Abstract
With our move to the country, our household underwent a radical change. All at once my parents’ life, so gay and lighthearted until then, took a more somber turn. My father had paid us little notice up to that time, for he considered bringing up children to be a woman’s and not a man’s affair. He was more concerned with Anyuta than with the other children, for she was the eldest, and she was a very amusing child. He loved to find occasions for indulging her. He sometimes took her sledding in winter, and liked to boast about her to our guests. When her naughti-ness went beyond all bounds and exasperated the servants past endurance, they sometimes went to Father to complain about her. But he would turn the whole thing into a joke, and Anyuta understood perfectly that even though he sometimes put a stern expression on his face for appear-ance’s sake, he was inwardly ready to laugh her naughtiness away.
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Notes
Kovalevskaya’s manuscript reads “a Polish tutor” without mentioning him by name. Yosif Ignatievich Malevich (1813–1898) lived at Palibino for nine years. His own reminiscences take sharp issue with
Kovalevskaya’s assessment of his minimal influence on her education. Indeed, Kovalevskaya herself wrote a reminiscence entitled From the Time of the Polish Uprising which clearly shows how Malevich’s teaching molded her sympathy for the cause of the Polish insurgents against their Russian conquerors. (The article was published in Sweden in Nordisk tidskrift under the pseudonym of Tanja Rajevski. It was, of course, unpublishable in Tsarist Russia.)
Miss Margaret Smith (1826–1914) belonged to an English family which had lived in Russia for many years. Her charges addressed her in the Russian fashion as “Margarita Frantsevna” or (behind her back) as “Margarita.” After leaving the Korvin-Krukovskys she went to live with the Shubert family in Petersburg.
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© 1978 Beatrice Stillman
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Kovalevskaya, S. (1978). Metamorphosis. In: A Russian Childhood. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3839-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3839-1_4
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