Virgin Soil: Fomushka and Fimushka

Virgin Soil seems like the right book to read after Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty. 

Perhaps at some point I will write about Turgenev’s revolutionaries, but right now I’m interested in the old couple: the Subochevs, Foma Lavrentyevich (Fomushka) and Yevfimiya Pavlovna (Fimushka). 

This is how Paklin describes them: 

““No politics, no literature, nothing modern gets a look in there. […] The smell there is antique; the people are antique, the air is antique. Take anything you like and it’s antique. Catherine II, powder, hooped skirts, the eighteenth century! […] They’re awfully like one another, only she wears a mobcap and he a nightcap—with the same ruches as the mobcap, but minus the ribbon. If it wasn’t for this ribbon, you wouldn’t know who was who…”” 

(translated by Michael Pursglove) 

Personally I think not much of interest has happened before this point. Nezhdanov, an illegitimate son of an aristocrat, and a Red, is employed as a tutor by the privy councillor Sipyagin; there he meets a few progressive people who want to “do something”—Marianna (Sipyagin’s niece), Markelov (Sipyagin’s brother-in-law), Solomin (a factory owner), etc. Paklin, one of the revolutionaries Nezhdanov has known from before, visits him, gets introduced to the others, and then takes them to the Subochevs, who gave shelter to his sister. 

“The Subochevs’ coachman, too, was an extremely ancient man, redolent of train oil and pitch; his beard began near his eyes and his eyebrows fell to his beard in a little cascade. He was so slow in all his movements that he used up a whole five minutes to take a pinch of snuff, two minutes to stick his whip into his belt and over two hours to harness Moveless alone.” 

Doesn’t that sound more like something out of Gogol? 

“When together, they were never bored, so they were never apart and did not wish for any other company. Neither Fomushka nor Fimushka had ever been seriously ill, and if one of them had some slight indisposition, they both drank an infusion of lime blossom, had warm oil rubbed onto the smalls of their backs or hot fat dropped onto the soles of their feet, and it soon passed.” 

The episode with the Subochevs is unlike anything that came before. It is—I wouldn’t say out-of-place—incongruous. 

I like it though. The old couple. The house. The servants in the house. The whole scene. It is lively, and unexpected.