Page:Chernyshevsky.whatistobedone.djvu/294

274 sister, and consequently our Rakhmétof did not have a large estate; he received about four hundred souls, and seven thousand desyatins of land. How he managed with his serfs, and his five thousand five hundred desyatins of land is not known to anybody, nor was it known that he kept for himself one thousand five hundred desyatins, and, moreover, generally it was not known, as long as he lived among us, that he was a proprietor, or that the land retained for himself gave him about three thousand rubles income. This we learned afterwards, but at that time we supposed, of course, that he was of the same family as those Rakhmétofs, many of whom were rich proprietors, and who, together bearing the same name, possessed about seventy-five thousand souls around the sources of the Medvyedítsa, Khoper, Sura, and Tsna rivers, who forever were the district marshals of those places, and one or the other of them is constantly the marshal of one or the other of the governmental cities through which run their feudatory rivers. And we knew that our friend Rakhmétof used to spend four hundred rubles a year; for a student of that time that was not very bad, but for a proprietor from among the Rakhmétofs it was too little; and so every one of us, though we cared really very little for such investigations, decided for himself, without making any inquiries, that our Rakhmétof must be from some impoverished or estateless branch of the Rakhmétofs, maybe the son of some kind of a governmental officer, who left his children a small fortune; but we did not bother ourselves about these things.

Now he was twenty-two years old, and he had been a student since he was sixteen; but for nearly three years he had given up the University. He left the second class, went to his estate, took charge of it, after defeating his guardian's resistance, and winning the anathemas of his brothers, and succeeding in making his sister's husbands forbid them to mention his name; then he wandered all over Russia in different guises, both by land and by water, and by one or the other, in a common and an uncommon way; for instance, by foot, and on rafts, and in slow boats; he had a good many adventures, which he brought upon himself. Among other things that he did, he sent two men to the University of