all his evenings playing cards at the English Club. They had eighteen children, half of them with one patronymic, half with another—a phenomenon that Maklakov found unintelligible at the time (and evidently still did in his 80s, when describing it in his memoirs).2 The other great-aunt, Mariia, never married. She lived on land that would have been very valuable if she had not given part of it to a church and if a railroad track had not prevented her from getting from her house to the rest of the property except by a roundabout route. This was no problem for her, as she never left her house. She rose at five in the afternoon and mainly enjoyed the company of other old ladies who played cards and read religious books to her. Maklakov, as her godson, had to go there for supper weekly until her death.
Some historians have suggested that Maklakov’s opinions were a product of his class origins; one, for example, says that he was one of a number of “great landowners” among the Kadets.3 That was indeed the background of many Kadet leaders, but not of Maklakov. In his memoirs he took some pains to explain that on his mother’s side (the one with money), the original wealth came from salaries. Though her forebears owned small estates in the vicinity of Moscow, that ownership entitled them to very little peasant labor in the days before the serfs’ emancipation, so emancipation itself inflicted no loss on them. Although Maklakov was technically a landowner because of land in Zvenigorod that his father had acquired for weekend and summer relaxation, the land occasioned expense and of course pleasure—but no income.4
Of his father’s ancestors, Maklakov knew only his grandfather, a man who pursued several careers fitfully—doctor, entrepreneur, playwright, and translator. The entrepreneurship seemed never to pan out. His development of a special breed of cocks for fighting went nowhere; so, too, did his efforts to design a perpetual motion machine. He unsuccessfully urged Maklakov’s father to join him at Monte Carlo to exploit a surefire gambling scheme. His efforts at dairy farming were effective at least in luring Vasily’s family out to visit the site, leaving Vasily with a memory of washing pigs, who squealed when they got soap in their eyes. In the end, the grandfather developed a passion for literature, writing a play that was produced at the Mali Theater in Moscow, and he learned English and translated Shakespeare. In his later years he lived permanently at the house of a hospitable neighbor, Count Olsufiev—presumably a sign of some charm on his part, unless the count was a complete pushover. He and his second wife lived apart, although they were not divorced; whenever he learned that she was at Vasily’s family’s house, he wouldn’t enter it.5
Vasily’s mother had been well educated and spoke three languages besides Russian; her bookshelves were full of classic works in Russian and foreign languages, which she often offered the children. The good education was coupled with a religiosity that seems extreme by modern standards. Maklakov believed it explained her indifference to the stirrings of reform in the 1860s. When her children wondered why they, though faithful, could not move mountains, she explained that it was because their faith was too weak. She managed, he thought, to live the maxim that one should hate the sin but love the sinner, never getting angry and always defending everyone.6
Given Alexei Maklakov’s career in science, he was naturally more inclined to empiricism than his wife. But he was skeptical rather than anti-religious. Seeing crowds of people taking off their hats and crossing themselves on Red Square at Easter, he mused, “Whatever the smart alecs say, what does this feeling come from?” It was probably typical of him to address the matter as a question. On one occasion young Vasily reported a conversation with a schoolmate who had offered an explanation of the origins of the universe: it had started, he said, with the appearance of a red-hot sphere. Vasily had asked, “Where did the sphere come from?” His father took delight and obvious pride in the response.7
Alexei had wanted to be a surgeon, but a shooting injury to his hand scotched that and also forced him to give up the violin. He redirected his medical interests to ophthalmology and, as Vasily saw it, pursued it with the spirit of a natural scientist, always looking for underlying explanations. The son’s perception seems confirmed by Alexei’s publishing ophthalmology articles in scientific journals in France. Life replicated Alexei’s scientific intellect rather directly in his son Alexei Alexeevich, another younger brother of Vasily, who became a professor of ophthalmology at Moscow University and director of the Moscow Eye Clinic.
As was evidently true for all who worked in the Moscow Eye Clinic, the family lived on-site. The clinic had been founded with private funds in 1826 and occupied a large building in central Moscow that not only survives to this day but is still an eye clinic. Vasily and several siblings remained there until their father’s death in 1895, so it was home to Vasily for his first twenty-six years.
The clinic gave Vasily a glimpse at the relation between accomplishment and privilege in late nineteenth-century Russia. One G. V. Grudev was chairman of the council nominally guiding the clinic. At the outset, so far as Vasily knew, he declared himself to be 84 years old, but after some years at that age he started losing years and worked down to 70. A passionate gardener, he had much of the hospital grounds set aside for his personal garden. Though his role was “purely decorative,” no one was troubled at his holding a nominally responsible position: “on the contrary, all would have found it quite improper to remove him.” Occupying the top managerial position was one G. I. Kertselli, also superannuated, who spent most of his day reading the paper. Actually running the place was a steward, Aleksei Ilych Lebedev, so much in charge that when any problem arose, one heard the phrase, “We must ask Aleksei Ilych.” Below him, managing the clinic’s lower-level personnel, was the clinic’s porter, who bossed them around as a noncommissioned officer bosses the troops.8
The clinic’s head doctor, Professor Gustav Ivanov Braun, extended the pattern of disconnect between responsibility and title, limiting his actual work at the clinic to giving lectures. At least in some instances he turned responsibility over to Maklakov’s father, but it appears that most issues were resolved by consensus—one largely driven by conservatism. Maklakov: “I recall that my father complained about the impossibility of ever making improvements; his colleagues always found a reason to keep the old ways.”9
There may have been a gap between his parents in political inclinations. Alexei met his future bride while visiting her house, first as a doctor and then as a friend. He was evidently slow to open up about his interest in Elizaveta, for when he first did so, her mother said, “Finally, sir, at last.” Vasily knew of the story and wondered whether Alexei’s slowness was due to shyness, to concern about marrying someone of wealth, or to concern about the possible gulf in political sympathies between the families. But as he seems not to have heard his mother express political views, it seems likely that her religious perspective rendered politics unimportant. Alexei’s own views were clear: he enthusiastically supported the emancipation and the other Great Reforms of the 1860s—above all, local self-government in the countryside (the zemstvo) and judicial reform, of which the key was a start on judicial independence. And he regarded the Great Reforms as simply the beginning of a process that should go much further. In a general way, these were the views of Alexei’s friends, many of whom were active in the city council (its duma) and often talked of municipal and rural self-government. Alexei himself served at times as a member of the Moscow City Duma and of the Moscow province zemstvo. They valued their own culture and education and believed the state should make these available to others (without making them yield their place). If Vasily had a fault to find in these views, it was that they failed to grasp the less patient mood prevailing among the unprivileged.10
In 1881 Elizaveta and the children visited Red Square on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, as they had usually done. The children had such a good time that they asked her if they could skip their music lessons. In words with a curiously religious tint, she answered, “Yes, fine, perhaps I’ll forgive you.” The next morning she didn’t come down to breakfast. Doctors came and gave prescriptions, but she lost consciousness on Monday. That evening the children were taken to her to say good-bye. Maklakov and his oldest sister tried to use the ultimate resource—they went to pray at the miracle-working icon of the Savior in
