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Chapter Five Topographical Tests in the Countryside BEFORE I HAD finished my examinations a joyful event finally took place in the Trubetskoi family. My cousin S. P. Trubetskaia married the very nice young Count N. Lamsdorf. This wedding, at which I performed the role of best man, was celebrated festively and gaily, after which the atmosphere of gloom that had prevailed in the house of Trubetskoi since the absurd and tragic death of my uncle Piotr Nikolaevich was significantly relieved. In the middle of May our examinations in St. Petersburg on all academic subjects were finished. All we had left to pass were the practical tests on topographical surveying and tactical problems in the field. The school moved to its Dudergof camp near Krasnoe Selo, and we volunteers made our way there too, having said a warm farewell to Basevich. The life hussar Taneev, Osorgin, and I rented a three-room dacha in Krasnoe Selo and every morning we would appear at the picturesque Dudergof camp near a lake for topographical work. They appointed a certain Captain Nevezhin to us volunteers—a very correct and humane person, who was in charge of us during all the tests. The tests began with plane table surveying, and each of us was assigned a separate parcel of land in the vicinity of Dudergof, which we had to plot very precisely on a map with a scale of 200 sazhens [426 meters] to the inch. We were given little village children as assistants, who would drag the base chain and help us to place the landmarks. I was assigned a rather difficult parcel, which included one of the steep and oddly shaped slopes of the Dudergof mountains, dotted with dachas (this was the very mountain that is mentioned in the cadet song that begins: “It’s as dark as a Moor’s a[sshole], / And the advance -guard camp is sleeping, / And on the top of Dudergof / An eagle-owl is plaintively crying . . .”). Besides this slope of the famous mountain, my parcel also included the old Pavlovskii redoubt, a plowed field, vegetable gardens, shrubbery, and part of the Baltic railroad line, which intersected with a broad country road. The slopes and the whole relief had to be carefully plotted on the map with contour lines. I had to perform the work in the space of a week. From early morn205 ing until night I would be on my parcel with a tripod and plane table, sighting individual landmarks, telegraph poles and spires on dachas, and composing an intricate and confusing triangulation on paper. Nevezhin would make a circuit of all the parcels on horseback twice a day, checking up on us. From time to time General Miller himself, on a beautiful bay horse, would appear on our parcels. The weather was unusually beautiful. It was a lovely, joyful, early and luxuriant spring. The apple and cherry trees were blossoming in a riot of intricate lace, and the little birds, as is their custom, were singing hymns to the spring, inspiring naughty erotic daydreams and moods in young people. Toward noon the heat would become unbearable, as in the South, and all the volunteers who had come to camp exhausted and pale from their nocturnal study sessions in St. Petersburg became as swarthy as Moors during the very first days, their noses and the backs of their necks peeling from the sun. After the Petersburg fever of examinations and maniacal cramming in Basevich’s quarters which had become so hateful to us, our topographical tests in the bosom of spring nature were a kind of joyful vacation for us all. We had a feeling that no one was going to fail at this point, and that we could consider our success to be in the bag. Since I had picked up an average grade of more than 10.5, I personally considered that no matter how mediocre my grades in topography, I would still get an average Guards-level grade. So I did not put in too much effort at this point, giving in to the general reaction that had overcome all of us. No one wanted to work seriously any more and we all took it easy. The most original approach to the surveying was that of a certain Pr——v, the scion of a well-known Moscow millionaire factory owner, who had become a volunteer in the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment under the aegis of Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fiodorovna. This bumpkin, who before...

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