Samara

Samara Governorate (Самарская губерния) appears in A Confession (1879–82) twice: as the steppe of the 1862 kumys stay, and as the estate behind the question “and what then?”. A draft adds the Molokans of Samara.

The 1862 kumys stay

Chapter III tells of a year of arbitration work, the schools and the magazine, ending in exhaustion: “I fell ill, mentally rather than physically, threw up everything, and went away to the Bashkirs in the steppes, to breathe fresh air, drink kumys, and live a merely animal life.”¹ Kumys, Maude’s note explains, is “a fermented drink prepared from mare’s milk”.

The PSS commentary adds the details: the first journey for kumys to Samara Governorate, begun 26 May 1862 (OS: 14 May), with two pupils of the Yasnaya Polyana school, Vasily Morozov and Egor Chernov. He lived in a Bashkir nomad camp on the Karalyk, in Nikolaevsky uezd (district) of the governorate, and was back at Yasnaya Polyana on 12 August 1862 (OS: 31 July). Morozov later wrote down his memories of the stay, published by Posrednik in 1917.²

The estate and “what then?”

In chapter III the estate comes first among the occupations that now needed a reason: “occupying myself with my Samara estate, the education of my son, or the writing of a book, I had to know why I was doing it”.³ Then the question: “Well, you will have 6,000 desyatinas of land in Samara Government and 300 horses, and what then?”⁴ A desyatina, Maude notes, is about 2¾ acres.

The figures are in the future tense (“you will have”). When the estate was bought, and its size: NEEDS PRIMARY SOURCE.

The Molokans in a draft

A draft of chapter XV, on the schismatics, names Samara: “In Samara, where I lived, there are many Molokans.” It recalls one old Molokan “who gave away all his property to the needy and from rich became poor, only to follow the rule: give to him that asks”.⁵ The final chapter XV keeps the Molokans only in a general list — “Catholics, protestants, Old-Believers, Molokans, and others” — with no Samara and no old man.⁶

Open questions

• When the estate was bought, its size at purchase, its exact location, coordinates, and its later history: NEEDS PRIMARY SOURCE.
• Whether “the farm on the Mocha”, from which a letter to Sophia Tolstaya was written on 25 July 1881, is the estate of chapter III.⁷ The letter shows a stay there in the summer the commentary says A Confession already existed in finished form.
• How the 1862 camp on the Karalyk relates to the later estate.

Dive provenance

• 1879-1882-a-confession — the ch. III passages, commentary note 19, and draft variant No. 20; Johan’s annotation III.15 (“Samara (the steppe estate): wikilink to be”) asked for this page. The 1881 letter is from the stories-for-the-people dive (E02).