After familiarizing himself with the events at Thermopylae, tactics became another of the boy’s favorite subjects. When he read those lines, Solovyov recalled a pencil sketch of a battle map that he had discovered in a Petersburg archive. By comparing the document with analogous sketches—at least eighteen battle maps of Thermopylae are attributed to cadet Larionov—it was possible to prove, without a doubt, that it belonged to the future general. The particular interest of that discovery consisted not only in the drawing being the earliest of those known but also that Leonidas himself was depicted in the upper right-hand corner of the sheet, in a general’s epaulets and with a two-headed eagle on his chest.
Among non-military subjects, Larionov liked dance. Considering the child’s overall mentality, this passion might appear somewhat unexpected, but that was only at first glance. Unlike their successors, in those days Russian officers loved to dance and did so capably. The Russian officers’ corps was very refined. Their well-balanced development—this was exactly what the cadets of the Second Corps were striving for—supposed more than manliness. It supposed elegance, too.
On top of all that, the cadet’s attitude toward dance was affected by a statement from the corps’ charter that had been framed and placed in the dance hall. According to Gurkovsky’s The Cadet Corps of the Russian Empire, the note held that the system for teaching dance was developed by a French dance school and took into consideration grace and beauty as well as the human body’s possibilities for expressing itself, both when resting and when moving. This text was the first to direct Larionov’s attention to the human figure’s plentiful possibilities.
The child also had a weakness for extracurricular reading. A housefather conducted this, reading classic Russian literature aloud to his charges. After noting Larionov’s interest in reading—as well as the cadet’s exemplary pronunciation—the housefather often instructed the boy to read aloud. The elderly soldier would sit in a corner of the classroom, cover his eyes with his hand, and listen to his pupil’s reading. He would bob his head approvingly in time with the reading, which would have given the impression of absorbed attention had the bobbing not been implausibly rhythmic. Sometimes a faint whistle would sound from his inflated nostrils, through a brush of coarse hair. They read Pushkin’s Poltava, Lermonotov’s Borodino, and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, but everyone especially liked Singer in the Camp of Russian Warriors.
The whistling would cease at the first lines of the Zhukovsky. Absolute silence, though, came with a later stanza: ‘Our Figner, dressed as an old man, enters / The enemy camp in the dead of night; / Steals like a shadow among their tents, / Sees everything there with his sharp eyes…’ Over all, just ‘Our Figner, dressed as an old man’ would have been enough, on its own, to attract attention, pronounced as it was almost as one word. And he was stealing in, too, among tents…
In 1894, Larionov allegedly read aloud the short story ‘Surgery’, which his father had brought for him. Accustomed to Russian classics, the housefather woke up but did not interrupt the cadet. The housefather liked the story, thanks to his own experience in dentistry. Upon learning that Chekhov was the author of the work, he wrote a letter to Lev Tolstoy, asking him if Anton Chekhov was a classic. Tolstoy did not answer. It should be concluded from this that in 1894 Chekhov was not yet a classic. Construction had not even begun on his Yalta home.
The reading repertoire for the wards of the Second Cadet Corps was not limited to the aforementioned works, however. Under their mattresses, hiding from their housefather’s eyes, were novels by Madame Genlis, verses from
Mister Barkov, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? —all copied out in the cadets’ distinct hands. When the elderly general recalled those years, he expressed admiration in the fact of copying Chernyshevsky’s novel. It was not just the copying but also the very reading of that thing that seemed like some sort of feat to him. From the memoirist’s point of view, Russian letters had never generated a more helpless text.
The old housefather discovered those books during an inspection of the cadets’ bedroom. After lengthy convincing by his students, he left them Madame de Genlis. In the end, he even agreed to turn a blind eye to Barkov. But he simply could not reconcile himself with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s work: the very mention of that surname sent him into a fit of rage. He threatened to expel from the corps and court martial the boy who had copied the novel. His identity could not be established then (it is possible that nobody wanted to), but the general knew it well. He considered it possible to mention only eight decades later, when there was no longer any threat to the copyist. He was cadet Lanskoy.
The housefather’s reaction was explainable. The Second Cadet Corps felt a share of responsibility in everything concerning Chernyshevsky. He had entered the corps as a tutor in 1853, while preparing his master’s dissertation. It is unlikely that this particular circumstance served as the beginning of all his troubles, but speaking purely chronologically—there is no getting around this—that circumstance preceded his troubles. Temporal as well as spatial patterns were later established, too.
Colonel Pazukhin, the ballistics instructor, drew wide-spread attention to the fact that the key points in the city for this writer and democrat fell along a single straight line. The Second Cadet Corps (place of work) → No. 7, Zhdanovskaya Embankment (place of residence) → Peter and Paul Fortress (place of imprisonment) → Mytinskaya Square (place of mock civil execution). In becoming familiar with these patterns, cadet Larionov could not have known that, by virtue of the connectedness of everything on earth, historian Solovyov—a researcher studying General Larionov’s battles with the consequences of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s work—would rent a room on that very same straight line (No. 11, Zhdanovskaya Embankment). This method for structuring thoughts, which was far from simple, forced Solovyov to tear himself away from the text and look at the sail of a distant yacht. A moment later he was reading again.
Entering the corps did not at all signify that the future general was isolated from the outside world. After passing an exam for his ability to salute and stand at attention, he was granted the right to go outside. Like cadets of other corps, the wards of the Second Corps had but one limitation: they were prohibited from walking on the sunny side of Nevsky Prospekt. It is possible that this prohibition was seen as a part of their Spartan education, as a necessary measure for acquainting the cadets with the shady side of life.
Sometimes the cadets were taken to the theater. These outings were a real holiday for them. Their time did not yet possess contemporary entertainment opportunities. Theater, which has now receded into the realm of the elite, was at the vanguard of the nineteenth century’s entertainment industry. As a means for education, theater was considered a mixed blessing or—depending upon the type of show—even dangerous. The theater was closed for Great Lent.
At the cadet corps, the preferred theater was the Alexandrinsky and the preferred show was Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm. According to the future general’s calculations, the cadets went to see The Storm sixteen times during his years of schooling. Such an obvious preference for one play over all others was explained by the housefather’s personal biases. His sympathy for Katerina manifested itself so visibly at the theater that those around him would begin to turn to look at him. From the very first line of the show, the aging soldier would sit, grasping at the armrests of his seat. Indignant at Boris’s spinelessness, he would crumple his peaked army cap and hit himself on the knee with it. During Kabanikha’s monologues, he would lift his own huge fist and, slowly, with a despairing grimace, sink it into the loge’s raspberry-colored velvet. When Katerina said, ‘Why is it that people can’t fly!’ the housemaster’s facial features would collapse immediately and he would cover his face with his hands, then begin sobbing as loudly as if he were baying. The civilian audience, who had already long been looking into the hall rather than the stage, would fall silent in respect. They were shaken by the Russian Army’s sentimentality.