Russian Rambles

by Isabel F. Hapgood

  "Exactly. You understand what a disgrace such ignorance was on my cousin's part."

  He was charming, amusingly frank on many points which I had supposed to be rather delicate with members of the "Orthodox" (as I must call it for the lack of a possible English equivalent for pravoslavny) Russian Church, but so well-bred and intelligent, withal, that we were sincerely sorry to say good-by to him at the door of our hotel.

  XIII. THE NIZHNI NOVGOROD FAIR AND THE VOLGA

  The most picturesque and appropriate way of reaching Nizhni Novgorod is by the Volga, with which its life is so intimately connected, and the most characteristic time to see the Volga steamers is on the way upstream during the Fair.

  What an assortment of people we had on board! To begin with, our boat was commanded by a Vice-Admiral in full uniform. His family was with him, spending the summer on board sailing up and down the river between Nizhni Novgorod and Astrakhan.

  The passengers over whom the vice-admiral ruled were delightfully varied. There were Russians from every quarter of the empire, and of as many races, including Armenians. One of the latter, an old man with a physiognomy not to be distinguished, even by our Russian friends who were traveling with us, from that of a Jew, seemed to take no interest in anything except in telling over a short rosary of amber beads, and standing guard at all stopping-places over his cabin, which he was determined to occupy alone, though he had paid but one fare. After he had done this successfully at several landing-places and had consigned several men to the second cabin, an energetic man appealed to the admiral. It required some vigorous language and a threat to break open the door if the key were not forthcoming, before the admiral could overcome the resistance of the obstinate old Armenian, who protested, in very bad Russian, that he was very ill indeed, and should certainly die if any one entered his cabin. He was still alive when we reached the end of our voyage, and had cleverly made his cabin-mate pay for all his food.

  Among the second-class passengers was a party of students returning to the University of Kazan. They exhibited all degrees of shabbiness, but this was only the modest plumage of the nightingale, apparently. For hours they sang songs, all beautiful, all strange to us, and we listened entranced until tea, cigarettes, and songs came to an end in time to permit them a few hours of sleep before we reached their landing. The third-class passengers, who were also lodged on the upper deck, aft, included Tatars and other Mohammedans from the Orient, who spread their prayer-rugs at sundown and went through their complicated devotions with an air of being quite oblivious to spectators. Several got permission from the admiral to ascend to the hurricane deck. But this, while unnecessary as a precaution against crowding or interference from their numerous Russian fellow-passengers, rendered them more conspicuous; and even this was not sufficient to make the instinctively courteous Russians stare at or notice them.

  The fourth-class passengers were on the lower deck. Among them was a company of soldiers in very shabby uniforms, who had been far down the river earning a little money by working in the harvest fields, where hands are always too few, and who were returning to garrison at Kazan. Some enterprising passengers from Astrakhan had laid in a large stock of the delicious round watermelons and luscious cantaloupe melons. By the time we reached Kazan, there were not many melons left in that improvised shop on the lower deck, Russians are as fond of watermelons as are the American negroes.

  At Samara we had seen enormous bales of camel's-hair, weighing upwards of eight hundred pounds, in picturesque mats of red, yellow, and brown, taken on board for the Fair. The porters seemed to find it easy to carry them on their backs, aided only by a sort of small chair-back, with a narrow, seat-like projection at the lower end, which was fastened by straps passing over the shoulders and under the arms. When we left Kazan, I noticed that a huge open barge was being towed upstream alongside us, that it was being filled with these bales, to lighten the steamer for the sand-bars and shallows of the upper river, and that a monotonous but very musical cadence was being repeated at intervals, in muffled tones, somewhere on board. I went down to the cargo department of the lower deck and found the singers,-the herculean porters. One after another they bent their backs, and two mates hoisted the huge bales, chanting a refrain which enabled them to move and lift in unison. The words were to the following effect: "If all don't grasp together, we cannot lift the weight." The music was sad, but irresistibly sweet and fascinating, and I stood listening and watching until the great barge was filled and dropped behind, for the company's tug to pick up and tow to Nizhni with a string of other barges.

  It is probably a vulgar detail, but I must chronicle the fact that the cooking on these Volga steamers-on the line we patronized, at least-is among the very best to be found in Russia, in my experience. On the voyage upstream, when they are well supplied with sterlet and other fish, all alive, from Astrakhan, the dinners are treats for which one may sigh in vain in the capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow, with their mongrel German-French-Russian cookery. The dishes are very Russian, but they are very good.

  I remember one particularly delicious concoction was composed of fresh sterlet and sour cabbage, with white grapes on top, baked to a brown crispness.

  We arrived at our wharf on the Volga front of the old town of Nizhni Novgorod about five o'clock in the afternoon. Above us rose the steep green hills on whose crest stood the Kremlin, containing several ancient churches, the governor's house, and so forth. On a lower terrace, to right and left, stood monasteries and churches intermingled with shops and mediocre dwellings. The only noteworthy church was that in front of us, with its picturesque but un-Russian rococo plaster decoration on red brick, crowned by genuine Russian domes and crosses of elaborately beautiful patterns.

  But we did not pause long to admire this part of the view, which was already familiar to us. What a change had come over the scene since we had bidden it farewell on our way downstream! Then everything was dead, or slumbering, except the old town, the city proper; and that had not seemed to be any too much awake or alive. The Fair town, situated on the sand-spit between the Volga and the mouth of the Oka, stood locked up and deserted, as it had stood since the close of last year's Fair. Now, as we gazed over the prow of the steamer, we could see the bridge across the Oka black with the swarming masses of pedestrians and equipages.

  The steamer company allows its patrons to sleep (but not to eat) on board the night after arrival and the night before starting, and we availed ourselves of the privilege, having heard that it was often no easy matter to secure accommodations in the Fair, and having no intention of returning to our former hotel, miles from all the fun, in the upper town, if we could help it.

  The only vacant rooms in the Fair seemed to be at the "best hotel," to which we had been recommended, with a smile of amusement which had puzzled us, by a Moscow friend, an officer in the army. Prices were very high at this hotel, which, like American summer hotels, is forced to make its hay for the year during the season of six weeks, after which it is locked up. Our room was small; the floor, of rough boards, was bare; the beds were not comfortable. For the same price, in Petersburg or Moscow, we should have had a spacious room on the bel étage, handsomely furnished, with rugs on an inlaid floor.

  Across one corner of the dining-room was built a low platform, on which stood a piano. We soon discovered its use. Coming in about nine o'clock in the evening, we ordered our samovar for tea in the dining-room,-a most unusual place. The proper place was our own room. But we had found a peculiar code of etiquette prevailing here, governed by excessive modesty and propriety, no doubt, but an obstructionist etiquette, nevertheless. The hall-waiter, whose business it is to serve the samovar and coffee, was not allowed to enter our room, though his fellows had served us throughout the country, after the fashion of the land. Here we were compelled to wait upon the leisure of the chambermaid, a busy and capricious person, who would certainly not be on hand in the evening if she was not in the morning. Accordingly, we ordered our tea in the din
ing-room, as I have said. Presently, a chorus of girls, dressed all alike, mounted the platform, and sang three songs to an accompaniment banged upon the piano by a man. Being violently applauded by a long table-full of young merchants who sat near, at whom they had been singing and staring, without any attempt at disguise, and with whom they had even been exchanging remarks, they sang two songs more. They were followed by another set of girls, also in a sort of uniform costume, who sang five songs at the young merchants. It appeared that one party was called "Russian singers," and the other "German singers." We found out afterwards, by watching operations on another evening, that these five songs formed the extent of their respective repertories.

  A woman about forty-five years of age accompanied them into the room, then planted herself with her back against the wall near us, which was as far away from her charges as space permitted. She was the "sheep-dog," and we soon saw that, while discreetly oblivious of the smiles, glances, and behavior of her lambs,-as all well-trained society sheep-dogs are,-she kept darting sharp looks at us as though we were doing something quite out of the way and improper. By that time we had begun to suspect, for various reasons, that the Nizhni Fair is intended for men, not for-ladies. But we were determined quietly to convince ourselves of the state of affairs, so we stood our ground, dallied with our tea, drank an enormous quantity of it, and kept our eyes diligently in the direction where those of the sheep-dog should have been, but never were.

  Their very bad singing over, the lambs disappeared to the adjoining veranda. The young merchants slipped out, one by one. The waiters began to carry great dishes of peaches, and other dainty fruits,-all worth their weight in gold in Russia, and especially at Nizhni,-together with bottles of champagne, out to the veranda. When we were satisfied, we went to bed, but not to sleep. The peaches kept that party on the veranda and in the rooms below exhilarated until nearly daylight. I suppose the duenna did her duty and sat out the revel in the distant security of the dining-room. Several of her charges added a number of points to our store of information the next day, at the noon breakfast hour, when the duenna was not present.

  We began to think that we understood our Moscow friend's enigmatic smile, and to regret that we had not met him and his wife at the Fair, as we had originally arranged to do.

  The far-famed Fair of Nizhni Novgorod-"Makary," the Russians call it, from the town and monastery of St. Makary, sixty miles farther down the Volga, where it was held from 1624 until the present location was adopted in 1824-was a disappointment to us. There is no denying that. Until railways and steamers were introduced into these parts, and facilitated the distribution of goods, and of commonplaceness and monotony, it probably merited all the extravagant praises of its picturesqueness and variety which have been lavished upon it. The traveler arrives there with indefinite but vast expectations. A fancy dress ball on an enormous scale, combined with an International Exposition, would seem to be the nearest approach possible to a description of his confused anticipations. That is, in a measure, what one sees; and, on the other hand, it is exactly the reverse of what he sees. I must confess that I think our disappointment was partly our own fault. Had we, like most travelers who have written extravagantly about the Fair, come to it fresh from a stay of (at most) three weeks in St. Petersburg and Moscow only, we should have been much impressed by the variety of types and goods, I have no doubt. But we had spent nearly two years in the land, and were familiar with the types and goods of the capitals and of other places, so that there was little that was new to us. Consequently, though we found the Fair very interesting, we were not able to excite ourselves to any extravagant degree of amazement or rapture.

  The Fair proper consists of a mass of two-story "stone" (brick and cement) buildings, inclosed on three sides by a canal in the shape of a horseshoe. Through the centre runs a broad boulevard planted with trees, ending at the open point of the horseshoe in the residence occupied by the governor during the Fair (he usually lives in the Kremlin of the Upper Town), the post-office, and other public buildings. Across the other end of the boulevard and "rows" of the Gostinny Dvor, with their arcades full of benches occupied by fat merchants or indolent visitors, and serving as a chord to the arc of the horseshoe, run the "Chinese rows," which derive their name from the style of their curving iron roofs and their ornaments, not from the nationality of the merchants, or of the goods sold there. It is, probably, a mere accident that the wholesale shops for overland tea are situated in the Chinese rows. It is a good place to see the great bales of "Kiakhta tea," still in their wrappings of rawhides, with the hair inside and the hieroglyphical addresses, weights, and so forth, cut into the skins, instead of being painted on them, just as they have been brought overland from Kiakhta on the Chinese border of Siberia. Here, also, rises the great Makary Cathedral, which towers conspicuously above the low-roofed town. Inside the boundary formed by this Belt Canal, no smoking is allowed in the streets, under penalty of twenty-five rubles for each offense. The drainage system is flushed from the river every night; and from the ventilation towers, which are placed at short intervals, the blue smoke of purifying fires curls reassuringly. Great care is necessary in this department, and the sanitary conditions, though as good as possible, are never very secure. The whole low sandspit is often submerged during the spring floods, and the retreating waters leave a deposit of slime and debris behind them, which must be cleared away, besides doing much damage to the buildings.

  The peculiarity of this Makary Fair is that nothing is sold by sample, in modern fashion; the whole stock of goods is on hand, and is delivered at once to purchasers. The taciturn, easy-going merchants in those insignificant-looking shops of the Gostinny Dvor "rows," and, to a small extent, in the supplementary town which has sprung up outside the canal, set the prices for tea and goods of all sorts all over Russia and Siberia for the ensuing year. Contracts for the future are dated, and last year's bills fall due, at "Makary." It is hard to realize.

  All the firms with whose shops we had been familiar in Petersburg and Moscow had establishments here, and, at first, it seemed not worth while to inspect their stocks, with which we felt perfectly acquainted. But we soon discovered that our previous familiarity enabled us to distinguish certain articles which are manufactured for the "Fair" trade exclusively, and which are never even shown in the capitals. For example, the great porcelain houses of St. Petersburg manufacture large pipe-bowls, ewers (with basins to match) of the Oriental shape familiar to the world in silver and brass, and other things, all decorated with a deep crimson bordering on magenta, and with gold. The great silk houses of Moscow prepare very rich and very costly brocades of this same deep crimson hue, besprinkled with gold and with tiny bouquets of bright flowers, or in which the crimson is prominent. They even copy the large, elaborate patterns from the robes of ancient Doges of Venice. All these, like the pipes and ewers, are made to suit the taste of customers in Bokhara and other Eastern countries, where a man's rank is, to a certain degree, to be recognized by the number and richness of the khalati which he can afford to wear at one time. This is one of the points in which the civilization of the East coincides very nearly with the civilization of the West. The khalat is a sort of dressing-gown, with wide sleeves, which is girt about the waist with a handsome shawl; but it would strike a European that eight or ten of these, worn one on top of the other, might conduce to the preservation of vanity, but not to comfort, in the hot countries where the custom prevails. The Bokhariots bring to the Fair khalati of their own thin, strong silk, in hues more gaudy than those of the rainbow and the peacock combined, which are always lined with pretty green and white chintz, and can be bought for a very reasonable price in the Oriental shops, together with jeweled arms and ornaments, rugs, and a great variety of fascinating wares.

  The choicest "overland" tea-the true name is "Kiakhta tea"-can be had only by wholesale, alas! and it is the same with very many things. There are shops full of rolls of sarpinka, a fine, changeable gingham in pink and blue, green
and yellow, and a score of other combinations, which washes perfectly, and is made by the peasants far down the Volga, in the season when agricultural labor is impossible. There are furs of more sorts than the foreign visitor is likely ever to have seen before; iron from the Ural mines by the ton, on a detached sand-spit in the Oka River; dried and salted fish by the cord, in a distant, too odorous spot; goldsmiths' shops; old-clothes shops, where quaint and beautiful old costumes of Russia abound; Tatar shops, filled with fine, multi-colored leather work and other Tatar goods, presided over by the stately Tatars from whom we had bought at Kazan; shops piled with every variety of dried fruit, where prime Sultana raisins cost forty cents for a box of one hundred and twenty pounds. Altogether, it is a varied and instructive medley.

  We learned several trade tricks. For example, we came upon the agency of a Moscow factory, which makes a woolen imitation of an Oriental silken fabric, known as termalama. The agent acknowledged that it was an imitation, and said that the price by the piece was twenty-five cents a yard. In the Moscow Oriental shops the dealers sell it for eight times that price, and swear that it is genuine from the East. A Russian friend of ours had been cheated in this way, and the dealers attempted to cheat us also,-in vain, after our Nizhni investigations.

  Every one seemed to be absorbed in business, to the exclusion of every other thought. But sometimes, as we wandered along the boulevard, and among the rows, we found the ground of the Gostinny Dvor strewn with fresh sprays of fragrant fir, which we took at first to be a token that a funeral had occurred among some of the merchants' clerks who lived over the shops. However, it appeared that a holy picture had been carried along the rows, and into the shops of those who desired its blessing on their trade, and a short service had been held. The "zeal" of these numerous devout persons must have enriched the church where the ikona dwelt, judging from the number, of times during our five days' stay that we came upon these freshly strewn paths.