At Home

“‘My darling, my darling!’ cried her aunt, shrieking as though she were in hysterics. ‘Our real mistress has come! You must understand you are our mistress, you are our queen! Here everything is yours! My darling, my beauty, I am not your aunt, but your willing slave!’”

Here, Auntie Dasha introduces the various power dynamics at play on the estate; her comment about becoming a “slave” is filled with irony because she, herself, is an enslaver. By calling Vera her mistress and queen, Dasha also foreshadows the climax of the story, when Vera takes on the role of cruel enslaver and calls for Alyona to be beaten with a birch stick.

“‘In old days, if the servants didn’t please him or anything else went wrong, he would jump up at once and shout: “Twenty-five strokes! The birch!” But now he has grown milder and you never hear him. And besides, times are changed, my precious; one mayn’t beat them nowadays. Of course, they oughtn’t to be beaten, but they need looking after.’”

By 1897, serfdom has officially ended, but the old customs and practices have not yet died away. In excusing the grandfather’s violence, Dasha reveals her paternalistic attitudes toward the peasants; though the grandfather can no longer beat them, they still require a strong hand to guide them day to day.

“The space, the lovely peace of the steppe, told her that happiness was near at hand, and perhaps was here already; thousands of people, in fact, would have said: ‘What happiness to be young, healthy, well-educated, to be living on one's own estate!’”

Vera spends much of “At Home” trying to reason with herself that life in the provinces should end in happiness. For Vera, the question of happiness is tied to what others think, which creates problems for her when she finds the company at the local parties and her one romantic interest in the village to be dull and uninteresting. The freedom and peace of the steppe seem out of reach for Vera, who is not free from the usual social pressures placed on young Russian women. Almost at once upon her arrival, she is pressured by her Auntie Dasha to marry Neshtchapov, so as to alleviate the burden of compounding interest on the estate’s mortgage.

“And at the same time the endless plain, all alike, without one living soul, frightened her, and at moments it was clear to her that its peaceful green vastness would swallow up her life and reduce it to nothingness.”

The Russian steppe is ambiguous in its meaning for Vera: It inspires in her feelings of poetic beauty and freedom but also premonitions of being absorbed into a life over which she has no control. Vera struggles to make sense of her conflicting views of the steppe as a space for possibility and a space for crushing futility.

“But what could she do? Where could she go? She could find no answer, and as she was returning home she doubted whether she would be happy here, and thought that driving from the station was far more interesting than living here.”

One of Vera’s defining traits is the inability to act decisively. Though she arrives at the family estate with bold ideas of innovation and reform, she is unable to figure out how to go about acting on any of them. Vera finds the idea of the journey between places far more interesting than the arrival, which is illustrative of her transitional situation: She is no longer a student, but she is not yet settled into her adult life.

“Her aunt complained that every one had grown lazy, that no one did anything, and that the estate yielded no profit. Indeed, there was no systematic farming; they ploughed and sowed a little simply from habit, and in reality did nothing and lived in idleness.”

The financial insolvency of the Kardin estate is the catalyst for Auntie Dasha to force Vera into marriage. The fact that this is Dasha’s only means of keeping the estate shows her generation’s inability to adapt to Russia’s changing economic conditions. Though she blames the peasants for being lazy, Dasha can’t find any fault in herself or in the violent grandfather, neither of whom has any practical ideas about how to manage the estate.

“And when they began to get ready to go in the evening, she was so pleased they were going at last, that she said: ‘Do stay a little longer.’”

The irony of Vera’s plea for her guests to stay, when she can’t wait for them to leave, reveals much about the distance between what Vera thinks and says, and what she is actually capable of doing. For example, though she despises the poor treatment of the peasants, she has no ideas about how she might materially improve their lives.

“The young people always argued hotly about things they did not understand, and the effect was crude. The discussions were loud and heated, but, strange to say, Vera had nowhere else met people so indifferent and careless as these. They seemed to have no fatherland, no religion, no public interests.”

The irony here is that while Vera derives grand ideas from the many books she reads, she has no idea how to put any of these ideas into practice; meanwhile, Dr. Neshtchapov, whom she holds in utter contempt, has actually built a school for the local peasants. Vera views his inability to give up his shares of the peasant surplus as hypocritical, and she seems to demand complete purity of vision, belief, and action from would-be reformers. However, she cannot act in accordance with her own beliefs.

“It would be nice to become a mechanic, a judge, a commander of a steamer, a scientist; to do something into which she could put all her powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out and sleep soundly at night; to give up her life to something that would make her an interesting person, able to attract interesting people, to love, to have a real family of her own. . . . But what was she to do? How was she to begin?”

Vera is completely frozen by practical questions about her future. This problem may stem from the limited social roles women of Vera’s class could occupy in 19th-century Russian society; in many ways, wealthy women like Vera have fewer choices than, say, the traveling laborer in the story, who can go from town to town and work in different trades.

“But while I was in the army I got a letter telling me my mother was dead. . . . And now I don't seem to care to go home. It's not my own father, so it's not like my own home.”

Vera observes the traveling laborer with curiosity from afar before engaging him in a brief conversation. When she does, he reveals that unlike Vera, he has no sense of home or family. Is Vera attracted to the traveling laborer? It’s never entirely clear, though Auntie Dasha, overhearing their conversation, dismisses him immediately on the grounds that he’s “illegitimate.” While the soldier only appears in one scene, his interaction with Vera lingers in her mind and provokes the crisis she experiences in the story’s climax.

“Suppose she struggled with her, got rid of her, made her harmless, prevented her grandfather from flourishing his stick-- what would be the use of it? It would be like killing one mouse or one snake in the boundless steppe. The vast expanse, the long winters, the monotony, and dreariness of life, instill a sense of helplessness; the position seems hopeless, and one wants to do nothing--everything is useless.”

Vera experiences depression when she dwells on whether she has the power to effect any real change. She excuses her indecisiveness by rationalizing that if you remove one abuser, there’s an entire system of abusers to replenish them.

“She ran to the familiar ravine and hid herself there among the sloe-trees, so that she might see no one and be seen by no one. Lying there motionless on the grass, she did not weep, she was not horror-stricken, but gazing at the sky open-eyed, she reflected coldly and clearly that something had happened which she could never forget and for which she could never forgive herself all her life.”

In the story’s pivotal moment, Vera lingers over what her punishment of Alyona reveals about her character. Having built herself up as a young, cosmopolitan intellectual, she has fallen into the same pattern of oppression as the people—and system—she despises.

“Evidently truth and happiness existed somewhere outside real life.”

By the story’s end, Vera resolves her failed search for happiness by deciding that true happiness does not exist in any meaningful way. The irony here is that after settling the question of finding happiness, Vera can actually live: Though she no longer expects to live a fulfilling life, she at least can accept a life unburdened by the thought that happiness is close at hand.