MAHOGANY
419
Three hundred years ago the last Czarevich of the Ryurik dyn–
asty was murdered in this town; on the day of the murder the
boyars Tuchkov played with the Czarevich
3
;
and the Tuchkov
family has persisted in the town to this very day, as have the
monasteries and many other families of less distinguished origin .
. . . This is the Russia of olden days, the provincial Russia of the
upper reaches of the Volga with its forests, marshes, monasteries,
manorial estates and a chain of towns-Tver, Uglich, Yaroslavl,
Rostov the Great. The town is a monastic Brugcs of the Russian
principalities, of streets sprouting medicinal camomile, of stone
monuments to murders and bygone ages. It is two hundred miles
from Moscow, but fifty miles from the nearest railroad station.
The ruins of manor houses and the wreck of mahogany
furniture are still to be found here. The curator of the museum
walks the town in a top hat, morning coat and checked trousers,
and he has grown side-whiskers like Pushkin's. He keeps the keys
of the museums and the monasteries in the pockets of his morn–
ing coat; he drinks tea in the tavern and vodka in the solitude of
his woodshed. In his house there are piles of Bibles, icons,
archimandrites' hoods, mitres, cassocks, chasubles, psalters, bre–
viaries, altar-cloths and vestments of the thirteenth, fifteenth alld
seventeenth centuries. In his study he has some mahogany which
once belonged to the Karazin family and on his writing-table
there is an ashtray in the form of a nobleman 's cap with a red
band and a white crown.
Vyacheslav Pavlovich Karazin is a nobleman who once
served in the Horse Guards. He resigned his commission about
twenty-five years before the Revolution because he was too
honest. A colleague of his had got involved in a theft and Kara–
zin had been sent to investigate; he reported the truth of the
matter to the authorities, but the authorities had covered up for
the thief. Karazin, unable to tolerate this, sent in his letter of
3. This reference to the murder of the Czarevich Dmitry, on the orders of
Boris Godunov, identifies the "Russian Bruges" as Uglich.
