'At whose expense?'
'At the expense of the lady, if the case is decided against her.'
'And if it is not ? '
Luckily at that moment the provincial prosecutor came i n . A prosecutor from his social position, from his official relationships, from the very buttons on his uniform, is bound to be an enemy of the governor, or at least to thwart him in everything. I purposely continued the conversation in his presence. The governor began to get angry and said that the whole question was not
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worth wasting a couple of words on. The prosecutor was quite indifferent to what would happen, and what became of the girl, but he immediately took my side and advanced a dozen different points from the code of laws in support of it. The governor, who in reality cared even less, said to me, smiling ironically:
'It's much the same whether she goes to her mistress or to prison.'
'Of course it's better for her to go to prison,' I observed.
'It will be more consistent with the intention expressed in the code,' observed the prosecutor.
'Let it be as you like,' the governor said, laughing more than ever. 'You've done your protegee a service: when she has been in prison for a few months she will thank you for it.'
I did not continue the argument; my object was to rescue the girl from domestic persecution; I remember tha t a couple of months later she was released and received her complete freedom.
Among the unsettled cases in my department there was a complicated correspondence which had lasted for several years, concerning acts of violence by a retired officer called Strugovshchikov and all sorts of wrongs committed on his estate. The affair began with a petition by his mother, and after that the peasants complained. He had come to some arrangement with his mother, and had himself accused the peasants of intending to kill him, without, however, adducing any serious testimony.
Meanwhile it was obvious from the evidence of his mother and his house-serfs that the man was guilty of all sorts of frantic actions. The business had been sleeping the sleep of the just for more than a year; it is always possible to drag a case out with inquiries and unnecessary correspondence and then, reckoning it to be settled, to file it in the archives. A recommendation had to be made to the Senate that he should be put under wardship, but for this purpose a declaration from the Marshal of Nobility was necessary. The Marshal of Nobility usually declines, not wishing to lose a vote. It rested entirely with me to get the case moving, but a coup de grace from the marshal was essential.
The marshal of the Novgorod Province, a nobleman who had served in the militia in 1 8 1 2 and had a Vladimir medal, tried to show me, when we met, that he was a well-read man, by talking in the bookish language of the period before Karamzin; once, pointing to a monument which the nobility of Novgorod had raised to itself in recognition of its patriotism in 1 81 2, he alluded with some feeling to the difficult, so to speak, and sacred, but none the less flattering, duties of a ma.rshal.
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All this was to my advantage.
The marshal came to the office about certifying the insan ity of some !'cclesiasti c ; \Yh!'n a ll the presidents of all the courts had exhaust!'d thP ir whole store of foolish questions, from wh i ch the lunatic might well have concluded that they too were not qui te i n their right minds, and he had finally b!'en elevatPd to the post of mndman, I drew th!' mnrshnl nsidP and told him nbout the cnse. Th!' marshal shrugged his shoulcl!'rs, a ssuming nn air of horror and indignntion, and ended by referring to the offic!'r as an arrant scoundrel 'who cnst a shadow over the well born commun ity of the nobility and gl'ntry of No...-gorod .'
'Probably,' I said, 'you would give ns th!' same answer in wri ting, if we a sked you ?'
Tlw marshal, caught unawares, promised to answer nccording to his conscience, adding that 'honour and truthfulness were the i nvar·iahle a ttrilnrtPS of the nobi lity of Russia.'
Though I had some doubt of the i nvariability of those attributes. I did set the business in motion, and the marshal kept his word. The case was brought before the Senate, and I remember very well the sweet moment ,...-hen the uka::. of the Senate was passed to my depa rtment, appointing trusteeship over the officer's estate nne! putting him under the supervision of the police. The officer had been convinced that the case was dosed, and after the uka::. he appeared at N ovgorod like one thunderstruck. He was at once told how it had happened ; the infuriat!'d officer was prepnred to iall upon me from behind a corner, to engage ruffians and have m!' a mbushed, but, being unaccustomed to campaigns on land, he quietly disappeared from sight in some district capital.
Unfortunatdy the 'a ttributes' of brutality, debauchery, and violence with house-serfs nnd peasants nre more 'invariable' than thos!' of 'honour and tmthfulness' among our nobility. Of course th!'re is a small group of cultured la ndowners who do not knock the ir sPrvants about from morning to night, do not thrash them every day; but even among them there are 'Penochkins'4 ; the rest ha...-e not yet a d...-anccd beyond the stage of Saltychikha6 and th!' AmPrican planters.
Rummaging about in the files, I found the correspondence of
·I The landowner in 'The Agent,' one of Turgene...-'s Sportsman's Sketches.
( Tr.)
5 Silltychikha was n Judy notorious in the reign of Catherine for her c ruelty to her serfs. She was eventunlly hrought to justice. ( Tr.)
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the provincial government of Pskov concerning a certain Madame Yaryzhkin, a landed lady. She had flogged two of her maids to death, was tried on account of a third, and was almost completely acqui tted by the Criminal Court, who based their verdict among other things on the fact that the third maid did not die.
This woman invented the most amazing punishments, hitting with a flat iron, with gnarled sticks or with a beetle.
I do not know \vhat the girl in question had done, but her mistress surpassed hersPlf. She made the girl kneel in filth, or_ on boards into which nails had been driven; in this position she beat her about the back and the head with a beetle and, when she had exhausted herself, called the coachman to take her place ; luckily he was not in the servants' quarters, and she went out to find him, while the girl, half frantic with pain and covered with blood, rushed out into the street with nothing on but her smock and ran to the police station. ThP police-inspector took her evidence and the case went its regular course. The police busied themselvf's and the Criminal Court busied itself over it for a year; at last the court, obviously bribed, very sagaciously decided to summon the lady's husband and suggest to him that he should restrain his wife from such punishments, and they obliged her, \vhile leaving her under suspicion of having brought about the death of two servants, to sign an undertaking not to inflict punishments in future. On this und<'rstanding the unfortunate girl, who had been kept somewhere else while the case was going on. was handed over to her mistress again.