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8 A New Equilibrium
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8 A New Equilibrium THE NEXT GENERATION [1802, July] 30th I heard mass for the feast of St. John the Warrior in the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity, the one in Kapel’ki. 31st I heard mass in my parish church. After dinner our son Aleksei Ivan[ovich] returned to us from Letovo, having left [Squire] Bibikov. August 1st I heard mass at the Monastery of the Miracles. Then I viewed the procession from the cathedral to the Moscow River, which was led by Right Reverend Serafim. 2nd I heard mass at the Church of St. Basil the Blessed on his feast day. 3rd I heard [Sunday] mass at the Church of the Tikhvin Madonna in Krasnoe Selo. 4th I heard mass at the New Virgin Convent. 5th I spent the day at home and heard the evening vigil at my parish church. 6th I heard mass there too. This evening my son Pëtr and his wife returned to Moscow from the Markar’ev Fair. 7th I heard mass in my parish church. Our son Pëtr Ivanovich had dinner with us. In the excerpt above from 1802 we find Ivan continuing his daily mass attendance at a wide variety of churches, a practice that he had begun in penance for the financial manipulations associated with his bankruptcy and which he had intensified in response to his devastating illness. Scattered in this schedule of faithful religious practice we see references to the activities of his children and their associates that can help us sketch the personal trajectories of these o√spring of a provincial merchant of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 224 a russian merchant’s tale The children of Ivan and Anna were growing up and finding their place in the world. Each of their four surviving children, all males, would eventually settle into a commercial or professional life that would justify Ivan’s strategy to salvage what opportunities he could from the wreckage caused by his own improvidence. Curiously, though perhaps not surprisingly, the mix of professions chosen by the children reflected interests that Ivan had cultivated in his own life. The fortunes of his step-uncle and ward, a kind of fifth child, Andrei Fëdorovich Makarov, also are of interest. Of the couple’s biological children, the eldest child, Pëtr, began with the greatest advantages. He received an excellent education at two private schools in Moscow. He had been married in 1794 to the daughter of a Moscow merchant family and had since 1796 been legally registered in the Moscow merchant guild as a member of the family of his father-in-law, Andrei Goroshkov. This move, it will be recalled, had been part of Ivan’s strategy to shelter his assets from his creditors. It also allowed Pëtr to continue to enjoy the privileges and exemptions of a guild merchant. In the meantime Pëtr had acquired on-the-job training in the grain business, which familiarized him with long-distance travel and trade that extended from south Russia and the middle Volga up to Petersburg . Even though he was unable to continue in the grain business after the family’s crash, Pëtr had education and professional experience that would allow him to succeed at other commercial enterprises. Like his father, Pëtr su√ered some serious bouts of illness after the move to Moscow. We saw that in 1797 the family feared for his life when he lay ill for over a month in late summer. This illness apparently did some damage to his lungs, for in the summer of 1799 he moved on his doctor’s advice to a home in Sokol’niki on the wooded northeast side of Moscow, where the air was fresh. He experienced another serious bout of illness the following year while on a trip to Petersburg. But thereafter we see no further references in the diary to health crises for Pëtr. Although Pëtr assisted his father for a time in the playing card business and he and Ivan may have continued to help one another from time to time, Pëtr’s professional life developed primarily within the sphere of his wife’s family. Curiously, too, Pëtr seemed to have an exceptionally close relationship to his wife, Anna Andreevna. She not only accompanied him on almost all of his visits to his parents but was also his companion on long business trips. In the diary excerpt...