Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
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RUSSIAN CRIMES AND CRUELTIES.93
Among this obedient people, the influence of social institutions is so great in every class—ideas and habits so rule over characters, that the fiercest excesses of vengeance still appear ruled by a certain degree of discipline. Murder is designed and executed in an orderly manner; no rage, no emotion, no words : a calm is preserved more terrible than the delirium of hate. They struggle with, overthrow, trample, and destroy each other, with the steady regularity of machines turning upon their pivots. This physical impassibility in the midst of scenes the most violent, this monstrous audacity in the conception and calmness in the execution, this silent passion and speechless fanaticism seem, if one might so express it, the innocence of crime. A certain order, contrary to nature, presides in this strange country over the most monstrous excesses; tyranny and revolt march in step, and perform their movements in unison.
As everything is in sympathetic accord, the immense extent of the territory does not prevent things bein£>` executed from one end of Russia to the other, with a punctuality, and a simultaneous correspondence, which is magical. If ever they should succeed in creating a real revolution among the Russian people, massacre would be performed with the regularity that marks the evolutions of a regiment. Villages would change into barracks, and organised murder would stalk forth armed from the cottages, form in line, and advance in order; in short, the Russians would prepare for pillage from Smolensk to Irkutsk, as they march to the parade in Petersburg. From so much uniformity, there results between the natural dispositions and the social habits of the people,
94 CHARACTERISTICS. OF REVOLT IN RUSSIA.
a harmony, the effects of which might become prodigious in good as in evil.
Everything is obscure in the future prospects of the world; but, assuredly, it will see strange scenes enacted before the nations by this predestined people.*
It is almost always under the influence of a blind respect for power, that the Russians disturb public order. Thus, if we are to believe what is repeated in secret, had it not been for the emperor's speech to the deputies of the peasants, the latter would not have taken up arms.
J trust that this fact, and those that I have elsewhere cited, will show the danger of inculcating liberal opinions among a population so ill-prepared to receive them. As regards political liberty, the more we love it, the greater care should we take to avoid pronouncing its name before those who would only compromise a holy cause by their manner of defending it. It is this which induces me to doubt of the truth of the imprudent reply attributed to the emperor. That prince knows, better than any one, the character of his people, and I cannot believe that he could have provoked the revolt of the peasants, even unwittingly.
The horrors of the insurrection are described by the author of Thelenef, with an accuracy the more
* There will be some readers who can scarcely read this and similar prophecies in the present work, without being reminded of the great northern nation of more inspired prophecy, the chief prince of Meshech (whence the word Muscovite is generally derived,) who, with all his bands, and with numerous Asiatic allies, is to devastate the Levant and Syria at some period that has'yet to come.—Trans.
RUSSIAN DIPLOMACY.95
scrupulous, as the principal incident occurred in the family of the narrator.
If he have allowed himself to ennoble the character and the passion of his hero and heroine, it is because he has a poetical imagination ; but while embellishing the sentiments, he has preserved the picture of national manners: in short, neither in the facts, the sentiments, nor the descriptions, does this little romance appear to me misplaced in the midst of a work, all the merit of which consists in the verisimilitude of its delineations.
I may add that the bloody scenes are yet being daily renewed in various parts of the same country where public order has been disturbed, and reestablished in so terrific a manner. The Russians have no right to reproach France for her political disorders, and to draw from them consequences favourable to despotism. Let but the liberty of the press be accorded to Russia for twenty-four hours, and we should learn things that would make us recoil with horror. Silence is indispensable to oppression. Under an absolute government every indiscretion of speech is equivalent to a crime of high treason.
If there are founcl among the Russians, better diplomatists than among nations the most advanced in civilisation, it is because our journals inform them of every thing which is done or projected among ourselves, and because, instead of prudently disguising our weaknesses, we display them, with passion, every morning; whilst, on the contrary, the Byzantine policy of the Russians, working in the dark, carefully conceals from us everything that is thought, done, or feared among them. We march exposed on all
96THE HISTORY OF THELENEF.
sides, they advance tinder cover. The ignorance in which they leave us blinds our view; our sincerity enlightens theirs ; we suffer from all the evils of idle talking, they have all the advantages of secrecy ; and herein lies all their skill and ability.
THE HISTORY OF THELENEF.*
The estates of Princehad been for several years
managed by a steward, named Thelenef. The prince, occupied with other matters, seldom thought of his domains. Disappointed in his ambitious views, he had travelled for a long time, in the hope of dissipating his chagrin as a disgraced courtier. At length, weary of seeking from the arts and from nature, consolation for his failure in politics, he returned to his own country, in order again to approach the court, and to endeavour by dint of care and diligence to recover the favour of the sovereign.
But while fruitlessly wasting his life and fortune in ](laying by turns the courtier at Petersburg, and the virtuoso in Southern Etirope, he lost the attachment of his peasants, exasperated by the ill-usage of Thelenef. This man ruled as a king in the extensive estates of Vologda, where his manner of exercising the lordly atithority made him generally execrated.
Thelenef had, however, a charming daughter, called
* I have purposely changed the names of the persons and places, with the especial objeet of disguising the true ones ; and I have also taken the liberty of correcting, in the style, a few I'xpressions foreign to the genius of our language.
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Xenie.* The amiability of this young person was an inborn virtue ; for, having early lost her mother, she had received no other education than that which her father could give her. He taught her French, and she learned, as it were by heart, some of the classics of the age of Louis XIV.; which had been left in the castle of Vologda by the father of the Prince. The Bible, the " Thoughts of Pascal," and Telema-chus were her favourite books. When but a small number of authors are read, when those authors are well chosen, and when their works are often re-perused, reading becomes very profitable. One of the causes of the frivolity of modern minds is the number of books badly read, rather than badly written, with which the world is inundated.
It would be rendering a service to the risin«· f>`ene-ration to teach them how to read, an acquirement which has become more rare since every one has learned how to write.
Thanks to her reputation for learning, Xenie, at the age of nineteen, enjoyed a well-merited influence
throughout the whole government of . People
came to consult her from all the neighbouring villages. In sickness, in disputes, in all the grievances of the poor peasants, Xenie was their guide and their support.
Her conciliating temper often brought upon her the rebukes of her father ; but the knowledge of having done some good, or prevented some evil, compensated for every thing. In a country where, in general, women have little influence, she exercised a power
* This pretty name is that of a Russian saintess.
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98THE HISTORY OF THELENEF.
which no man in the district could dispute with her, the power of reason over brutish minds.
Even her father, violent as he was both by disposition and
habit, felt the influence of her benevolent nature, and too often blushed to find himself checking the violence of his wrath through fear of giving pain to Xenie. Like a tyrannical prince, he blamed himself for his clemency, and accused himself of being too easy. He gloried in his angry passions, to which
he gave the title of justice : the serfs of Prince
called them by another name.
The father and daughter resided in the castle of Vologda, which was situated in a widely extended plain, whose scenery, for Russia, is very pastoral. The castle was built on the border of a lake, which surrounded it on three sides. This lake, whose banks are fiat, communicates with the Volga by several tributary streams, which, in their short and gentle course, wind through the plain, deeply embedded in the soil, and are discoverable to the eye from afar, only by the lines of stunted willows and other sickly shrubs growing here and there along their borders. They intersect the prairie in every direction, without beautifying or enriching it; for the flowing water does not improve the marsh}'- soil.
The appearance of the mansion had a certain air of grandeur. From the windows of one side the eye stretched over the lake, which reminds one of the sea, for its even and dark edges disappear, morning and evening, in the mists of the horizon ; from those of the other side, over vast pastures, intersected by ditches, and abounding with osiers. In these pastures, which are never mown, consist the chief riches
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of the country, and the care bestowed in the rearing of the cattle which roam over them at large, forms the sole occupation of the peasants.
Numerous herds and flocks, whose diminutive size and feeble frames evince the severity of the climate, feed on the banks of the lake of Vologda, and form the only enlivening objects in the scene. Such landscapes are destitute of real beauty; nevertheless they have a tranquil, indistinct, and dreamy kind of grandeur, whose deep repose lacks neither sublimity nor poetry : it is the east without the sun.
One morning, Xenie went out with her father to assist in numbering the eattle, an operation which he himself performed every day. The herds, picturesquely grouped at different distances before the castle, animated the green banks of the lake, which were brightened by the rays of the rising sun, whilst the bell of a neighbouring chapel was summoning to morning prayer some infirm, and therefore unemployed women, and several decayed old men, who enjoyed with resignation the repose of age.
The noble form of these hoary heads, the still fresh complexion of faces, whose brows were silvered with age, demonstrate the salubrity of the atmosphere, and evidence the beauty of the human race in this frozen zone. It is not to youthful countenances we must look, when we would know if beauty exists in a country.
" Look, my father," said Xenie, as she crossed the causeway which formed the isthmus that united the peninsula of the eastle to the plain ; " look at the flag floating over the cabin of my foster-brother." f 2
100THE HISTORY OF THELENEF.
The Russian peasants are frequently permitted to leave home, in order to exercise their industry in the neighbouring towns, and sometimes even as far off" as St. Petersburg. On such occasions they pay to their masters a rent or fine, and only what they gain beyond this is their own. When one of these travelling serfs returns home to his wife, a pine, like a mast, is raised above the cabin, and a flag flutters on the top as a signal to the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, in order that when they see the joyful sign, they may sympathise with the happiness of the wife.
It was in accordance with this ancient custom that they had raised the streamer upon the pinnacle of the Pacome's cottage. The aged Elizabeth, the mother of Fedor, had been the nurse of Xenie.
í¢ He has returned then, this good-for-nothing foster-brother of thine," replied Thelenef. " Oh ! I am so glad he has," said Xenie. ·: One knave more in the district," muttered Thelenef, " we have already enough of them;" and the face of the steward, always gloomy, assumed a yet more forbidding expression.
·£ It would be easy to make him good," replied Xenie ; " but you will not exert your power."
" It is you who prevent me : you interfere with the duties of a master, by your soft ways and counsels of false prudence. Ah ! it was not in this manner that my father and grandfather ruled the serfs of our lord's father."
" But yoTi forget," replied Xenie, with a trembling voice, " that Fedor was from his childhood more gently brought up than other peasants ; how can he
THE HISTORY OF THELENEF.101
be like them ? His education was from the first as much cared for as mine."
"` He ought to be so much the better, and he is all the worse; such are the effects of education ; but it is your fault, you and your nurse would constantly bring him to the castle, and I in my kind wish to please you, forgot, and allowed him to forget, that he was not born to live with us."
" You cruelly reminded him of it afterwards,'' answered Xenie, with a sigh.
" Your ideas are not Eussian : sooner or later, you will learn to your cost, to know how peasants must be governed." He then continued, muttering between his teeth, " `Wbat is this devil of a Fedor doing, to come back here, after my letters to the prince. The prince cannot have read them, and the steward down there is jealous of me ! "
Xenie heard the self-communings of Thelenef, and anxiously watched the progress of the resentful feelings of the steward, who considered that he had been braved in his own house by an intractable serf. She hoped to appease him by these reasonable words : — " It is now two years since you had my poor foster-brother almost beaten to death. What have you gained by your severity ? Nothing; his lips did not utter one word of excuse, he would have expired under the torture, rather than have humbled himself before you : for he knew that lñs punishment was too severe for his fault. I confess he had disobeyed you, but he was in love with Catharine. The cause of the offence lessened its importance; this you would not take into consideration. Since that scene, and the marriage and departure which followed it, the hatred
г 3
102THE HISTORY OF THELENEF.
of all our peasants has become so intense, that I fear for you, my father."
" And therefore you rejoice at the return of one of my most formidable enemies," replied the exasperated Thelenef.
" Ah ! I do not fear him : we have both sucked the same breast ; he would die rather than make me unhappy."
" He has given good proof of this truly ; he would be the first to murder me if he dared."
" You judge him too harshly. Fedor would, I am sure, defend you against them all, even though you have deeply offended him : you remember your severity too well yourself, for him to forget it. Is not this the truth, father ? He is полу married, and his wife has already a little one; this domestic happiness луШ soften his character. The birth of children often changes the hearts of husbands."
" Silence ! You will deprive me of all sense with your romantic notions. Go and read in your books about affectionate peasants and generous slaves. í know better than you do, the men I have to deal with: they are idle and vindictive like their fathers, and you луШ never change them."
" If you Avould permit me to act, and would give
me your aid, лve might, together, reform them ; but
here comes my good Elizabeth, returning from mass.'*
Thus speaking, Xenie ran to throw her arms around
her nurse. " !№олу then you are happy !"
" Perhaps," replied the old woman, in а 1олу voice. " He is come back." " Not for long, I fear." " What do you mean ? " ^
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" They have all lost their senses; but, hush !"
" "Well, Mother Pacome," said Thelenef, casting a sinister glance upon the old woman, " your good-for-nothing son has returned to you ; his wife, I suppose, is satisfied; his return will рголе to you and all, that I do not wish him ill."
" I am glad of it, sir, we need your protection ; the prince is coming, and we do not know him."
" How ! What! —the prince our master ?" then checking himself, " doubtless," exclaimed Thelenef, much sm`prised, but not wishing to seem ignorant of what a peasant appeared to know, " doubtless I will protect you ; but he will not be here so soon as you think: the report of his coming is current every year at tins season."
" Pardon me, sir, he will be here shortly."
The steward longed to question the nurse more closely, but his dignity restrained him. Xenie saw his embarrassment, and came to his help.