A. PUSHKIN
CHAPTER ONE
The Steppes. A Kalmyk kibitka. The Caucasian hot springs. The Georgian military highway. Vladikavkaz. An Ossetian funeral. The Terek. The Darial gorge. Crossing the snowy mountains. The first glimpse of Georgia. Aqueducts. Khozrev-Mirza. The mayor of Dusheti.
…From Moscow I went to Kaluga, Belev, and Orel, and thus added an extra hundred and thirty miles; on the other hand I met Ermolov.7 He lives in Orel, his country estate being close by. I came to him at eight o’clock in the morning and did not find him at home. My driver told me that Ermolov did not visit anyone except his father, a simple, pious old man, that the only people he did not receive were town officials, and that anyone else had free access to him. An hour later I came to him again. Ermolov received me with his usual courtesy. At first glance I did not find in him the least resemblance to his portraits, painted usually in profile. A round face, fiery gray eyes, bushy gray hair. A tiger’s head on a herculean torso. His smile is unpleasant, because it is unnatural. But when he falls to thinking and frowns, he becomes superb and strikingly resembles the poetical portrait painted by Dawe.8 He was wearing a green Circassian jacket. On the walls of his study hung sabers and daggers, souvenirs of his rule over the Caucasus. He appears to bear his inaction with impatience. Several times he began talking about Paskevich, and always sarcastically; talking of the ease of his victories, he compared him to the son of Nun, before whom walls fell down at the sounding of trumpets, and called the count of Erevan the count of Jericho.9 “Let him run into a pasha who is not intelligent, not skillful, but merely stubborn—for instance, the pasha who ruled in Shumla,” said Ermolov, “and Paskevich is done for.” I passed on to Ermolov the words of Count Tolstoy,10 that Paskevich had acted so well during the Persian campaign that the only thing left for an intelligent man was to act worse, in order to be distinguished from him. Ermolov laughed, but did not agree. “Men and expenses could have been spared,” he said. I think he is writing or wants to write his memoirs. He is not pleased with Karamzin’s History;11 he wishes that an ardent pen would portray the transition of the Russian nation from insignificance to glory and power. He spoke of Prince Kurbsky’s writings con amore.12 The Germans took a beating. “Some fifty years hence,” he said, “people will think there was an auxiliary Prussian or Austrian army in our campaign, commanded by this or that German general.” I stayed with him for about two hours. He was vexed that he had not remembered my full name. He apologized by means of compliments. The conversation turned several times to literature. Of Griboedov’s verse he says that reading it makes his jaws ache.13 Of government and politics there was not a word.
My route lay through Kursk and Kharkov, but I turned off onto the direct road to Tiflis, sacrificing a good dinner in a Kursk inn (no trifling thing in our travels) and not curious to visit Kharkov University, which could not match a meal in Kursk.
The roads as far as Elets are terrible. My carriage sank several times into mud worthy of the mud of Odessa. Sometimes I managed to make no more than thirty miles in a day. Finally I saw the steppes of Voronezh and rolled on freely over the green plain. In Novocherkassk I found Count Pushkin, who was also going to Tiflis, and we agreed to travel together.14
The transition from Europe to Asia is felt more and more by the hour: forests disappear, hills smooth out, grass becomes thicker and shows more vegetative force; birds unknown in our forests appear; eagles sit like sentinels on the mounds that mark the high road and gaze proudly at the travelers; over the fertile pastures
Indomitable mares
Proudly stray in herds.15
Kalmyks settle around the station huts. Near their kibitkas graze their ugly, shaggy horses, known to you from the fine drawings of Orlovsky.16
The other day I visited a Kalmyk kibitka (crisscross wattle, covered with white felt). The whole family was preparing to have lunch. In the center a cauldron was boiling, and the smoke went out through an opening in the top of the kibitka. A young Kalmyk girl, not bad-looking at all, was sewing and smoking a pipe. I sat down beside her. “What’s your name?”—“* * *”—“How old are you?”—“Ten and eight.”—“What are you sewing?”—“Pant.”—“For whom?”—“For self.” She handed me her pipe and started on lunch. In the cauldron tea was boiling with mutton fat and salt. She offered me her dipper. I did not want to refuse and took a sip, trying to hold my breath. I do not think any other national cuisine could produce anything more vile. I asked for something to follow it up. They gave me a piece of dried mare’s meat; I was glad enough of that. Kalmyk coquetry scared me; I hastily got out of the kibitka and rode away from the Circe of the steppe.
—
In Stavropol I saw clouds on the edge of the sky that had struck my eyes exactly nine years earlier. They were still the same, still in the same place. These were the snowy peaks of the Caucasian mountain range.
From Georgievsk I went to see Hot Springs.17 There I found great changes: in my time the baths were in huts hastily slapped together. The springs, most of them in their primitive state, spurted, steamed, and poured down the mountain in all directions, leaving white or reddish traces behind them. We scooped up the seething water with a dipper made of bark, or with the bottom of a broken bottle. Now magnificent baths and houses have been built. A boulevard lined with lindens follows around the slope of Mashuk. Everywhere there are clean paths, green benches, regular flowerbeds, bridges, pavilions. The sources have been fitted out and lined with stone; police notices are tacked to the walls of the baths; everywhere there is order, cleanliness, prettiness…
I confess: The Caucasian springs now offer more conveniences; but I regretted their former wild state; I regretted the steep, stony paths, the bushes, and the unfenced precipices over which I once clambered. With sadness I left the springs and made my way back to Georgievsk. Night soon fell. The clear sky was strewn with millions of stars. I rode along the bank of the Podkumok. A. Raevsky18 used to sit there with me, listening to the melody of the waters. The outline of majestic Beshtau grew blacker and blacker in the distance, surrounded by its vassal mountains, and finally disappeared in the darkness…
The next day we went further on and arrived in Ekaterinograd, formerly the seat of the governor-general.
In Ekaterinograd the Georgian military highway begins; the post road ends. You hire horses to Vladikavkaz. You are provided with a convoy of Cossacks, foot soldiers, and one cannon. Mail is sent twice a week and travelers join it: this is known as an “occasion.” We did not have long to wait. The mail came the next day, and the morning after, at nine o’clock, we were ready to be on our way. At the assembly place a whole caravan gathered, consisting of somewhere around five hundred people. There was a drum roll. We set off. At the head went the cannon, surrounded by foot soldiers. After it stretched carriages, britzkas, kibitkas for the soldiers’ wives, who traveled from one fortress to another; behind them creaked a train of two-wheeled arbas.*4 Alongside them ran herds of horses and oxen. Next to them galloped Nogai guides in burkas and with lassoes. All this pleased me very much at first, but I soon became bored. The cannon went at a walk, the match smoked and the soldiers lit their pipes from it. The slowness of our march (on the first day we made only ten miles), the insufferable heat, the shortage of supplies, the uncomfortable night stops, and finally the constant creaking of the Nogai arbas drove me out of all patience. The Tatars take pride in this creaking, saying that they drive around like honest people who have no need to hide. This time I would have found it more pleasant to travel in less respectable company. The road is rather monotonous: a plain; hills off to the sides. At the edge of the sky—the peaks of the Caucasus, getting higher and higher each day. Fortresses sufficient for these parts, with moats that any of us could have jumped across in the old days without a running start, with rusty cannon that have not been fired since the time of Count Gudovich,19 with dilapidated ramparts where a garrison of chickens and geese wanders about. Within the fortress several hovels, where you can obtain
with difficulty a dozen eggs and some sour milk.
The first noteworthy place is the fortress of Minaret. Approaching it, our caravan went along a lovely valley, between burial mounds overgrown with lindens and plane trees. These are the graves of several thousands who died from the plague. Gay with flowers sprung from the infected ashes. To the right shone the snowy Caucasus; ahead loomed an enormous tree-clad mountain; beyond it lay the fortress. Around it can be seen the traces of a devastated aul called Tatartub, which was once the main village in Great Kabarda. A slight, solitary minaret testifies to the existence of the vanished settlement. It rises slenderly amidst the heaps of stones on the bank of a dried-up stream. The inner stairway had not yet collapsed. I climbed up it to the platform, from which the mullah’s voice is no longer heard. There I found several unknown names scratched into the bricks by fame-loving travelers.
Our road became picturesque. Mountains towered above us. Barely visible flocks crawled over their heights, looking like insects. We also made out a shepherd, maybe a Russian, taken prisoner once and grown old in captivity. We came upon more burial mounds, more ruins. Two or three tombstones stood on the side of the road. There, by Circassian custom, their horsemen are buried. A Tatar inscription, the image of a saber, a tribal emblem cut into the stone, are left to predatory grandsons in memory of a predatory ancestor.
The Circassians hate us. We have forced them out of their open grazing lands; their auls have been devastated, whole tribes have been wiped out. They withdraw further and further into the mountains and from there carry out their raids. The friendship of the peaceful Circassians20 is unreliable; they are always ready to help their violent fellow tribesmen. The spirit of their wild chivalry has noticeably declined. They rarely attack an equal number of Cossacks, never the foot soldiers, and they run away at the sight of a cannon. But they never miss a chance to attack a weaker troop or a defenseless man. The country roundabout is full of rumors of their villainies. There is almost no way to subdue them, so long as they are not disarmed, as the Crimean Tatars were, which is very hard to accomplish on account of the hereditary feuds and blood vengeance that reign among them. Dagger and saber are parts of their body, and a baby begins to wield them sooner than he can prattle. Among them killing is a simple body movement. They keep prisoners in hope of ransom, but they treat them with terrible inhumanity, force them to work beyond their strength, feed them raw dough, beat them whenever they like, and have them guarded by their young boys, who at one word have the right to cut them up with their children’s sabers. A peaceful Circassian who had shot at a soldier was recently captured. He justified it by the fact that his rifle had stayed loaded for too long. What to do with such people? It is to be hoped, however, that if we acquire the region east of the Black Sea, cutting the Circassians off from their trade with Turkey, that will force them to become friendlier to us. The influence of luxury could contribute to their taming: the samovar would be an important innovation. There is a means that is stronger, more moral, more consistent with the enlightenment of our age: the preaching of the Gospel. The Circassians embraced the Mohammedan faith very recently. They were carried away by the active fanaticism of the apostles of the Koran, the most notable of whom was Mansur, an extraordinary man, who for a long time stirred up the Caucasus against Russian dominion, was finally seized by our forces, and died in the Solovki monastery.21 The Caucasus awaits Christian missionaries. But it is easier for our idleness to pour out dead printed letters instead of the living word and to send mute books to people who are illiterate.
We reached Vladikavkaz, the former Kapkai, the threshold of the mountains. It is surrounded by Ossetian auls. I visited one of them and found myself at a funeral. People crowded around a saklia. In the yard stood an arba hitched to two oxen. Relatives and friends of the deceased arrived from all directions and with loud weeping went into the saklia, beating their foreheads with their fists. The women stood quietly. The dead man was carried out on a burka
…like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.22
They placed him on the arba. One of the guests took the deceased’s rifle, blew the powder off the pan, and placed it next to the body. The oxen set out. The guests followed. The body was to be buried in the mountains, some twenty miles from the aul. Unfortunately, nobody could explain these rites to me.
The Ossetes are the poorest tribe of the peoples inhabiting the Caucasus; their women are beautiful and, one hears, very well-disposed to travelers. At the gates of the fortress I met the wife and daughter of an imprisoned Ossete. They were bringing him dinner. Both seemed calm and bold; nevertheless, at my approach they both lowered their heads and covered themselves with their tattered chadras. In the fortress I saw Circassian amanats, frisky and handsome boys. They constantly play pranks and escape from the fortress. They are kept in pitiful conditions. They go around in rags, half naked and abominably filthy. On some I saw wooden fetters. The amanats, once they are set free, probably do not miss their stay in Vladikavkaz.
The cannon left us. We went on with the foot soldiers and the Cossacks. The Caucasus took us into its sanctuary. We heard a muted noise and saw the Terek pouring out in various directions. We rode along its left bank. Its noisy waves turn the wheels of the low Ossetian mills, which look like dog kennels. The deeper we penetrated into the mountains, the narrower the gorge became. The constrained Terek throws its muddy waves with a roar over the rocks that bar its way. The gorge meanders along its course. The stone feet of the mountains are polished by its waves. I went on foot and stopped every other minute, struck by the gloomy enchantment of nature. The weather was bleak; clouds stretched heavily along the black peaks. Count Pushkin and Stjernvall, looking at the Terek, recalled Imatra and preferred “the thundering river of the North.”23 But I had nothing with which to compare the spectacle before me.
Before we reached Lars, I lagged behind the convoy, unable to tear my eyes from the enormous cliffs between which the Terek gushes with indescribable fury. Suddenly a soldier comes running towards me, shouting from far off: “Don’t stop, Your Honor, they’ll kill you!” This warning, unaccustomed as I was, seemed extremely odd to me. The thing was that Ossetian bandits, safe in this narrow spot, shoot at travelers across the Terek. On the eve of our march they made such an attack on General Bekovich,24 who galloped through their gunfire. Visible on a cliff are the ruins of some citadel: they are stuck all over with the saklias of peaceful Ossetes, as with swallows’ nests.
We stopped for the night in Lars. Here we found a French traveler, who frightened us about the road ahead. He advised us to abandon the carriages in Kobi and continue on horseback. With him for the first time we drank Kakheti wine from a stinking wineskin, reminiscent of the feasting in the Iliad:
And in goatskins wine, our great delight!25
Here I found a soiled copy of The Prisoner of the Caucasus,26 and, I confess, I reread it with great pleasure. It is all weak, youthful, incomplete; but much of it is aptly divined and expressed.
The next morning we went on our way. Turkish prisoners were working on the road. They complained about the food they were given. They could never get used to Russian black bread. That reminded me of the words of my friend Sheremetev on his return from Paris: “Life in Paris is bad, brother: nothing to eat; no black bread for the asking!”
Five miles from Lars is the Darial outpost. The gorge bears the same name. The cliffs on both sides stand like parallel walls. Here it is so narrow, so narrow, one traveler writes, that you not only see but seem to feel the closeness.27 A scrap of sky like a ribbon shows blue over your head. Rivulets, falling down from the mountainous heights in small and splashing streams, reminded me of Rembrandt’s strange painting, The Rape of Ganymede.28 Besides that, the gorge is lighted perfectly in his taste. In some places the Terek washes right at the foot of the cliffs, and stones are piled along the road in the guise of a dam. Not far from the outpost, a little bridge is boldly thrown across the river. You stand on it
as if on a mill. The little bridge shakes all over, and the Terek rumbles like the wheels that turn the millstone. Across from Darial on a steep cliff you can see the ruins of a fortress. Legend has it that a certain Queen Daria hid there, giving her name to the gorge: a tall tale. “Darial” in old Persian means “gate.” By Pliny’s testimony, the Caucasian Gate, which he mistakenly calls Caspian, was here.29 The gorge had a real gate across it, a wooden one, bound with iron. Under it, writes Pliny, flows the river Diriodoris. Here a fortress was erected to hold off the raids of the wild tribes, and so on. See the journey of Count J. Potocki, whose learned researches are as entertaining as his Spanish novels.30
From Darial we set out for Kazbek. We saw the Trinity Gate (an arch formed in the cliff by an explosion of powder)—a road used to pass under it, but now the Terek, which often changes its bed, flows there.
Not far from the settlement of Kazbek, we crossed the Furious Gully, a ravine which, during heavy rains, turns into a raging torrent. This time it was perfectly dry and roared in name only.
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