by Lydia Davis
LORD ROYSTON’S TOUR
Gotheberg: Greatly Daring Dined
He was a good deal tossed and beaten about off the Skaw, before sailing up the river this morning. On board also were the Consul, Mr. Smith, and an iron merchant, Mr. Damm. Neither he nor his two servants have any common language with any inhabitant of the inn. Considerable parts of the town of Gotheberg were burned down, it being built almost entirely of wood, and they are rebuilding it with white brick.
He has completely satisfied his curiosity about the town.
On an excursion to Trolhatte, the harness breaks three or four times between every post. Here the traveler drives, and the peasant runs by the side of the carriage or gets up behind. He views with great interest the falls of Trolhatte. In an album at a small inn at Trolhatte, he inscribes some Greek anapests evoking his impressions of them.
He inspects the canal and the cataracts under the guidance of a fine old soldier. He sees several vessels loaded with iron and timber pass through the sluices. He receives great civilities from the English merchants, particularly from Mr. Smith, the Consul. He eats cheese and corn brandy, raw herrings and caviar, a joint, a roast, fish and soup, and can’t help thinking of Pope’s line, “greatly daring dined.”
To Copenhagen: The Water, Merely Brackish
Leaving Gotheborg, he passes through country uncommonly dreary, destitute of wood, covered with sand or rock, then country that is well wooded and watered, bearing crops chiefly of rye or barley, with a few fields of wheat and occasional hop grounds. Many of the wood bridges are quite rotten and scarcely bear the weight of a carriage. Crossing the Sound after reaching Helsinborg, he sees with great surprise a flock of geese swimming in the sea, tastes the water, and finds it merely brackish.
His knowledge of Copenhagen is so far limited to the streets he has driven through and the walls of the room he is sitting in, but there is no appearance of poverty, none of the wooden houses of Sweden, and the people are well dressed. He has reason to be satisfied with his servants, particularly Poole, who is active and intelligent.
The Danish nobility have mostly retired to their country houses.
The Barren Province of Smolang
Leaving Helsinborg, he has traveled through extensive forests of fir and birch: this is the barren Province of Smolang, so thinly inhabited that in two days he met only one solitary traveler.
Poole has contrived to get on by composing a language of English, Dutch, German, Swedish, and Danish in which euphony is not the most predominant feature.
For some time he has got nothing to eat but some rye bread—much too hard, black, and sour, he thinks, for any human being to eat. He might have had plenty of some raw salt goose if he had liked.
Stockholm is not so regular as Copenhagen, but more magnificent.
He has been to the Arsenal and seen the skin of the horse that carried Gustavus Adolphus at the battle of Lutzen, and the clothes in which Charles XII was shot.
He has sent his father two pieces of Swedish money, which is so heavy that when it was used as current coin, a public officer receiving a quarter’s allowance had to bring a cart to carry it away.
To Westeras
In Upsala he visited the Cathedral and found there a man who could speak Latin very fluently. The Rector Magnificus was not at home. He was detained some time in a forest of fir and birch by the axletree breaking. In general, he is annoyed by having to find separate lodgings for himself and his horses in each town.
His Swedish has made the most terrible havoc with the little German he knows.
In Abo
He understands there is a gloom over the Russian court.
St. Petersburg: Rubbers of Whist
The immense forests of fir strike the imagination at first but then become tedious from their excessive uniformity. He has eaten partridges and a cock of the woods. As he advances in Russian Finland he finds everything getting more and more Russian: the churches begin to be ornamented with gilt domes and the number of persons wearing beards continues to increase. A postmaster addresses him in Latin but in spite of that is not very civil. The roads are so bad that eight horses will not draw him along and he is helped up the mountain by some peasants. He sees two wolves. He crosses the Neva over a wooden bridge. He is amused at finding his old friends the Irish jaunting-cars.
The most striking objects here are certainly the common people.
He has a poor opinion of the honesty of the country when he finds in the Russian language a single word to express “the perversion of Justice by a Judge,” as in Arabic there is a word to express “a bribe offered to a Judge.”
In the Russian language they have only one word to express the ideas of red and beautiful, as the Romans used the word “purple” without any reference to color, as for instance “purple snow.”
He is bored by the society of the people of St. Petersburg, where he plays rubbers of whist without any amusing conversation. He considers card games even more dull and unentertaining than spitting over a bridge or tapping a tune with a walking stick on a pair of boots.
The general appearance of the city is magnificent, and he sees this as proof of what may be done with brick and plaster—though the surrounding country is very flat, dull, and marshy. The weather begins to be cold, and a stove within and a pelisse without doors are necessary.
He wishes to see the ice-hills and sledges, and the frozen markets.
He goes to a Russian tragedy in five acts by mistake, thinking it is a French opera. Yet he expects in course of time to be able to converse with his friends the Sclavonians. He sees the Tauride, now lapsed to the crown, behind which is a winter garden laid out in parterres and gravel walks, filled with orange trees and other exotics, and evenly heated by a great number of stoves. The Neva is now blocked by large pieces of ice floating down from the Ladoga. Though the temperature has been down to twenty degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, that is not considered to be much at all here.
The Empress gives birth to an Archduchess. When the Court assembles to pay their respects, the person who most attracts attention is Prince Hypsilantes, the Hospodar of Wallachia, and the Greeks of his train.
There is not much variety in his mode of life. He studies Russian in the morning.
He begins to be very tired of this place and its inhabitants: their hospitality; the voracious gluttony on every side of him; their barefaced cheating; their conversation, with its miserable lack of information and ideas; their constant fear of Siberia; their coldness, dullness, and lack of energy. The Poles are infinitely the most gentlemanlike, and seem a superior order of men to their Russian masters.
He won’t remain here as long as he had intended, but will purchase two sledge kibitkas, and other supplies, and depart, not for Moscow, but for Archangel.
He imagines there must be something curious in driving reindeer on the ice of the White Sea.
To Archangel: The Mayor Makes a Speech
He buys two sledges covered with a tilt, furnishes them with a mattress, and lays in frozen beefsteaks, Madeira, brandy, and a large saucepan. For the trip he dresses in flannel, over that his ordinary clothes, over his boots fur shoes, over the fur shoes a pair of fur boots, covers his head with a cap of blue Astrachan wool, wraps himself in a sable pelisse, and over it all throws a bear skin.
On the road there are no accommodations, so he sees inside the houses of the peasantry. The whole family lives in one room in suffocating heat and smell and with a number of cockroaches, which swarm in the wooden huts. The dirt is excessive. But the people are civil, hospitable, cheerful, and intelligent, though addicted to spirits, quarrelsome among themselves, and inclined to cheat. They are more like the common Irish than anyone else he has seen. Peter the Great has by no means succeeded in forcing them to abandon their beards.
In the cottage, people come to see him dine. Twenty or thirty women crowd around him, examining him and asking him questions.
He passes through Ladoga and Vitigra. Approaching Kargosso
l, he counts from a distance nineteen churches, most of which have five balloon-like domes, gilt, copper, or painted in the most gaudy colors, and thinks it must be a magnificent town, but the number of churches here almost equals the number of houses.
In Archangel the Archbishop speaks Latin very fluently, but does not know whether the Samoyeds of his diocese are Pagans or Christians.
His hostess is anxious to show that they, too, have fruit, and brings in some specimens preserved. Here they have in the woods a berry with a strong taste of turpentine.
The mayor comes in during the evening and makes a speech to him in Russian three quarters of an hour long.
The temperature in Archangel is fifty-one degrees below freezing, both his hands are frozen, and Pauwells has a foot frozen. He goes northeast of Archangel, procures three sledges and twelve reindeer, and sets out over the unbeaten snow in search of a horde of Samoyeds. He finds them exactly on the Arctic circle in an immense plain of snow surrounded by several hundred reindeer. They are Pagans.
Back in Archangel, the cold has increased, and he is forced to bake his Madeira in an oven to get at it, and to carve his meat with an axe. It is nearly seventy degrees below freezing, barely three points above the point of congelation of mercury.
Moscow Is Immense and Extraordinary
Moscow is immense and extraordinary, after a journey over the worst road he has ever traveled in his life through a forest which scarcely ever suffered any interruption but continued with dreary uniformity from one capital to another.
He begins to be able to read Russian fairly easily, and speak it sufficiently. Poole has also picked up enough.
He sends his younger brother a Samoyed sledge and three reindeer cut out of the teeth of a sea horse by a peasant at Archangel.
The extent of Moscow is prodigious despite its small population because in no quarter of the city do the houses stand contiguous. The Kremlin is certainly the most striking quarter, and nearly thirty gilt domes give it a most peculiar appearance.
He is much interested by the passage of regiments composed of some of the wandering nations. One day there passed two thousand Bashkirs from the Oremburg frontiers on their lean desert horses, armed with lances and bows, some clothed in complete armor, some with the twisted coat of mail or hauberk, some with grotesque caps, others with iron helmets. These people are Mohammedans. Their chief is dressed in a scarlet caftan, their music is a species of flute which they place in the corner of their mouths, singing at the same time. They are almost always at war with the Kirghese.
A regiment of Calmucs passes through. Their features are scarcely human. They worship the Dalai Lama. He also sees a number of Kirghese of the lesser and middle hordes.
He continues his study of Russian, finds the language sonorous, but thinks it hardly repays anyone the trouble of learning it, because there are so few original authors—upon the introduction of literature it was found much easier to translate. The national epic poem, however, about the conquest of the Tartars of Casan, would be good if it weren’t for the insufferable monotony of the meter.
Another Trip to Petersburg
Proceeding along the frozen river, the postilions missed their road, came to a soft place on the ice, and the horses broke through. The kibitka in which he lay could not be opened from the inside and the postilions paid no attention to him, being concerned only with trying to save their horses. One of them woke Poole in his sledge to request an axe. Poole saw the vehicle half-floating in the water and had just time to open the leather covering. He jumped out upon the ice with his writing desk and the carriage went down to the bottom. One horse drowned.
In Petersburg, the Carnival was taking place: theaters erected on the river, ice-hills, long processions of sledges, multitudes of people, and public masquerades given morning and evening.
In Moscow Again, He Plans the Continuation of His Tour
Now Moscow is very dull during the fast.
He plans to get a large boat, embark at Casan, and float down the Volga to Astracan sitting on a sofa. He will reach the banks of the Caspian.
The carriages he will use have not a particle of iron in their whole composition.
There is a sect of Eunuchs who do this to themselves for the kingdom of heaven. They had at one time propagated their doctrines to such an extent that the government was forced to interfere, afraid of depopulation. It seized a number of them and sent them to the mines of Siberia.
He is preparing for his journey, and he will be accompanied as far as Astracan by an American of South Carolina, Mr. Poinsett, one of the few liberal and literary and gentlemanlike men he has seen emerge from the forests of the New World.
He has hired a Tartar interpreter, whom his valet de chambre is somewhat afraid of and calls “Monsieur le Tartare.”
He is waiting for letters from Casan about the condition of the roads, but because it is spring and travel by both sledge and carriage is precarious, there is almost no communication between towns.
An edict has appeared forbidding conversation on political subjects.
In the Russian Empire, where perhaps of three men whom you meet, one comes from China, another from Persia, and the third from Lapland, you lose your ideas of distance.
Foreign newspapers are prohibited.
He has gone up to the top of a high tower at one in the morning to see the spectacle of Moscow with its hundreds of churches illuminated on Easter Eve.
Then he has been very surprised to see all the females of the family run up to him and cry out, “Christ is risen from the dead!”
When he sets out he and Mr. Poinsett will each be armed with a double-barreled gun, a brace of pistols, a dagger, and a Persian saber; each of the four servants also will have his pistols and cutlass. He will be sorry to leave Moscow.
Casan: No Man Could Suppose Himself to Be in Europe
The accommodations along the way are as they have been all over Muscovy: one room, in which you sleep with the whole family in the midst of a suffocating heat and smell; no furniture to be found but a bench and table, and an absolute dearth of provisions.
As he proceeds he finds the Tartars in the villages increasing in numbers, and the Russian fur cap giving way to the Mohammedan turban or the small embroidered coif of the Chinese.
He sleeps in the cottage of a Tcheremisse, with neither chimney nor window. The women have their petticoats only to the knee and braid their hair in long tresses, to which are tied a number of brass cylinders.
No man could suppose himself to be in Europe—though by courtesy Casan is in Europe—when he contemplates the Tartar fortifications, the singular architecture of the churches and shops, and the groups of Tartars, Tcheremesses, Tchouasses, Bashkirs, and Armenians.
An Armenian merchant promises to have a boat ready in two or three days.
To the Quarantine Grounds Near the Astracan
The beauty of the scenery on the Volga is gratifying, the right bank mountainous and well wooded. After passing Tsauritzin, where both banks were in Asia, there is nothing on either side but vast deserts of sand.
He sees great numbers of pelicans. Islands are white with them. He sees prodigious quantities of eagles, too. He and the others eat well on sterlet and its caviar. The number of fish in the Volga is astounding. The Russian peasants won’t eat some of them for reasons of superstition. For example, he had too much of a sort of fish like the chad, and offered them to the boat’s crew, but they refused them, saying that the fish swam round and round, and were insane, and if they ate them they, too, would become insane.
There is some reason for refusing pigeons, too, and also hares.
Samara is the winter home of a number of Calmouks. Only during the summer do they wander with their flocks in the vast steppes on the Asiatic side and encamp in their circular tents of felt. The heat of the Steppe is suffocating. The blasts of wind during the summer immediately destroy the flocks exposed to them, which instantly rot. The Tartars and Calmouks make every species of laitage k
nown in Europe and also ardent spirits they distill from cow’s and mare’s milk.
He comes upon a village as distinguished for the excessive cleanliness of the houses and the neatness of the gardens as the Russian habitations are for their dirt and filth.
The town of Astracan is inhabited by thirteen or fourteen different nations, each description of merchants in a separate caravanserai.
His next excursion before he proceeds to the northern provinces of Persia will be a short distance into the desert to the habitation of a Calmouk Prince. He wants to go hawking with his daughter the Princess, who with her pipe at her mouth hunts on the unbroken horses of the desert.
Solianka: Banners in the Wind
He is staying in a village inhabited exclusively by Tartars. He visits a Calmouk camp and enters the tent of the chief Lama. It is very neat and covered with white felt, the floor matted and strewn with rose leaves. The priest shows the idols and sacred books. He brings out the banner of silk painted with the twelve signs of the zodiac. Some banners are inscribed with prayers. These are placed at the door of the tent, in the wind: letting them flutter about is supposed to be equivalent to saying the prayers. The Lama orders tea: the leaves and stalks are pressed into a large square cake and this is boiled up with butter and salt in the Mongol manner. It forms a nauseous mixture, but he drinks it and then takes his leave, all the village coming out of their tents and going down with him to the waterside. At least a third of the men in the village are priests.