Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

by Astolphe De Custine

  At nine o'clock this evening I returned to the

  SUPERIORITY OF THE FEMALE SEX.147

  house of the governor. "We had first music, and aftenvards a lottery.

  One of the brothers of the lady of the house plays the violoncello in a charming manner; he was accompanied on the piano by his wife, a very agreeable woman. This duo, as well as many national airs, sung with taste, made the evening pass rapidly.

  The conversation of Madame de, the old

  friend of my grandmother and of Madame de Po-

  lignac, contributed in no slight degree to shorten

  it. This lady has lived in Kussia for forty-seven

  years ; she has viewed and judged the country with

  discernment and justice, and she states the truth

  without hostility, and yet without oratorical pre

  cautions : this is new to me ; her frankness strangely

  contrasts with the universal dissimulation practised by

  the Russians. An intelligent French woman, who has

  passed her life among them, ought, I think, to know

  them better than they know themselves; for they

  blind themselves in order the better to impose false

  hood upon others. Madame desaid and repeated

  to me, that in this country the sentiment of honour is without power except in the heart of the women : they have made it a matter of religion to be faithful to their word, to despise falsehood, to observe delicacy in money affairs, and independence in politics;

  in short, according to Madame de, the greater

  number of them possess what is wanted in the great majority of the men — probity in all the circumstances of life, whether of greater or less importance. In general, the -Russian women think more than the men, because they act less. Leisure, that advantage inherent in a woman's mode of life, is as advantageous и 2

  J 48JUSTIFICATION OF PROVIDENCE.

  to their character as to their understanding; they are better informed, less servile, and possess more energy of sentiment than the other sex. Heroism itself often appears to them natural, and becomes easy. The Princess Troubetzkoï is not the only woman who has followed her husband to Siberia; many exiled men have received from their wives this sublime proof of devotion, which loses none of its value for being less rare than I imagined it: unfortunately I do not know their names. "Where will they find a historian and a poet ? "Were it only on account oí unknown virtues, it would be necessary to believe in a last judgment. The glory of the good is a part which would be wanting to the justice of God : we can imagine the pardon of the Omnipotent; we cannot imagine his indifference. Virtue is only so called, because it cannot be recompensed by men. It would lose its perfection and become a matter of mercenary calculation if it were sure of always being appreciated and remunerated upon earth: virtue which did not reach to the supernatural and the sublime would be incomplete. If evil did not exist, where would there be saints ? The combat is necessary to the victory, and the victory may even ask from God the crown of conqueror. This beautiful spectacle justifies Providence, which, in order to present it to the attentive Heaven, tolerates the errors of the world.

  Towards the close of the evening, before permitting me to leave, my entertainers, with the view of paying me a compliment, expedited, by several clays, a ceremony which has been looked forward to for six months in the family : it was the drawing of a lottery, the ob-

  A LOTTERY.

  149

  ject of which was charity. All the prizes, consisting of articles made by the lady of the house, her friends and relatives, were tastefully spread upon the tables: the one whieh fell to me, I cannot say .by chance, for my tickets had been carefully selected, was a pretty note-book with a varnished cover. I wrote in it the date, and added a few words by way of remembrance. In the times of our fathers, an impromptu in verse would have been suggested; but, in these days, when public impromptus abound ad nauseam, those of the salon are out of date. Ephemeral literature, politics, and philosophy have dethroned the quatrain and the sonnet. I had not the ready wit to write a single couplet; but I should, in justice, add, that neither did I feel the ambition.

  After bidding farewell to my amiable entertainers, whom I am to meet again at the fair of Nijni, I returned to my inn, very well satisfied with the day. The house of the peasant in which I lodged the day before yesterday, and the saloon of to-day, in other words, Kamtschatka and Versailles within a distance traversed in a few hours, present a contrast which describes Russia.

  I sacrifice my nights to relate to my friends the objects that strike me during the day. My chapter is not finished, and dawn already appears.

  The contrasts in this empire are abrupt; so much so that the peasant and the lord do not seem to belong to the same land: the grandees are as cultivated as if they lived in another country ; the serfs are as ignorant and savage as though they served under lords like themselves.

  It is much less with the abuses of aristocracy that H 3

  150 WANT OF A BENEFICENT ARISTOCRACY.

  I reproach, the Russian government, than with the absence of an authorised aristocratic power, whose attributes are clearly and constitutionally defined. Recognised political aristocracies have always struck me as being beneficent in their influence; whilst the aristocracies that have no other foundation than the chimeras, or the injustices of privileges, are pernicious because their attributes remain undefined and ill regulated. It is true the Russian lords are masters, and too absolute masters, in their territories ; whence arise those excesses that fear and hypocrisy conceal by humane phrases, softly pronounced, which deceive travellers, and too often the government also. But these men, though monarchs in their far distant domains, have no power in the state ; they do what they please on their own estates, defying the power of the emperor, by corrupting or intimidating his secondary agents ; but the country is not governed by them; they enjoy no consideration in the general direction of affairs. It is only by becoming courtiers, by labouring for promotion in the tchinn, that they can obtain any public credit or standing. This life of the courtier excludes all elevation of sentiment, independence of spirit, and humane, patriotic views, which are essential elements of aristocratic bodies legally constituted, in states organised to extend their power and to flourish long.

  The government, on the other hand, equally excludes the just pride of the man who has made his fortune by his labour. It unites all the disadvantages of democracy with those of despotism, and rejects every thing that is good in both systems.

  Russia is governed by a class of subaltern employes,

  BUREAUCRACY.

  151

  transferred direct from the public schools to the public administration. These individuals, who are very frequently the sons of men born in foreign lands, are noble so soon as they wear a cross at their button-hole; and it is only the Emperor who gives this decoration. Invested with the magical sign, they become proprietors of lands and of men; and thus obtaining power without obtaining also that heritage of magnanimity natural in a chieftain born and habituated to command, the new lords use their authority like upstarts as they are, and render odious to the nation, and the world, the system of servitude established in Russia, at the period when ancient Europe began to destroy her feudal institutions. By virtue of their offices, these despots oppress the country with impunity, and incommode even the Emperor; who perceives, with astonishment, that he is not so powerful as he imagined, though he dares not complain or even confess it to himself. This is the bureaucracy, a power terrible every where, because its abuses are always made in the name of order, but more terrible in Russia than any where else. When we see administrative tyranny substituted for Imperial despotism, we may tremble for a land where is established, without counterbalance, the system of government propagated in Europe under the French Empire.

  The emperors of Russia, equally mistaken in their confidence and their suspicion, viewed the nobles as rivals, and sought only to find slaves i
n the men they needed for ministers. Hence has sprung up the swarms of obscure agents who labour to govern the land in obedience to ideas not their own; from which it n 4

  152CHILDEEN OF THE POPES.

  follows that they can never satisfy real wants. This class of employes, hostile in their hearts to the order of things which they direct, are recruited in a great measure from among the sons of the popes* — a body of vulgar aspirants, of upstarts without talent, for they need no merit to oblige the state to disembarrass itself of the burden which they are upon it; people who approach to all the. ranks without possessing any; minds which participate alike in the popular prejudices and the aristocratic pretensions, without having the energy of the one or the wisdom of the other: to include all in one clause, the sons of the priests are revolutionists charged with maintaining the established order.

  Half enlightened, liberal as the ambitious, as fond of oppressing as the slave, imbued with crude philosophical notions utterly inapplicable to the country which they call their own, though all their sentiments and s`emi-enlightened ideas come from abroad, these men are urging the nation towards a goal of which they are perhaps ignorant themselves, which the Emperor has never imagined, and which is not one that true Russians or true friends of humanity will desire.

  This permanent conspiracy dates as far back as the time of Napoleon. The political Italian had foreseen the danger of the Russian power; and wishing to weaken the enemy of revolutionised Europe, he had recourse in the first place to the influence of ideas. He profited by his friendly relations with, the Emperor Alexander, and by the innate tendency of that prince towards liberal institutions, to send to Petersburg,

  * Greek priests.

  PROPAGANDISE! OP NAPOLEON. 153

  under pretext of aiding in the accomplishment of the Emperor's designs, a great number of political workmen,—a kind of masked army, charged with secretly preparing the way for our soldiers. These skilful intriguers were instructed to mix themselves up with the government, and especially with the system of public education, and to instil into the minds of the rising generation doctrines opposed to the political religion of the land. Thus did the great warrior — heir to the French revolution and foe to the liberties of the world—throw from afar the seeds of trouble and of discord, because the unity of despotism appeared to him a dangerous weapon in the military government which constitutes the immense power of Russia.

  That empire is now reaping the fruit of the slow and profound policy of the adversary it flattered itself that it had conquered, — an adversary whose posthumous machiavelisni survives reverses unheard of in the history of human Avars. To the secretly-working influence of these pioneers of our armies, and to that of their children and their disciples, I attribute in a great measure the revolutionary ideas which have taken root in many families, and even in the army; and the explosion of which has produced the conspiracies that we have seen hitherto breaking themselves against the strength of the established government. Perhaps I deceive myself, but I feel persuaded that the present Emperor will triumph over these ideas, by crushing, even to the last man, those who defend them.

  I was far from expecting to find in Russia such vestiges of our policy, and to hear from the mouths of Russians reproaches similar to those that the Spall 5

  154PEOPAGANDISM OF NAPOLEOtf*

  niards have addressed to us for thirty-five years past, If the mischievous intentions which the Russians attribute to Napoleon were real, no interest, no patriotism could justify them. We cannot save one part of the world by deceiving the other. Our religious propagandism appears to me sublime, because the Catholic church accords with every form of government and every degree of civilisation, over which it reigns with all the superiority of mind over body: but political proselytism, that is to say, the narrow spirit of conquest, or to speak yet more justly, the spirit of rapine justified by that skilful sophistry called glory, is odious; for, far from drawing together the human race, this contracted ambition divides them : unity can only give birth to elevated and extended ideas; but the politics of national interference are always little; its liberality is hypocritical or tyrannical ; its benefits are ever deceptive : every nation should derive from within itself the means for the improvements it requires.

  To resume: the problem proposed, not by men, but by events, by the concatenation of circumstances, to an emperor of Russia, is to favour among the nation the progress of knowledge in order to hasten the emancipation of the serfs; and further to aim at this object by the improving of manners, by the encouraging of humanity and of legal liberty; in short, by ameliorating hearts with the view of alleviating destinies. Such is the condition imperative upon any man who would now reign, even at Moscow: but the peculiarity of the Emperor's position is, that he has to shape his course towards this object, keeping clear on the one side of the mute though well-organised

  TASK OF THE EMPEROK.155

  tyranny of a revolutionary administration, and on the other of the arrogance and the conspiracies of an aristocracy so much the more unquiet and formidable as its power is vague and undefined.

  It must be owned that no sovereign has yet acquitted himself in this terrible task with so much firmness, talent, and good fortune as have been displayed by the Emperor Nicholas. He is the first of the modern Russian princes who has perceived the necessity of being a Russian in order to confer good upon the Russians. Undoubtedly history will say : This man was a great sovereign.

  I have no time left for sleeping: the horses are already in my carriage, and I shall soon be on the road to Nijni.

  H 6

  156 THE BANKS OF THE VOLGA.

  CHAP. XXXIL*

  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 SAR-

  MATIAN. ELEGANCE, INDUSTRY, AND HUMILITY OF THE PEA

  SANTS. THEIR MUSIC. — NATIONAL MUSIC DANGEROUS TO

  DESPOTISM.THE ROAD TO SIBERIA. — A PICTURE OF RUSSIA. —

  EXILES ON THE ROAD.

  Our road follows the eourse of the Volga. Yesterday I crossed that river at Yaroslaf, and I have re-crossed it to-day at Kunitcha. In many places its two banks differ in physical aspect. On one side stretches an immense plain level with the water, on the other, the bank forms an almost perpendicular Avail, sometimes a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet high. This rampart or natural embankment, which extends a considerable way backwards from the river before it again loses itself in gradual slopes upon the plain, is clothed with osiers and birch, and^is broken from distance to distance by the river's tributaries. These water-courses form deep furrows in the bank, which they have to pierce in order to reach the mighty stream. The bank is quite a mountain chain, and the furrows are real valleys, across which the road parallel to the Volga is carried.

  * Written at Yourewetch Powolskoi, a small town between Yaroslaf and Nijni Novgorod.

  RUSSIAN COACHMEN,157

  The Russian coachmen, although so skilful on level ground, are, on mountainous roads, the most dangerous drivers in the world. That on which we are now travelling puts their prudence and my sang-froid to the full proof. The continual ascending and descending would, if the declivities were longer, be, under their mode of driving, extremely perilous. The coachman commences the descent at a foot's pace; when about a third of it is got over, which generally brings you to the steepest part, man and horses begin mutually to weary of their unaccustomed prudence ; the latter get into a gallop, the carriage rolls after with constantly increasing velocity until it reaches the middle of a bridge of planks, frail, disjointed, uneven, and movable; for they are placed, but not fixed, upon the beams which support them, and under the poles which serve as rails to the trembling structure. A bridge of this kind is found at the bottom of each ravine. If the horses, in their wild gallop, do not bring the carriage straight on the planks, it will be overtur
ned. The life of the traveller depends entirely upon the address of the driver, and upon the legs of four spirited, but weak and tired animals. If a horse stumbles, or a leather breaks, all is lost,

  At the third repetition of this hazardous game I desired that the wheel should be locked, but there was no drag on my Moscow carriage: I had been told that it was never necessary to lock the wheel in Russia. To supply the want, it was necessary to detach one of the horses, and to use its traces. I have ordered the same operation to be repeated, to the great astonishment of the drivers, each time that the length and steepness of the declivity has seemed

  158

  RUSSIAN COACHMEN

  to threaten the safety of the carriage, the frailness of which I have already only too often experienced. The coachmen, astonished as they appear, do not make the least objection to my strange fancies, nor in any way oppose the orders that I give them through the feldjäger; but I can read their thoughts in their faces. The presence of a government-servant procures me every where marks of deference: such a proof of favour on the part of the authorities renders me an object of respect among the people. I would not advise any stranger, so little experienced as I am, to risk himself without such a guide on Russian roads, especially those of the interior.