CHAPTER IX

Until Prince Andrew settled in Boguchárovo its owners had always been

absentees, and its peasants were of quite a different character from

those of Bald Hills. They differed from them in speech, dress, and

disposition. They were called steppe peasants. The old prince used to

approve of them for their endurance at work when they came to Bald Hills

to help with the harvest, or to dig ponds and ditches, but he disliked

them for their boorishness.

Prince Andrew’s last stay at Boguchárovo, when he introduced hospitals

and schools and reduced the quitrent the peasants had to pay, had not

softened their disposition but had on the contrary strengthened in

them the traits of character the old prince called boorishness. Various

obscure rumors were always current among them: at one time a rumor that

they would all be enrolled as Cossacks; at another of a new religion to

which they were all to be converted; then of some proclamation of the

Tsar’s and of an oath to the Tsar Paul in 1797 (in connection with which

it was rumored that freedom had been granted them but the landowners had

stopped it), then of Peter Fëdorovich’s return to the throne in seven

years’ time, when everything would be made free and so “simple” that

there would be no restrictions. Rumors of the war with Bonaparte and

his invasion were connected in their minds with the same sort of vague

notions of Antichrist, the end of the world, and “pure freedom.”

In the vicinity of Boguchárovo were large villages belonging to the

crown or to owners whose serfs paid quitrent and could work where they

pleased. There were very few resident landlords in the neighborhood

and also very few domestic or literate serfs, and in the lives of the

peasantry of those parts the mysterious undercurrents in the life of

the Russian people, the causes and meaning of which are so baffling to

contemporaries, were more clearly and strongly noticeable than among

others. One instance, which had occurred some twenty years before, was

a movement among the peasants to emigrate to some unknown “warm rivers.”

Hundreds of peasants, among them the Boguchárovo folk, suddenly began

selling their cattle and moving in whole families toward the southeast.

As birds migrate to somewhere beyond the sea, so these men with their

wives and children streamed to the southeast, to parts where none of

them had ever been. They set off in caravans, bought their freedom one

by one or ran away, and drove or walked toward the “warm rivers.” Many

of them were punished, some sent to Siberia, many died of cold and

hunger on the road, many returned of their own accord, and the movement

died down of itself just as it had sprung up, without apparent reason.

But such undercurrents still existed among the people and gathered new

forces ready to manifest themselves just as strangely, unexpectedly, and

at the same time simply, naturally, and forcibly. Now in 1812, to anyone

living in close touch with these people it was apparent that these

undercurrents were acting strongly and nearing an eruption.

Alpátych, who had reached Boguchárovo shortly before the old prince’s

death, noticed an agitation among the peasants, and that contrary to

what was happening in the Bald Hills district, where over a radius of

forty miles all the peasants were moving away and leaving their villages

to be devastated by the Cossacks, the peasants in the steppe region

round Boguchárovo were, it was rumored, in touch with the French,

received leaflets from them that passed from hand to hand, and did not

migrate. He learned from domestic serfs loyal to him that the peasant

Karp, who possessed great influence in the village commune and had

recently been away driving a government transport, had returned with

news that the Cossacks were destroying deserted villages, but that the

French did not harm them. Alpátych also knew that on the previous day

another peasant had even brought from the village of Visloúkhovo, which

was occupied by the French, a proclamation by a French general that no

harm would be done to the inhabitants, and if they remained they would

be paid for anything taken from them. As proof of this the peasant had

brought from Visloúkhovo a hundred rubles in notes (he did not know that

they were false) paid to him in advance for hay.

More important still, Alpátych learned that on the morning of the

very day he gave the village Elder orders to collect carts to move the

princess’ luggage from Boguchárovo, there had been a village meeting at

which it had been decided not to move but to wait. Yet there was no

time to waste. On the fifteenth, the day of the old prince’s death,

the Marshal had insisted on Princess Mary’s leaving at once, as it was

becoming dangerous. He had told her that after the sixteenth he could

not be responsible for what might happen. On the evening of the day the

old prince died the Marshal went away, promising to return next day for

the funeral. But this he was unable to do, for he received tidings that

the French had unexpectedly advanced, and had barely time to remove his

own family and valuables from his estate.

For some thirty years Boguchárovo had been managed by the village Elder,

Dron, whom the old prince called by the diminutive “Drónushka.”

Dron was one of those physically and mentally vigorous peasants who grow

big beards as soon as they are of age and go on unchanged till they

are sixty or seventy, without a gray hair or the loss of a tooth, as

straight and strong at sixty as at thirty.

Soon after the migration to the “warm rivers,” in which he had taken