OUR ROAD follows the course of the Volga. Yesterday, I crossed that river at Yarovslavl, and I have recrossed it today at Kuniche. In many places its two banks differ in physical aspect. On one side, stretches an immense plain level with the water, on the other, the bank forms an almost perpendicular wall, sometimes a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet high. This rampart or natural embankment, which extends a considerable way backwards from the river before it again loses itself in gradual slopes upon the plain, is clothed with willows and birch, and is broken, from distance to distance, by the river’s tributaries. These watercourses form deep furrows in the bank, which they have to pierce in order to reach the mighty stream. The bank, thus broken, resembles a mountain chain, and the furrows are real valleys, across which the road parallel to the Volga is carried.
The Russian coachmen, although so skillful on level ground, are, on mountainous roads, the most dangerous drivers in the world. That on which we are now traveling puts their prudence and my sangfroid to the full proof. The continual ascending and descending would, if the declivities were longer, be, under their mode of driving, extremely perilous. The coachman commences the descent at a foot’s pace; when about a third of it is got over, which generally brings you to the steepest part, man and horses begin mutually to weary of their unaccustomed prudence; the latter get into a gallop, the carriage rolls after with constantly increasing velocity until it reaches the middle of a bridge of planks, frail, disjointed, uneven, and moveable: for they are placed, but not fixed, upon their supporting beams, and under the poles which serve as rails to the trembling structure. A bridge of this kind is found at the bottom of each ravine. If the horses, in their wild gallop, do not bring the carriage straight on the planks, it will be overturned. The life of the traveler depends entirely upon the address of the driver, and upon the legs of four spirited, but weak and tired animals. If a horse stumbles, or a strap breaks, all is lost.
At the third repetition of this hazardous game, I desired that the wheel should be locked, but there was no drag on my Moscow carriage; I had been told that it was never necessary to lock the wheel in Russia. To supply the want, it was necessary to detach one of the horses, and to use its traces. I have ordered the same operation to be repeated, to the great astonishment of the drivers, each time that the length and steepness of the declivity have seemed to threaten the safety of the carriage, the frailness of which I have already only too often experienced. The coachmen, astonished as they appear, do not make the least objection to my strange fancies, nor in any way oppose the orders that I give them through the Feldjäger; but I can read their thoughts in their faces. The presence of a government servant procures me everywhere marks of deference: such a proof of favor on the part of the authorities renders me an object of respect among the people. I would not advise any stranger, so little experienced as I am, to risk himself without such a guide on Russian roads, especially those of the interior.
When the traveler has been so fortunate as to cross safely the bottom of the ravine, the next difficulty is to climb the opposite bank. The Russian horses know no other pace but the gallop: if the road is not heavy, the hill short, and the carriage light, they bring you to the summit in a moment; but if the ascent is long, or the road, as is frequently the case, sandy, they soon come to a stop, panting and exhausted, in the middle of their task; turn stupid under the application of the whip, kick, and run back, to the imminent danger of throwing the carriage into the ditches; while at each dilemma of the kind I say to myself, in derision of the pretensions of the Russians, There are no distances in Russia!
The coachmen, however adroit they may be, want experience when they leave their native plains; they do not understand the proper manner of getting horses over mountains. At the first signs of hesitation everybody alights; the servants push at the wheels; at every few steps the horses stop to breathe, when the men rub their nostrils with vinegar, and encourage them with voice and hand. In this manner, aided by strokes of the whip, generally applied with admirable judgment, we gain the summit of these formidable ridges, which in other countries would be climbed without difficulty. The road from Yaroslavl to Nizhny is one of the most hilly in the interior of Russia; and yet I do not believe that the natural rampart or quay that crowns the banks of the Volga exceeds the height of a house of five or six stories in Paris.
There is one danger when journeying in Russia which could hardly be foreseen—the danger the traveler runs of breaking his head against the cover of his calèche. He who intends visiting the country need not smile, for the peril is actual and imminent. The logs of which the bridges and often the roads themselves are made, render the carriages liable to shocks so violent, that the traveler, when not warned, would be thrown out if his equipage were open, and would break his neck if the head were up. It is therefore advisable, in Russia, to procure a carriage the top of which is as lofty as possible. A bottle of seltzer water, substantial as those bottles are, has, although well packed in hay, been broken under my seat by the violence of the jolts.
Yesterday, I slept in a post-house, where there was a want of every common convenience. My carriage is so uncomfortable, and the roads are so rough, that I cannot journey more than twenty-four hours together without suffering from violent headache, and, therefore, as I prefer a bad lodging to brain-fever, I stop wherever we may happen to be. The greatest rarity in these out-of-the-way lodgings, and indeed in all Russia, is clean linen. I carry my bed with me, but I cannot burden myself with much store of sheets; and the tablecloths which they give me at the post-houses, as substitutes, have always been in use. Yesterday, at eleven o’clock in the evening, the master of the post-house sent to a village more than a league distant to search for clean sheets on my account. I should have protested against this excess of zeal in my Feldjäger, but I did not know of it until the next morning. From the window of my kennel, by the obscured light that is called night in Russia, I could admire at leisure the eternal Roman peristyle, which, with its wooden, whitewashed pediment and its plaster pillars, adorns, on the stable side, the Russian post-houses. The constant sight of this clumsy architecture creates a nightmare that follows me from one end of the empire to the other. The classic column has become the sign of a public building in Russia: false magnificence here displays itself by the side of the most complete penury; but “comfort,” and elegance well understood, and everywhere the same, are not to be seen, either in the palaces of the wealthy, where the halls are superb, but where the bedchamber is only a screen, or yet in the huts of the peasants. There may, perhaps, be two or three exceptions to this rule in the whole empire. Even Spain appears to me less in want than Russia of objects of convenience and necessity.
Another precaution indispensable to a traveler in this country is a Russian lock. All the Slavic peasants are thieves, in the houses if not on the highway. When, therefore, you have got your luggage into the room of an inn full of different classes of people, it is necessary, before going out to walk, either to make your servants mount guard at the door, or to lock it. One of your people will be already engaged in keeping watch over the carriage; and there are no keys, nor even locks to the doors of apartments in Russian inns. The only expedient, therefore, is to be provided with staples, rings, and padlock. With these you may speedily place your property in safety. The country swarms with the most adroit and audacious of robbers. Their depredations are so frequent, that justice does not dare to be rigorous. Everything is here done by fits and starts, or with exceptions,—a capricious system, which too well accords with the ill-regulated minds of the people, who are as indifferent to equity in action as to truth in speech.
I, yesterday, visited the convent of Kostroma, and saw the apartments of Alexis Romanov and his mother, a retreat which Alexis left to ascend the throne, and to found the actual reigning dynasty. The convent was like all the others. A young monk, who had not been fasting, and who smelt of wine at a considerable distance, showed me the house. I prefer old monks with white beards, and popes with bald heads, to these young, well-fed recluses. The Treasury, also, resembled those I had seen elsewhere. Would the reader know in a few words, what is Russia? Russia is a country where the same persons and the same things are everywhere to be seen. This is so true, that on arriving at any place, we think always that we recognize persons whom we had left elsewhere.
At Kuniche, the ferryboat in which we recrossed the Volga had sides so low, that the smallest thing would have caused it to upset. Nothing has ever appeared to me more dull and gloomy than this little town, which I visited during a cold rain, accompanied with wind, that kept the inhabitants prisoners in their houses. Had the wind increased, we should have run much risk of being drowned in the river. I recollected that at Petersburg no one stirs a step to save those who fall into the Neva; and I thought, that should the same fate happen to me here, not an attempt would be made to save me by anyone on these banks, which are populous though they appear a desert, so gloomy and silent are the soil, the heavens, and the inhabitants. The life of man has little importance in the eyes of the Russians; and, judging by their melancholy air, I should say they are indifferent to their own lives as well as to those of others.
Existence is so fettered and restrained, that everyone seems to me secretly to cherish the desire of changing his abode, without possessing the power. The great have no passports, the poor no money, and all remain as they are, patient through despair, that is, as indifferent about death as about life. Resignation, which is everywhere else a virtue, is in Russia a vice, because it perpetuates the compulsory immobility of things.
The question here, is not one of political liberty, but of personal independence, of freedom of movement, and even of the expression of natural sentiment. The slaves dare only quarrel in a low voice; to be angry is one of the privileges of power. The greater the appearance of calm under this system, the more do I pity the people: tranquillity or the knout!—this is for them the condition of existence. The knout of the great is Siberia; and Siberia itself is only an exaggeration of Russia.
I am writing in the midst of a forest, many leagues from any habitation. We are stopped, in a deep bed of sand, by an accident that has happened to my carriage; and while my valet is, with the aid of a peasant whom Heaven has sent us, repairing the damage, I, who am humbled by the want of resources which I find within myself for such an occurrence, and who feel that I should only be in the way of the workmen if I attempted to assist them, take up my pen to prove the uselessness of mental culture, when man, deprived of all the accessories of civilization, is obliged to struggle, without any other resource but his own strength, against a wild nature, still armed with all the primitive power that it received from God.
As I have before said, handsome female peasants are scarce in Russia; but when they are handsome, their beauty is perfect. The oval or almond shape of their eyes imparts a peculiar expression; the eyelid is finely and delicately chiseled, but the blue of the pupil is often clouded, which reminds one of the ancient Sarmatians, as described by Tacitus: this hue gives to their veiled glances a gentleness and an innocence, the charm of which is irresistible. They possess all the vague and shadowy delicacy of the women of the North, united with the voluptuousness of the Oriental females. The expression of kindness in these ravishing creatures inspires a singular feeling,—a mixture of respect and confidence. He must visit the interior of Russia who would know the real gifts of the primitive man, and all that the refinements of society have lost for him. In this patriarchal land it is civilization which spoils the inhabitants. The Slav was naturally ingenuous, musical, and almost tenderhearted; the drilled Russian is false, tyrannical, imitative, and foolishly vain. It would take more than a century to establish an accord between the national manners and the new European ideas; supposing that, all the while, Russia was governed by enlightened princes,—friends of progress, as the expression now is. At present, the complete separation of classes makes social life a violent, immoral thing. It might be supposed that it was from this country Rousseau took the first idea of his system; for it is not even necessary to possess the resources of his magic eloquence to prove that arts and sciences have done more evil than good to the Slavs. The future will show the world whether military and political glory can compensate the Russian nation for the happiness of which their social organization deprives them.
The Russians are, in short, a resigned nation,—this simple description explains everything. The man who is deprived of liberty,—and here the definition of that word extends to natural rights and real wants,—though he may have all other advantages, is like a plant excluded from the air: in vain do you water its roots, the languishing stem produces a few leaves, but will never send forth flowers.
The spectacle now before my eyes proves to me the truth of what I have always heard respecting the Russian’s singular dexterity and industry.
A Russian peasant makes it a principle to recognize no obstacles,—I do not mean to his own desires, unhappy creature! but to the orders he receives. Aided by his inseparable hatchet, he becomes a kind of magician, who creates in a moment all that is wanted in the desert. He repairs your carriage, or, if it is beyond repair, he makes another, a kind of telega, skillfully availing himself of the remains of the old one in the construction of the new. I was advised in Moscow to travel in a tarantasse, and I should have done well to have followed that advice; for with such an equipage, there is never danger of stopping on the road. It can be repaired, and even reconstructed, by every Russian peasant.
If you wish to camp, this universal genius will build you a dwelling for the night, and one that will be preferable to the taverns in the towns. After having established you as comfortably as you can expect to be, he wraps himself in his sheepskin and sleeps at the door of your new house, of which he defends the entrance with the fidelity of a dog; or else, he will seat himself at the foot of a tree before the abode that he has erected, and, while continuing to gaze on the sky he will relieve the solitude of your lodging by national songs, the melancholy of which awakes a response in the gentlest instincts of your heart; for an innate gift of music is still one of the prerogatives of this privileged race. The idea that it would be only just that he should share with you the cabin built by his hands, will never enter his head.
I am struck with the simplicity of the ideas and sentiments of these men. God, the King of heaven; the czar, the king of earth—this is all their theory: the orders, and even the caprices, of the master, sanctioned by the obedience of the slave; this suffices for their practice. The Russian peasant believes that he owes both body and soul to his lord.
Conforming to this social devotion, he lives without joy, but not without pride; for pride is the moral element essential to the life of all intelligent beings. It takes every kind of form, even the form of humility,—that religious modesty discovered by Christians.
A Russian does not know what it is to say no to his lord, who represents to him his two other greater masters, God and the emperor; and he places all his talent, all his glory, in conquering those little difficulties of existence that are magnified, and even valued, by the lower orders of other lands, as auxiliaries in their revenge against the rich, whom they consider as enemies, because they are esteemed the happy of the earth.
The Russian serfs are too completely stripped of all the blessings of life to be envious: the men who are most to be pitied are they who no longer complain. The envious among us are those whose ambitious aims have failed: France, that land of easy living and rapid fortune-making, is a nursery of envious people. I cannot feel sympathy with the regrets, full of malice, that prey on these men, whose souls are enervated by the luxuries of life; but the patience of the peasants here, inspires me with a compassion—I had almost said, with an esteem that is profound. The political self-denial of the Russians is abject and revolting; their domestic resignation is noble and touching. The vice of the nation becomes the virtue of the individual.
The plaintive sadness of the Russian songs strikes every foreigner; but this music is not only melancholy, it is also scientific and complicated: it is composed of inspired melodies, and, at the same time, of harmonious combinations exceedingly abstruse, and that are not elsewhere attained except by study and calculation. Often, in traveling through villages, I stop to listen to pieces executed by several voices with a precision and a musical instinct that I am never tired of admiring. The performers, in these rustic quintets, guess, by intuition, the laws of counterpoint, the rules of composition, the principles of harmony, the effects of the different kinds of voice, and they disdain singing in unison. They execute series of harmonies, elaborate, unexpected, and interspersed with trills and delicate ornaments, which, if not always perfectly correct, are very superior to the national melodies heard in other lands.
The song of the Russian peasants is a nasal lamentation, not very agreeable when executed by one voice; but when sung in chorus, these complaints assume a grave, religious character, and produce effects of harmony that are surprising. I had supposed the Russian music to have been brought from Byzantium, but I am assured that it is indigenous: this will explain the profound melancholy of the airs, especially of those which affect gaiety by their vivacity of movement. If the Russians do not know how to revolt against oppression, they know how to sigh and groan under it.
Were I in the place of the emperor, I should not be content with forbidding my subjects to complain; I should also forbid them to sing, which is a disguised mode of complaining. These accents of lament are avowals, and may become accusations: so true it is that the arts themselves, under despotism, are not innocent; they are indirect protestations.
Hence, no doubt, the taste of the government and the courtiers for the works, literary or artistical, of foreigners: borrowed poetry has no roots. Among a people of slaves, when patriotic sentiments produce profound emotions, they are to be dreaded: everything that is national, including even music, becomes a means of opposition.
It is so in Russia, where, from the corners of the farthest deserts, the voice of man lifts to Heaven vengeful complaints; demanding from God the portion of happiness that is refused him upon earth. Nothing more striking reveals the habitual sufferings of the people than the mournfulness of their pleasures. The Russians have consolations, but no enjoyments. I am surprised that no one before me should have warned the government of its imprudence in allowing the people an amusement which betrays their misery and their resignation. He who is powerful enough to oppress men, should, for consistency’s sake, forbid them to sing.
I am now at the last stage on the road to Nizhny. We have reached it on three wheels, and dragging a prop of wood in the place of the fourth.
A great part of the road from Yaroslavl to Nizhny is a long garden avenue, traced almost always in a straight line, broader than the great avenue in our Champs Elysées at Paris, and flanked on either side by two smaller alleys, carpeted with turf and shaded by birch trees. The road is easy, for they drive nearly always upon the grass, except when crossing marshy tracts by means of elastic bridges; a kind of floating floors, more curious than safe either for the carriages or the horses. A road on which grows so much grass can be little frequented, and is therefore the more easily kept in repair. Yesterday, before we broke down, I was praising this road, which we were then traveling at full gallop, to my Feldjäger. “No doubt it is beautiful,” replied the individual addressed, whose figure resembles that of a wasp, whose features are sharp and dry, and whose manners are at once timid and threatening, like hatred suppressed by fear: “no doubt it is beautiful—it is the great road to Siberia.”
These words chilled me through. It is for my pleasure, I said to myself, that I travel this road: but what have been the thoughts and feelings of the many unfortunate beings, who have traveled it before me? These thoughts and feelings, evoked by the imagination, took possession of my mind. Siberia!—that Russian hell, is, with all its phantoms, incessantly before me. It has upon me the effect that the eye of the basilisk has upon the fascinated bird.
What a country is this! a plain without limits and without colors, with only here and there some few inequalities in the surface, a few fields of oats and rye, a few scattered birch and pine woods in the distance, villages built of gray boards along the lines of road; on rather more elevated sites, at every twenty, thirty, or fifty leagues, towns, the vast size of which swallows up the inhabitants, and immense, colorless rivers, dull as the heavens they reflect! Winter and death are felt to be hovering over these scenes, giving to every object a funereal hue: the terrified traveler, at the end of a few weeks, feels as if he were buried alive, and, stifling, struggles to burst his coffin lid, that leaden veil that separates him from the living.
Do not go to the North to amuse yourself, unless at least you seek your amusement in study; for there is much here to study.
I was then traveling upon the great road to Siberia, and while absorbed in the reflection it so naturally suggested, I saw in the distance a group of armed men, who had stopped under one of the side alleys of the road.
“What are those soldiers doing there?” I asked my courier.
“They are Cossacks,” he replied, “conducting exiles to Siberia!”—
It is not then, a dream, it is not the mythology of the gazettes; I see there the real unhappy beings, the actual exiles, proceeding wearily on foot to seek the land where they must die forgotten by the world, far from all that is dear to them, alone with the God who never created them for such a fate. Perhaps I have met, or shall meet, their wives or mothers: for they are not criminals; on the contrary, they are Poles —the heroes of misfortune and devotion. Tears came into my eyes as I approached these unhappy men, near to whom I dared not even stop lest I should be suspected by my Argus. Alas! before such sufferings the sentiment of my impotent compassion humiliates me, and anger rises above commiseration in my heart. I could wish to be far away from a country where the miserable creature who acts as my courier can become formidable enough to compel me, in his presence, to dissimulate the most natural feelings of my soul. In vain do I repeat to myself that, perhaps, our convicts are still worse off than the colonists of Siberia; there is, in that distant exile, a vague poetry, which adds to the severity of the sentence all the influence of the imagination; and this inhuman alliance produces a frightful result. Besides, our convicts are solemnly convicted; but a few months’ abode in Russia suffices to convince us that there are no laws there.
There were three exiles, and they were all innocent in my eyes; for under a despotism, the only criminal is the man who goes unpunished. These three convicts were escorted by six Cossacks on horseback. The head of my carriage was closed, and the nearer we approached the group, the more narrowly did the courier strive to watch the expression of my countenance. I was greatly struck with the efforts he made to persuade me that they were only simple malefactors, and that there was no political convict among them. I preserved a gloomy silence: the pains that he took to reply to my thoughts, appeared to me very significative.
Frightful sagacity of the subjects of despotism! all are spies, even as amateurs, and without compensation.
The last stages of the road to Nizhny are long and difficult, owing to the sand-beds, which get deeper and deeper,[2] until the carriages become almost buried in them. They conceal immense, movable blocks of wood and stone, very dangerous to the carriages and horses. This part of the road is bordered by forests, in which, at every half league, are encampments of Cossacks, designed to protect the journeying of the merchants who resort to the fair. Such a precaution reminds me of the Middle Ages.
My wheel is repaired, so that I hope to reach Nizhny before evening.
[1]Written at Yurevets, a small town between Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod.
[2]A chaussée is being made from Moscow to Nizhny, which will be soon completed.