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became the Mestchersky code-phrase for homosexuals. ‘Petty informer, tattler, toady, a creature of perverted sexual taste, pulp novelist, embezzler’ – the gossips did not spare him. It was said his wife had caught him in flagrante with a trumpet player of the Guards. It was whispered the Prince also dressed up in women’s clothes. Yet his morals apparently did not bother those who read him for his opinions. After the assassination of the Liberator Tsar in 1881, Vladimir Mestchersky wrote an editorial in The Citizen which brayed out the master theme of a new epoch: ‘Everywhere one goes, only a single cry is heard from the people: Beat them! Beat them! In answer to this what do the authorities reply? Anything except the birch. What is the result of this contradiction? A terrible lack of discipline, the destruction of the father’s authority within the family, drunkenness, crime and so on…’
    When the new Tsar, Alexander III, took the throne in 1881, there were few makers of opinion more to his taste than Prince Mestchersky. Natasha’s father and mother refused to receive the old debaucher in their home, yet they seem to have shared most of his views, though in milder form.
    The Mestcherskys were a family of highly strung hypochondriacs. Like most Russian families of the time, they called doctors at the slightest cough or fever. In their case, however, family anxieties about health had some foundation. Natasha’s oldest sister, Katherine, had gone to a hotel in Ostend to take the sea air and had died of ‘galloping consumption’ (tuberculosis) at the age of twenty; in their grief, Natasha’s mother and father watched over their remaining children with obsessive attention. The next daughter, Maria, had been invalided by a riding accident and was taken on a round-the-world tour by her mother to recover. The older son, Sasha, a stooping giant six foot six inches tall, was a mild and gentle character whose passion was his mother’s greenhouses: he grew carnations from cuttings and became a fanatic for the colour green, wearing a suite of green baize with a green deerstalker hat and experimenting with all the variations of green orchids. His favourite dish was pea soup.
    An English tutor was hired to turn this shy and peculiar boy into a gentleman fit for a career. No one ever knew quite what happened – Natasha’s mother could not bear to discuss it – but the tutor took to beating Sasha for every mistake in lessons and for every bout of masturbation in bed. The boy would have silently endured this routine had he not succumbed to meningitis. When he recovered the truth came out, the tutor was dismissed, and the parents reconciled themselves to the fact that poor Sasha was happier after all devoting himself to his Malmaison carnations and the manageable world of the greenhouse.
    Natasha thought Sasha was lovable but insipid and Peter, her younger brother, charming but weak; her sisters were ‘all good women, but none of them brilliant’. The tall and elegant Sonia, with her chestnut hair, was a bit of a flirt before marriage and then too austere and serious-minded afterwards; Sophia likewise was too earnest; Maria a bit of an invalid; poor Vera ‘very high strung’ and the man she married, the worthy Baron Offenberg, a most dreadful bore. Natasha was as blunt as her mother in her estimation of the faults of her kin.
    The winters of Natasha’s childhood were spent in the Mestchersky house opposite the yellow and white buildings of Moscow University, just behind the Kremlin on the Nikitskaya. The summers, from late May until the end of September, were spent at Doughino.
    I take out Baedeker’s guide to the Russian Empire, 1914 edition, and follow the railway lines 200 miles west from Moscow to the province of Smolensk and find the river Vasousa. The river flowed through the bottom of the estate. In spring it would burst its banks and the