Vasily’s mother had been well educated and spoke three languages besides Russian; her bookshelves were full of classic works in Russian and foreign languages, which she often offered the children. The good education was coupled with a religiosity that seems extreme by modern standards. Maklakov believed it explained her indifference to the stirrings of reform in the 1860s. When her children wondered why they, though faithful, could not move mountains, she explained that it was because their faith was too weak. She managed, he thought, to live the maxim that one should hate the sin but love the sinner, never getting angry and always defending everyone.6
Given Alexei Maklakov’s career in science, he was naturally more inclined to empiricism than his wife. But he was skeptical rather than anti-religious. Seeing crowds of people taking off their hats and crossing themselves on Red Square at Easter, he mused, “Whatever the smart alecs say, what does this feeling come from?” It was probably typical of him to address the matter as a question. On one occasion young Vasily reported a conversation with a schoolmate who had offered an explanation of the origins of the universe: it had started, he said, with the appearance of a red-hot sphere. Vasily had asked, “Where did the sphere come from?” His father took delight and obvious pride in the response.7
Alexei had wanted to be a surgeon, but a shooting injury to his hand scotched that and also forced him to give up the violin. He redirected his medical interests to ophthalmology and, as Vasily saw it, pursued it with the spirit of a natural scientist, always looking for underlying explanations. The son’s perception seems confirmed by Alexei’s publishing ophthalmology articles in scientific journals in France. Life replicated Alexei’s scientific intellect rather directly in his son Alexei Alexeevich, another younger brother of Vasily, who became a professor of ophthalmology at Moscow University and director of the Moscow Eye Clinic.
As was evidently true for all who worked in the Moscow Eye Clinic, the family lived on-site. The clinic had been founded with private funds in 1826 and occupied a large building in central Moscow that not only survives to this day but is still an eye clinic. Vasily and several siblings remained there until their father’s death in 1895, so it was home to Vasily for his first twenty-six years.
The clinic gave Vasily a glimpse at the relation between accomplishment and privilege in late nineteenth-century Russia. One G. V. Grudev was chairman of the council nominally guiding the clinic. At the outset, so far as Vasily knew, he declared himself to be 84 years old, but after some years at that age he started losing years and worked down to 70. A passionate gardener, he had much of the hospital grounds set aside for his personal garden. Though his role was “purely decorative,” no one was troubled at his holding a nominally responsible position: “on the contrary, all would have found it quite improper to remove him.” Occupying the top managerial position was one G. I. Kertselli, also superannuated, who spent most of his day reading the paper. Actually running the place was a steward, Aleksei Ilych Lebedev, so much in charge that when any problem arose, one heard the phrase, “We must ask Aleksei Ilych.” Below him, managing the clinic’s lower-level personnel, was the clinic’s porter, who bossed them around as a noncommissioned officer bosses the troops.8
The clinic’s head doctor, Professor Gustav Ivanov Braun, extended the pattern of disconnect between responsibility and title, limiting his actual work at the clinic to giving lectures. At least in some instances he turned responsibility over to Maklakov’s father, but it appears that most issues were resolved by consensus—one largely driven by conservatism. Maklakov: “I recall that my father complained about the impossibility of ever making improvements; his colleagues always found a reason to keep the old ways.”9
There may have been a gap between his parents in political inclinations. Alexei met his future bride while visiting her house, first as a doctor and then as a friend. He was evidently slow to open up about his interest in Elizaveta, for when he first did so, her mother said, “Finally, sir, at last.” Vasily knew of the story and wondered whether Alexei’s slowness was due to shyness, to concern about marrying someone of wealth, or to concern about the possible gulf in political sympathies between the families. But as he seems not to have heard his mother express political views, it seems likely that her religious perspective rendered politics unimportant. Alexei’s own views were clear: he enthusiastically supported the emancipation and the other Great Reforms of the 1860s—above all, local self-government in the countryside (the zemstvo) and judicial reform, of which the key was a start on judicial independence. And he regarded the Great Reforms as simply the beginning of a process that should go much further. In a general way, these were the views of Alexei’s friends, many of whom were active in the city council (its duma) and often talked of municipal and rural self-government. Alexei himself served at times as a member of the Moscow City Duma and of the Moscow province zemstvo. They valued their own culture and education and believed the state should make these available to others (without making them yield their place). If Vasily had a fault to find in these views, it was that they failed to grasp the less patient mood prevailing among the unprivileged.10
In 1881 Elizaveta and the children visited Red Square on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, as they had usually done. The children had such a good time that they asked her if they could skip their music lessons. In words with a curiously religious tint, she answered, “Yes, fine, perhaps I’ll forgive you.” The next morning she didn’t come down to breakfast. Doctors came and gave prescriptions, but she lost consciousness on Monday. That evening the children were taken to her to say good-bye. Maklakov and his oldest sister tried to use the ultimate resource—they went to pray at the miracle-working icon of the Savior in a church on Ostozhenka, to which their mother had often taken them. But when they came home, their mother was no better. A little later Alexei told the children that she had died. Having borne eight children, of whom seven survived, she was dead at 33. For a long time Maklakov reproached himself for the failure of his prayers and for the lack of faith that this failure must imply. He was just short of 12 years old.11
The seven Maklakov children, with the youngest girl, Mariia, at extreme left, Vasily third from the right, and Nikolai fourth from the right. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
By the time of his mother’s death Vasily was enrolled in the gymnasium. His parents had disagreed on whether he should be sent there—his mother favored tutors at home; his father preferred the gymnasium for the exposure to real life, including its “dark side.” The school, in fact, gave Vasily an early hint of some of the stultifying, oppressive, pedantic, and humorless qualities he was to encounter at the university. The students themselves did not represent an abrupt switch for him: they seemed to have been drawn from a similar social niche, being generally the children of such people as doctors and professors. One classmate was the son of a cook. With the revelation of this background and a suggestion from on high (probably the school administration) that the son of a cook didn’t belong, “he grew in our eyes like a rare bird.”
Maklakov did very well academically, never getting less than a “five,” the highest grade possible. He was especially good at foreign languages and studied Greek on his own, just out of curiosity. (But he acknowledges in his memoirs that at an audience with the pope in 1904, he was unable to converse in Latin.) Though admitting that there were some excellent teachers, he deplored the teaching methods generally. For ancient languages there was a great focus on grammar rules, at the expense of reading literature. When a teacher took up actual thoughts expressed in classical literature, it was “like contraband.” History similarly seemed to consist of pumping the students full of isolated facts. It seemed to Vasily as if the object must have been to kill any interest in history or literature. Reflecting on it later, he