The countess’ residence was the only structure in town that had a colonnaded front. The common people called it the Palace and the section of Kasimir Street it faced the Pillars. The sidewalk opposite was the favourite promenade of the younger generation, and every afternoon, in auspicious weather, it glittered with the uniforms of army officers and gymnasium boys. The Palace was built by her grandfather in the closing days of the previous century. It abutted on a long narrow lane formed on one side by Anna Nicolayevna’s garden and leading to Theatre Square, where stood the playhouse and the Nobles’ Club. When the white rigidity of these buildings was relieved by the grass of its lawns and the foliage of its trees the spot was the joy of the town.
During the winter of the year following the countess’ sojourn at the German watering place, Miroslav was stirred by a sensation, the central figure of which was Pavel’s tutor, the instructor of geography and history in the local gymnasium, Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin. Pavel was then in the graduating class.
Besides being connected with the male gymnasium Pievakin taught at the female high school of Miroslav. The town was fond of him and he was fond of the town and upon the whole he was contented. One of the things that galled him was the fact that his superior, the newly appointed director of the school, was his inferior both in years and in civil rank. Pievakin was a “councillor of state,” while Novikoff, the head of the male gymnasium, was only a “collegiate assessor.” Novikoff was a painstaking, narrow-minded functionary, superciliously proud of his office and slavishly loyal to the letter of the law. He was a slender, dark-complexioned man of forty, but he tried to look much older and heavier. He copied the Czar’s side-whiskers, walked like a corpulent grandee, perpetually pulling at his waistcoat as though he were burdened by a voluminous paunch, and interlarded his speech with aphorisms from the Latin Grammar.
One day as the director strutted ponderously along one of the two corridors, the word “parliament” fell on his ear. It was Pievakin’s voice. The old man was explaining something to his class with great ardour. Novikoff paused, his lordly walk congealing into the picture of dignified attention. The next minute, however, his grandeur melted away. His face expressed unfeigned horror. Pievakin was drawing an effusive parallel between absolute monarchies and limited. This was distinctly in violation of the Circular of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment enjoining teachers of geography, in cases of this kind, to adhere strictly to the bare terminology of the approved text-book without venturing into anything like an elucidation. Not that Pievakin was betraying any partiality for limited monarchies. Indeed, to him the distinction between the two forms of government was neither of more nor of less interest than the difference between a steppe and a prairie or a simoon and a hurricane. It appealed to him because it was geography, and in his ecstasy over the lesson all thought of the Ministry and its Circulars had escaped his mind.
That afternoon he was summoned to the director’s office on the floor below.
Novikoff was at his large, flat-topped desk, studiously absorbed in some papers. He silently motioned the teacher of geography to a seat, and went on with his feigned work. After a lapse of some minutes he straightened up, played a few scales upon the brass buttons of his uniform, and said:
“It pains me to have to say it, Alexandre Alexandrovich, but these are queer times and the passions of youth should be moderated, held in check, suppressed, not aroused. The imagination of one’s pupils is not to be trifled with, Alexandre Alexandrovich.”
He paused mournfully. The little old man, who had not the least idea what he was driving at, waited in consternation. The room was overheated, and the pause had an overpowering effect on him. He felt on the verge of fainting.
“The point is,” Novikoff resumed, with a sudden spurt in his voice, “that in your class work you sometimes suffer yourself to say things that cannot but be regarded as dangerous. Dangerous particularly in view of the evil influences at work among the young of our generation; in view of the very sad fact that college students will disguise themselves as peasants——”
“What do you mean, sir?” Pievakin burst out, reddening violently. “How dare you liken me to those fellows? I was serving the Czar while you were still a whippersnapper. I’m a councillor of state, sir. How dare you make these insinuations?”
“I expected as much,” Novikoff answered, nervously polishing his buttons. “Defying one’s superior is of a piece with the views you’re trying to instill into the minds of your scholars.”
“What is of a piece with what? Speak out, sir,” Pievakin shrieked.
“Bridle your temper, sir. I can’t allow that.”
“Then tell me what it’s all about,” the teacher of history and geography said in a queer, half-beseeching, half-threatening voice.
“Well, this morning you were expatiating upon the blessings of a constitutional government. Yes, sir. There are no spies to eavesdrop on one in this building, but it seems you never speak so loud nor with so much gusto as when you get to the subject of constitutions and parliaments and things of that kind.”
“It isn’t true. I merely said a word or two on the various forms of government. It’s practically all in Smirnoff’s Geography.”
“ ‘Practically’! It’s against the law. I am very sorry, but it becomes my duty to report it to the curator.”
Here Pievakin, losing control of himself, shouted “Spy!” and “Scoundrel!” and darted out of the room.
This happened at a time when the “peasantist” movement, the peaceful, unresisting stage in the history of what is commonly known as Nihilism, was at its height. The educated young generation was in an ecstasy of altruism. It was the period of “going to the people,” when hundreds of well-bred men and women, children of the nobility, would don peasant garb and go to share the life of the tillers of the soil, teaching them to read, talking to them of universal love, liberty and equality. The government punished this “going to the people” with Asiatic severity. Russia has no capital punishment for the slaying of common mortals, the average penalty for murder being about ten years of penal servitude in Siberia; and this penalty the courts were often ordered to impose on absolutely peaceable missionaries, on university students who practically did the same kind of work as that pursued by the “university settlements” in English-speaking countries. There were about one thousand of these propagandists in the political prisons of the empire, and their number was growing. They were kept in solitary confinement in cold, damp cells. Scores of them went insane or died of consumption, scurvy or suicide before their cases came up for trial.
Pievakin’s house was searched by gendarmes, but no “underground” literature was discovered there. He was not arrested, but spies shadowed his movements and about a month after the domiciliary visit he was officially notified by the curator’s office that he was to be transferred to the four-year “progymnasium” of a small town a considerable distance off. This implied that his work was to be restricted to boys of fourteen and less in a town out of the way of “dangerous tendencies.” He grew thin and haggard and a certain look of fright never left his eye. The other instructors at the gymnasium, all except one, and many of his private acquaintance plainly shunned him. He had become one of those people with whom one could not come in contact without attracting the undesirable attention of the police. One of those who were not afraid to be seen in his company was the “truncated cone.” “My crooked back is the only one that does not bend,” the deformed man would joke. The tacit philosophy of his attitude toward the world seemed to be something like this: “You people won’t consider me one of you. I am only a hunchback, something like an elf, and you will take many an unwelcome truth from me which you would resent in one like yourselves. So let us proceed on this understanding.”
When Boulatoff heard that his favourite teacher was to be exiled to a small town “to render him harmless,” he was shocked. Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin was the last man in the world