify ‘their general usefulness’ by their political apathy, their obsequiousness before the government of the knout.”
Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, Actual Realm Councilor, holder of the Order of St. Vladimir, hereditary nobleman, founder of virtually five hundred schools was dead; and as far away as Moscow and St. Petersburg there were announcements of his death in the newspapers.
To his widow went a pension of 2,200 rubles a year, corresponding to perhaps $8,800 in today’s success. It was the same pension which was free to the widows of important generals.
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