Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
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However this may be, it did not soften the character of the monster, who continued to the end of his life to wallow in the filthiest debauch, and to wash himself in innocent blood.
On the approach of death, he caused himself to be carried several times into the apartment where lay his treasures. There he greedily feasted his dulled lack-lustre eyes on the jewels and useless gold which he could not carry with him beyond the grave.
After having lived as a tiger, he died as a satyr, outraging by a revolting act, his daughter-in-law, an angel of virtue and purity, the young and chaste wife of his second son, Fedor, who, after the death of the Czarewitch, had become the heir of the empire. This young lady approached the bed of the dying
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MORAL LESSON.
man to console him in his last moments, — and waa seen to fly, uttering a scream of horror.
Thus died Ivan IV. in the Kremlin ; and, though it be difficult to believe, he was long mourned by the nation, the great and the little, the laity and the clergy, as though he had been the best of princes.
These marks of sympathy, whether spontaneous or not, arc, it must be owned, any thing but encouraging to virtuous sovereigns. Let us, however, draw this lesson from the history: Unlimited despotism has upon the human mind the effect of an intoxicating drink; the madness of the tyrant is communicable to the slave; and, which is yet more astonishing, the victims become the zealous accomplices of their executioners.
A detailed and veracious history of this country would, perhaps, be one of the most instructive books that could be furnished for human meditation, but it would be impossible to compile. Karumsin attempted the work, and flattered his models, but he stopped before the accession of the Iíomanows. The faint and abridged sketch that I have traced will suffice to give an idea of the events and the men with whom the mind, in spite of itself, associates the terror-clad walls of the Kremlin.
APPENDIX.345
APPENDIX TO CHAP. XXVL
The reader will now be able to enter in some measure into the feeling produced by the sight of the great Russian fortress; but a painter alone could impart any definite conception of its form. Art has no name by which to characterise the architecture of this infernal citadel; the style of its palaces, prisons, and churches have nothing in common with any known order of building. The Kremlin is neither Gothic, classic, moresque, nor yet pure Byzantine : it is neither like the Alhambra, nor the monuments of Egypt, India, China. Greece, or Rome. If the expression may be allowed, it is built in the Czaric style. Ivan is the ideal of a tyrant; the Kremlin is the ideal of a tyrant's palace. The Czar is the inhabitant of the Kremlin ; the Kremlin is the house of a Czar. I have little taste for newly-coined words, and least of all for those of my own coining : but Czaric architecture is a descriptive term necessary to the traveller ; no other could picture what it pictures to the thoughts of those who know practically the meaning of the word czar.
Dream on some day, when under the influence of fever, that you tread the abodes of the strange beings that come and go before your eyes, and you may form some idea of this city of the giants, whose edifices thus rise in the midst of a city of men. The Kremlin has been imagined by M. de Lamartine, who, without having seen it, has painted it in his descriptions of the city of the antediluvian giants, in his Fall of an Angel, a work that, notwithstanding the rapidity with which it was composed, or perhaps owing to that inspired rapidity, contains beauties of the highest order, and may be designated as poetry in fresco.
The Russians are, of all civilised people, those among whom the sentiment of equity is the most weak and the most vague. Thus, in giving the surname of Terrible to Ivan IV., a title which they had previously accorded as one of eulogy to his grandfather, Ivan III., they have done jnstiee neither to the glorious monarch nor to the tyrant. The following is from Karamsin : —
" It is to be remarked that, in the memory of the people, the
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brilliant renown of Ivan survived the recollection of his bad qualities. The groans had ceased, the victims were reduced to dust; new events caused ancient traditions to be forgotten ; and the memory of this prince reminded people only of the conquest of three Mogul kingdoms. The proofs of his atrocious actions were buried in the public archives; whilst Kazan, As-traehan, and Siberia remained in the eyes of the nation as imperishable monuments of his glory. The Russians, who saw in him the illustrious author of their power and civilisation, rejected or forgot the surname of tyrant, given him by his contemporaries. Under the influence of some confused recollections of his cruelty, they still call him Ivan the Terrible, but without distinguishing him from his grandfather, to whom ancient Russia had given the same epithet, rather in praise than in reproach. History does not pardon wicked princes so easily as do people."
Thus are the great prince and the monster together identified under the appellation`of Terrible!!—and this by posterity ! Such is Russian equity ; and time is accomplice in the injustice. Lavau, when describing the Kremlin, does not blush to invoke the shade of Ivan IV., whom he dares to compare to David weeping the faults of his youth.
I cannot resist here inserting another extract from Karamsin, illustrative of the character of a prince in whom Russia gloried — Ivan III., grandfather of Ivan IV.
" Without being a tyrant like his grandson, he had received from nature a certain harshness of character, which he knew how to moderate by the strength of his reason. Founders of dynasties are rarely distinguished by the sensibility of their feelings; and the firmness requisite for great political achievements is very nearly allied to stern severity. It is said that a single glance of Ivan's, when he was excited with anger, would make timid women swoon; that petitioners dreaded to approach his throne ; and that even at his table, his grandees trembled before him—not daring to utter a single word, or to make the slightest movement, when the monarch, fatigued with conversation, and overcome with wine, fell asleep towards the end of the banquet: all then sat in profound silence, waiting for a new command, to divert the Czar, and to enjoy themselves."
It was Ivan III. who was the true founder of the modern
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Russian empire ; and it was he also who rebuilt, in stone, the walls of the Kremlin.
The portrait of Ivan III., by Karamsin, does not belie the declaration of that great prince: " I will give to Russia whomsoever I please." This was his answer to the boyards when they demanded the crown for his grandson, whom he had dispossessed in favour of the son of a second wife : for, to the present times, legitimacy in Russia has depended on the good pleasure of the Czars.
Peter the Great confirmed this principle of Ivan III., by making, as did that prince, the succession dependant on his caprice. He yet more resembled Ivan IV. by the execution of his son, whose life he destroyed, as well as that of the priests and others who encouraged the young prince in his resistance to the civilisation imported from the West, and enjoined as the most sacred duty by the cruel founder of the new empire of Russia. The following is extracted from M. le General Comte de Ségur's History of Rtissia, and of Peter the Great:
" It was in 1716 that the Czar thus declared himself beyond and above all laws ; as though he was preparing for the terrible coup-(Vétat with which, in 1718, he stained his renown. *******
"In September, 1716, Alexis, to escape from the infant civilisation of the Russians, took refuge in the midst of the civilisation of Europe. He placed himself under the protection of Austria, and lived concealed with a mistress at Naples.
" Peter discovered his retreat, and wrote to him. His letter commenced with reproaches, and concluded by dreadful menaces if he did not obey the orders sent to him. It contained also these words: ' Do you fear me ? I assure you, and promise you, in the name of God, and by the final Judgment, that if you submit to my will, and return here, I will not subject you to any punishment; nay, I will love you even more than formerly.'
" On this solemn pledge of a fath
er and a monarch, Alexis returned to Moscow the 3d February, 1718 : on the day after, he was disarmed, seized, interrogated, contemptuously excluded from the throne—both he and his posterity—and thrown into a fortress.
" There, every day and night, an absolute father, violating
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his sworn faith, together with all the laws of nature, and the laws that he had himself given to his empire, саше to tortur< the timid mind of this unfortunate prince, by a political inquisition erµial in insidious atrocity to the inquisition of religion. He tormented him with all the terrors of heaven and of earth, md forced him to denounce his friends and relations, including even his own mother.
" This protracted crime lasted for five months. The two first saw the exile of numerous nobles, the disinherison of a son, the imprisonment of a sister, the disgrace -and flagellation of a wife, and the execution of a brother-in-law. Nor was this sufficient. In one single day Gleboff, a Russian general, said to have been the lover of the repudiated Czarina, was impaled in the midst of a scaffold, the four corners of which were graced by the heads of a bishop, a boyard, and two other dignitaries, who, before decapitation, had been broken on the wheel. This horrible scaffold was again surrounded by a circle of stumps of trees, on which more than fifty priests and other citizens had been beheaded. * * * The emperor promenaded coolly in the midst of the scene. It is even said that, instigated by a restless ferocity, he mounted the scaffold to assure himself of the agony of Gleboff; and that the latter, making him a sign to approach, spit in his face. * * *
" Meanwhile the principal victim remained trembling and isolated. Peter caused him to be carried from the prisons of Moscow to those of Petersburg.
" It was there that he continued to torture the mind of his son by extorting from him the smallest recollections of irritation, indocility, and rebellion ; congratulating himself at each confession; noting them down day by day with fiendish precision, and labouring upon them, until he thought that, by means of certain constructions, he had succeeded in making out a case of capital crime.
" He then called together his creatures in order to submit to them, as he said, ' the long list of unheard-of crimes of which his son had been guilty against a father and a sovereign. He alone had the right to judge him, nevertheless he sought their aid ; for he feared eternal death, as he had promised his son pardon, and had sworn it to him by the judgment of God. If was therefore for them to do justice, without consideration of
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birth or person, in order that the country might not be wronged.' It is true that he added to this perspicuous and fearful order, the palpably insidious instruction, that the judges were to decide without flattering him or fearing his disgrace, if it was concluded that his son only merited a light punishment.
" The slaves understood their master. * * * The grandees of the state, to the number of one hundred and eighty, obeyed. They pronounced sentence of death unanimously and without hesitation. * * *
"' Nothing could deter the emperor from his design, — neither the time that his wrath had had to cool, nor remorse, nor yet the repentance, the submissiveness, and the trembling weakness of the suppliant. Things that appease and disarm even foreign enemies were without effect on the heart of a father. On the contrary, as he had been his son's accuser and judge, so also he resolved to be his executioner. On the 7th July. 1718, the very day following the sentence, he repaired, followed by his nobles, to receive the last tears of his son, and to mingle with them his own ; and when at length it was imagined that his heart had melted, he sent for a strong potion, which he had previously caused to be prepared. Growing impatient, he hastened its arrival by a second message ; he had it presented as a wholesome remedy, and did not retire—'profoundly sorrowful, it is true* — until he had poisoned the hapless young man, who still continued to implore his pardon. He then attributed the death of his victim, who expired some hours after in frightful convulsions, to the terror with which the announcement of his sentence had struck him. This gross pretence was the only cover he deemed necessary for the brutal minds of his dependants : but he eommended to them silence; which commendation was so well obeyed, that, except for the memoirs of a foreigner, a witness, and even an actor in the horrible drama, history would never have known these fearful and final details."
* To weep over its victim is one of the traits of Russian character. —Note by the Author of the Travels.
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
ivCONTENTS.
Rural Scenery in Moscow. — Drunkenness among the Rus
sians. — Hidden Poetry. — Song of the Don Cossacks. — The
Music of Northern Nations. — The Cossacks. — Their Cha
racter.— Influence under which they Fight. — Political Sub
terfuges. — A Polish Fable.--Page 34
CHAPTER XXIX.
The Tartar Mosque. — The Descendants of the Mongols in Moscow. — Tower of SoukarefF. — Colossal Reservoir. — Byzantine Architecture. — Public Institutions. — The Emperor every where. — Dissimilarity in the Slavonian and German Characters.—The Noblemen's Club. — Polite Education of the Russians. — Habits of the Higher Classes. — A Russian Coffee-house. — Religious Belief of the old Serfs. — Society in Moscow. — A Country House in a City. — Real Politeness. — Review of Russian Character. — Their want of Generosity. — Contempt for the Law of Kindness. — Seductive Manners of the Russians.— Their Fickleness. — Resemblance of the Poles and Russians. — Libertinism in Moscow.
—Moral Consequences of Despotism. — Observations on
Modern Literature. — Drunkenness a Vice of the highest
Classes. — Russian Curiosity. — Portrait of Princeand
his Companions. — Murder in a Nunnery. — Conversation at a Table-d'hôte. — The Lovelace of the Kremlin. — A Burlesque Petition. — Modern Prudery. — Parting Scene with
Prince. — An elegant Coachman. — Morals of the
Citizens'Wives. — Libertinism the Fruit of Despotism.— Moral Licence in lieu of Political Freedom. — Condition of the Serfs and other Classes.—Nature of Russian Ambition.
—Results of the System of Peter the Great. — The true
Power of Russia. — Danger of Truth. — Songs of the Russian
Gipsies. — Musical Revolution accomplished by Duprez.—
The Theatre in Russia.—French Language in Russia un
derstood superficially.—A Russian in his Library. — The
Tarandasse. — Russian Ideas of Distance. — A noble Trait in
Russian Character.------ õG
CONTENTS.
V
CHAPTER XXX.
Roads in the Interior.— Farms and Country Mansions.— Monotony the great Characteristic of the Land. — Pastoral Life of the Peasants. — Beauty of the Women and ol
—Policy attributed to the Poles. — A Night at the Convent
of Troïtza. — Pestalozzì on Personal Cleanliness. — Interior
of the Convent.—Pilgrims. — Saint Sergius.— History of
the Convent. — Its Tombs and Treasures. — Inconveniences
of a Journey in Russia. — Bad Quality of the Water. — Want
of Probity a National Characteristic. - - Page 104
CHAPTER XXXI.
Commercial Importance of Yaroslaf. — A Russian's Opinion of Russian Architecture. — Description of Yaroslaf. — Monotonous Aspect of the Country. — The Boatmen of the Volga.
Coup-d'œil on the Russian Character. — Primitive Drovskas. — Antique Costume. — Russian Baths. — Difference between Russian and German Children. — Visit to the Governor. — An agreeable Surprise. — Souvenirs of Versailles. — Influence of French Literature. — Visit to the Convent of the Transfiguration.—Russian Piety. — Byzantine Style in the Arts. — Great Points of Religious Discussion in Russia. — The Zacuska. — The Sterled. — Russian Dinners. Family Soiree. — Moral Superiority of the Female Sex in Russia.—Justif
ication of Providence. —A Lottery. — French Ton changed by Politics.—Want of a beneficent Aristocracy.
The real Governors of Russia.—Bureaucracy. — Children of the Popes. — Propagandism of Napoleon still operates in Russia. — The Task of the Emperor.- - -124
CHAPTER XXXII.
The Banks of the Volga. — Russian Coachmen in Mountain Roads. — Kostroma. — Ferry on the Volga. — Accident in a Forest. — Beauty of the Women. — Civilisation injurious.
Rousseau justified.—Etymology of the Word Sarmatian.
Elegance, Industry, and Humility of the Peasants.— Their Music. — National Music dangerous to Despotism. — The Road to Siberia. — A Picture of Russia. — Exiles on the Road. - - - - - - - - -156
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Site of Xijni-Novgorod. — Predilection of the Emperor for that City. — The Kremlin of Nijni. — Concourse at the Fair. — The Governor. — Bridge of the Oka. — Difficulty in obtaining a Lodging. — The Plague of Persicas. — Pride of the Feldjäger. — The Fair-Ground. — Subterranean City. — Singular Appearance of the River. — The City of Tea. — Of Rags. — Of Wheelwrights' Work. — Of Iron. — Origin of the Fair. — Persian Village. — Salt Fish from the Caspian. — Leather. — Furs. — Lazzaronis of the North. — Badly chosen Site. — Commercial Credit of the Serfs. —Their Mode of i·aleulating. — Bad Faith of the Xobles. — Prices of Merchandise. — Turquoises of the Buchanans. — Kirguis Horses.
—The Fair after Sunset. —The Effects of Music in Russia.
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CHAPTER XXXIV.
Financial Phenomenon. — Financial Reform of the Emperor's.
—Means taken by the Governor of Xijni to induce the Mer