AN ATTACK of ophthalmia, which came on between Petersburg and Moscow, gives me much pain and annoyance. Notwithstanding this ailment, I resumed today my promenade of yesterday evening, in order to compare the Kremlin by daylight with the fantastic Kremlin of the night. The shade increases and distorts everything: the sun restores to objects their forms and their proportions.
At this second view the fortress of the czars still surprised me. The moonlight magnified, and threw out in strong relief certain masses of the building, but it concealed others; and, while acknowledging that I had imagined to myself too many vaults, and galleries, hanging roads, and lofty portals, I found quite enough of all these objects to justify my enthusiasm. There is something of everything at the Kremlin: it is a varied landscape in stone. The solidity of its ramparts exceeds that of the rocks on which they stand. The multitude and the multiformity of its parts are a marvel. This labyrinth of palaces, museums, towers, churches, and dungeons, is terrific as the architecture of Martin; it is as great and more irregular than the compositions of that English painter. Mysterious sounds rise out of the depth of its underground; such abodes must be haunted by spirits, they cannot belong to beings like ourselves. The sounds seem to come from the grave. The citadel of Moscow is not merely a palace, a national sanctuary for the historical treasures of the empire; it is the bulwark of Russia, the revered asylum in which sleep the tutelary saints of the country: it is also the prison of specters.
This morning, still wandering without a guide, I penetrated even to the heart of the fortress, and found my way into the interior of some of the churches which ornament that pious city, as venerated by the Russians for its relics as for the worldly riches and the warlike trophies which it encloses. I am too excited now to describe these objects in detail, but hereafter I shall pay a methodical visit to the Treasury.
The Kremlin, on its hill, gives me the idea of a city of princes, built in the midst of a city of people. This tyrannical castle, this proud heap of stones, looks down scornfully upon the abodes of common men; and, contrary to what is the case in structures of ordinary dimensions, the nearer we approach the indestructible mass, the more our wonder increases. Like the bones of certain gigantic animals, the Kremlin proves to us the history of a world of which we might doubt until after seeing the remains. In this prodigious creation, strength takes the place of beauty, caprice of elegance: it is like the dream of a tyrant, fearful but full of power; it has something about it that disowns the age; means of defense which are adapted to a system of war that exists no longer; an architecture that has no connection with the wants of modern civilization: a heritage of the fabulous ages; a jail, a palace, a sanctuary, a bulwark against the nation’s foes, a bastille against the nation, a prop of tyrants, a prison of people,—such is the Kremlin. A kind of northern Acropolis, a Pantheon of barbarism, this national sanctuary may be called the Alcazar of the Slavs.
Such, then, was the chosen abode of the old Muscovite princes; and yet these formidable walls were not sufficient shelter for the terror of Ivan IV.
The fear of a man possessing absolute power is the most dreadful thing upon earth; and with all the imagery of this fear visible in the Kremlin, it is still impossible to approach the palace without a shudder.
Towers of every form, round, square, and with pointed roofs, belfries, dungeons, turrets, spires, sentry boxes fixed upon minarets, steeples of every height, style, and color; palaces, domes, watchtowers, walls, embattlemented and pierced with loopholes; ramparts, fortifications of every species, whimsical inventions, incomprehensible devices, kiosks by the side of cathedrals—everything announces violation and disorder, everything betrays the continual surveillance necessary to the security of the singular beings who were condemned to live in this supernatural world. Yet these innumerable monuments of pride, caprice, voluptuousness, glory, and piety, notwithstanding their apparent variety, express one single idea, which reigns here everywhere—war maintained by fear. The Kremlin is the work of a superhuman being, but that being is malevolent. Glory in slavery— such is the allegory figured by this satanic monument, as extraordinary in architecture as the visions of St. John are in poetry. It is a habitation which would suit some of the personages of the Apocalypse.
In vain is each turret distinguished by its peculiar character and its particular use; all have the same signification,— terror armed.
Some resemble the caps of priests, others the mouth of a dragon, others swords, their points in the air, others the forms and even the colors of various exotic fruits; some again represent a headdress of the czars, pointed, and adorned with jewels like that of the doge of Venice; others are simple crowns; and all this multitude of towers faced with glazed tiles, of metallic cupolas, of enameled, gilded, azured, and silvered domes, shine in the sun like the colossal stalactites of the salt mines in the neighborhood of Kraków. These enormous pillars, these steeples and turrets of every shape, pointed, pyramidical, and circular, but always in some manner suggesting the idea of the human form, seem to reign over the city and the land. To see them from afar, shining in the sky, one might fancy them an assembly of potentates, richly robed and decorated with the insignia of their dignity, a meeting of ancestral beings, a council of kings, each seated upon his tomb; specters hovering over the pinnacles of a palace. To inhabit a place like the Kremlin is not to reside, it is to defend one’s self. Oppression creates revolt, revolt necessitates precautions, precautions increase dangers, and this long series of actions and reactions engenders a monster; that monster is despotism, which has built itself a house at Moscow. The giants of the antediluvian world, were they to return to earth to visit their degenerate successors, might still find a suitable habitation in the Kremlin.
Everything, whether purposely or not, has a symbolical sense in its architecture; but the real, the abiding, that appears after you have divested yourself of your first emotions in the contemplation of these barbaric splendors, is, after all, only a congregation of dungeons pompously surnamed palaces and cathedrals. The Russians may do their best, but they can never come out of the prison.
The very climate is an accomplice of tyranny. The cold of the country does not permit the construction of vast churches, where the faithful would be frozen at prayer: here, the soul is not lifted to heaven by the glories of religious architecture; in this zone, man can only build to his God gloomy dungeons. The somber cathedrals of the Kremlin, with their narrow vaults and thick walls, resemble caves; they are painted prisons, just as the palaces are gilded jails.
As travelers say of the recesses of the Alps, so of the wonders of this architecture—they are horribly beautiful.
Whether the Kremlin be viewed under a purely historical, or a poetical and picturesque aspect, it is the most national monument in Russia, and consequently the most interesting both for Russians and for foreigners.
This sanctuary of despotism was reconstructed in stone for Ivan III, in 1485, by two Italian architects, Marco and Pietro Antonio, who were invited to Moscow by the Great Prince, when he wished to again rear the ramparts, formerly wooden, of the fortress more anciently founded under Dmitry Donskoi.
But if the Kremlin was not built by Ivan IV, it was built for him. It was by a spirit of prophecy that the great king, his grandfather, constructed the palace of the tyrant. Italian architects may be found everywhere, but in no other place have they produced a work similar to that which they raised at Moscow. I may add that there have been elsewhere absolute, unjust, arbitrary, and capricious sovereigns, and yet, that the reign of none of these monsters has resembled that of Ivan IV. The same seed springing under different climates and in different soils, produces plants of the same species, but of many varieties. The earth will never see another masterpiece of despotism similar to the Kremlin, nor another nation as superstitiously patient as was the Muscovite under the monstrous reign of its greatest tyrant.
The consequences of that reign are felt even in our days. Had the reader accompanied me in this journey, he would have discovered, as I have done, in the inner depths of the Russian character, the inevitable injury produced by arbitrary power carried to its last excess; showing itself by a careless indifference to the sanctity of truth in speech, of candor in sentiment, and of justice in acts; and, when fully developed, by falsehood rampant in all its forms, fraud triumphant, and the moral sense, in fact, wholly destroyed.
I could fancy I saw a procession of vices pouring forth from all the gates of the Kremlin to inundate Russia.
Other nations have supported oppression, the Russian nation has loved it: it loves it still. Is not such fanaticism of obedience characteristic? It may not, however, be denied that this popular mania has here sometimes become the principle of sublime actions. In this inhuman land, if society has depraved the individual, it has not enervated him: he is not good, but he is also not contemptible. The same may be said of the Kremlin: it is not pleasant to behold, but it inspires awe. It is not beautiful, but it is terrible—terrible as the reign of Ivan IV.