person
Old Musatov
also: Старик Мусатов, Иван Герасимыч, Ivan Gerasimych, papasha
A drunken, penniless old man who visits his grown son Boris to beg money under a pretext of urgent business, then confesses -- in a long, self-lacerating monologue -- to a lifetime of fleecing, shaming, and lying to his children, as well as verbally abusing his late wife and neglecting his children when they were small. He alternates between maudlin self-accusation and gleeful, transparent lying about racetrack winnings and a coming pension, and is living with a common-law partner (his "бабенция") in a shabby rented room.
Reading notes
- The Father §21 You can't drag a dung beetle onto a rose
"Навозного жука не затащишь на розу" is Old Musatov's own bitter proverb-like formulation for his sense that he is constitutionally unfit for the clean, respectable life his sons keep trying to offer him -- an image of self-disgust he returns to more directly a few lines later when he asks to be left to die in the "pit.''
- The Father §24 riffraff
Old Musatov confesses here to getting drunk with neighbors the previous night and cursing his own children to the assembled company, falsely playing the part of an abandoned, unhappy father to win the pity of drunken women -- a small but pointed admission of habitual public slander against his own children, which he immediately diagnoses as his own recurring pattern: deflecting blame for his vices onto them.
- The Father §32 Whatever I did or said, it always seemed to me that this was just how things ought to be
from here through the end of section 32, Old Musatov gives a frank, unsoftened account of his conduct as a younger man -- coming home drunk and angry to verbally abuse his late wife over household expenses for entire nights at a time, and making his children wait, hungry, to eat dinner until he woke from his drunken sleep. The story presents this domestic abuse and neglect in the father's own words, without authorial comment or euphemism, as the source of the guilt that now drives his maudlin self-accusations; the translation preserves this directness rather than softening it.
- The Father §65 Attendez!
"Атанде" is a comic Russian mangling of the French "attendez" ("wait!"), a fashionable interjection Old Musatov uses to strike an air of worldly gentility as he sees his son off with drunken ceremony -- the same threadbare performance of dignity he puts on throughout the visit.