FOR LYOVA ODOEVTSEV, of the Odoevtsevs, life had brought no special traumas; in the main, it had flowed along. Figuratively speaking, the thread of his life had streamed rhythmically from someone’s divine hands, skimmed through the fingers. Without undue haste, without breaks or knots, that thread had remained under steady and moderate tension, showing only an occasional slight sag.

In point of fact, even his belonging to an old and famous Russian family is almost immaterial. If his parents had ever had to recall and define their attitude to their surname, that was in the long-ago years when Lyvoa did not exist or was in the womb. For Lyova himself, ever since he could remember, there was no need of it, and he was rather a namesake than a scion. He was Lyova.

His infancy, it is true (Lyova was conceived in a “fateful” year), had brought some disagreeable relocations for him, or rather for his parents, to the land of their notable ancestor—“deep into the Siberian mines,” as it were. Lyvoca vaguely remembered this: it was cold, Mama bartered her kimono (huge silk flowers) for potatoes, and he, little Lyovushka, once ran off to the pond and found three rubles on the shore. That little stretch of water, the stretch of blank gray fence, and the stone on which he painfully stubbed his toe in his joy were fixed in his memory, along with the color of the three-ruble note. He could neither remember nor understand that his father had “really been lucky,” that such “mild” measures were most unusual and what had happened to them was a great good fortune and a happy accident, if only because Lyovushka’s grandfather had been “taken” the year his parents got married, almost ten years back, and all those years they hadn’t been “touched.” (That Grandfather had been taken back then was “lucky” for Grandfather, too, because it was “in time”; later he would have been “dealt with differently” but this way he migrated from exile to exile, noting worse.) That there was no news from Grandfather might also be as bad as you could imagine, though not for Grandfather—for them: you never knew what he . . . Not to mention the other relatives “over the border”—you could expect any dirty trick from them. On the whole, it “might have been worse.” But these favorable calculations were beyond Lyova. He could neither remember nor understand this—even later on, when he might have been able, if not to understand, then at least to remember—because Grandfather had not been discussed in his presence for a good ten years, and everything that had personally happened to him, Lyova, had somehow turned into a so-called wartime childhood. Indeed, the war had begun soon after they were exiled, evacuees had appeared in their remote backwater, and there was no longer anything exceptional about their family’s situation.

In the end, for reasons that were hidden from Lyova even longer than the existence of the “live” grandfather, everything turned out happily, and after the war they returned to their native city as if from evacuation, all three of them, without casualties. Papa began to lecture, at the university as before, eventually defending his doctoral thesis and occupying the chair in which his father had shone (the only fact Lyova knew about Grandfather); Lyova himself studied and grew up, eventually finishing school and entering the university under his father; Mama didn’t seem to do anything and got older.

Lyova grew up in the so-called academic milieu, and from childhood he dreamed of becoming a scholar. Only not a philologist, like his father and apparently his grandfather; not a humanist, more likely a biologist . . . biology was a “purer” science, he fancied. He liked the way Mama brought strong tea to Father every evening in his study. Father paced the dark room, softly clinking the spoon against his tea glass an saying things to Mama in a voice as muted as the lamplight, which picked from the gloom only the desk with its papers and books. When no one was home, Lyova would brew himself some nice strong tea and drink it through a stick of macaroni, and then he fancied he was wearing on his head the black professorial skullcap. “Like Father, but bigger than Father . . .”

That was the pose in which he read his first book, and the book was Fathers and Sons. It became a point of special pride for him that the first book he ever read was a thick and serious one. He bragged a bit about never having skinny little children’s books, no Pavkas or Pavliks (not realizing that he got second credit: the Odoevsteves simply didn’t have those little books in the house. The reason was neither stated nor explained—it was acted on). What most impressed him, perhaps, was that he read his thick book with absorption and even major honors as he conceived it, turned out to be not so hard after all, not even boring (the latter, in his childish mind, had somehow seemed a necessary condition of elitehood). What also impressed him in Turgenev was the word “maidens” and the fact that now and again these maidens drank “sugar water.” Imagining this and forgiving Turgenev’s in that one had to be so great, gray, and bearded back then, just to write what could be so well mastered in our day by a boy as little (though very gifted as Lyova, and further, his own time was better in that he had been born now, not back then, this was the time that had borne Lyova, so gifted at understanding everything so early . . . thus for a long while the concept of the serious, in Lyova’s mind, coincided with solidity and an imposing appearance. But after he had read “all” of Pushkin and done a report in school for the poet’s sesquicentennial, he had really no idea what more could be required on the path that had opened so easily to him: everything was already within his grasp, and he had just as much time left ahead as in childhood. To endure this waiting, one needed “willpower,” a magic spiritual category of those years, almost the only one Lyova picked up outside the family citadel. In this very armchair, sinking into it so deep that the only thing visible was a black skullcap, he taught himself the first lessons in courage, because the willpower that Meresyev had plenty of in the absence of legs, Lyova had too little in the presence of arms. Was this when he announced that the natural sciences attracted him more than the humanistic? . . . but that would be too psychoanalytical. His parents, privately noting their son’s humanist bent, did not block his naturalist leanings.

In the newspapers, Lyova liked to read the obituaries of scholars. (He skipped the obituaries of political figures, because politics was never mentioned in the family, neither damned nor praised, and he regarded it as something very external and exempt from criticism, not even so much out of caution—they didn’t seem to have taught him that, either—as because it was totally irrelevant to him. This side of his upbringing, his “apoliticality,” should be recounted in detail, but for the time being we merely note it.) In obituaries for scholars he would find an unusually pleasant tone of propriety and respect, and naturally he would imagine himself an old man already, surrounded by his numerous pupils, a member of numerous scholarly societies, his life a sort of sustained celebration. The obituaries also mentioned tireless labor, unbending will, and courage; these were somehow a matter of course, even little Lyova understood that without the “labor” it was “nothing but shallow daydreaming”—but nevertheless, chief in those dreams were the strong tea, the skullcap, and all the many forms of idleness to which a man of merit (or, as it was customary to say for some reason, “emeritus”) was entitled, apparently by right.

Their house, which had been built after a design by the well-known Benois, with the elegance and insouciance typical of pre-Revolutionary modernism; a house in which no two windows were identical, it seemed because the apartments had been built to order (a “cooperative” of those years, in its own way) and everyone wanted something different—some wanted a bay window, some narrow and high, and some even round—beyond all symmetry, and yet somehow with an easily grasped sense of the whole; a house with a predominance, insistent as a childhood, of the seaweed lines of Liberty silk—in the molding, in the grillwork of balconies and elevators, in the occasional surviving World of Art stained-glass windows—this dear house was populated by numerous tribes of professors, their dying-out elders and currently-dean sons and graduate-student grandsons (although not in all families the succession had been built up so effectively), because three institutions of higher learning and several scientific research institutes were located in the vicinity. The house stood on a deserted and handsome old street, right across from the famous Botanical Garden and Institute.

Lyova had always liked the quiet vale of science. He pictured people working selflessly and nobly in the great white-columned building, as well as in the ancient wooden laboratory cottages, dating back almost to Elizabeth, that dotted the beautiful park. Far away from noise, from all this thundering technology, people were busy with their serious business, their plants . . . During elections to the Soviets his parents’ voting place was at the Botanical Institute, and as Lyova climbed the broad carpeted staircase with them he respectfully scrutinized the portraits of eminent graybeards and pince-nez wearers of botanical science. They looked at him dryly without enthusiasm, as at an infusorian but could they know that someday they would have to move over and make room for Lyova’s portrait? His heart sweetly stopped and skipped a beat with delight over his own future.