The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

On my way to my grandmother’s, I stopped for a few days in Orel, where my uncle, who left behind him the memory of an honest man, was then serving as a justice of conscience.³⁴ He had many excellent sides, which inspired respect even in people who didn’t share his views and sympathies: when young he had been a dandy, a hussar, then a horticulturist and a dilettante artist of remarkable abilities; noble, straightforward, an aristocrat, and “an aristocrat au bout des ongles.”^† Having his own understanding of his duties, he naturally submitted to the new, but wished to treat the emancipation critically and presented himself as a conservative. He wanted only such emancipation as in the Baltic countries. With the young he was protective and kind, but their belief that salvation lay in a steady movement forward, and not backward, seemed erroneous to him. My uncle loved me and knew that I loved and respected him, but he and I did not agree in our views of the emancipation and other questions of the time. In Orel he made me into a purifying sacrifice on those grounds, and though I carefully tried to avoid these conversations, he aimed for them and liked very much to “defeat” me.

Most of all my uncle liked to bring me to cases in which his justice’s practice revealed “popular stupidity.”

I recall a luxurious, warm evening that I spent with my uncle in the “governor’s garden” in Orel, taken up with the—I must confess—by then considerably wearisome argument about the properties and qualities of the Russian people. I insisted, incorrectly, that the people are very intelligent, and my uncle, perhaps still more incorrectly, insisted that the people are very stupid, that they have no notion of law, of property, and are generally Asians

, who can astonish anyone you like with their savagery.

“And here, my dear sir,” he says, “is an example for you: if your memory has preserved the situation of the town, then you should remember that we have gullies, outskirts, further outskirts, of which the devil knows who fixed the boundaries and to whom the building permits were allotted. That has all been removed by fire in several stages, and in place of the old hovels, new ones of the same sort have been built, and now nobody can find out who has what right to be sitting there.”

The thing was that when the town, having rested from the fires, began to rebuild itself, and some people began to buy lots in the areas beyond the church of St. Basil the Great, it turned out that the sellers not only had no papers, but that these owners and their ancestors considered all papers utterly superfluous. Up to then, houses and land had been changing hands without any declaration to the authorities, and without any taxes or contributions to the treasury, and all this was said to have been written down in some “moatbook,” but the “moatbook” had burned up in one of the countless fires, and the one who kept the records in it had died, and along with it all traces of rights of ownership had vanished. True, there were no disputes about rights of ownership, but all this had no legal authority, and was upheld by the fact that Protasov said his father had bought his little house from the Tarasovs’ late grandfather, and the Tarasovs did not contest the Protasovs’ right of ownership. But since rights were now mandatory, and there were no rights, the justice of conscience was faced with resolving the question: did crime call up law, or did law create crime?

“And why did they do it that way?” asked my uncle. “Because these aren’t ordinary people, who need good state institutions to safeguard their rights, these are nomads, a

horde that has become sedentary, but is still not conscious of itself.”

With that we fell asleep and slept well. Early in the morning I went to the Orlik, bathed, looked at the old places, remembered Golovan’s house, and on coming home found my uncle conversing with three “good sirs” unknown to me. They were all of merchant construction—two of them middle-aged, in frock coats with hooks, and one completely white-haired, in a loose cotton shirt, a long, collarless coat, and a tall peasant hat.

My uncle indicated them to me and said:

“Here’s an illustration of yesterday’s subject. These gentlemen are telling me their case: join our discussion.”

Then he turned to those present with a joke that was obvious to me, but, of course, incomprehensible to them, and added:

“This is my relative, a young prosecutor from Kiev, who is going to see a minister in Petersburg and can explain your case to him.”

The men bowed.

“Of the three of them, you see,” he went on, “this is Mr. Protasov, who wishes to buy a house and land from this man, Tarasov; but Tarasov has no papers. You understand: none! He only remembers that his father bought the house from Vlasov, and this man here, the third, is the son of Mr. Vlasov, who, as you see, is also of a certain age.”

“Seventy,” the old man observed curtly.