THE POPULATION of Petersburg amounts to four hundred and fifty thousand souls, besides the garrison. So say patriotic Russians; but those who are well informed, and who consequently pass here for evil-disposed persons, assure me that it does not reach to four hundred thousand, in which number the garrison is included. Small houses of wood occupy the quarters beyond those immense spaces called squares, that form the center of this city of palaces.
The Russians, descended from a union of various warlike and wandering tribes, have not yet quite forgotten the life of the bivouac. Petersburg is the headquarters of an army, and not the capital of a nation. However magnificent this military city may be, it appears bare and naked in the eyes of one from the west of Europe.
“The distances are the curse of Russia,” said the emperor; and it is a remark the justice of which may be verified even in the streets of Petersburg. Thus, it is not for the mere sake of display that people’s carriages are drawn by four horses: here, every visit is an excursion. The Russian horses, though full of mettle and sinew, have not so much bone as ours; the badness of the pavement soon tires them; two horses could not easily draw, for any considerable time, an ordinary carriage in the streets of Petersburg. To be able to drive four is therefore an object of the first necessity to those who wish to live in the fashionable world. Among the Russians, however, all have not the right to attach four horses to their carriage. This permission is only accorded to persons of a certain rank.
After leaving the center of the city, the stranger loses himself in vaguely defined lines of road, bordered by barracks which seem as though destined for the temporary accommodation of laborers employed in some great work; they are the magazines of forage, clothes, and of other supplies for the military. The grass grows in these soi-disant and always deserted streets.
So many peristyles have been added to houses, so many porticoes adorn the barracks that here represent palaces, so great a passion for borrowed decorations has presided over the construction of this temporary capital, that I count fewer men than columns in the squares of Petersburg, always silent and melancholy, by reason of their size alone and their unchangeable regularity. The line and rule figure well the manner in which absolute sovereigns view things, and straight angles may be said to be the blocks over which despotic architecture stumbles. Living architecture, if the expression may be permitted, will not rise at command. It springs, so to speak, from itself, and is an involuntary creation of the genius and wants of a people. To make a great nation is infallibly to create an architecture. I should not be astonished if someone succeeded in proving that there are as many original styles of architecture as mother tongues. The mania for rules of symmetry is not, however, peculiar to the Russians; with us it is a legacy of the empire. Had it not been for this bad taste of the Parisian architects, we should, long since, have been presented with some sensible plan for ornamenting and finishing our monstrous Place du Carrousel; but the necessity for parallels and precedents stops everything.
The principal street in Petersburg is the Nevsky Prospect, one of the three lines which meet at the palace of the Admiralty. These three lines divide into five regular parts the southern side of the city, which, like Versailles, takes the form of a fan. It is more modern than the port, built near the Islands by Peter the Great.
The Nevsky Prospect deserves to be described in detail. It is a beautiful street, a league in length, and as broad as our boulevards. In several places, trees have been planted, as unfortunate in their position as those of Paris. Dust gnaws at them during the summer; snow buries them in the winter, and the thaw cuts and grates their bark. The Prospect serves as a promenade and rendezvous for all the idlers of the city. Of these, however, there are but few, for here people seldom move for the sake of moving; each step that is taken has an object independent of pleasure. To carry an order—to pay their court—to obey their master, whoever he may be—such are the influences which put in motion the greater part of the population of Petersburg and of the empire.
Large, uneven flint-stones form the execrable pavement of this boulevard called the Prospect; but here, as in some other principal streets, there are, deeply imbedded in the midst of the stones, blocks of fir wood in the shape of cubes, and sometimes of octagons, over which the carriages glide swiftly. Each of these pavements consists of two lines, two or three feet broad, and separated by a strip of the ordinary flint pavement, on which the shaft horse runs. Two of these roads, that is to say, four lines of wood, run the length of the Nevsky Prospect, one on the left, the other on the right of the street; they are separated from the houses by raised flags for the foot passengers. This beautiful and vast perspective extends —gradually becoming less populous, less beautiful, and more melancholy—to the undetermined limits of the habitable city; in other words, to the confines of the Asiatic barbarism by which Petersburg is always besieged; for the desert may be found at the extremity of its more superb streets.
A little below the bridge of Aniskoff is the street named Jelognaia, which leads to a desert called the Square of Alexander. I doubt whether the Emperor Nicholas has ever seen this street. The superb city created by Peter the Great, and beautified by Catherine II and other sovereigns, is lost at last in an unsightly mass of stalls and workshops, confused heaps of edifices without name, large squares without design, and in which the natural slovenliness and the inborn filthiness of the people of the land, have for one hundred years permitted every species of dirt and rubbish to accumulate. Such filth, heaped up year after year in the Russian cities, serves as a protestation against the pretension of the German sovereigns, who flatter themselves that they have thoroughly polished the Slavic nation. The primitive character of that people, however disguised it may have been by the yoke imposed upon it, at least shows itself in some of the corners of the cities; and if they have cities at all, it is not because they want them, but because their military masters compel them to emulate the west of Europe. These poor exotic birds, placed in the cage of European civilization, are victims of the mania, or rather of the ambition of the czars, conquerors of the future world, and who well know that, before subjugating us, they must imitate us.
Nothing, I am told, can give any idea of the state of the Petersburg streets during the melting of the snow. Within the fortnight which follows the breaking up of the ice on the Neva, all the bridges are carried away, and the communications between different quarters of the city are, during several days, interrupted, and often entirely broken off. The streets then become the beds of furious torrents; few political crises could cause so much damage as this annual revolt of Nature against an incomplete and impracticable civilization. Since the thaw at Petersburg has been described to me I complain no longer of the pavements, detestable though they be; for I remember they have to be renewed every year.
After midday, the Nevsky Prospect, the grand square of the palace, the quays and the bridges are enlivened by a considerable number of carriages of various kinds and curious forms: this rather relieves the habitual dullness of the most monotonous capital in Europe, a German residence built on a greater scale. The interior of the houses is equally gloomy; for notwithstanding the magnificence of certain apartments destined to receive company, and furnished in the English style, there may be seen in the background various signs of a want of cleanliness and order, which at once reminds the observer of Asia.
The articles of furniture least used in a Russian house are beds. The women servants sleep in recesses similar to those in the old-fashioned porters’ lodges in France; whilst the men roll themselves up on the stairs, in the vestibule, and even, it is said, in the drawing rooms, upon the cushions which they place on the floor for the night.
This morning I paid a visit to Prince ———. He is a great nobleman, but ruined in fortune, infirm and dropsical. He suffers so greatly that he cannot get up, and yet he has no bed on which to lie,—I mean to say, nothing which would be called a bed in lands where civilization is of older date. He lives in the house of his sister who is absent. Alone in this naked palace, he passes the night on a wooden board covered with a carpet and some pillows. In all the Russian houses that I have entered, I have observed that the screen is as necessary to the bed of the Slavs as musk is to their persons:—intense dirtiness does not always exclude external elegance. Sometimes, however, they have a bed for show; an object of luxury, which is maintained through respect for European fashions, but of which no use is ever made. The residences of several Russians of taste are distinguished by a peculiar ornament—a little artificial garden in a corner of the drawing room. Three long stands of flowers are ranged round a window, so as to form a little verdant sitting room or kind of kiosk, which reminds one of those in gardens. The stands are surmounted by an ornamented balustrade, which rises to about the height of a man, and is overgrown with ivy or other climbing plants that twist around the trelliswork, and produce a cool agreeable effect in the midst of a vast apartment, blazing with gilt work and crowded with furniture. In this little verdant boudoir are placed a table and a few chairs: the lady of the house is generally seated there, and there is room for two or three others, for whom it forms a retreat, which, if not very secret, is secluded enough to please the imagination.
The effect of this household thicket is pleasing and the idea sensible, in a land where secrecy should preside over all private conversation. The usage is, I believe, imported from Asia.
I should not be surprised to see the artificial gardens of the Russian reception rooms introduced someday into the houses of Paris.[1] I should rejoice to see the innovation, were it only to cope with the Anglomanes, who have inflicted an injury on the good taste and the real genius of the French, which I shall never pardon.
The Slavs, grave by necessity rather than by nature, scarcely dare to laugh, except with their eyes; but words being thus repressed, these eyes, animated by silence, supply the place of eloquence, so strongly is passion depicted in their expression. That expression is almost always intelligent, and sometimes gentle, though more often anxious, even to a degree of wildness that conveys the idea of some animal of the deer kind caught in the toils.
They seem born to guide a chariot, and show good blood, like the horses which they drive. Their strange appearance and the activity of their steeds render it amusing to go about the streets of Petersburg. Thanks to its inhabitants, and in despite of its architects, this city resembles no other in Europe.
The Russian coachmen sit upright on their seats; they always drive at great speed, but with safety. The precision and quickness of their eye are admirable. Whether with two or four horses, they have always two reins to each horse, which they hold with the arms much extended. No impediment stops them in their course; men and horses, both half wild, scour the city at full speed: but nature has rendered them quick and adroit; consequently, notwithstanding the reckless daring of these coachmen, accidents are of rare occurrence in the streets of Petersburg. They have often no whip, or when they have one, it is so short that they can make no use of it. Neither do they have recourse to the voice; the reins and the bit are their only instruments. One may wander round Petersburg for hours without hearing a single shout. If the pedestrians do not get out of the way with sufficient celerity, the faleiter, or postilion, utters a little yelp, like the sharp cry of a marmot roused in his nest, on hearing which, everyone gives way, and the carriage rushes past without having once slackened its speed.
The carriages are in general devoid of all taste, badly varnished, and seldom cleaned. If brought from England, they do not long resist the wear and tear of the pavement of Petersburg. The harness is strong, and at the same time light and elegant: it is made of excellent leather; in short, notwithstanding the negligence of the servants, the tout ensemble of these equipages is original, and to a certain degree picturesque.
They only harness four horses abreast for long journeys. In Petersburg, they are placed two and two; the traces by which they are attached are long beyond all proportion. The child who guides the leaders, is, like the coachman, dressed in the Persian robe called the armiac. However well it may suit the man who is seated, it is not convenient on horseback; notwithstanding which the Russian postilion is bold and dexterous.
I do not know how to describe the gravity, the haughty silence, the address, and the imperturbable temerity of these little Slavic monkeys. Their pertness and dexterity are my delight every time that I go into the city; and they have, which is less often seen here than elsewhere, the appearance of being happy. It is the nature of man to experience satisfaction when what he does is done well. The Russian coachmen and postilions, being the most skillful in the world, are perhaps content with their lot, however hard it may be in some respects.
It must also be observed that those in the service of the nobles pride themselves on their personal appearance, and take pains with it; but those who ply on hire, excite, as do also their unfortunate horses, my sincere pity. They remain in the street from morning till evening, at the door of the person who lets them, or on the stands assigned by the police. The horses eat always in harness, and the men always on their seat. I pity the former more than the latter, for the Russians have a taste for servitude.
The coachmen live, however, in this manner only during the summer. In the winter, sheds are built in the midst of the most frequented squares, and near the theaters and the palaces where fêtes are most frequently given. Around this shelter large fires are lighted, where the servants warm themselves; nevertheless, in the month of January, scarcely a night passes on which there is a ball, without a man or two dying of cold in the streets.
A lady, more sincere than others to whom I addressed questions on this subject, replied, “It is possible, but I have never heard it talked about.” A denial which involved a strange avowal. It is necessary to visit this city, in order to learn the extent to which the rich man will carry his contempt for the life of the poor, and the slight value which life in general has in the eyes of men condemned to live under absolutism.
In Russia, existence is painful to everybody. The emperor is scarcely less inured to fatigue than the lowest of his serfs. I have been shown his bed, the hardness of which would astonish our common laborers. Here, everyone is obliged to repeat to himself the stern truth, that the object of life is not to be found on earth, and that the means of attaining it is not pleasure. The inexorable image of duty and of submission appears at each instant, and makes it impossible to forget the hard condition of human existence—labor and sorrow!
If for a moment, in the midst of a public promenade, the appearance of a few idlers should inspire the illusive idea that there may be in Russia, as elsewhere, men who amuse themselves for the sake of amusement, men who make pleasure a business, I am soon undeceived by the sight of some Feldjäger, passing rapidly in his telega. The Feldjäger is the representative of power—he is the word of the sovereign: a living telegraph, he proceeds to bear an order to another similar automaton, who awaits him, perhaps, a thousand leagues off, and who is as ignorant as his comrade of the objects that put them both in motion. The telega, in which the man of iron travels, is of all traveling vehicles the most uncomfortable. It consists of a little cart with two leather seats, but without springs or back. No other kind of carriage could stand the roads of this savage empire. The first seat is for the coachman, who is changed at each stage; the second is reserved for the courier, who travels till he dies; and among men devoted to such a life, death arrives early.
Those whom I see rapidly crisscrossing the fine streets of this city, seem to represent the solitudes into which they are about to plunge. I follow them in imagination, and at the end of their course appear to me Siberia, Kamchatka, the Salt Desert, the Wall of China, Lapland, the Frozen Ocean, Novaya Zemlya, Persia, or the Caucasus. These historical, or almost fabulous, names produce on my imagination the effect of a dim and vapory distance in a vast landscape, and engender a species of reverie which oppresses my spirits. Nevertheless, the apparition of such blind, deaf, and dumb couriers is a poetical aliment, constantly presented to the mind of the stranger. These men, born to live and die in their telegas, impart of themselves a melancholy interest to the humblest scene of life. Nothing prosaic can subsist in the mind when in the presence of so much suffering and so much effort. It must be owned that, if despotism renders unhappy the people that it oppresses, it is conducive to the amusement of travelers, whom it fills with an astonishment ever new. Where there is liberty, everything is published and speedily forgotten, for everything is seen at a glance; but under an absolute government everything is concealed, and therefore everything is conjectured: the greater the mystery, the greater the curiosity, which is enhanced even by the necessary absence of apparent interest.
I have been describing a city without character, rather pompous than imposing, more vast than beautiful, and full of edifices without style, taste, or historic interest. But to make the picture complete, that is, faithful, I should have inserted the figures of men naturally graceful, and who, with their Oriental genius, have adapted themselves to a city built by a people which had no country, for Petersburg has been constructed by wealthy men, whose minds were formed by comparing, without deep study, the different countries of Europe. This legion of travelers, more or less refined, and rather skillful than learned, formed an artificial nation, a community of intelligent and clever characters, recruited from among all the nations of the world. They did not constitute the Russian people. These latter are roguish as the slave, who consoles himself by privately ridiculing his master; superstitious, boastful, brave, and idle as the soldier; and poetical, musical, and contemplative as the shepherd; for the habits of a nomad people prevailed for a long time among the Slavs. All this is in keeping neither with the style of the architecture nor with the plan of the streets in Petersburg: there has been evidently no connection between the architect and the inhabitant. Peter the Great built the city against the Swedes rather than for the Russians; but the natural character of its population betrays itself, notwithstanding their respect for the caprices of their master; and it is to such involuntary disobedience that Russia owes its stamp of originality. Nothing can efface the primitive character of its people; and this triumph of innate faculties over an ill-directed education, is an interesting spectacle to every traveler capable of appreciating it.
Happily for the painter and the poet, the Russians possess an essentially religious sentiment. Their churches, at least, are their own. The unchangeable form of these pious edifices is a part of their religion: superstition defends her sacred fortresses against the mania for mathematical figures in freestone oblongs, planes, and straight lines; in short, against the military, rather than classic, architecture which imparts to each of the cities of this land the air of a camp destined to remain for a few weeks during the performance of some grand maneuvers.
The genius of a nomad race is equally recognized in the various vehicles and harness, the carriages, and the droshkies. The latter is so small as quite to disappear under those who occupy it. Its singular appearance, as it passes rapidly between long straight lines of very low houses, over which are seen the steeples of a multitude of churches and other buildings, may be easily imagined.
These gilded or painted spires break the monotonous line of roofs, and rise in the air with shafts so tapered, that the eye can scarcely distinguish the point where their gilding is lost in the mists of a polar sky. They are of Asiatic origin, and appear to be of a height which, for their diameter, is truly extraordinary. It is impossible to conceive how they maintain themselves in air.
Let the reader picture to himself an immense assemblage of domes, to which are always attached the four belfries necessary to constitute a church among the modern Greeks; a multitude of cupolas covered with gold, silver, or azure; palace roofs of emerald green, or ultramarine; squares ornamented with bronze statues; an immense river bordering and serving as a mirror to the picture—let him add to it the bridge of boats thrown across the river’s broadest part—the citadel, where sleep in their unornamented tombs Peter the Great and his family,[2] and an island covered with edifices built after the model of Grecian temples—let him embrace in one view the whole of these varied parts, and he will understand how Petersburg may be infinitely picturesque, notwithstanding the bad taste of its borrowed architecture, the marshes which surround it, the unbroken flatness of its site, and the pale dimness of its finest summer days.
Let me not be reproached for my contradictions; I have myself perceived them without wishing to avoid them, for they lie in the things which I contemplate. I could not give a true idea of objects that I describe, if I did not often seem to contradict myself. If I were less sincere, I should appear more consistent; but in physical as in moral order, truth is only an assemblage of contrasts—contrasts so glaring, that it might be said nature and society have been created, only in order to hold together elements which would otherwise oppose and repel each other.
How admirable is the power of the primitive endowment of nations! For more than a hundred years, the higher classes of Russians, the nobles, the learned, and the powerful of the land, have been begging ideas and copying models from all the communities of Europe; and yet this absurd fantasy of princes and courtiers has not prevented the people from remaining original.
The finely endowed Slavic race has too delicate an organization to mingle indiscriminately with the Teutonic people. The German character has, even at this day, less affinity with the Russian than has the Spanish, with its cross of Arab blood. Slowness, heaviness, coarseness, timidity, and awkwardness, have nothing in common with the genius of the Slavs. They would rather endure vengeance and tyranny. Even the German virtues are odious to the Russians; thus, in a few years the latter, notwithstanding their religious and political atrocities, have made greater progress in public opinion at Warsaw than the Prussians, notwithstanding the rare and solid qualities which distinguish the German people. I do not speak of this as desirable, I only note it as an existing fact: it is not all brothers who love, but all understand each other.
As to the analogy which I imagine I can in certain points discover between the Russians and the Spaniards, it is accounted for by the relations which may have originally existed between some of the Arab tribes, and some of the hordes which passed from Asia into Muscovy. The Moresque architecture bears an affinity to the Byzantine, which is the model of the real Muscovite. The genius of the Asiatic wanderers in Africa could not be contrary to that of other Eastern nations but recently established in Europe. History is explained by the progressive influence of races.
But for the difference in the religion and the habits of the people, I could here fancy myself on one of the most elevated and barren plains of Castile. In fact, we are enduring at present the heat of Africa; for twenty years Petersburg has not known so burning a summer.
Notwithstanding the tropical heats, I see the Russians already preparing their provision of winter fuel. Boats loaded with billets of birch wood, the only fuel used here (for the oak is a tree of luxury), obstruct the large and numerous canals which intersect the city in every direction. It is built on the model of Amsterdam: an arm of the Neva flows through the principal streets; in winter it is filled up by the ice and snow; in summer, by the innumerable boats. The wood is conveyed from the boats in narrow carts of a primitive simplicity of construction, on which it is piled to a height which makes it resemble a moving wall. The logs are held together by a chain that the driver tightens with a stick he uses as a tourniquet. He hangs on to this arrangement to keep all the parts together like a squirrel swinging on a branch. I have never once seen any of these tottering edifices fall.
Fuel is becoming scarce in Russia. Wood is as dear in Petersburg as in Paris. There are houses here which consume as much as the value of nine or ten thousand francs per winter. In beholding the inroads made upon the forests, we may ask, with inquietude, how will the next generation warm themselves?
If the jest be pardonable, I would advise, as a measure of prudence on the part of the people who enjoy a genial climate, that they should furnish the Russians wherewith to keep good fires. They might then less covet the southern sun.
The carts used for moving the filth and refuse of the city are small and inconvenient. With such machines, a man and horse can do but little work in a day. Generally speaking, the Russians show their skill rather in their manner of using inferior implements than by the pains they take to perfect those which they have. Endowed with little power of invention, they most frequently want the mechanical appliances suitable to the end they would attain. This people, who possess so much grace and so much facility of character, have no creative genius. The Russians are the Romans of the North. Both peoples have drawn their arts and sciences from strangers. The former have intelligence; but it is an imitative, and therefore ironical, intelligence; it counterfeits everything, and invents nothing. Ridicule is a prevailing trait in the character of tyrants and slaves. All oppressed people are given to slander, satire, and caricature; they revenge themselves for their inaction and degradation by sarcasm. The nature of the relation which exists between nations and their governments has yet to be elucidated. In my opinion, each nation has for a government the only one which it could have. I do not, however, pretend either to impose or expound this system. It is a labor which I leave to those who are worthier and wiser than I: my present object is the less ambitious one of describing what has most struck me in the streets and on the quays of Petersburg.
Several parts of the Neva are entirely covered with boats of hay. These rural objects are larger than many houses; they are hung with straw mattings, which give them the picturesque appearance of Oriental tents or Chinese junks. Only in Petersburg have I seen edifices of straw from which families rush out like beasts from their lair.
The trade of plasterer is important in a city where the interior of the houses is a prey to swarms of vermin, and where the appearance of the exterior is spoilt every winter. The manner in which the Russian plasterers perform their work is curious. There are only three months in the year during which they can work outside the houses; the number of workers is therefore considerable, and they are found at the corner of every street. These men, suspended at the peril of their life on little planks attached to a long hanging cord, like spiders repairing their webs torn by a storm, swing in front of the edifices which they rewhiten.
In the provinces they whitewash the towns through which the emperor may have to pass: is this an honor rendered to the sovereign, or do they seek to deceive him as regards the wretchedness of the land? In general, the Russians carry about their persons a disagreeable odor, which is perceptible at a considerable distance. The higher classes smell of musk; the common people, of cabbage mixed with exhalations of onions and old greasy, perfumed leather. These scents never vary.
It may be supposed from this, that the thirty thousand subjects of the emperor who enter his palace on the 1st of January, to offer him their felicitations, and the six or seven thousand that we shall see tomorrow pressing into the interior of the palace of Peterhof, in honor of their empress, must leave on their passage a formidable perfume.
Among all the women of the lower orders whom I have hitherto met in the streets, not a single one has struck me as possessing beauty, and the greater number among them are ugly and dirty to a degree that is repulsive. Astonishment is excited by the recollection that they are the wives and mothers of men with features so fine and regular, profiles so perfectly Grecian, and forms so elegant and supple as those seen among even the lowest classes of the nation. There are nowhere old men so handsome, nor old women so hideous, as in Russia. I have seen few women of the middle class. One of the singularities of Petersburg is, that the number of women in proportion to that of the men is less than in other capitals. I am assured that the former do not, at the utmost, form more than a third of the total population of the city. Their scarcity causes them to be only too highly prized. They attract so eager an attention that there are few who risk themselves alone, after a certain hour, in the streets of the less populous quarters. In the capital of a country altogether military, and among a people addicted to drunkenness, this discreetness appears to me sufficiently well founded. At all times the Russian women show themselves less in public than the French: it is not necessary to go far back to find the time when they passed their lives locked up like the women of Asia. This reserve, the remembrance of which still lingers, recalls, like so many other Russian customs, the origin of the people. It contributes to the dullness of the streets and the fêtes of Petersburg. The finest sights in the city are the parades, which strengthens my former observation, that the Russian capital is but a camp somewhat more stable and pacific than a mere bivouac.
There are few cafés in Petersburg, and no authorized public balls in the interior of the city. The promenades are not much frequented, and those who are met there exhibit a gravity that conveys but little idea of enjoyment.
But if fear makes men serious, it also makes them extremely polite. I have never elsewhere seen so many men of all classes treating each other with respect. The driver of the droshky formally salutes his comrade, who never passes him without rendering reverence for reverence; the porters salute the plasterers, and so with all the others. This urbanity is, perhaps, affected; at least, I believe it overstrained: nevertheless, the mere appearance of amenity contributes to the pleasure of life. If a pretended politeness has so much about it that is valuable, what a charm must real politeness possess, the politeness, that is to say, of the heart!
A stay in Petersburg would be agreeable to any traveler of standing or character, who could believe all that he heard. The greatest difficulty would be the escaping of dinners and soirées, those real plagues of Russia, and it may be added of all societies where strangers are admitted, and, consequently, where intimacy is excluded.
I have accepted here but few private invitations. I was chiefly curious to view the solemnities of the court, but I have seen enough: one soon wearies of wonders in the contemplation of which the heart has no share.
[1]They have been introduced into many houses in Germany; and the custom is spreading.—Trans.
[2]The Greek rite forbids sculpture in churches.