Marshal Paskiewitch can attest the truth of these
AUTOCRACIES AXD DEMOCRACIES. 285
remarks: they do not dare to ruin him, but they do all that is possible to make him a cipher. Before this journey, my ideas of despotism were suggested by my study of society in Austria and Prussia. I had forgotten that those states are despotic only in name, and that manners and customs there serve to correct institutions. In Germany, the people despotically governed appeared to me the happiest upon earth : a despotism thus mitigated by the mildness of its customs caused me to think that despotism was not after all so detestable a thing as our philosophers had pretended. I did not then know what absolute government was among a nation of slaves.
It is to Russia that we must go in order to see the results of this terriljle combination of the mind and science of Europe with the genius of Asia — a combination which is so much the more formidable as it is likely to last; for ambition and fear, passions which elsewhere ruin men by causing them to speak too much, here engender silence. This forced silence produces a forced calm, an apparent order, more strong and more frightful than anarchy itself. I admit but few fundamental rules in politics, because in the art of government I believe more in the efficacy of circumstances than of principles, but my indifference does not go so far as to tolerate institutions which necessarily exclude all dignity of human character in their objects.
Perhaps an independent judiciary and a powerful aristocracy would instil a calm and an elevation into the Russian character, and render the land happy ; but I do not believe the emperor dreams of such modes
28f)STATE OF ТПЕ
of ameliorating the condition of his people. However superior a man may be, he does not voluntarily renounee his own way of doing good to others.
But what right have we to reproach the Emperor of Russia with his love of authority ? Is not the genius of revolution as tyrannical at Paris as the genius of despotism at Petersburg ?
At the same time, we owe it to ourselves to make here a restriction that will show the difference between the social state of the two countries. In France, revolutionary tyranny is an evil belonging to a state of transition ; in Russia, despotic tyranny is permanent.
It is fortunate for the reader that I have wandered from the subject with which I commenced my chapter, namely, the illuminated theatre, the gala representation, and the translated pantomime (a Russian expression) of a French ballet. Had I continued my description, he might have experienced a little of the ennui with which this dramatic solemnity inspired me ; for the dancing at the Opera of Petersburg, without ]Iadamoiselle Taglioni, is as cold and stiff as the dances of all European theatres when they are not executed by the first talents in the world ; and the presence of the court encourages neither actors nor audience, for, before the sovereign, it is not permitted to applaud. The arts, disciplined as they are in Russia, produce interludes which do very well to amuse soldiers during the intervals of military command. They are magnificent, royal, imperial— but they are not really amusing. Here the artistes obtain wealth, but they do not draw inspiration:
ARTS IN PETERSBURG.
287
riches and elegance foster talents; but that which is yet more indispensable to them is the good taste and the freedom of public opinion.
The Russians have not yet reached the point of civilisation at which there is real enjoyment of the arts. At present their enthusiasm on these subjects is pure vanity; it is a pretence, like their passion for classic architecture. Let these people look within themselves, let them listen to their primitive genius, and, if they have received from Heaven a perception of the beauties of art, they will give up copying, in order to produce what God and nature expect from them. So far, all their magnificent works together will never be equivalent, in the eyes of those few real amateurs of the beautiful who vegetate at Petersburg, to a sojourn in Paris, or a journey in Italy.
The Opera-house is built on the plan of those of ]Blan and Naples ; but these latter are more stately, and more harmonious in their proportions, than any thing of the kind which I have yet seen in Russia.
288 POPULATION OF PETERSBURG.
CHAP. XIV,
THE POPULATION OF PETERSBURG.SOLITUDE OF THE STREETS,—
THE ARCHITECTURE. PLACE DU CAROUSEL IN PARIS. SQUARE
OF THE GRAND DDKE AT FLORENCE. THE PERSPECTIVE
NEWSKI. PAVEMENTS. EFFECTS OF THE THAW.INTERIOR
OF THE HOUSES THE BEDS. VISIT TO PRINCE . —
BOWERS IN THE DRAWING-ROOMS. BEAUTY OF THE SLAVONIAN-
MEN. RUSSIAN COACHMEN AND POSTILLIONS. THE FELD-
JÄGER. THE POETICAL ASPECT OF THE LAND. — CONTRAST BE
TWEEN MEN AND THINGS. ARCHITECTURE OF THE CHURCHES.
— A GENERAL VIEW OF PETERSBURG. — PICTURESQUE AND BEAUTIFUL NOTWITHSTANDING ITS ARCHITECTURE. — NATURE BEAUTIFUL EVEN NEAR THE POLE. — ANTIPATHY BETWEEN THE TEUTONIC AND RUSSIAN RACES. — ITS EFFECTS IN POLAND.—
RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN THE RUSSIANS AND SPANIARDSHEAT
OF THE SUMMER. FUEL IN PETERSBURG. —ADDRESS OF THE
RUSSIAN PEOPLE. THE DESIGNS OF PROVIDENCE. — FUTURE
SCARCITY OF FUEL IN RUSSIA.WANT OF INVENTIVE MECHANICAL
GENIUS AMONG THE PEOPLE.THE ROMANS OF THE NORTH.
RELATION BETWEEN PEOPLE AND THEIR GOVERNMENTS. — THE PLASTERERS. — UGLINESS AND DIRTINESS OF THE WOMEN OF THE LOWER CLASSES. — THEIR DISPROPORTION IN POINT OF NUMBER, AND ITS RESULT. —ASIATIC MANNERS. — RUSSIAN POLITENESS.
The population of Petersburg amounts to four hundred and fifty thousand souls, besides the garrison. So say patriotic Russians: but those who are well informed, and who consequently pass here for evil-disposed persons, assure me that it does not reach to four hundred thousand, in which number the garrison is included. Small houses of wood occupy the quarters beyond those immense spaces, called squares, that form the centre of the city.
SOLITUDE OF THE STREETS.289
The Russians, descended from a junction of various warlike and wandering tribes, have not yet quite forgotten the life of the bivouac. Petersburg is the head-quarters of an army, and not the capital of a nation. However magnificent this military city may be, it appears bare and naked in the eyes of one from the West of Europe.
" The distances are the curse of Russia," said the emperor; and it is a remark the justice of which may be verified even in the streets of Petersburg. Thus, it is not for the sake of display that people's carriages are drawn by four horses: here every visit is an excursion. The Russian horses, though full of mettle and sinew, have not so much bone as ours : the badness of the pavement soon tires them; two horses could not easily draw for any considerable time an ordinary carriage in the streets of Petersburg. To drive four is therefore an object of the first necessity to those who wish to live in the fashionable world. Among the Russians, however, all have not the right to attach four horses to their carriage. This permission is only accorded to persons of a certain rank.
After leaving the centre of the city the stranger loses himself in vaguely-defined lines of road, bordered by barracks which seem as though destined for the temporary accommodation of labourers employed in some great work; they are the magazines of forage, clothes, and of other supplies for the military. The grass grows in these soi-disant and always deserted streets.
So many peristyles have been added to houses, so many porticoes adorn the barracks that here re-
vol. i.о
290 ARCHITECTURE IN ST. PETERSBURG.
present palaces, so great a passion for borrowed decorations has presided over the construction of this temporary capital, that I count fewer men than columns in the squares of Petersburg, always silent and melancholy, by reason of their size alone, and their unchangeable regularity. The line and rule figure well the manner in which absolute sovereigns view things, and straight angles may be said to be the blocks over which despotic architecture stumbles. Living architecture, if the expression may be permitted, will not rise at command. It springs
, so to speak, from itself, and is an involuntary creation of the genius and wants of a people. To make a great nation is infallibly to create an architecture. I should not be astonished if some one succeeded in proving that there are as many original styles of architecture as mother tongues. The mania for rules of symmetry is not, however, peculiar to the Russians: with us, it is a legacy of the Empire. Had it not been for this bad taste of the Parisian architects, we should, long since, have been presented with some sensible plan for ornamenting and finishing our monstrous Place du Carrousel, but the necessity for parallels stops every thing.
TThen architects of genius successively contributed their efforts to making the square of the Grand Duke at Florence one of the most beautiful objects in the world, they were not tyrannised over by a passion for straight lines and arbitrary proportions: they conceived the idea of the beautiful in all its liberty, without reference to mathematical diagrams. It has been a want of the instinctive perceptions of art, and the free creations of fancy working upon popular
THE PEESPECTIVE NEWSKI.291
data, which has caused a mathematical eye to preside over the creation of Petersburg. One can never for a moment forget, in surveying tliis abode of monuments without genius, that it is a city built by a man, and not by a people. The conceptions appear limited, though their dimensions are enormous.
The principal street in Petersburg is the Perspective Ncwski, one of the three lines which meet at the palace of the Admiralty. These three lines divide into five regular parts the southern side of the city, which, like Versailles, takes the form of a fan. It is more modern than the port, built near to the islands by Peter the Great.
The Perspective Newski deserves to be described in detail. It is a beautiful street, a league in length, and as broad as our Boulevards. In several places trees have been planted, as unfortunate in their position as those of Paris. It serves as a promenade and rendezvous for all the idlers of the city. Of these, hoAvever, there are but few, for here people seldom move for the sake of moving; each step that is taken has an object independent of pleasure. To carry an order—to pay their court—to obey their master, whoever he may be — such are the influences which put in motion the greater part of the population of Petersburg and of the empire.
Large uneven flint-stones form the execrable pavement of this boulevard called the Perspective : but here, as in some other principal streets, there are deeply imbedded in the midst of the stones, blocks of fir-wood in the shape of cubes, and sometimes of octagons, over which the carriages glide swiftly. Each of these pavements consists of tAvo lines, two or three о 2
292JELOGNAIA STREET.
feet broad, and separated by a stripe of the ordinary flint pavement on which the shaft horse runs. Two of these roads, that is to say, four lines of wood, run the length of the Perspective Newski, one on the left, the other on the right of the street, without touching the houses, from which they are separated by raised flags for the foot passengers. This beautiful and vast perspective extends—gradually becoming less populous, less beautiful, and more melancholy —to the undetermined limits of the habitable city, in other words, to the confines of the Asiatic barbarism by which Petersburg is always besieged; for the desert may be found at the extremity of its most superb streets.
A little below the bridge of AniskofF is the street named Jelognaia, which leads to a desert called the square of Alexander. I doubt whether the Emperor Nicholas has ever seen this street. The superb city created by Peter the Great, and beautified by Catherine II., and other sovereigns, is lost at last in an unsightly mass of stalls and workshops, confused heaps of edifices without name, large squares without design, and in which the natural slovenliness and the inborn filthiness of the people of the land, have for one hundred years permitted every species of dirt and rubbish to accumulate. Such filth, heaped up year after year in the Russian cities, serves as a protestation against the pretension of the German princes, who flatter themselves that they have thoroughly polished the Slavonian nations. The primitive character of these people, however disguised it may have been by the yoke imposed upon it, at least shows itself in some of the corners of the cities ; and if they
EFFECTS OF THE THAW.—HOUSES.293
have eities it is not because they wanted them, but because their military masters compel them to emulate the West of Europe. These unfortunate animals, placed in the eage of European civilisation, are victims of the mania, or rather of the ambition of the Czars, conquerors of the future world, and who well know that before subjugating us, they must imitate us.
Nothing, I am told, can give any idea of the state of the Petersburg streets during the melting of the snow. Within the fortnight which follows the breaking up of the iee on the Neva, all the bridges are earned away, and the communications between different quarters of the eity are, during several days, interrupted, and often entirely broken off. The streets then become the beds of furious torrents: few political erises eould cause so much damage as this annual revolt of nature against an incomplete and impracticable civilisation. Since the thaw at Petersburg has been described to me I complain no longer of the pavements, detestable though they be ; for I remember they have to be renewed every year.
After mid-day, the Perspective Newski, the grand square of the palace, the quays and the bridges are enlivened by a considerable number of carriages of various kinds and curious forms : this rather relieves the habitual dulness of the most monotonous capital in Europe. The interior of the houses is equally gloomy, for notwithstanding the magnificence of certain apartments destined to receive company, and furnished in the English style, there may be seen in the baek ground various. signs of a want of cleanliness and order which at once reminds the observer of Asia.
о 3
294BEDS.—VISIT TO PErøCE .
The articles of furniture least used in a Russian house are beds. The women servants sleep in recesses similar to those in the old fashioned porters' lodges in France; whilst the men roll themselves up on the stairs, in the vestibule, and even, it is said, in the saloons upon the cushions, which they place on the floor for the night.
This morning I paid a visit to Prince. He
is a great nobleman, but decayed in estate, infirm and dropsical. He suffers so greatly that he cannot get up, and yet he has no bed on which to lie, — I mean to say, nothing which would be called a bed in lands where civilisation is of older date. He lives in the house of his sister, who is absent. Alone in this naked palace, he passes the night on a wooden board covered with a carpet and some pillows. In all the Russian houses that I have entered, I have observed that the screen is as necessary to the bed of the Slavonians as musk is to their persons:—intense dirtiness does not always exclude external elegance. Sometimes however they have a bed for show, an object of luxury, which is maintained through respect for European fashions, but of which no use is ever made. The residences of several Russians of taste are distinguished by a peculiar ornament — a little artificial garden in the corner of the drawin£f-room. Three long- stands of flowers are ranged round a window so as to form a little verdant saloon or kind of chiosc, which reminds one of those in gardens. The stands are surmounted by an ornamented balustrade, which rises to about the height of a man, and is overgrown with ivy or other climbing plants that twist around the trellis work, and produce
BEAUTY OP THE SLAVONIAN MEN. 295
a cool agreeable effect in the midst of a vast apartment blazing with gilt work) and crowded with furniture. In this little verdant boudoir are placed a table and a few chairs: the lady of the house is generally seated there, and there is room for two or three others, for whom it forms a retreat, which, if not very secret, is secluded enough ,to please the imagination.
The effect of this household thicket is not more pleasing than the idea is sensible in a land where secrecy should preside over all private conversation. The usage is, I believe, imported from Asia.
I should not be surprised to see the artificial gardens of the Russian saloons introduce
d some day into the houses of Paris. They would not disfigure the abode of the most fashionable female politician in France. I should rejoice to see the innovation, were it only to cope with the Anglo-manes who have inflicted an injury on good taste and the real genius of the French, which I shall never pardon. The Slavonians, when they are handsome, are lightly and elegantly formed, though their appearance still conveys the idea of strength. Their eyes are аБ oval in shape, and have the deceitful, furtive glance of the Asiatics. Whether dark or blue, they are invariably clear and lively, constantly in motion, and when they laugh their expression is very graceful.
This people, grave by necessity rather than by nature, scarcely dare to laugh except with their eyes; but, words being thus repressed, these eyes, animated by silence, supply the place of eloquence, so strongly is passion depicted in their expression. That expression is almost always intelligent, and sometimes gentle, О 4
296 RUSSIAN COACHMEN AND POSTILLIONS.
though more often anxious even to a degree of wildness that conveys the idea of some animal of the deer kind caught in the toils.
The Slavonians, born to guide a chariot, show good blood, like the horses which they drive. Their strange appearance and the activity of their steeds render it amusing to traverse the streets of Petersburg. Thanks to its inhabitants, and, in despite of its architects, this city resembles no other in Europe.
Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia Page 28
