In the spring of 1881, Metchnikoff having recovered from relapsing fever, we went to stay with my parents at Kieff and found my father dying. He entrusted Elie with the care of the family, and they came to live with us at Odessa. But, the following year, we had the misfortune to lose my mother also. From that moment my husband took upon himself the responsibility of the whole family.

Our resources came from landed property, and he, who had never concerned himself with rural questions, had to make himself acquainted with them. In this he was greatly helped by a neighbour, Count Bobrinsky, through whose influence he came to abandon the purely theoretical opinions he had hitherto held concerning agrarian questions. He had considered communal property as a desirable agrarian system: Count Bobrinsky showed him that it was not so, at any rate in Little Russia.

Metchnikoff came to the country with the keenest desire to make himself useful. First of all he devoted the gratuity which he had received on leaving the University, to a school which my sister and myself desired to open in our family property. But we were met by administrative opposition which nearly wrecked our plan, under the pretext that it was intended for political propaganda. And though cordial relations were established from the first between Metchnikoff and the peasantry, many complications were unavoidable, due to the general agrarian situation, to the insufficiency of the peasants’ allotments, and to their primitive methods of cultivation.

My father, whose property was in the province of Kieff, had inherited another domain in that of Kherson; Metchnikoff therefore had to manage both estates and to adapt himself to their very different respective circumstances. The majority of the farmers in Little Russia at that time were Jews and were beginning to be persecuted both by the Government and by the peasants; Elie was constantly obliged to intervene. In the province of Kherson, it was a tradition with the peasants that the land should belong to them, and they imagined that this could be brought about by the simple elimination of the farmers. Therefore they inflicted constant vexations upon the latter, allowing cattle to pasture in their crops, pulling up their beetroots, etc. Metchnikoff attempted in vain to re-establish peace by means of compromise; he persuaded a farmer to sub-let part of the land to the peasants, but this had to be given up, for the latter did not carry out their engagements. Relations between the farmers and the peasants were getting worse and worse, and Metchnikoff, foreseeing a catastrophe, warned the local administration that the situation was getting very grave and would lead to irreparable consequences. He was merely told that preventive measures would be useless; hereupon the peasants brutally murdered a keeper who was turning the cattle away from the crops. Then at last the administration awoke, arrested the murderers, and twelve men were exiled to Siberia.

All this caused Metchnikoff the deepest anxiety, the more so that he was absolutely incapable of altering the situation. As soon as it became possible, he sold to the peasants that portion of the land which belonged to us personally; until then, the property had been common to the whole family, of which the younger members were not yet of age. This, however, was not a general solution, and these moral preoccupations, as well as the heavy responsibility incumbent upon him, kept him from his scientific work. He was therefore very pleased to hand over the management of the property to one of my brothers who had just completed his studies in a Higher Agricultural School, and, in spite of difficult conditions, Elie had the satisfaction of giving up everything in good order.

Thanks to my parents’ inheritance, he was able to abandon his share of the Panassovka patrimony to the children of his brother and to live henceforth independently. He wished to pursue researches on the shores of the Mediterranean: therefore, in the autumn of the year 1882, we went to Messina with my two sisters and my three young brothers. The children were no trouble to Elie, who loved them; on the contrary, he enjoyed organising the journey and arranging all sorts of pleasures for them. The children, accustomed to his kindly indulgence, always came to “the Prophet” for everything they wanted.[14]