Read Online The King of Vodka by Linda Himelstein - Free Book Online Page B

mistrusted class. Russian playwright Aleksander Ostrovskiy described the world merchants inhabited as “the land of darkness.” Ostrovskiy, a child of one of Moscow’s main business districts, believed that cultural ignorance, limitless greed, immoral conduct, and sheer stupidity ruled the entire class. He wrote about it repeatedly in his plays, beginning in 1849 with It’s A Family Affair , a tale of Bolshov the merchant, who pretends to be bankrupt to escape his sizable debts. He transfers his assets to hisdaughter and son-in-law only to have them run off with the money. The betrayal leaves Bolshov penniless and ultimately in “the pit” or debtors’ prison, which the writer contends, is exactly where such cheats belong.
    Literary giants from Tolstoy to Nikolay Gogol to Anton Chekhov to Ivan Turgenev joined Ostrovskiy in his ridicule. They, too, created the shadiest of characters out of rotten merchant cloth. Fyodor Dostoevskiy wrote: “A merchant is ready to join any Jew, to betray everyone and everything, for the sake of income.” 3
    Russia’s general contempt for its merchantry echoed similar though less strident sentiments from other parts of Europe. But it was in Moscow, more than any other place, that the antagonism worked like a translucent fence, isolating the country’s future business leaders. This fledgling community occupied a veritable no-man’s land, cloistered behind heavy walls and bolted gates that were more like fortresses than homes. For the most part, merchants avoided social gatherings and public events that took them away from their routines and insular lives. They had no place in the schools and little involvement in civic affairs. Even peasants considered them baldly corrupt, happy to have them confined to their capitalist ghettos. “A merchant in Russia occupied a rather low rank in the social hierarchy,” explained Dostoevskiy. “And, being frank, he didn’t deserve more.” 4
    Nor did the merchants seem to want more—at least not yet. They were not particularly interested in challenging the gentry, whom they dubbed lazy and unjustifiably snobbish. Years later, many of the wealthiest and most successful merchants concluded that it was the merchants—not the nobility—who represented the future pinnacle of society. Pavel Tretyakov, one of Moscow’s premiere textile merchants and a leading philanthropist for whom the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow is named, strongly opposed his daughter Vera’s marriage to pianist—and nobleman—Aleksander Ziloti. Tretyakov objected to Ziloti’s frivolous artistic profession, convinced that the musician was after his money. He would have much preferred his daughter to choose a fellow merchant—aristocrat or not. Tretyakov failed to dissuade his daughter from her choice, but he did structure her wedding settlement in a way that prevented anyone he found “distasteful” from getting it. Tretyakov’s contemporaries seemed to have come to the same conclusions. “Have you heard that this young boy, Ziloti, already a bright pianist…made a brilliant match in the sense of fortune: 400,000 rubles in her dowry?” composer Pyotr Tchaikovskiy was asked in a letter. 5 Tchaikovskiy, a distant relative by marriage, attended Vera’s wedding.
    To Arseniy, though, becoming a merchant had nothing to do with politics or class warfare. It was about liberty and free enterprise. It was, quite unashamedly, about Pyotr.
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    Arseniy, the aging ex-serf, set out early on April 30, 1858, hoping to beat the long lines he expected to encounter on the way to obtaining his merchant license. * Pyotr, sensing the import of his father’s mission, joined him. They both wore long, dark frock coats atop trousers tucked into long boots, aiming to look decent and traditional. The duo made small talk as they walked. Even though they were both giddy about their business