Russian Rambles

by Isabel F. Hapgood

  Even if Count Tolstoy were able to support himself, he certainly could not support a wife and the nine living children out of sixteen which he has had. There is no justice in expecting the adult members of the family to accept and practice his doctrines. They do not compel him to accept theirs, though they are in the majority. The little ones could not feed themselves, even were they ideal peasant children. It would be nearer the truth to say that the countess has taken possession of the property; she administers it wisely and economically, for the good of the family and her husband. She issued, about five years ago, a cheaper edition of her husband's works, the only edition available hitherto having been very expensive. The wisdom of her step was proved by the large profits derived from it in the course of three years,-fifty thousand dollars,-all of which was applied to the needs of the family.

  The count is not the only one at Yasnaya Polyana to deny himself. For the past two winters the whole family have remained on the estate, and have not gone to Moscow, with the exception of one who is in business at the capital, one member who is at his studies, and one who is married and resides on another estate. This is because the income did not amount to a certain sum, a very moderate sum in American eyes, without which a stay in town would have been imprudent.

  The question naturally follows: If the countess holds the property, and the count continues to get the good of it, in a modest way; if the count does not do everything for himself, and earn his daily bread by manual toil, is not he mentally unbalanced to proclaim his theories to the world, and to change his mind so often on other points?

  The answer is: No. Undoubtedly the count, when he attained to his convictions on the subject of poverty and labor, hoped to carry his family with him. The countess, like a brave woman, like a devoted wife and mother, refused to adopt his views. She is willing to shoulder the responsibility of her refusal, and her conduct is an honor to her. As for his changes of doctrine, we are all very much like him in the matter of inconsistency. Only, as very few of us enjoy the renown or the authority of Count Tolstoy, it rarely occurs to us to proclaim our progressive opinions to the world; at most, one or two experiences cure us of that weakness, even if any one thinks it worth while to notice them in the slightest degree. Very few of us are so deeply rooted in our convictions, or so impressed with their importance to the world as principles, that we will raise a finger to defend them. We alternately know that we shall never change them again, and suspect that we may see something better at any moment; and we refrain from committing ourselves unnecessarily in any form which can be brought up against us hereafter.

  The case is precisely the reverse with Count Tolstoy. He is so full of the missionary spirit, so persuaded of the truth and value of his beliefs, that he rushes into print with them instantly. There they are, all ready for those who do not sympathize with him to use as missiles when he gets a new inspiration. Change of opinion is generally progress. Continuity, an absolute lack of change, means stagnation and death in the mental as well as in the physical world. As the count is impressible and reads much, his reading and meditation are fruitful of novelties, which he bravely submits to the judgment of the world without pausing to consider whether they coincide with his other utterances or not. That he does not always express his abstract ideas clearly is the inevitable result of the lack of philosophical training.

  But enthusiastic souls who grieve over the imperfections in the present organization of society are always waiting for some one of warmer zeal to lead them. Such persons perceive the ideal side of every argument, interpret doctrines with their hearts, not with their heads, and are fired by the newest conception of social relations. As one of the most marked characteristics of Count Tolstoy lies in infusing his own personality into every word he writes, it is only natural that these people should adopt him as their guide. It is not the fault of any one in particular that he has abandoned a doctrine by the time others have mastered it. The only refuge is in the cry of Hamlet:-

  "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!

  That ever I was born to set it right."

  Thus much I think I may say of the home life of the famous Russian writer without sinning against the duties imposed by the frank and cordial hospitality for which we are indebted to the family. It has seemed time to enter a protest against various misrepresentations and misconceptions in regard to them which are current. In conclusion, I beg leave to explain that my spelling of the name is that used by themselves when writing in English, and in print upon their French cards.

  IX. A RUSSIAN HOLY CITY

  It was close on midnight when we left Yasnaya Polyana. A large and merry party of Count Tolstoy's children and relatives escorted us: some in the baggage cart, perched on our luggage; some in the jaunting-car-like lineika with us, on our moonlight drive to the little station where we were to join the train and continue our journey southward.

  We should have preferred to travel by daylight, as we were possessed of the genuine tourist greed for seeing "everything;" but in this case, as in many others in Russia, the trains were not arranged so that we could manage it.

  There is very little variety along the road through central Russia, but the monotony is of a different character from that of the harsh soil and the birch and pine forests of the north. The vast plains of this tchernozyom-the celebrated "black earth zone"-swell in long, low billows of herbage and grain, diversified only at distant intervals by tracts of woodland. But the wood is too scarce to meet the demands for fuel, and the manure of the cattle, well dried, serves to eke it out, a traveling native in our compartment told us, instead of being used, as it should be, to enrich the land, which is growing poor. Now and then, substantial brick cottages shone out amidst the gray and yellow of the thatched log huts in the hamlets. We heard of one landed proprietor who encouraged his peasant neighbors to avoid the scourge of frequent conflagrations by building with brick, and he offered a prize to every individual who should comply with the conditions. The prize consisted of a horse from the proprietor's stables, and of the proprietor's presence, in full uniform and all his orders, at the house-warming. The advantages of brick soon became so apparent to the peasants that they continued to employ it, even after their patron had been forced to abolish the reward, lest his horses and his time should be utterly exhausted.

  Minor incidents were not lacking to enliven our long journey. In the course of one of the usual long halts at a county town, a beggar came to the window of our carriage. He was a tall, slender young fellow, about seven-and-twenty years of age. Though he used the customary forms,-"Give me something, sudarynya [12] if only a few kopeks, Khristi radi!" [13] there was something about him, despite his rags, there was an elegance of accent in his language, to which I was not accustomed in the "poor brethren" generally.

  I pretended ignorance of Russian and the sign language, but watched him as I continued my conversation in English. Thereupon my man repeated his demands in excellent French, with a good accent. I turned on him.

  "This is unusual," I said in Russian, by way of hinting that I belonged to the category of the willfully deaf. "Accept my compliments on your knowledge of French and of Russian. But be so good as to explain to me this mystery before I contribute."

  "Madam," he retorted, "I'd have you know that I am a gentleman,-a gentleman of education."

  "Then pray solve the other mystery,-why you, strong, young, healthy, handsome, are a professional beggar."

  He stalked off in a huff. Evidently he was one of that class of "decayed nobles" of whom I had heard many curious tales in Moscow; only he had decayed at a rather earlier age than the average.

  As we proceeded southward, pretty Little Russian girls took the place of the plainer-featured Great Russian maidens. Familiar plants caught our eyes. Mulleins-"imperial sceptre" is the pretty Russian name-began to do sentinel duty along the roadside; sumach appeared in the thickets of the forests, where the graceful cut-leaved birch of the north was rare. The Lombardy poplar, the favorite of the Little Rus
sian poets, reared its dark columns in solitary state. At last, Kieff, the Holy City, loomed before us in the distance.

  I know no town in Russia which makes so picturesque and characteristic an impression on the traveler as Kieff. From the boundless plain over which we were speeding, we gazed up at wooded heights crowned and dotted with churches. At the foot of the slope, where golden domes and crosses, snowy white monasteries and battlemented walls, gleamed among masses of foliage punctuated with poplars, swept the broad Dnyepr. It did not seem difficult then to enter into the feelings of Prince Oleg when he reached the infant town, on his expedition from unfertile Novgorod the Great, of the north, against Byzantium, and, coveting its rich beauty, slew its rulers and entered into possession, saying, "This shall be the Mother of all Russian Cities." We could understand the sentiments of the pilgrims who flock to the Holy City by the million.

  The agreeable sensation of approach being over, our expectations, which had been waxing as the train threaded its way through a ravine to the station, received a shock. It was the shock to which we were continually being subjected whenever we made pious pilgrimages to places of historic renown. On each occasion of this sort we were moved to reflect deeply on the proverbial blessings of ignorance. It makes a vast difference in one's mental comfort, I find, whether he accepts the present unquestioningly, with enthusiasm, and reconstructs the historic past as an agreeable duty, or whether he already bears the past, in its various aspects, in his mind, in involuntary but irrational expectation of meeting it, and is forced to accept the present as a painful task! Which of these courses to pursue in the future was the subject of my disappointed meditations, as we drove through the too Europeanized streets, and landed at a hotel of the same pattern. It is easy to forgive St. Petersburg, in its giddy youth of one hundred and seventy-five winters, for its Western features and comforts; but that Kieff, in its venerable maturity of a thousand summers, should be so spick and span with newness and reformation seemed at first utterly unpardonable. The inhabitants think otherwise, no doubt, and deplore the mediaeval hygienic conditions which render the town the most unhealthy in Europe, in the matter of the death-rate from infectious diseases.

  Our comfortable hotel possessed not a single characteristic feature, except a line on the printed placard of regulations posted in each room. The line said, "The price of this room is four rubles [or whatever it was] a day, except in Contract Time." "Contract Time," I found, meant the Annual Fair, in February, when the normal population of about one hundred and sixty-six thousand is swelled by "arrivers"-as travelers are commonly designated on the signboards of the lower-class hotels-from all the country round about. When, prompted by this remarkable warning, I inquired the prices during the fair, the clerk replied sweetly,-no other word will do justice to his manner,-"All we can get!" Such frankness is what the French call "brutal."

  The principal street of the town, the Krestchatik, formerly the bed of a stream, in front of our windows, was in the throes of sewer-building. More civilization! Sewage from the higher land had lodged there in temporary pools. The weather was very hot. The fine large yellow bricks, furnished by the local clay-beds, of which the buildings and sidewalks were made, were dazzling with heat. It is only when one leaves the low-lying new town, and ascends the hills, on which the old dwellers wisely built, or reaches the suburbs, that one begins thoroughly to comprehend the enthusiastic praises of many Russians who regard Kieff as the most beautiful town in the empire.

  The glare of the yellow brick melts softly into the verdure of the residence quarter, and is tempered into inoffensiveness in the Old Town by the admixture of older and plainer structures, which refresh the eye. But the chief charm, unfailing, inexhaustible as the sight of the ocean, is the view from the cliffs. Beyond the silver sweep of the river at their feet, animated with steamers and small boats, stretches the illimitable steppe, where the purple and emerald shadows of the sea depths and shallows are enriched with hues of golden or velvet brown and misty blue. The steppe is no longer an unbroken expanse of waving plume-grass and flowers, wherein riders and horses are lost to sight as, in Gogol's celebrated tale, were Taras Bulba and his sons, fresh from the famous Academy of Kieff, which lies at our feet, below the cliffs. Increasing population has converted this virgin soil into vast grainfields, less picturesque near at hand than the wild growth, but still deserving, from afar, of Gogol's enraptured apostrophe: "Devil take you, steppe, how beautiful you are!"

  Naturally, our first pilgrimage was to the famous Kievo-Petcherskaya Lavra, that is, the First-Class Monastery of the Kieff Catacombs, the chief monastic institution and goal of pilgrims in all the country, of which we had caught a glimpse from the opposite shore of the river, as we approached the town. Buildings have not extended so densely in this direction but that a semblance of ascetic retirement is still preserved. Between the monastery and the city lies the city park, which is not much patronized by the citizens, and for good reasons. To the rich wildness of nature is added the wildness of man. Hordes of desperadoes, "the barefoot brigade," the dregs of the local population, have taken up their residence there every spring, of late years, in the ravines and the caves which they have excavated, in humble imitation of the holy men of the monastery of old. From time to time the police make a skirmish there, but an unpleasant element of danger is still connected with a visit to this section of the city's heart, which deters most people from making the attempt.

  Beyond this lie the heights, on which stand the fortress and the Catacombs Monastery. Opposite the arsenal opens the "Holy Gate;" all Russian monasteries seem to have a holy gate. "The wall, fourteen feet in height, and more in some places, surrounding the principal court, was built by Hetman Mazeppa," says the local guide-book. Thus promptly did we come upon traces of that dashing Kazak chieftain, who would seem, judging from the solid silver tombs for saints, the churches, academy, and many other offerings of that nature in Kieff alone, to have spent the intervals between his deeds of outrageous treachery and immorality in acts of ostentatious piety. In fact, his piety had an object, as piety of that rampant variety usually has. He meditated betraying Little Russia into the power of Poland; and knowing well how heartily the Little Russians detested the Poles because of the submission to the Pope of Rome in those Greek churches designated as Uniates, he sought to soothe their suspicions and allay their fears by this display of attachment to the national church. His vaingloriousness was shown by his habit of having his coat of arms placed on bells, ikonostasi, [14] and windows of the churches he built. In one case, he caused his portrait to be inserted in the holy door of the ikonostas,-a very improper procedure,-where it remained until the middle of the last century. Highly colored frescoes of the special monastery saints and of historical incidents adorned the wall outside the holy gate. Inside, we found a monk presiding over a table, on which stood the image of the saint of the day, a platter covered with a cross-adorned cloth, for offerings, and various objects of piety for sale.

  The first thing which struck us, as we entered the great court, was the peculiar South Russian taste for filling in the line of roof between the numerous domes with curving pediments and tapering turned-wood spirelets surmounted by golden stars and winged seraphs' heads surrounded by rays. The effect of so many points of gold against the white of the walls, combined with the gold of the crosses, the high tints of the external frescoes, and the gold of the cupolas, is very brilliant, no doubt; but it is confusing, and constitutes what, for want of a better word, I must call a Byzantine-rococo style of architecture. The domes, under Western influence, during the many centuries when Kieff was divorced from Russia, under Polish and Lithuanian rule, assumed forms which lack the purity and grace of those in Russia proper. Octagonal cupolas supported on thick, sloping bases involuntarily remind one of the cup-and-ball game. Not content with this degenerate beginning, they pursue their errors heavenward. Instead of terminating directly in a cross, they are surmounted by a lantern frescoed with saints, a second octagonal dome, a ball, and
a cross. These octagons constitute a feature in all South Russian churches.