Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [332]
For the notion of a country house was still new to Russia. The knight’s manor and the magnate’s castle, so much the rule in England or France, could be found as far east as Poland – but in old Muscovy they had been completely unknown. As for the country villa of the Renaissance, with its cultivated pursuit of leisure – the idea would have been unimaginable. Until the eighteenth century, when the Bobrovs visited their estates, they had always stayed in houses within the walled town of Russka. Though a noble who was very poor might find himself living in a village, in a house almost indistinguishable from the peasants’, only after the reign of Peter the Great did landowners even begin to live like European squires.
Their country houses were nearly always modest. While Russian rulers and their favourites had palaces that might rival those of Germany or France, the houses of men like Bobrov would have seemed makeshift to an English gentleman. Indeed, their construction and scale were far closer to those of the landowners in the newly freed colonies of America.
Only one thing had spoiled the tranquillity of the Bobrovs – the name of their village: Dirty Place. When they had lived in Russka it had not mattered, but when he came to live on the estate, Alexander had found the name offensive and absurd. He had toyed with various new names before inclining towards one derived from that of his own family: Bobrovo. Bobrovo, therefore, was now the official designation of the village and estate, though some of the older peasants still referred to it as Dirty Place.
Today there was a sense of expectancy in the house. In the area around Moscow, new regiments were nastily being raised. The previous afternoon, Bobrov had received a personal letter from the military governor of Vladimir asking him to supply more serfs as recruits. The peasants in the village had been drawing lots that very morning and shortly he would hear who had been chosen.
His own second son, Alexis, though only nineteen, was proudly serving as an infantry officer. Every time anyone approached the house, Tatiana would rush to the door, hoping they might be bringing a letter from him. Patriotism, excitement, seemed to be in the air.
And yet, in all these preparations, there was one great problem that filled Alexander Bobrov with a special sense of foreboding.
‘For it’s not Napoleon’s troops I fear so much,’ he told Tatiana. ‘It’s our own people.’ The serfs.
When the story of Napoleon’s great invasion of Russia is told, it is often forgotten that, in the months leading up to it, a great many Russian landowners feared an internal revolution more than they feared the invader. And for this view there was good reason. All over Europe, the conquering emperor of the French had claimed to be liberating people from their rulers in the name of the Revolution: to many of them he was a hero. Indeed, of the huge force who were to march with him into Russia in 1812 – the legendary Grand Army – less than half were French at all. And of all these European contingents, none fought more eagerly than those from the next-door Polish territories – formerly grabbed by Austria and Prussia when unhappy Poland was partitioned – whom Napoleon had indeed liberated. No wonder then if Russian leaders feared that their own subjugated Poles, and their oppressed Russian serfs, might rise in sympathy with this liberating army. ‘He’ll do what Pugachev failed to do, and give us a real revolution,’ Bobrov had predicted gloomily.
If the outside world was full of danger, however, the salon where the Bobrovs were sitting was a scene of quiet,