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Updated: May 14, 2025
First of all, young Shrâdik departed for a concert-tour, through Austria and Germany; and, though he and Gregoriev parted most cordially, it was with a feeling of new freedom that Ivan looked about him, when the persistent practiser of trills and runs was gone to show the great world the results of meritorious study.
Now, into their unstable existence, came Ivan; and over him brother and sister had their first dispute: Irina her first victory. True, Sergius knew, and was to know, nothing of his sister's past acquaintance with the composer, or what a debt he, as a brother, owed Ivan. In his eyes Gregoriev was simply a man of the world, unknown to the police, and, therefore, a valuable tool.
The ladies were pleased to praise their corsage bouquets of camellias so hurriedly obtained; and all the party partook heartily of the hors d'oeuvres and liqueurs served on a side-table, according to the old Muscovite custom. Gregoriev was the only one of them all who appeared to be quite unaffected by what he had drunk.
A man more versed in feminine ways than he, might have read much in the manner of the lady's farewell to him. For her attitude was ingenuous enough to have suggested the fact that had Lieutenant Gregoriev and not Colonel Brodsky been the original holder of her debt, the damsel's attitude might have been less unyielding. But Ivan had still his boyish belief in the perfection of all woman nature.
And then, as Tsarskoë-Selo filled, and the Nikitenko divorce proceedings came thundering down the broad corridor of scandal, Ivan Gregoriev, his youth, success, trial, disgrace and disinheritance, melted away into the utter oblivion of the twice-told, the old, and the stale. Ah! Could Ivan himself have gained something of indifference!
Yet its situation was one of the greatest of crosses to this man, who had known and cast away many a heavier burden during his career. Remote as he was from the fashionable districts, there was neither man nor woman in the city, from the proudest house in the Equerries' quarter to the outskirts of the Novaia Andronovka, but knew and shuddered, agreeably, at the Gregoriev reputation.
"Maidonovo" was a moderate-sized house, set in the midst of twenty acres of land situated a half-mile from the extremity of the village of Klin. A year after his wife's death Michael Gregoriev had sold the place, which he had always detested.
Certainly this reputation of his was one thing that had kept the door he knocked on closed. But there were other reasons innumerable ones, in fact; some of them adequate, others entirely inconsistent, that Princess Mirski or Madame Apúkhtin might have named. Yet, in the final summing-up, there would probably have been a traditional indefiniteness about the wherefore of the Gregoriev ostracism.
Their ghosts appeared, in the company of Nicholas Rubinstein, on the night when this stanch friend came to tell Ivan that, instead of the brief passacaglia which he had modestly offered as his first piece on the concert programme, it had been decided on a hearing entirely arranged by Nicholas, to make Monsieur Gregoriev the chief figure of the evening, by playing his first symphony "Youth," as the pièce de résistance of the first half!
Young Gregoriev, however, had, up to this time the new year of 1852 worked, studied and dreamed by himself under the direction, first of his mother, recently of his tutor, Monsieur Ludmillo, the son of a Polish exile, educated in France, and only permitted to re-enter Russia upon the death of his father, in 1847.
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