The Russian Album Read Online Free PDF

of six girls and two boys: Katherine, Alexander (known as Sasha), Sonia, Maria, Sophia, Peter, Vera and Natasha. She was the last, the little gawky one, a child of middle age. Her mother, Maria Panin, was a descendant of Nikita Panin, Catherine the Great’s chancellor whose brother, General Peter Panin, had led the troops in the suppression of the uprising of the peasant bandit Pugachev in the 1780s. Doughino, the family estate, was a gift to the Panins from the Empress. Natasha’s father, Prince Nicholas Mestchersky, was rector of Moscow University.
    Only one photograph remains of Natasha’s mother and father. They are seated side by side on a couch at Doughino. He is thin, fine-boned and long in the face. His long white beard trails down the front of his frock coat. He is bending to graze his wife’s hand with his lips. His eyes gaze at her devotedly. She does not spare him a glance. She stares out at the camera, massive, stout and ugly with highly polished black ankle boots poking out beneath her black taffeta dress. Her black hair is pulled back in a tight bun; her cheeks are heavy; her lidded eyes appraise the photographer with lofty amusement. The Panins had once been Panini and had come to Russia from Italy some time in the seventeenth century to make their fortune. From them, Natasha’s mother had inherited dark olive skin and a passion for argument. Her daughters said she had a ‘man’s brain’; she was impatient of the coy and innocent vagueness of the women of her time and class. Ugly and vivacious, imperious and argumentative, she ruled Doughino in the summers and the upper reaches of Moscow society in the winters. Together with Countess Sheremetieff and a Miss Tuitcheff, she made up a trio known as the ‘ conseil des infaillibles ’ in the Moscow society of the 1880s. They were the court of final instance on manners, deportment and marriages. She was famous in her heyday for the sharpness of her tongue. Once when old Prince Volkonsky took her hand at a dinner party and began to tell her unsavoury Moscow gossip, she reached into her reticule, pulled out a small padlock and handed it to him, saying tartly in French that if he couldn’t stop telling tales about his friends, he should keep his mouth shut. She dominated them all, husband, children, servants: every summer the married daughters were commanded to appear at Doughino with their husbands and children from the four corners of western Russia, with nurses and governesses, tutors and coachmen, to spend the summer together under her watchful and disapproving eye.
    Natasha’s father was a mild old gentleman of conventional opinions, ruled by his wife and his daughters. Natasha took after him in looks and temperament: high forehead, long straight nose, tall and thin-boned. His only apparent role in his children’s upbringing was to line them up in his study every morning and administer a spoonful of cod-liver oil followed by a slice of black bread to take away the taste.
    He was generous and absent-minded, always doling out money to the Moscow beggars when out on his morning walk to the university. Once when Natasha was with him, a beggar approached and when her father replied ruefully that he had forgotten to carry any change, the beggar replied that he had plenty; Natasha’s father stood there smiling absently while the beggar took the ruble note and handed back enough kopecks to make the transaction satisfactory to both sides. In matters of charity, as in matters of the home, Natasha’s father was a patriarch ruled by others.
    Natasha’s father had a brother as scabrous as he was respectable. An anti-Semitic homosexual, always in the company of young Guards officers, he was known in Petersburg circles as the Prince of Sodom. He was also the editor of The Citizen ( Grazhdanin ), required reading for the reactionaries of his epoch. Because of Uncle Vladimir, ‘a certain kind of citizen’