Book: FOUR-THIRDS OF OUR LIVES

When my father's parents died, his older brother Alexander Pavlovich, who was 12 years older than him, became his guardian and sent him to the military corps in Moscow, and the boy lived in the Noble boarding house. I often asked my father about life in this boarding house; he retained good memories of this life. The husband and wife were in charge of the housekeeping at the boarding house, as well as the upbringing of students, he was Russian, she was French. The way of life was family, the pupils did not feel lonely or unhappy; one thing they could not reconcile with was the soups that the French headmistress fed them: the soups were purely vegetable, pureed and ... without meat. It seemed to the boys with a wolfish appetite that the French Madame was saving on them and did not give them the usual borscht with fat and a good piece of beef!

In the autumn, when the harvest was over, there was a big holiday on the estate, and all the peasants, dressed up, came and waited for the owner to come out; when Pavel Ivanovich almost did not go out anymore, and his eldest son Sasha was not at home, his father went out to everyone; the headman put him on an overturned barrel, and he distributed money to the peasants, which the headman gave him. Then they brought out the wine, poured mugs for everyone, and the headman also served my father a good glass of vodka. He lifted this pile, told them something to everyone that was supposed to be then, and everyone drank, and he was with them. In general, in his life my father never drank anything except French red wine, and even then only one or two glasses; for him to drink at least a glass of vodka - that never happened.

He took with him some food and in the summer, alone, went through the dense forest, along the paths to this monastery, and the course there was forty versts. He walked for almost a day, and told me that he never had any fear, and sometimes he even slept in the woods. Coming to the monastery, he went to the abbot, who loved him very much, sat with him for a long time, walked around the monastery with the monks, went with them to the field, to the church, to the services and, having lived like this for a week, peacefully and without any doubt went home; but at home, too, no one thought to worry about him - after all, he went "on a pilgrimage", and nothing could be. We must think that there was almost no evil hooliganism in the village at that time, life went according to the long-established Orthodox calendar, everyone knew the unwritten charter of life; no one would have thought to offend or simply frighten a boy who was walking alone through the forest to a distant monastery, and even more so the landlord's son.

Bourgeois is a Western word, naturally created by Western European countries for themselves, but in our country very soon it became just an abusive nickname, launched after the revolution: and there were almost no real bourgeoisie.

... after all, the old noble Russia, where the title opened many doors, surprisingly even then got along with the new Russia, where the nobility as the ruling class had already outlived itself, and where society began to live quite clearly and live quite clearly - with the light hand of Soviet textbooks it is called "bourgeois".