Tientietnikov resigns from government service and returns home

Tientietnikov resigns from government service and returns home after a dispute with his superior forces him to choose between a bureaucratic career and responsibility for his estate. His departure is more than a retreat from office: he argues that restoring a badly managed property and caring for its three hundred peasants is a more consequential public service than remaining a copyist, and his homecoming makes that conviction personal.

A Career That Becomes Secondary

Tientietnikov had gradually grown more accustomed to government service, but it never became the central purpose he had expected. It divided his time and made him value his leisure; his uncle, by contrast, had begun to hope that the young man would succeed in the profession. The break came through Tientietnikov’s association with two “embittered” friends, people whose passionate denunciations of injustice influenced him even though they were themselves unbalanced and impatient with disagreement. Their company sharpened his attention to faults he had previously overlooked, and helped turn irritation with the service into a crisis of principle.

The immediate target of that irritation was Lienitsin, a department director whom Tientietnikov judged pliant toward his superiors and harsh toward his inferiors. He also saw Lienitsin as attentive to slights: the director noted those who failed to greet him on festival days and took offense when a visiting card was not delivered to his butler. Tientietnikov’s dislike mounted until he felt compelled to insult him. He did so deliberately and effectively, bringing matters to a point at which Lienitsin required him either to apologize or to leave the service. Tientietnikov chose to leave.

The Argument for Leaving

His uncle responded with alarm. Tientietnikov, he insisted, had begun his career well and should not abandon it merely because he disliked one director; if everyone acted on such grounds, the service would be left without staff. The uncle urged him to put aside pride, make amends, and reconsider. The appeal presents resignation as a costly break with a promising career, not as an easy escape from one.

Tientietnikov answered by distinguishing the state’s clerical needs from the obligations attached to his land. He conceded that, as Lienitsin’s subordinate, he had been wrong to address him as he did. But his own estate contained three hundred peasant souls, was badly administered, and was in the hands of a foolish bailiff. The state, he argued, would lose little by replacing one copyist; it would lose much more if those three hundred taxpayers failed to pay what they owed. If he could conserve and improve their fortunes and make them sober, hard-working, law-abiding taxpayers, he believed that work would be no less valuable than service under a department director.

That defense reframes the choice as a dispute over what counts as service. His uncle imagines country life as social isolation and intellectual stagnation, where one encounters peasants rather than generals, princes, and the signs of European civilization. Tientietnikov is already beginning to see the estate differently: not as a punishment or a withdrawal into idleness, but as a place where his education might be used and his responsibilities directly fulfilled.

The Return to the Estate

After finding one or two modern works on agriculture, Tientietnikov set out for the home of his boyhood. The journey brings his reasoning out of the realm of argument and into the land itself. The road passes through a ravine and a forest of immense old oaks, firs, and elms; when he asks the peasants who owns the forest, they answer that it belongs to Tientietnikov. Beyond it, he crosses meadows and two bridges over a winding river, again learning that the land on either side is his. He then sees unharvested fields of wheat, rye, and barley, the peasants’ carved huts, the red roofs of the estate’s stone outbuildings, and the church pinnacles.

The sequence of questions and answers makes ownership newly strange to him. What had existed as an estate in his name, managed at a distance, becomes a real landscape whose resources and neglected work lie before his eyes. At its approach, he asks himself why he had remained a scribe of lifeless documents instead of governing what he calls an earthly paradise. He recalls having been educated to promote good among those under him and to improve his domain, yet having entrusted it to an ignorant bailiff and maintained an absentee guardianship over peasants whose abilities and characters he did not know. In his view, direct estate management has more value than the fanciful administration of distant provinces where he could only produce mistakes and irregularities.

Homecoming and Responsibility

The people at the estate answer his arrival before he can put his resolution into practice. Hearing that the master is approaching, the peasants gather on the verandah. They surround him with a shout of welcome and remember his grandfather and great-grandfather; some of the older men and women weep. Their affection is striking precisely because Tientietnikov has not earned it through regular personal care. He recognizes that they welcome him despite his never having come to see them or taken the least interest in their affairs, and he is moved to tears in turn.

He then forms a mental vow to share their tasks and occupations. This response gives the resignation its human consequence: the estate is no longer merely an asset or a source of tax liability, but a community whose members have remembered him even while he remained absent. The episode does not establish what reforms he will accomplish or how completely he will meet that vow. It ends with the decision and its moral demand, leaving the practical labor still ahead.

Significance of the Choice

Tientietnikov’s departure sets two models of responsibility against one another: advancement within the state’s offices and direct stewardship of land and people. His claim is not that the peasants stand outside the state’s economic order; he explicitly measures his service partly by their capacity to remain taxpayers. But he also insists that this administrative calculation carries a personal duty to conserve and improve their lives, a duty his absentee management has neglected.

The narrative makes the return persuasive through a change of scale. In the office, Tientietnikov’s conflict revolves around rank, insult, apology, and the replacement of a copyist. On the road home, it unfolds across forests, bridges, fields, buildings, and the gathered peasants. The broad estate that his uncle dismisses as a barren provincial retreat becomes, in Tientietnikov’s perception, a field of work and obligation. His resignation is therefore both a refusal of a career and the beginning of an attempt to make ownership answerable to the people living on the land.