Miss Whishaw's father was a collector of geometrid moths, so she understood Uncle's obsession, and, being herself a gifted watercolorist, she could give him and Mopsy tips on technique. Miss Whishaw was a plain, spunky product of. Victorian England. Once, she joined several dozen peasants who were making a pilgrimage to the catacombs in Kiev, where a number of saints were buried. On foot, it took three days. Her nemesis was the boys' tutor, Nicolai Ivanovitch. He had been thrown out of the University of Kharkov for subversive ideas and membership in a secret group of radicals. Mopsy recalled him as cia typical future Bolshevik." The children's mother had engaged him. Their father probably would not have approved of the choice; he had a low opinion of university students. "Education makes. ..a Russian noisy," the general in "Rolling-Flax" says. "If I had my way I would close the Universities for good now-abolish them altogether. They are yearly turning out a mob of hungry, lawless discontents, who will not work." Squared off around the samovar, Nicolai Ivanovitch and Miss Whishaw would sit on the balcony and argue endlessly about topics like Home Rule in Ireland. Mopsy remembered thinking it strange that they kept calling each other "my dear" when they were supposed to be quarrelling. Nika, when he came back, took a photograph of the two of them with his mother, against some foliage. Nicolai Ivanovitch, leaning on the palings of a fence behind them, is quite handsome, in the style of Lenin, with peculiarly brilliant, narrowed eyes and a pointed beard, and is wearing a white collarless jacket with a double row of brass buttons. Miss Whishaw is vigilant under heavy lids. She looks like someone who is probably never going to marry, and, in fact, she never did. Mopsy visited her after she had gone back to Dover. She was working on the book then, but she wouldn't let Mopsy see it. Years later, her sister sent it to the family. "You might be interested in this book," the covering note said. "I think your lovely house is described in it." Everyone read it, and agreed that it contained a lot of truth.

       Alexandra Nicolaevna, who is about thirty-five in the photograph, conforms closely to that description of her in "Rolling-Flax." She busied herself with planning the meals; there were seldom fewer than twenty 'people at her table. She tried to interest the peasants in learning to read and write, with little success. They seemed determined to remain illiterate, perhaps out of spite, and only reluctantly went to her school. She also ran a dispensary for the peasants, administering turpentine, iodine, boric acid, and quinine, the last for the "swamp fever"-possibly malaria-with which they sometimes came down. One of her patients was old Pindy, who had helped build the house in 1826. His age was estimated to be a hundred and ten. Pindy lived ten miles away and came once a week for his medicine. Getting off his wagon, he would walk his old horse up the final rise to the house. He seemed to have forgotten that serfdom had been over for thirty years. "And how much did they pay for you?" he would ask, slapping the behind of a pretty girl in the kitchen. Nika photographed him sitting on a stone wall, with his white beard, and his perfect bowl of white hair, coming down almost to his eyebrows, and with his gnarled hands folded humbly in his lap. Like most of Alexandra Nicolaevna's patients, Pindy thought that if he drank off the whole bottle of medicine at once he would feel better faster, and he had to be persuaded to take it in daily doses.

       When the peasants felt really sick, they went to old Karakutsa, who looked after the sheep, and who was said to be able to stop bleeding with whispered incantations. Karakutsa's remedies, which relied heavily on the local flora and fauna, had been in use since the days when Perun was god of the steppe, and the fact that Karakutsa himself had lived to such an old agehe, too, was said to be a centenarian -was a good advertisement for them. Reviling modern medicine, he would seize the arm of his patient, feel his pulse., and then locate precisely between the wrist and elbow a second, fainter throbbing, which he called the brain pulse. The brain pulse, he said, was an infallible index of the condition of the body. "Your brain pulse is dead," he would tell his patient. Holding the arm tightly and swaying back and forth with his eyes closed, he would murmur his incantation so quicklythree times in one breaththat the patient couldn't make out the words. For payment, he accepted hens, shoes, vodka whatever he was offered.

       There were three thousand dessiatines of prodigiously fertile land on the Shideyevo estate (a dessiatine is 2.7 acres), of which two thousand were cultivated. Sometimes the crops ripened so quickly that dessiatines of rye and oats, and even of wheat, were left to rot because nobody had time to get them in. The wheat harvest of 1906 was exceptional. The Avinoffs invited forty people to help them celebrate their good fortune. Tassels of wheat were placed among the flowers in vases around the house. After a sumptuous banquet, everyone toasted "His Excellency the Harvest" in champagne and danced until dawn. With some of the profits from the harvest, Alexandra Nicolaevna had a set of jewelry made up by Faberge. The necklace, bracelets, rings, earrings, and brooch were made of golden spikes of wheat, with tiny diamonds as kernels. Mopsy wore the jewels when she was presented at court the following year.

       At the emancipation, in 1861, each serf had received a small allotment of land. But the peasants still needed cash, and the only way to get it was to work for the Avinoffs. They got three meals and wages-about fifty cents a day. In summer, the muzhiks worked six days a week. In the winter, there was little to do, and they stayed home and made articles-wooden snow shovels, twig brooms, felt boots, unglazed milk pots, crafts of carved wood and bark and of silver-to sell in the nearby markets of Poltava and Y ekaterinoslav. (Poltava, the provincial capital, was thirty-five miles away; Yekaterinoslav, the present Dnepropetrovsk, was about fifty miles away.) The busiest month was August. With every horse, wagon, and driver in use, it was a bad time to travel. Everyone, even mothers with newborn babies at their breasts, took to the fields, and flashing sickles, accompanied by thrilling songs, hacked down the wheat and corn. The work began at dawn and ended after dark. Sometimes the muzhiks would make a bonfire on the open steppe, and while one told stories the rest would sit and finally fall asleep in its glow.

       There were two villages below the house-Novoselovka and Homohivka, joined by a road and separated by the lower garden. Their combined population was about three hundred, and there were several large peasant families-the Moshuras, the Kolnechenkos, the Oleshkos. The cottages, nestled together in the sha'de of willows and poplars, had bright-white sides, and the roofs were thatched with tall reeds from the marsh. The walls were made of clay plastered on a willow frame. Inside was a stove built up in tiers called lezhankas, on which members of the family slept. Strings of shrivelled mushrooms and bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling. The krasny ugol, or "beautiful corner ," where icons glimmered behind a perpetual flame, was at the eastern end of the room. On Saturday, their day off, the peasants came up to church. The bells played a lively little tune at four-thirty to summon them. The bells also tolled across the valley at ten on Sunday morning, for the special service on each of the thirty saints' days that were celebrated on the estate, and during blizzards, when they were rung, on Alexandra Nicolaevna's orders, to help travellers keep their bearings. The Saturday vespers lasted an hour. The peasants came in through the main entrance and stood at the rear of the church, dropping to their knees and crossing themselves. For many years, the services were performed by the old batyushka Father John. Another bearded hundred-yearold, he had been in residence since the time of Andrei Fyodorovitch, but he was so timid that he hardly dared address the Avinoffs, unless it was to compliment Mopsy on her painting. "The brush of Raphael," he would say. Once, at Easter, the batyushka and his acolyte went down to the villages to bless the peasants' eggs. At each cottage, they were offered a glass of vodka, and when they had made their rounds they returned, reeling, through the lilac allee in the lower garden. The lilacs had been trained to grow together, forming a canopy. For some reason, the batyushka and his acolyte decided to climb into the lilacs, and there they passed out. Mopsy found them s1eeping there the next morning.

      Besides the field hands from the villages, around a hundred dvorniki, or yard servants, were attached to the house and the numerous outbuildings, where a variety of activities went on, making Shideyevo practically self-sufficient. Most of the dvorniki were landless. Not all of them had been recruited locally. By the end of the century, a significant number of dvorniki were leaving estates and drifting into the cities, where they got work in factories, lived in slums, and became ripe for the teachings of Karl Marx. The outbuildings formed a courtyard with the south side of the house. Mopsy made me a sketch to explain the layout. The first outbuilding, linked to the southeast corner of the house by a connective bridge, cqntained the kitchen, the laundry, and quarters for the cooks and the two coachmen, Jacob and Terence. Then came the ice house. Ice was brought up by oxen from the liman-a small, hourglass-shaped lake made by the river Orel as it flowed through the marsh below-covered with straw, and kept there over the summer. Next was the carriage house. It held a number of now extinct conveyances. The landau was an open wagon with two facing seats and a capacity of eight. Nika took a picture of everyone heading off for a picnic in the landau. Uncle is wearing a white cap with a big visor and is holding upright, like a slack wind sock, a long-handled butterfly net. Two lineikas were used for bathing expeditions and as backup transport for larger picnics. (The bathers swam nude in the river, one sex at a time.) Nicholas N abokov, the composer, has described the lineika as "a Russian cross-breed between an English brake and an American covered wagon."  There were also two sizes of coach, a kareta and a kolyaska, and a chetvyorka, which was like a troika, except that it was drawn by four horses instead of three. With a purported top speed of twenty-five miles per hour, it was the fastest rig at the Avinoffs' disposal. And, finally, there was Alexandra Nicolaevna's wicker kar:<;inka- "little basket"-which was drawn by the Shetland ponies.

       After the carriage house came the stables, with about thirty horses. Then the piggery. The pigs were looked after by a Cossack, who, it was joked, through long association had come to look like a pig himself. Then the barn, where more than fifty oxen were kept. They were for plowing and bringing up the water and the ice, and they always travelled in a double yoke. Then the sheep shed. Karakutsa's vicious sheepdogs had a standing feud with the hunting pack, which occupied the house end of the courtyard. There was an imaginary line in the middle of the yard, and terrible fights broke out whenever a dog went over it. Then the black bakery, where dark bread was made, and where the field hands got their meals. Then the dairy. Then the white bakery, where bubliki and bublichki, loaves and buns of bread, were made. The baker Pyotr Ivanovitch lived there, with his wife and masses of children. Then the blacksmith's shop. Then the shop of the shoemaker, who was also the tanner, harnessmaker, and bookbinder. Then the machine shop, where engines were fixed and grain was ground. The next building was rented to Yavorovsky, the Honest Jew. He was a rabbi and attended to the commercial needs of the community. In his store, you could buy cloth, sweets, needles, kerosene, and other basic items. Because the Yavorovskys were the only Jews around, they were spared the pogroms; Jews as nearby as Yekaterinoslav, however, were persecuted. The last building in the courtyard was the Winter Wing, or the Fliigel, as it was called-a large brick house with four apartments, where the butler Roman Vasilyevitch lived, as did Father John and the cabinetmaker Vasily Bartolemevitch (who also made frames for Mopsy's paintings); where guests were put up; where the Avinoffs stayed in the winter, when the main house was closed; and where the estate manager, Frederic Augustovitch Brauns, had his office. "You see, we
were fully equipped," Mopsy told me with a sigh. "We didn't depend on anything from the outside."

       Miss Whishaw suggests, and Mopsy confirmed, that while the General was still in Tashkent, Alexandra Nicolaevna was paid an unusual number of calls by a general practitioner in Poltava, Dr. Wolkenstein. He was a Tolstoyist, and, like Tolstoy, wore a rubashka, or peasant shirt. His wife had been deported to Siberia as a revolutionary. He was bald and not particularly handsome but, Mopsy recalled, "a great charmer," who spoke with feeling and had dark, searching eyes. Alexandra Nicolaevna, we are told in "Rolling-Flax," "enjoyed a gentle flirtation, and vibrated sensitively to the opinions of others." The four of them-Alexandra Nicolaevna, Dr.. Wolkenstein, the tutor Nicolai Ivanovitch, and Miss Whishaw-spent hours on the balcony arguing about the fate of Russia. According to the novel, there was a hectograph in the basement of the house, on which Alexandra and the Doctor ran off seditious pamphlets. If this was true, Mopsy knew nothing about it.

       Alexandra Nicolaevna's liberal episode ended, in any case, when her husband came back from Tashkent. Life returned to normal with the General at the head of the table. In a passage that Mopsy dismissed as "complete nonsense," Miss Whishaw describes mealtime at Shideyevo with the family reunited:
 
 

Dinner was usually a very long, and a very trying meal. Everyone was placed according to rank; the women sitting near [Alexandra Nicolaevna]. and the men near the General. Conversation flagged, because half the people were admitted to the table as a favour, and were not supposed to spl'ak. Amongst those who were below the salt was the Kharkov dressmaker; she had especially stipulated in her contract that she was to dine with the family. Fraulein Anna was expected to be seen, not heard; and the G~neral thought it was quite unnecessary for [Nicolai Ivanovitch] to make a remark. He disapproved of students and universities, and thought the education of the masses was a mistake.       Occasionally Father John, the batyushka, dined with the family; owing to the excessive respect he felt for [Alexandra Nicolaevna], he used to rise like a little boy in school, whenever she spoke to him -frequently spilling his soup as he did so. As a rule she did not attempt to keep up a conversation with him. Lastly, out of politenl'ss, and for the good of the children, the conversation was carried on in English; and a bored look settled down upon the faces of thos~ who were destined to sit for more than an hour, listening to what they could not possibly understand.

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