At the age of fourteen, in a Holy Scripture class, little Varya Suvorova had been struck by an idea so un-impugnable in its very obviousness that it was hard to believe nobody had ever thought of it before. If God created Adam first and Eve afterwards, far from demonstrating that men were more important, this demonstrated that women were more perfect. Man was the experimental prototype of the human being, the rough draft, while woman was the final approved version, as finally revised and amended. Why, it was as clear as day! But for some reason the real, interesting side of life belonged exclusively to the men and all the women did was have children and do embroidery, then have more children and do more embroidery. Why was there such injustice in the world? Because men were stronger. And that meant she had to be strong.
So little Varya had decided she was going to live her life differently. The United States already had the first woman doctor in Mary Jacobi and the first woman priest in Antoinette Blackwell, while life in Russia was still riddled with dodoism and patriarchal discipline. But never mind, just give her time!
On graduating from girls' high school Varya had emulated the United States in waging a victorious war of independence (her papa, the solicitor Suvorov, proved to be a spineless weakling) and started training to be a midwife - thereby making the transition from 'perishing nuisance' to 'loony nihilist'.
The training did not work out well. Varya mastered the theoretical part with no difficulty, although she found many aspects of the process of creating a human being quite astonishing, even incredible; but when her turn came to assist at a genuine birth, it had proved most embarrassing. Unable to bear the heart-rending howls of the woman giving birth and the terrible sight of the flattened head of the infant as it emerged from the tormented and bloody flesh, Varya had disgraced herself by slumping to the floor in a dead faint, after which the only course left open to her had been to study to be a telegrapher. It had been flattering at first to become one of the first female telegraphers in Russia - they had even written about Varya in the St Petersburg Gazette (an article entitled 'Long Overdue' in the issue of the 28th of November 1875), but the job had proved to be boring beyond all endurance and without any prospects of advancement whatsoever.
And so Varvara, to her parents' relief, had taken herself off to their Tambov estate - not to idle her time away, but to nurture and educate the peasant children. It was there, in a brand-new school building still exuding the scent of fresh pinewood sawdust, that she had met the St Petersburg student Pyotr Yablokov, her Petya. Pyotr taught arithmetic, geography and basic natural science and Varvara taught all the other subjects. Quite soon, however, the peasants had realised that there were neither wages nor any other form of gratification to be earned by attending school, and they had taken their children back home - Enough of that loafing about, there's work to be done! But by that time Varya and Petya had already mapped out the course of their future life: free, modern, founded on mutual respect and a rational division of responsibilities.
She had put an end to humiliating dependence on her parents' handouts and they had rented a flat on the Vyborg side - with mice, but also with three whole rooms - in order to be able to live like Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov in Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done! They each had their own territory and the third room was reserved for one-to-one discussions and receiving guests. To the landlords they had called themselves husband and wife, but their cohabitation was exclusively comradely in nature: in the evening they would read, drink tea and converse in the communal living room, then they wished each other good night and went to their separate rooms. They had lived in this way for almost a year, and lived very well, in perfect harmony, without any vulgarity or filth. Pyotr studied at the university and gave lessons and Varvara qualified as a stenographer and earned as much as a hundred roubles a month. She kept the records of court proceedings and took down the memoirs of a crazy old general, the conqueror of Warsaw,- and then, on the recommendation of friends, she had found herself recording the text of a novel for a Great Writer (we shall dispense with names, since the arrangement ended in unpleasantness). Varya regarded the Great Writer with veneration and had absolutely refused to accept any payment, feeling that she was quite fortunate enough to be doing such work at all; but the intellectual luminary had misinterpreted her refusal. He was terribly old, over fifty, burdened with a large family and not at all good-looking, but there was no denying that he spoke eloquently and convincingly: virginity really was a ridiculous prejudice, bourgeois morality was repulsive and there was nothing shameful about human nature. Varya had listened and then consulted for hours on end with her Petya about what she ought to do. Petya agreed that chastity and hypocritical piety were shackles imposed on women, but he resolutely counselled her against entering into physiological relations with the Great Writer. He grew heated and attempted to demonstrate that the Writer was not so very Great after all, even though he did have past services to his credit - that many progressive people actually regarded him as a reactionary. It had all ended, as previously mentioned, unpleasantly. One day the Great Writer, breaking off the dictation of a scene of exceptional power (Varya was writing with tears in her eyes) began breathing noisily, then he gave a loud snort, embraced his brown-haired stenographer clumsily round the shoulders and dragged her over to the divan. For a while she endured his unintelligible whisperings and the touch of his trembling fingers, which had become hopelessly entangled in her hooks and buttons, until suddenly she realised quite clearly -she did not, in fact, understand it so much as sense it -that this was all wrong and it simply could not happen. She pushed the Great Writer away, ran out of the room and never went back.
This story had a bad effect on Pyotr. It was March, spring had come early, the breeze blowing from the Neva was redolent of open spaces and drifting ice, and Pyotr had given her an ultimatum: things could not go on as they were,- they were made for each other,- their relations had stood the test of time. They were both flesh and blood and they had no business attempting to defy the laws of nature. Of course, he would settle for carnal love without a wedding ceremony, but it would be better to get married properly, since it would spare them many complications. And somehow he had managed to put things so cleverly that afterwards only one thing was discussed: which kind of wedding they should have, civil or church. The arguments continued until April, but in April the long-expected war for the liberation of the Russian people's Slav brethren had broken out, and as a man of honour Pyotr Yablokov had signed up as a volunteer. Before his departure Varya had promised him two things: that she would soon give him her final answer and that they would assuredly fight together side by side - somehow she would think of a way.
And so she had. Not immediately, but she had thought of a way. She had failed to get a job as a nurse in a temporary military infirmary or a field hospital -they refused to take her incomplete midwifery studies into consideration. Nor were female telegraphers being taken on for active army service, Varya had been on the point of succumbing to despair when a letter arrived from Roumania: Petya complained that he had not been allowed to join the infantry because of his flat feet and had been retained at headquarters on the staff of the commander-in-chief, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich - for volunteer Yablokov was a mathematician and the army was desperately short of cryptographers.