A CHILD IN RUSSIA.•
ENGLISH readers may well be grateful to Mr. J. D. Duff for his trans. lotion of a very unusual book. Recollections of childhood viewed from the standpoint of later life are common enough. But in the case of Aksakoff, though his account of what he saw and felt between the ages of five and eight was not written till the year before his death at sixty-seven, it takes none of its colour from later experience. We have what happened to the child exactly as it appeared to the child— told so well, indeed, that it has become a Russian classic—but giving us only a child's account of what he saw, felt, and thought. Nor is this the only wonder in the book. A second is that it was written " when he was almost blind, a prisoner to his room, and suffering con- stant pain for which death was the only cure." But his reminiscences show no trace of the conditions in which they were written. He was able to put the present altogether on one side, and to think only of the griefs and pleasures of more than sixty years earlier. Aksakoff lived for a great part of these years at Ufa, the chief town of one of the easternmost provinces of European Russia. His first distinct recollection is of a long illness from which he only recovered slowly and with many relapses. His mother was implored to listen to the assurances of the doctors and the priest that the child was " not for this life" and to "suffer his innocent soul to depart in peace." In spite of these entreaties, she persevered, and with the help of Buchan's Domestic .Medicine she brought him safely through. It is then that he has the first distinct remembrance of himself as " gentle, quiet, full of pity for suffering, a great coward," and much given to reading a child's book called The Mirror of Virtue. When this had been learnt by heart from end to end he made an attempt on Buchan, in which he found really interesting descriptions of herbs, salts, and roots used in medicine. Fortunately his love of reading was mentioned to an old friend, who gave him twelve numbers of Reading for Children. Ho rushed home with them, lay down on his bed, refused to come down to dinner, and, as his mother told him afterwards, behaved just as if he were insane. But this treasure opened a now world to him. Ho learnt something about many natural phenomena, and about bees and the changes undergone by butterflies, and out of this grow an intense desire to observe all these wonders with his own eyes. Aksakoff passed his life during these years at three places—Ufa, where his father held some official post ; Bagrovo, which is the name he gives to an estate belonging to his grandfather to which his parents moved about half-way through the period with which the book deals ; and another estate in the country belonging to an aunt. Naturally the journeys between these places fill a large space in his recollections. They gave the child a series of new ideas, which are reproduced without any attempt to test them by later knowledge. We have first his mother and his little sister ; then his father, whom he regards chiefly as a playmate who is constantly trying to detach him from his mother's very strict control ;
and then the larger world of grandparents and uncles and aunts. These are all described exactly as they struck him at the time. Of his mother we should like to know more. She was evidently out of touch with her surroundings. She gave the boy as a reason for disliking the move to Bagrovo that she " did not like her relatives nor any of the neighbours, who were all ill-mannered and uneducated people unable to converse on any subject." She was not, however, usually so frank as on this occasion, for Aksakoff remembers his especial
• rears of Childhood. By Serge Aksakoft. Translated by J. D. Dug. Londoiki Edward Arnold. 1103. ed. net.]
dislike of a way she had of beginning to discuss a thing with him as if he were grown-up, and then suddenly stopping short and going on in a quite different strain. Nor did she share her son's passion—as soon as he was allowed to do what he liked in anyway—for living out of doors. Even when ho had persuaded her to come out to an island in the river at Bagrovo which was his special haunt, she called for a large rug and leather cushions, " a precautionary and artificial treatment of nature " which quite damped his pleasure for the moment, though it did not prevent his storing up a bundle of recollections which make this chapter, " ilfy First Spring in the Country," the most interesting in the book. Mr. Duff promises us a translation of A Family History, which carries on the narrative of Aksakofre life and gives some account of his family. In the original the two make one book, and all who read this first instalment will welcome the completion of it.
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