DURING the last two days I have seen many sights; among others, the Tartar mosque. The religion of the conquerors is now tolerated in a corner of the capital of the vanquished; and this, only on condition that the Christians have free permission to enter the Mohammedan sanctuary.
The mosque is a small and mean edifice, and the men there allowed to worship God and the prophet, have a wretched, timid, dirty, and poverty-stricken appearance. They come to prostrate themselves in this temple every Friday, upon a filthy piece of woolen mat, which each carries with him. Their graceful Asiatic garments have become rags; their own condition is abject: they live as much apart as possible from the population which surrounds them. In seeing these beggars in appearance, creeping in the midst of actual Russia, it is difficult to realize the idea of the tyranny which their fathers exercised over the Muscovites.
The unfortunate sons of conquerors trade at Moscow in the provisions and the merchandise of Asia, and adhere as much as possible to the practice of their religion, avoiding the use of wines and strong liquors, and shutting up their women, or at least veiling them, in order to shield them from the eyes of other men; a precaution which is, however, little needed, for the Mongol race present but few attractions. High cheekbones, flat noses, small sunken black eyes, frizzled hair, a brown and oily skin, a low stature, an appearance of filth and squalor,—such were the characteristics which I remarked in the men of this degenerate race, and in the small number of women of whose features I could obtain a glimpse.
The Russians take credit for the tolerance which they accord to the faith of their ancient tyrants. I find such tolerance more ostentatious than philosophical: and, for the people to whom it is extended, it is but one humiliation more. Were I in the place of the descendants of those implacable Mongols, who were so long masters of Russia and the terror of the world, I would prefer praying to God in the secret of my heart, rather than in the shadow of a mosque accorded by the pity of my ancient tributaries.
When I wander over Moscow without aim and without guide, I never weary. Each street, each outlet, affords the view of a fresh city; a city which, studded with its embroidered, pierced, and battlemented walls, broken with towers, and supporting multitudes of turrets and watchtowers, appears as though built by genies. Then there is the Kremlin, poetical in its aspect, historical by its name, the root of an empire, the heart of a city, and which for me is all Moscow. I return there with an ever-new attraction; but it is necessary to avoid carefully examining in detail the incoherent masses of monuments with which this walled mountain is encumbered. The exquisite sense of art, the talent, that is, of finding the one only perfectly just expression of an original conception, is unknown to the Russians; nevertheless, when giants copy, their imitations always possess a kind of beauty: the works of genius are grand, the works of physical power are great: and this alone is something.
To divert my mind for a moment from the terrific Kremlin, I have paid a visit to the tower of Sukharev, built on an eminence near to one of the entrances of the city. The first story is a vast structure, containing an immense reservoir, from whence nearly all the water drunk in Moscow is distributed to the different parts of the city. The view of this walled lake, reared high in air, produces a singular impression. The architecture is heavy and gloomy; but the Byzantine arcades, the massy flights of steps, and the ornaments in the style of the Lower Empire, make the whole very imposing. This style is perpetuated in Moscow: had it been applied with discernment, it would have given birth to the only national architecture possible to the Russians: though invented in a temperate climate, it equally accords with the wants of northern people and the habits of those of the South. The interiors of Byzantine edifices are very similar to ornamented cellars; the solidity of the massive vaults, and the obscurity of the walls, offer a shelter from the cold as well as from the sun.
I have also been shown the University, the School of Cadets, the Institutions of St. Catherine and of St. Alexander, the Hospitals for Widows and for Foundlings, all vast and pompous in appearance. The Russians pride themselves in having so great a number of magnificent public establishments to show to strangers: for my part, I should be content with less of this kind of splendor; for no places are more tedious to wander over than these white and sumptuously monotonous palaces, where everything is conducted in military order, and where human life seems reduced to the action of the pendulum of a clock.
Among us, there is the fatigue of license and variety; here, we are discouraged by uniformity frozen over by pedantry, which yet we may not separate from the idea of order; whence it follows, that we hate what we ought to love. Russia, that infant nation, is nothing more than an immense college; everything is conducted there as in a military school, the only difference being, that the scholars never leave it until they die.
The new converts to civilization have not yet lost their taste, as upstarts, for everything that dazzles, everything that attracts the eye. Children and savages always love these things. The Russians are children who have the habit, but not the experience of misfortune; hence the mixture of levity and causticity which characterizes them. The enjoyments of a calm and equable life, adapted solely to satisfy the affections of intimacy, to administer to the pleasures of conversation and of mind, would never long suffice them: not that these great lords show themselves altogether insensible to refined pleasures; but, to captivate the haughty frivolity of such disguised satraps, to fix their vagrant imaginations, lively excitements are necessary. The love of play, intemperance, libertinism, and the gratifications of vanity, can scarcely fill the void in their satiated hearts: the creation of God does not furnish these unhappy victims of wealth and indolence with any means to get through their weary days. In their proud misery, they summon to their aid the spirit of destruction. All modern Europe is the prey of ennui. It is this which attests the nature of the life led by the youth of the present day: but Russia suffers from the evil worse than the other communities; for here everything is excessive. To describe the ravages of society in a population like that of Moscow would be difficult: nowhere have the mental maladies engendered in the soul by ennui—that passion of men who have no passions— appeared to me so serious or so frequent as among the higher classes in Russia: it may be said that society has here commenced by its abuses. When vice does not suffice to enable the human heart to shake off the ennui that preys upon it, that heart proceeds to crime.
The interior of a Russian coffeehouse is very curious. It consists generally of a large, low apartment, badly lighted, and usually occupying the second floor of the house. The waiters are dressed in white shirts, girded round the middle, and falling like a tunic over loose white pantaloons. Their hair is long and smooth, like that of all the lower orders of Russians; and their whole adjustment reminds one of the theophilanthropists of the French republic, or the priests of the opera when paganism was the fashion at the theater. They serve you with excellent tea, superior, indeed, to any found in other lands, with coffee and liqueurs: but this is done with a silence and solemnity very different from the noisy gaiety which reigns in the cafés of Paris. In Russia all popular pleasures are melancholy in their character: mirth is viewed as a privilege; consequently, I always find it assumed, affected, overdone, and worse than the natural sadness. Here, the man who laughs is either an actor, a drunkard, or a flatterer.
This reminds me of the times when the Russian serfs believed, in the simplicity of their abjectness, that heaven was only made for their masters: dreadful humility of misfortune! Such was the manner in which the Greek church taught Christianity to the people.
The society of Moscow is agreeable; the mixture of the patriarchal traditions of the old world with the polished manners of the modern, produces a combination that is, in a manner, original. The hospitable customs of ancient Asia and the elegant language of civilized Europe have met together at this point of the globe, to render life pleasant and easy. Moscow, fixed on the limits of two continents, marks, in the middle of the earth, a spot for rest between London and Peking.
A small number of letters of introduction suffice to put a stranger in communication with a crowd of persons, distinguished either by fortune, rank, or mind. The debut of a traveler is here easy.
I was invited a few days ago to dine at a country house. It is a pavilion situated within the limits of the city, but, to reach it, we had to traverse, for more than a league, fields that resemble steppes, to skirt solitary pools of water; and, at last, on approaching the house, we perceived, beyond the garden, a dark and deep forest of firs, which borders the exterior bounds of Moscow. Who would not have been struck with the sight of these profound shades, these majestic solitudes, in a city where all the luxuries and refinements of modern civilization are to be found? Such contrasts are characteristics; nothing similar is to be seen elsewhere.
I entered a wooden house—another singularity. In Moscow both rich and poor are sheltered by planks and boards, as in the primitive cottages. But the interior of these large cabins exhibits the luxury of the finest palaces of Europe. If I lived at Moscow, I would have a wooden house. It is the only kind of habitation the style of which is national, and, what is more important, it is the only kind that is adapted to the climate. Houses of wood are esteemed by the true Muscovites as warmer and healthier than those of stone.
We dined in the garden; and, that nothing should be wanting to the originality of the scene, I found the table laid under a tent. The conversation, although between men only, and very lively, was decent—a thing rarely known among the nations who believe themselves the first in civilization. The guests were persons who had both seen and read much; and their views appeared to me very clear and just. The Russians are apes in the manners and customs of refined life; but those who think (it is true their number is limited) become themselves again, in familiar conversation—Greeks, namely, endowed with a quickness and sagacity which is hereditary.
The dinner seemed to me short, although in reality it lasted a considerable time, and although, at the moment of sitting down at table, I saw the guests for the first time, and the master of the house for the second. This remark is worthy of notice, for great and true politeness could alone have put a stranger so quickly at his ease. Among all the recollections of my journey, that of this day will remain as one of the most agreeable.
At the moment of leaving Moscow, never to return, except merely to pass through it, I do not think it will be inappropriate for me summarily to review the character of the Russians, so far as I have been able to discern it, after a sojourn in their country, very brief, it is true, but employed without cessation in attentively observing a multitude of persons and of things, and in comparing, with scrupulous care, innumerable facts. The variety of objects which passes before the eyes of a stranger, as much favored by circumstances as I have been, and as active as I am when excited by curiosity, supplies, to a certain extent, the time and leisure which I have wanted. I naturally take pleasure in admiring: this disposition ought to procure some credit for my opinions when I do not admire.
In general, the men of this country do not appear to me inclined to generosity; they scarcely believe in that quality; they would deny it if they dared; and if they do not deny it, they despise it, because they have nothing in themselves by which to apprehend its nature. They have more finesse than delicacy, more good temper than sensibility, more pliancy than easy contentedness, more grace than tenderness, more discernment than invention, more wit than imagination, more observation than wit, more of the spirit of selfish calculation than all these qualities together. They never labor to produce results useful to others, but always to obtain some recompense for themselves. Creative genius has been denied them; the enthusiasm which produces the sublime is to them unknown; sentiments which seek only within themselves for approval and for recompense, they cannot understand. Take from them the moving influences of interest, fear, and vanity, and you will deprive them of all action. If they enter the empire of arts, they are but slaves serving in a palace; the sacred solitudes of genius are to them inaccessible; the chaste love of the beautiful cannot satisfy their desires.
It is with their actions in practical life, as with their creations in the world of thought,—where artifice triumphs, magnanimity passes for imposture.
Greatness of mind looks to itself for a recompense; but if it asks for nothing from others, it commands much, for it seeks to render men better: here, it would render them worse, because it would be considered a mask. Clemency is called a weakness among a people hardened by terror: implacable severity makes them bend the knee, pardon would cause them to lift the head; they can be subdued, but no one knows how to convince them; incapable of pride, they can yet be audacious; they revolt against gentleness, but they obey ferocity, which they take for power.
This explains to me the system of government adopted by the emperor, without, however, leading me to approve it. That prince knows how to make himself obeyed, and acts in a way to command obedience; but, in politics, I am no admirer of the compulsory system. Here, discipline is the end; elsewhere, it is the means. Is it pardonable in a prince to resist the good dictates of his heart, because he believes it dangerous to manifest sentiments superior to those of his people? In my eyes, the worst of all weaknesses is that which renders a man pitiless and unmerciful. To be ashamed of being magnanimous is to confess an unworthiness of possessing supreme power.
The people are in need of being incessantly reminded of a world better than the present world. How can they be made to believe in God, if they are not to know what is pardon? Prudence is only virtuous when it does not exclude a higher virtue. If the emperor has not in his heart more clemency than he displays in his policy, I pity Russia; if his sentiments are superior to his acts, I pity the emperor.
The Russians, when amiable, have a fascination in their manners whose spell we feel in spite of every prejudice; first, without observing it, and afterwards, without being able to throw it off. To define such an influence would be to explain the power of imagination. The charm forms an imperious, though secret attraction,—a sovereign power vested in the innate grace of the Slavs, that gift of grace which, in society, can supply the want of all other gifts, and the want of which nothing can supply.
Imagine the defunct French politeness again restored to life, and become really all that it appeared—imagine the most agreeable and unstudied complaisance—an involuntary, not an acquired, absence of egotism—an ingenuity in good taste —a pleasant carelessness of choice—an aristocratic elegance without hauteur—an easiness without impertinence—the instinct of superiority tempered by the security which accompanies rank:—but I am wrong in attempting to delineate with too finely drawn strokes; these are delicacies in the shading which must be felt. We may divine them, but we must avoid attempting to fix by words their too elusive forms. Let it suffice that all these, and many other graces, are found in the manners and conversation of the really elegant Russians, and more frequently, more completely, among those who have not traveled, but who, remaining in Russia, have nevertheless been in contact with distinguished foreigners.
These charms, these illusions, give them a sovereign power over hearts; so long as you remain in the presence of the privileged beings, you are under a spell; and the charm is double, for such is their triumph, that you imagine yourself to be to them what they are to you. Time and the world, engagements and affairs, are forgotten; the duties of society are abolished; one single interest remains—the interest of the moment; one single person survives—the person present, who is always the person liked. The desire of pleasing, carried to this excess, infallibly succeeds: it is the sublime of good taste; it is elegance the most refined, and yet as natural as an instinct. This supreme amiability is not assumed or artificial, it is a gift which needs only to be exercised; to prolong the illusion you have but to prolong your stay. The Russians are the best actors in the world: to produce an effect they need none of the accompaniments of scenery.
Every traveler has reproached them with their versatility; the reproach is but too well founded: you feel yourself forgotten in bidding them adieu. I attribute this, not only to levity of character, to inconstancy of heart, but also to the want of solid and extended information. They like you to leave them; for they fear lest they should be discovered when they allow themselves to be approached for too long a time uninterruptedly. Thence arises the fondness and the indifference which follow each other so rapidly among them. This apparent in-constancy is only a precaution of vanity, well understood and sufficiently common among people of the fashionable world in every land. It is not their faults that people conceal with the greatest care, it is their emptiness; they do not blush to be perverse, but they are humbled at being insignificant. In accordance with this principle, the Russians of the higher classes willingly exhibit everything in their minds and character likely to please at first sight, and which keeps up conversation for a few hours; but if you endeavor to go behind the decorated scene that thus dazzles you, they stop you as they would a rash intruder, who might take it into his head to go behind the screen of their bedchambers, of which the elegance is entirely confined to the outer side of the division. They give you a reception dictated by curiosity; they afterwards repel you through prudence.
This applies to friendship as well as to love, to the society of men as well as to that of women. In giving the portrait of a Russian, we paint the nation, just as a soldier under arms conveys the idea of all his regiment. Nowhere is the influence of unity in the government and in education so sensibly visible as here. Every mind wears a uniform. Alas! how greatly must those suffer, be they even no longer young and sensitive, who bring among this people—coldhearted and keen-witted both by nature and social education—the simplicity of other lands! I picture to myself the sensibility of the Germans, the confiding naïveté and the careless gaiety of the French, the constancy of the Spaniards, the passion of the English, the abandon and good nature of the true, the old Italians, all in the toils of the inherent Russian coquetry; and I pity the unfortunate foreigners who could believe for a moment they might become actors in the theater which awaits them here. In matters of the affections, the Russians are the gentlest wild beasts that are to be seen on earth; and their well-concealed claws unfortunately divest them of none of their charms. I have never felt a fascination to be compared to it, except in Polish society: a new relation, discoverable between the two families! Civil hate in vain strives to separate these people; nature reunites them in spite of themselves. If policy did not compel one to oppress the other, they would recognize and love each other. The Poles are chivalric and Catholic Russians; with the further difference, that, in Poland, it is the women who form the life of society, or, in other words, who command, and that in Russia, it is the men.
These same people, so naturally amiable, so well endowed, so extremely agreeable, sometimes go astray in paths which men of the coarsest characters would avoid.
It is impossible to picture to oneself the life of many of the most distinguished young persons in Moscow. These men, who bear names, and belong to families known throughout Europe, are lost in excesses that will not bear to be described. It is inconceivable how they can resist for six months the system they adopt for life, and maintain with a constancy which would be worthy of heaven, if its object were virtuous. Their temperaments seem to be made expressly for the anticipated hell;—for it is thus that I qualify the life of a professed debauchee in Moscow.
In physical respects, the climate, and in moral respects, the government, of this land devour all that is weak in its germ: all that is not robust or stupid dies early, none survive but the debased, and natures strong in good as in evil. Russia is the land of unbridled passions or of passive characters, of rebels or of automata, of conspirators or of machines. There is here nothing intermediate between the tyrant and the slave, between the madman and the animal: the juste milieu is unknown; nature will not tolerate it; the excess of cold, like that of heat, pushes man to extremes.
Notwithstanding the contrasts which I here point out, all resemble each other in one respect—all have levity of character. Among these men of the moment, the projects of the evening are constantly lost in the forgetfulness of the morrow. It may be said that with them the heart is the empire of chance; nothing can stand against their propensity to embrace and to abandon. They live and die without perceiving the serious side of existence. Neither good nor evil seems in their eyes to possess any reality: they can cry, but they cannot be unhappy. Palaces, mountains, giants, sylphs, passions, solitude, brilliant crowds, supreme happiness, unbounded grief,—but it is useless to enumerate: a quarter of an hour’s conversation with them suffices to bring before your eyes the whole universe. Their prompt and contemptuous glance surveys, without admiring, the monuments raised by human intelligence during centuries. They fancy they can place themselves above everything, because they despise everything. Their very praises are insults: they eulogize like people who envy; they prostrate themselves, but always unwillingly, before the objects they believe to be the idols of fashion. But at the first breath of wind, the cloud succeeds the picture, and soon the cloud vanishes in turn. Dust, smoke, and chaotic nothingness, are all that can issue from such inconsistent heads.
No plant takes root in a soil thus profoundly agitated. Everything is swept away; everything becomes leveled; all is wrapt in vapor. But from this fluid element nothing is finally expelled. Friendship or love that was imagined lost, will often again rise, evoked by a glance or a single word, and at the very moment when least thought of; though, in truth, it is only thus revived to be almost as quickly again dismissed. Under the ever-waving wand of these magicians, life is one continued phantasmagoria—one long fatiguing game, in which, however, the clumsy alone ruin themselves; for when all the world is cheating, nobody is being cheated: in a word, they are false as water, to use the poetical expression of Shakespeare, the broad strokes of whose pencil are the revelations of nature.
This explains to me why hitherto they have appeared to be doomed by Providence to a despotic government: it is in pity as much as through custom that they are tyrannized over.
If, in addressing myself to the friend to whom I send this chapter, I addressed myself to but one philosopher, here would be the place for inserting details of manners which resemble nothing that he has ever read of, even in France, where everything is written and described; but, behind him, I see the public, and this consideration stops me. My friend must therefore imagine what I do not relate; or, rather, to speak more correctly, that friend will never be able to imagine it. The excesses of despotism, which can alone give birth to the moral anarchy that here reigns around me, being only known by hearsay, their consequences would appear incredible. Where legitimate liberty is wanted, illegitimate liberty is sure to spring up; where the use is interdicted, the abuse will certainly creep in: deny the right, and you create the fraud: refuse justice, and you open the door to crime.
Under the influence of these principles, Moscow is, of all the cities in Europe, the one in which the dissolute man of the fashionable world has the widest field for his career. The government is too well informed not to know that under an absolute rule some kind of revolt must somewhere break out; but it prefers that this revolt should be in manners rather than in politics. Here lies the secret of the license of the one party and the tolerance of the other. The corruption of manners in Moscow has also other causes. One is, that the greater number of wellborn, but, by their conduct, ill-famed persons, retire when disgraced, and here establish themselves.
After the orgies which our modern literature takes pleasure in depicting, if we are to believe the authors, with a moral intention, we ought to be familiar with all the features of dissolute life. I pass over the question of the pretended utility of their aim; I can tolerate their long though useless sermons: but there is in literature something more dangerous even than the immoral; it is the ignoble. If, under the pretext of provoking salutary reforms in the lowest classes of society, the taste of the superior classes is corrupted, evil is done. To present to women the language of the pothouses, to make men of rank in love with coarse vulgarities, is to injure the manners of a nation in a way for which no legal reform can compensate. Literature is lost among us, because our most intellectual writers, forgetting all poetical sentiment, all respect for the beautiful, write for the taste of the town; and, instead of elevating their new readers to the views of delicate and noble minds, they lower themselves to the point of ministering to their coarsest appetites. They have rendered literature an ardent liquor, because, with sensibility, the faculty of tasting and feeling simple things is lost. This is a more serious evil than all the inconsistencies that have been noted in the laws and manners of the former state of society. It is another consequence of the modern materialism, which would reduce everything to the useful, and which can only discern the useful in immediate and positive results. Woe to the land where the men of genius lower themselves to play the part of commissioners of police! When an author feels himself called upon to describe vice he should at least redouble his respect for good taste; he should propose to himself the ideal truth for the type even of his most vulgar characters. But too often, under the professions of our moralist, or rather moralizing romance writers, we discover less love of virtue than cynic indifference to good taste. There is a want of poetry in their works, because there is a want of faith in their hearts. To ennoble the picture of vice, as Richardson has done in his Lovelace, is not to corrupt the mind, but to avoid soiling the imagination and lowering the tone of sentiment. Such respect for the delicacy of the reader has, if you like, a moral object; it is far more essential to civilized society than an exact knowledge of the turpitude of its bandits, and the virtues of its prostitutes. I must ask pardon for this excursion in the fields of contemporary criticism, and hasten to return to the strict and painful duties of the veracious traveler, duties that are unfortunately too often opposed to these laws of literary composition, which a respect for my language and my country has induced me to refer to.
The writings of our boldest painters of manners are but weak copies of the originals which have been daily presented to my eyes since I have been in Russia.
Bad faith injures everything, but more especially the affairs of commerce: here it has yet another sphere of action; it incommodes the libertines in the execution of their most secret contracts. The continual alterations of money, favor, in Moscow, every species of subterfuge; nothing is clear and precise in the mouth of a Russian, nothing is well defined or well guaranteed; and the purse always gains something by the slipperiness of the language. This extends even to amorous transactions: each party, knowing the duplicity of the other, requires payment in advance, whence much difficulty arises.
The female peasants are more cunning than even the women of the town. Sometimes these young and doubly corrupted savages violate the primary laws of prostitution, and escape with their booty, without paying the dishonorable debt they had contracted. The bandits of other lands observe their oaths, and maintain the good faith of comradeship in crime. The dissolute and abandoned in Russia know nothing that is sacred, not even the religion of debauchery, though it be a guarantee essential to the exercise of their profession, —so true is it that the commerce even of shame cannot be carried on without probity.
Civilization, which elsewhere elevates the mind, here perverts it. It had been better for the Russians had they remained savages:—to polish slaves is to betray society. It is needful that a man possess a basis of virtue to enable him to bear culture.
Under the influence of their government, the Russian people have become taciturn and deceitful, although naturally gentle, lively, docile, and pacific. Assuredly these are rare endowments; and yet, where there is a want of sincerity there is nothing. The Mongolian avidity of this race, and its incurable suspicion and distrust, are revealed by the least as well as the most important circumstances of life. Should you owe twenty rubles to a workman, he would return twenty times a day to ask for them, unless, at least, you were a dreaded nobleman. In Latin lands, a promise is a sacred thing—a pledge to the giver as well as the receiver. Among the Greeks, and their disciples the Russians, the word of a man is nothing better than the false key of a robber—it serves to break into the interests of others.
To make the sign of the cross in the streets before an image, and on sitting down to table, is all that the Greek religion teaches.
Intemperance is here carried to such excess, that one of the men, the most liked, and whose society is the most courted in Moscow, disappears every year for six weeks, neither more nor less. If it be asked what has become of him, the answer, “he is only gone to have a fuddling bout,” satisfies everybody.
The Russians have too much levity to be vindictive; they are graceful debauchees. I take pleasure in repeating that they are supremely pleasant and agreeable; but their politeness, insinuating as it is, sometimes becomes exaggerated and fatiguing. This often makes me regret coarseness, which has at least the merit of being natural. The first law of politeness is to indulge only in praises that can be accepted; all others are insults. True politeness is nothing more than a code of flatteries well disguised. What is so flattering as cordiality? for, in order to manifest it, sympathy must first be felt.
If there are very polite persons among the Russians, some are also very impolite. The bad taste of these latter is shocking. They inquire, after the manner of savages, into things the most important, as well as into the most trifling bagatelles, without any modesty and with the utmost minuteness. They assail you with impertinent or puerile questions, and act at the same time as children and as spies. The Slavs are naturally inquisitive; and it is only good education, and the habits of the best society, that can repress their curiosity: those who have not these advantages never tire of putting you in the witness-box: they must know the objects and the results of your journey; they will ask boldly if you prefer Russia to other lands; if you think Moscow more beautiful than Paris; if the Winter Palace at Petersburg is finer than the Tuileries; if Krasnoye Selo is larger than Versailles: such interrogations are repeated unceasingly, and with each new individual to whom you are introduced you have to recommence the rehearsal of this catechism, in which national vanity hypocritically draws upon the urbanity of foreigners, and ventures its own rudeness in reliance upon the politeness of others.
I have been introduced to a person who was described to me as a singular character, worthy of observation. He is a young man of illustrious name, the Prince ———, only son of a very rich individual; this son spends twice his income, and treats his mind and body as he does his fortune. The tavern is his empire: it is there that he reigns eighteen hours out of the twenty-four; on that ignoble theater he displays, naturally and involuntarily, noble and elegant manners; his countenance is intellectual and extremely fascinating; his disposition is at once amiable and mischievous: many traits of rare liberality, and even of touching sensibility, are recounted of him.
Having had for his tutor a man of great talent, an old French abbé and émigré, he is remarkably well educated; his mind is quick and endowed with great capacity; his wit is unequaled in Moscow, but his language and conduct are such as would not be tolerated elsewhere: his charming though restless face betrays the contradiction that exists between his natural character and his course of life.
Profligacy has impressed upon his countenance the traces of a premature decay; still, these ravages of folly, not of time, have been unable to change the almost childish expression of his noble and regular features. Innate grace will last with life, and remain faithful to the man who possesses it, whatever effort he may make to throw it off. In no other land could a man be found like the young Prince ———, but there are more than one such here.
He is to be seen surrounded by a crowd of young men, his disciples and competitors, who, without equaling him either in disposition or in mind, all share with him a kind of family resemblance: it may be seen at the first glance that they are, and only can be, Russians. It is for this reason that I am about to give some details connected with their manner of life.
But already my pen falls from my hands; for it will be necessary to reveal the connection of these libertines, not with women of the town, but with the youthful sisters of religious orders,—with nuns, whose cloisters, as it will be seen, are not very securely guarded. I hesitate to relate facts which will too readily recall our revolutionary literature of 1793. I shall remind the reader of the Visitandines;—and why, he will ask, lift a corner of the veil that shrouds scenes of disorder which ought to remain carefully covered? Perhaps my passion for the truth obscures my judgment; but it seems to me that evil triumphs so long as it remains secret, whilst to publish it is to aid in destroying it; besides, I have resolved to draw a picture of this country as I see it,—not a composition, but an exact and complete copy from nature. My business is to represent things as they are, not as they ought to be. The only law that I impose on myself, under a sense of delicacy, is to forbear making any allusion to persons who desire to remain unknown. As for the man whom I select for a specimen of the most unbridled among the libertines of Moscow, he carries his contempt of opinion to the extent of desiring me to describe him as I see him. The truth of the several facts related by himself, which I cite, have been confirmed to me by others.
A story of the death of a young man, killed in the convent of ———, by the nuns themselves, he told me yesterday at a full table d’hôte, before several grave and elderly personages, employees and placemen, who listened with an extraordinary patience to this and several other tales of a similar kind, all very contrary to good manners.
I have surnamed this singular young man the Don Juan of the Old Testament, so greatly does the measure of his madness and audacity exceed the ordinary bounds of an abandoned life among modern nations. Nothing is little or moderate in Russia: if the land is not, as my Italian cicerone calls it, a land of miracles, it is truly a land of giants.
The story in question related to a young man, who, after having passed an entire month concealed within the convent of ———, began, at last, to weary of his excess of happiness to a degree that wearied the holy sisters also. He appeared dying: whereupon the nuns, wishing to be rid of him, but fearing the scandal that might ensue should they send him to die in the world, concluded that it would be better to make an end of him themselves. No sooner said than done:—the mangled remains of the wretched being were found a few days after at the bottom of a well. The affair was hushed up.
If we are to believe the same authorities, there are numerous convents in Moscow in which the rules of the cloister are little observed. One of the friends of the prince yesterday exhibited before me, to the whole legion of libertines, the rosary of a novice, which he said she had forgotten and left that very morning in his chamber. Another made a trophy of a Book of Prayers, which he stated had belonged to one of the sisters who was reputed among the most holy of the community of ———; and the audience warmly applauded.
I shall not go on. Each had his scandalous anecdote to relate, and all excited loud peals of laughter. Gaiety, ever increasing, soon became drunken riot under the influence of the wine of Ai, which overflowed in goblets, the size of which was more capable of satisfying Muscovite intemperance than our old-fashioned champagne glasses. In the midst of the general disorder, the young Prince ——— and myself alone preserved our reason,—he, because he can outdrink everybody, I, because I cannot drink at all, and had therefore abstained from attempting.
In the midst of the uproar, the Lovelace of the Kremlin rose with a solemn air, and, with the authority which his fortune, his name, his handsome face, and yet more, his superior mental capacity give him, he commanded silence, and to my great surprise obtained it. I could have fancied I was reading the poetical description of a tempest appeased by the voice of some pagan god. The young god proposed to the friends whom the gravity of his aspect had thus suddenly calmed, to indite a petition, addressed to the proper authorities, humbly remonstrating, in the name of the courtesans of Moscow, that the ancient religious institutions of nunneries so completely interfered with and rivaled their lay community, in the exercise of their calling, as to render that calling no longer profitable; and therefore respectfully stating that, as the expenses of these poor cyprians were not diminished in the same proportion as their gains, they ventured to hope an equitable consideration of their case would induce the authorities to see fit to deduct from a part of the revenue of the said convents, a pecuniary aid, which had become absolutely necessary, unless it was wished that the religious orders should entirely take the place of the civil recluses. The motion was put and carried with loud acclamations; ink and paper were called for; and the young madman immediately drew up, in very good French, and with magisterial dignity, a document too scandalously burlesque for me to insert here, though I have a copy. It was thrice read by the author before the meeting, with a loud emphatical voice, and was received with the most flattering marks of approbation.
Such was the scene, of which I have perhaps already recounted too much, that I witnessed yesterday in one of the best-frequented taverns of Moscow. It was the day after the agreeable dinner party in the pretty pavilion of ———. In vain is uniformity the law of the state: nature lives on variety, and knows how, at all costs, to obtain her wants.
I have spared the reader many details, and greatly moderated the expression of those which I have inflicted upon him. If I had been more exact, I should not be read. Montaigne, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and many other great describers, would chasten their style if they wrote in our age; how much more carefully, then, should they who have not the same right to independence watch over their words and allusions. The prudery of the present day, if not respectable, is at least formidable. Virtue blushes; but hypocrisy loudly exclaims.
The captain of the troop of debauchees, whose headquarters is the tavern before noticed, is endowed with so singular an elegance, his bearing is so distinguished, his person so agreeable, there is so much good taste even in his follies, so much kindly feeling painted on his countenance, so much nobleness in his manner, and even in his wildest language, that I pity more than I blame him. He rules from a high elevation the companions of his excesses; he has no appearance of being born for bad company; and it is impossible to avoid feeling a deep interest in him, although he is, in great part, responsible for the errors of his imitators. Superiority, even in evil, always exerts its influence.
He had engaged me today to accompany him on an excursion into the country, which was to occupy two days. But I have just been to find him in his usual retreat, in order to excuse myself. I pleaded the necessity of hastening my journey to Nizhny, and obtained my release. Before however leaving him to the course of folly which is dragging him onwards, I must describe the scene that was prepared for me in the court of the tavern, into which they obliged me to descend to view the decampment of this horde of libertines. The farewell was a true bacchanal.
Imagine a dozen young men already more than half drunk, loudly disputing with one another respecting their seats in three calèches, each drawn by four horses. A group of lookers-on, the tavern-keeper at their head, followed by all the servants of the house and stables, admired, envied, and ridiculed —although this last was done under the cloak of much outward reverence; meanwhile the leader of the band, standing up in his open carriage, played his part, and ruled, by voice and gesture, with unaffected gravity. There was placed at his feet a bucket, or rather a large tub, full of champagne bottles in ice. This species of portable cellar was the provision for the journey,—to refresh his throat, as he said, when the dust of the road was troublesome. One of his adjutants, whom he called the general of the corks, had already opened two or three bottles; and the young madman was dispensing huge goblets of the costly wine, the best champagne to be had in Moscow, to the bystanders, as a parting libation. Two cups, quickly emptied and incessantly replenished by his most zealous satellite, the general of the corks, were in his hands. He drank one, and offered the other to the nearest bystander. His servants were all clothed in grand livery, with the exception of the coachman, a young serf whom he had recently brought from his estates. This man was dressed in a most costly manner, far more remarkable in its apparent simplicity than the gold-lace trappings of the other servants. He had on a shirt of precious silken tissue, brought from Persia, and above it a caftan of the finest cashmere, bordered with beautiful velvet, which, opening at the breast, displayed the shirt, plaited in folds so small as to be scarcely perceptible. The dandies of Petersburg like the youngest and handsomest of their people to be thus dressed on days of ceremony. The rest of the costume corresponded with this luxury. The boots, of fine Torzhok leather, embroidered with flowers in gold and silver thread, glittered at the feet of the rustic, who seemed dazzled with his own splendor, and was so perfumed that I was almost overcome with the essences exhaled from his hair, beard, and clothes at the distance of several feet from the carriage.
After having drunk with the whole tavern, the young noble leant towards the man thus decked out, and presented him with a foaming cup, saying, “Drink.” The poor, gilded muzhik was, in his inexperience, at a loss how to act. “Drink, I say,” continued his master (this was translated to me); “drink, you rascal: it is not to you I give this champagne, but to your horses, who will not have strength to gallop the whole journey if the coachman is not drunk”: upon which the whole assembly laughed and loudly cheered. The coachman was soon persuaded: he was already in the third bumper when his master gave the signal to start, which he did not do till he had renewed to me, with a charming politeness, his regret at having been unable to persuade me to accompany him on this party of pleasure. He appeared so distingué, that, while he spoke, I forgot the place and scene, and fancied myself at Versailles in the time of Louis XIV.
At last he departed for the château, where he is to spend three days. These gentlemen call such an excursion a summer hunt.
We may easily guess how they relieve themselves in the country from the ennui of town life—by continuing the same thing; by pursuing the same career; by reviving the scenes of Moscow, except, at least, that they introduce new figurantes upon the boards. They carry with them, in these journeys, cargoes of engravings of the most celebrated pictures of France and Italy, to furnish them with subjects for tableaux vivants, which they cause to be represented with certain modifications of costume.
The villages, and all that they contain, are their own; so that it may easily be supposed the privilege of the noblemen in Russia extends further than at the opéra-comique of Paris.
The ——— Tavern, open to all the world, is situated in one of the public squares of the city, a few steps only from a guard-house full of Cossacks, whose stiff bearing and severely gloomy air would impart to foreigners the idea of a country where no one dares to laugh even innocently.
As I have imposed upon myself the duty of communicating the ideas that I have formed of this land, I feel called upon to add to the picture already sketched, a few new specimens of the conversation of the parties already brought before the reader.
One boasted of himself and his brothers being the sons of the footmen and the coachmen of their reputed father; and he drank, and made the guests drink, to the health of all his unknown parents. Another claimed the honor of being brother (on the father’s side) of all the maids of his mother.
Many of these vile boasts are no doubt made for the sake of talking: but to invent such infamies in order to glory in them, shows a corruption of mind that proves wickedness to the very core—wickedness worse even than that exhibited in the mad actions of these libertines.
According to them, the tradesmen’s wives in Moscow are no better than the women of rank.
During the months that their husbands go to the fair of Nizhny, the officers of the garrison take special care not to leave the city. This is the season of easy assignations. The ladies are generally accompanied to the place of rendezvous by some respectable relation, to whose care their absent husbands have confided them. The goodwill and silence of these family duennas have also to be paid for. Gallantry of this kind cannot be excused as a love affair: there is no love without bashful modesty,—such is the sentence pronounced from all eternity against women who cheat themselves of happiness, and who degrade instead of purifying themselves by tenderness. The defenders of the Russians pretend that at Moscow the women have no lovers: I agree with them: some other term must be employed to designate the friends whose intimacy they seek in the absence of their husbands.
I repeat that I am disposed to doubt many things of this kind that are told to me; but I cannot doubt that they are related pleasantly and complacently to the first newly arrived foreigner; and the air of triumph in the narrator seems to say—We also, you see, are civilized!
The more I consider these debauchees’ manner of life, the more I wonder at the social position—to use the language of the day—which they here preserve, notwithstanding conduct that in any other land would shut all doors against them. I cannot tell how such notorious offenders are treated in their own families; but I can testify that, in public, everyone pays them peculiar deference: their appearance is the signal for general hilarity; their company is the delight even of elderly men, who do not imitate them, but who certainly encourage them.
In observing the general reception which they receive, I ask myself what a person should here do to lose credit and character.
By a procedure altogether contrary to that observable among free people, whose manners become more puritanical, if not more pure, in proportion as democracy gains ground in the constitution, corruptness is here confounded with liberal institutions; and distinguished men of bad character are admired as is with us a talented opposition or minority. The young Prince ——— did not commence his career as a libertine until after finishing a three years’ exile at the Caucasus, where the climate ruined his health. It was immediately after leaving school that he incurred this penalty for having broken the windowpanes of some shops in Petersburg. The government, having determined to see a political intention in this harmless riot, has, by its excessive severity, converted a hair-brained youth, while yet a child, into a profligate, lost to his country, his family, and himself. Such are the aberrations into which despotism—that most immoral of governments— can drive the minds of men.
Here all revolt appears legitimate; revolt even against reason and against God! Where order is oppressive, disorder has its martyrs. A Lovelace, a Don Juan, or yet worse if it were possible, would be viewed as a kind of liberator, merely because he had incurred legal punishments. The blame can only fall on the judge. People here avow their hatred of morals just as others would elsewhere say, “I detest arbitrary government.”
I brought with me to Russia a preconceived opinion, which I possess no longer. I believed, with many others, that autocracy derived its chief strength from the equality which it caused to reign beneath it. But this equality is an illusion. I said, and heard it said, that when one man is all-powerful, the others are all equal, that is, all equally nullities; which equality, if not a happiness, is a consolation. The argument was too logical to prove practically true. There is no such thing as absolute power in the world; there are arbitrary and capricious powers; but, however outrageous they may become, they are never heavy enough to establish perfect equality among their subjects.
The Emperor Nicholas can do everything. But if he often did all that he could do, he would not retain this power very long. So long, therefore, as he forbears, the condition of the nobleman is very different from that of the muzhik or the tradesman whom he ruins. I maintain that there is at this day, in Russia, more real inequality in the conditions of men than in any other European land.
The circumstances of human societies are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation. I can see reigning under the emperor, among the castes which constitute his empire, hatreds which have their source solely in the abuses of secondary power.
In general, the men here use a very soft and specious language. They will tell you with the most benign air that the Russian serfs are the happiest peasants upon earth. Do not listen to them, they deceive you: many families of serfs in distant cantons suffer even from hunger; many perish under poverty and ill-treatment. In every class in Russia humanity suffers; and the men who are sold with the land suffer more than the others. It will be pretended that they are protected by a legal right to the necessaries of life; such right is but a mockery for those who have no means of enforcing it.
It will be further said that it is the interest of the nobles to relieve the wants of their peasants. But does every man always understand his interests? Among us, those who act foolishly lose their fortunes, and there is the end of it; but here, as the fortune of man consists in the life of a number of men, he who mismanages his property may cause whole villages to perish of famine. The government, when attracted by too glaring excesses, sometimes puts the unprincipled nobleman under guardianship; but this ever-tardy step does not restore the dead. The mass of sufferings and unknown iniquities that must be produced by such manners under such a constitution, with so great distances and so dreadful a climate, may be easily imagined. It is difficult to breathe freely in Russia when we think of all these miseries.
The nobleman has, in the government of his estates, the same difficulties to contend with, as regards the distances of places, the ignorance of facts, the influence of customs, and the intrigues of subalterns, that the emperor has in his wider sphere of action; but the nobleman has, in addition, temptations that are more difficult to resist; for being less exposed to public view, he is less controlled by public opinion and by the eye of Europe. From this firmly established order, or rather disorder of things, there result inequalities, caprices, and injustices, unknown to societies where the law alone can change the relations of society.
It is not correct, then, to say that the force of despotism lies in the equality of its victims; it lies only in the ignorance of liberty and in the fear of tyranny. The power of an absolute master is a monster ever ready to give birth to a yet greater— the tyranny of the people.
It is true that democratic anarchy never lasts; whilst the regularity produced by the abuses of autocracy are perpetuated from generation to generation.
Military discipline, applied to the government of a state, is the powerful means of oppression, which constitutes, far more than the fiction of equality, the absolute power of the Russian sovereign. But this formidable force will sometimes turn against those who employ it. Such are the evils which incessantly menace Russia,—popular anarchy carried to its most frightful excess, if the nation revolt, and the prolongation of tyranny, applied with more or less rigor according to times and circumstances, if she continue in her obedience.
Duly to appreciate the difficulties in the political position of this country, we must not forget that the more ignorant the people are, and the longer they have been patient, the more likely is their vengeance to be dreadful. A government which wields power by maintaining ignorance, is more terrible than stable: a feeling of uneasiness in the nation—a degraded brutality in the army—terror around the administration, a terror shared even by those who govern—servility in the church—hypocrisy in the nobility—ignorance and misery among the people—and Siberia for them all: such is the land as it has been made by necessity, history, nature, and a Providence ever impenetrable in its designs.
And it is with so decayed a body that this giant scarcely yet emerged out of Asia, endeavors now to influence by his weight the balance of European policy, and strives to rule in the councils of the West, without taking into account the progress that European diplomacy has made in sincerity during the last thirty years!
At Petersburg, to lie is still to perform the part of a good citizen; to speak the truth, even in apparently unimportant matters, is to conspire. You would lose the favor of the emperor, if you were to observe that he had a head cold.
But once for all, what is it that can have induced this badly armed colossus to come to fight, or at least to struggle, in the arena of ideas with which it does not sympathize—of interests which do not yet exist for it?
Simply the caprice of its masters, and the vainglory of a few traveled noblemen. Unlucky vanity of parvenus, which has enticed the government to run blindfold against difficulties that have caused modern communities to recoil backwards, and that have made them regret the era of political wars, the only wars known in former times!
This country is the martyr of an ambition which it scarcely understands; and, all wounded as it is, it strives to maintain a calm, imposing air. What a part has its head to sustain. To defend by continual artifices a glory built only upon fictions, or at least, on nothing more than hopes!
I leave tomorrow for Nizhny. Were I to prolong my stay in Moscow, I should not see this fair, which is drawing to a close. I shall not conclude the present chapter until after my return this evening from Petrovsky, where I am going to hear the Russian Gypsies.
I have been selecting a room in the hotel, which I shall continue to keep during my absence at Nizhny; having made it a hiding place for my papers: for I dare not venture on the road to Kazan with all that I have written since I left Petersburg; and I know no one here to whom I should like to confide these dangerous chapters. Exactness in the recital of facts, independence in the judgments formed, truth, in short, is more suspicious than anything else in Russia: it is truth which peoples Siberia, not, however, to the exclusion of robbery and murder, an association which frightfully aggravates the fate of political offenders.
I have returned from Petrovsky, where I saw the dancing-hall, which is beautiful; it is called, I believe, the Vauxhall. Before the opening of the ball, which appeared a dull affair, I was taken to hear the Russian Gypsies. Their wild and impassioned song has some distant resemblance to that of the Spanish gitanos. The melodies of the North are less lively, less voluptuous, than those of Andalusia, but they produce a more profoundly pensive impression. There are some which mean to be gay, but they are more melancholy than the others. The Gypsies of Moscow sing, without instruments, pieces which possess originality; but when the meaning of the words that accompany this expressive and national music is not understood, much of the effect is lost.
There is also at Moscow a French theater, where M. Hervet, whose mother had a name in Paris, plays the parts of bouffe very naturally. I saw Michel Perrin given by this actor with a simplicity and a gusto which greatly pleased me. I am ignorant how far the Russians understand our theater: I do not put much faith in the pleasure which they appear to feel on seeing representations of French comedies; they have so fine a tact that they guess the fashion before it is proclaimed to them; this spares them the humiliation of owning that they follow it. The delicacy of their ear, and the varied inflections of the vowels, the multiplicity of the consonants, and the numerous hissing sounds in which they are exercised in speaking their own tongue, accustom them from infancy to master all the difficulties of pronunciation. Those, even, who only know a few words of French, pronounce them as we do. This often deceives us: we imagine that they understand our language as well as they speak it, which is a great error. The small number who have traveled, or have been born in a rank where education is necessarily carefully directed, alone understand the niceties of Parisian intellectual conversation. Our delicate strokes of wit are lost on the mass. We distrust other foreigners, because their accent of our language is disagreeable, and appears to us ridiculous; and yet, notwithstanding the labor with which they speak it, they understand us better and less superficially than the Russians, whose soft and imperceptible cantilène at first deceives us. As soon as they begin to talk carelessly, to relate a story, or to minutely describe a personal impression, the illusion ceases, and the deception is discovered. But they are the cleverest people in the world at concealing their deficiencies: in intimate society this diplomatic talent is wearisome.
A Russian showed me yesterday, in his cabinet, a little portable library, which struck me as a model of good taste. I approached the collection to open a volume the appearance of which had attracted me; it was an Arabic manuscript, bound in old parchment. “You are greatly to be envied; you understand Arabic?” I said to the master of the house. “No,” he answered; “but I always have every kind of book around me: it sets off a room, you know.”
Scarcely had this ingenuous confession escaped him than the involuntary expression of my face caused him to perceive that he had forgotten himself; whereupon, feeling very sure of my ignorance, he set about translating to me a few pretended passages of the manuscript, and did it with a volubility, a fluency, and an address, which would have deceived me, had not his previous dissimulation, and the embarrassment which he betrayed on my first perceiving it, put me on my guard. I clearly saw that he wished to obliterate the effect of his frank avowal, and to impress me with the idea, without his actually stating it, that in making such confession he had only been joking. The artifice, skillful as it was, failed in its object.
These are the childish stratagems of a people whose restless self-love urges them to a rivalry with the civilization of more ancient nations.
There is no kind of artifice or falsehood of which their devouring vanity is not capable, in the hope that we shall be induced to say, on returning to our several countries, “It is a great mistake to call those people the barbarians of the North.” This appellation is never out of their heads; they remind strangers of it on every occasion with an ironical humility; and they do not perceive that their very susceptibility on the point furnishes their detractors with arms against them.
I have hired one of the carriages of the country to travel in to Nizhny, in order to save my own: it is a species of tarantasse on springs,[1] but scarcely more substantial than my calèche. This was the remark of a person who has just been to aid me in expediting my departure. “You alarm me,” I replied; “for I am tired of breaking down at every stage.”
“For a long journey I should advise you to get another, if, at least, one could be found in Moscow at the present season: but the trip is so short that this will serve your purpose.”
This short trip, including the return, and the detour that I propose making by Troitsa and Yaroslavl, is one of four hundred leagues, for one hundred and fifty of which, the roads are, I am told, detestable, abounding with logs and stumps of trees buried in the mud, deep sands full of loose stones, &c. &c. By the manner in which the Russians speak of distances, it is easy to perceive they inhabit a land large as Europe, and of which Siberia is a part.
One of the most attractive traits in their character, at least in my opinion, is their dislike to objections: they refuse to recognize either difficulties or obstacles.
The common people participate in this, it may be, a little gasconading humor, of the nobility. With his hatchet, which he never lays aside, a Russian peasant triumphs over accidents and predicaments that would altogether stop the villagers of our own provinces; and he answers, “yes,” to everything that is demanded of him.
[1]The real tarantasse is the body of a calèche placed, without springs, on two shafts, which join together the axletrees of the front and hind wheels.