Fig. 19THE DNIEPER AT KIEF.
THE DNIEPER AT KIEF.
Beggars, who in Russia are as thick about the churches as the pigeons that pick up crumbs in front of St. Mark's, are almost essential to the histrionic panoramas at these places of pilgrimage. I have never seen so large or so varied a collection of professional and casual mendicants as within and about the sacred enclosures of Kief. Some appeared to enjoy vested rights; these privileged personages would as little endure to be driven from a favoured post as with us a sweeper at a crossing would tolerate a rival broom. Several of these waiters upon charity might be termed literary beggars; their function is to read aloud from a large book in the hearing of the passers-by. They are often infirm, and occasionally blind, but they read just the same. Another class may be called the incurables; in England they would be kept out of sight, but here in Russia, running sores, mutilated hands and legs, are valuable as stock-in-trade. Loathsome diseases are thrust forward as a threat, distorted limbs are extortionate for alms; it is a piteous sight to see; some of these sad objects are in the jaws of death, and come apparently that they may die on holy ground. Another class may be called the pious beggars; they stand at the church doors; they are picturesque and apostolic; long beards and quiet bearing, with a certain professional get-up of misery and desolation, make these sacred mendicants grand after their kind. Such figures are usually ranged on either side of the chief entrance; they are motionless as statues, save when in the immediate act of soliciting alms; indeed I have sometimes noticed how beggars standing before a church façade are suggestive of statuary, the want of which is so much felt in the unsculpturesque architecture of Russia. Pilgrims and beggars—the line of demarcation it is not always easy to define—have an Oriental way of throwing themselves into easy and paintable attitudes; in fact posture plays a conspicuous part in the devotions of such people; they pray bodily almost more than mentally,—the figure and its attendant costume become instruments of worship.
The Cathedral of St. Sophia, which dates back to the Eleventh Century, is of interest from its resemblance to St. Mark's, Venice, in the plan of the Greek cross, in the use of domes and galleries, and in the introduction of mosaics as surface-decorations. I saw the galleries full of fashionable worshippers; the galleries in St. Mark's on the contrary, are always empty and useless, though constructed for use. In the apse are the only old mosaics I have met with in Russia; it is strange that an art which specially pertains to Byzantium was not turned to more account by the Greco-Russian Church. There is in the apse, besides, a subject composition,—a noble female figure, colossal in size, the arms upraised in attitude of prayer, the drapery cast broadly and symmetrically. In the same interior are associated with mosaics, frescoes, or rather wall-paintings insecco. On the columns which support the cupola are frescoes which, though of no art value, naturally excited curiosity when they were discovered some few years since, after having been hid for two or more centuries by a covering of whitewash. Some other wall-pictures are essentially modern, and others have been restored, after Russian usage, in so reckless and wholesale a fashion as to be no longer of value as archæologic records. In the staircase leading to the galleries are some further wall-paintings, said to be contemporaneous with the building of the cathedral; the date, however, is wholly uncertain. These anomalous compositions represent a boar-hunt and other sports, with groups of musicians, dancers, and jugglers, intervening. In accord with the secular character of the subjects is the rude naturalism of the style. Positive knowledge as to date being wanting, it is impossible to speak of these works otherwise than to say that they cannot be of Byzantine origin. If of real antiquity they will have to join company with other semi-barbaric products in metal, etc., which prove, as we have seen, that Russia has two historic schools, the Byzantine, on the one hand, debilitated and refined, as of periods of decline, and, on the other, a non-Byzantine and barbarous style, strong and coarse as of races still vital and vigorous. A like conflict is found in the North of Italy between the Byzantine and the Lombard manner; and even in England the west front of Wells Cathedral presents the same unresolved contradictions. It would seem that over the greater part of Europe, Eastern as well as Western, these two hostile arts were practiced contemporaneously; at all events the same buildings are found to display the two opposite styles. It would appear probable, however, that the respective artists or artisans belonged to at least two distinct nationalities.
The Pecherskoi Monastery, or Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra, at Kief, the Kremlin in Moscow, and the grand monastery of Troitza, have this in common, that the situation is commanding, the site elevated. Also, these three venerable sanctuaries are strongholds, for though the holy places at Kief are not on all sides fortified, yet the approach from the old city, which is the most accessible, lies along bastions and walls. In fact, here we have again a semblance to the ancient idea of a church, a citadel, and a palace united, as in an acropolis—the Church and the State being one; the arm of the flesh sustaining the sword of the spirit,—a condition of things which has always given to the world its noblest art. The walk to this most ancient monastery in Russia passes pleasantly by the side of a wood; then opens a view of the vast plain beneath, intersected by the river Dnieper, over which is flung the great suspension-bridge built by the English engineer, Charles Vignolles, at the cost of £350,000. The immediate approach is lined with open shops or stalls for the sale of sacred pictures, engravings of saints, and other articles which pilgrims love to carry back to their homes. Within the enclosure trees throw a cool shade, under which, as in the courtyards of mosques in Constantinople, the hot and weary may repose.
The cathedral dedicated to the ascension of the Virgin, has not the slightest pretence to external architecture. The walls are mostly whitewashed, and some of the windows have common square heads crowned by mean pediments; the intervening pilasters and floral decorations in relief, and all in the midst of whitewash, are of the poorest character. The seven gilded cupolas or domes may be compared to inverted cups surmounted by crosses. The form resembles the cup commonly combined in the fantastic towers and spires of Protestant churches in Germany, where, however, it has been supposed to signify that the laity partake of the chalice. These domes are made further decorative at the point of the small circular neck which connects the cupola with the upper member or finial; around this surface is painted a continuous series of single saints standing; the effect of these pictures against the sky, if not quite artistic, is striking. Other parts of the exterior may indicate Italian rather than Oriental origin, but the style is far too mongrel to boast of any legitimate parentage. Here, as in the Kremlin, are external wall-paintings of saints, some standing on solid ground, others sitting among clouds; the Madonna is of course of the company, and the First and Second Persons of the Trinity crown the composition. The ideas are trite and the treatment is contemptible—the colours pass from dirty red into brown and black. These certainly are the worst wall-paintings I have ever met with, worse even than the coarsest painted shrines on the waysides of Italy; indeed no Church save the Greek Church would tolerate an art thus debased. A year after my journey to Kief I travelled through the Tyrol on my way from the Ammergau Passion Play. The whole of this district abounds in frescoes, many being on the external walls of private dwellings. This village art of the Bavarian Highlands, though often the handiwork of simple artisans, puts to shame both the external and the internal wall-paintings at Kief, Troitza, and the Kremlin. Yet this contrast between Russia and Southern nations does not arise so much from the higher ability of the artists, as from the superiority of the one school to the other school. The pictorial arts fostered by the Western Church are fundamentally true, while the arts which the Eastern Church has patronized and petrified are essentially false and effete.
The scene which strikes the eye on entering this parti-coloured Cathedral of the Assumption, though strange, is highly picturesque. To this holy shrine are brought the halt, the lame, and the blind, as to the moving of the waters. Some press forward to kiss the foot of a crucifix, others bow the head and kiss the ground, a servile attitude of worship, which in the Greco-Russian Church has been borrowed from the Mohammedans. The groups which throng the narrow, crowded floor, are wonderfully effective; an artist with sketch-book in hand would have many a good chance of catching graphic heads and costumes, and all the more easily because these pilgrims are not so lively as lethargic. Still, for grand scenic impression, I have never in Russia witnessed any church function so striking as the piazza in front of St. Peter's on Easter Day, when all Rome flocks to receive the Pope's blessing from the balcony. Yet the whole interior of this cathedral is itself a picture, or rather a countless succession of pictures; as to the architecture there is not the minutest space that has not been emblazoned by aid of a paint-pot.
But the greatest marvel in this Cathedral of the Assumption is the iconostas, or screen for the sacred pictures, a structure indispensable to all Russian churches, of which I have withheld the description till now, when I find myself in front of a large and more astounding erection than can be found in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Troitza. In small churches these sacred placards, bearing the character of drop-scenes, are apt to be paltry, indeed the irreverent stranger may even be reminded of painted caravans at village fairs. But in large cathedrals the screen which stands between the people in the nave and the priests in the holy of holies, presents a vast façade, upon which are ranged, in three, four, or five stories, a multitude of sacred pictures covered with gold and decked with jewels. These elaborate contrivances correspond to the reredos in Western churches, only with this important difference, that they are not behind the holy place but in front of it. They might, perhaps, with more correctness be compared to the rood-screens which in our churches stand between the altar and the people. The sacred screen now before me mounts its head into the dome, and presents an imposing and even an architectonic aspect, but certain details, such as classic mouldings of columns, and a broken entablature, pronounce the edifice to be comparatively modern. The summit is fitly crowned by a crucifix, almost in the flat, in order not to evade the law of the Russian Church, which prohibits statues in the round; the figure of Christ is silver, the cross and the drapery of gold or silver-gilt. On either side of the crucifix stand in their prescriptive stations the Madonna and St. John. On the story beneath comes the entombment, all covered with gold and silver, in a low-relief which indicates the forms of the figures beneath; the heads, which are not in relief but merely pictorial, are the only portions of the picture actually visible.
These altar-screens, which in Russia are counted not by tens but by hundreds and thousands, are highly ornate. Silver and gold and jewellery are conjoined with painting after the nursery and doll-like fashion approved in the South of Spain and at Naples. Only in the most corrupt of Roman Catholic capitals does ecclesiastical art assume the childish forms common in Russia. Resuming the description of the above altar-screen, we find next in range below the entombment a large composition, comprising God the Father surrounded by cherubs, with two full-grown seraphs, encircled by six gold wings, standing on either side. Again, the only parts of the picture permitted to be seen are the heads, crossed hands, black legs and feet. Christ with the open book of judgment is another conspicuous figure; also a companion head, gigantic in size, is the Madonna, directly Byzantine in type, though its smooth and well-kept surface gives little sign of age. The Christ, too, must be accounted but as modernized Byzantine; here is none of the severity or of the tenuity of the early periods. The type is poor though refined, debilitated though ideal. The hair, parted on the forehead, falls thickly on the shoulders. The face is youthful, not more than thirty, and without a wrinkle; the cheeks are a little flushed, the prevailing expression is placidity. The accessories of glory, drapery, and open book are highly decorative; here embossed patterns on the gold coverings enhance the richness of the surface-ornament. Once again the Russians appear supreme in metal-work, especially in the elaboration of decoration in the flat. Most of the pictures above mentioned are evidently supremely holy; they are black and highly gilded; moreover, they move most deeply all sorts and conditions of men, women, and children.
I may here again mention that one purpose of my Russian journey was to discover whether there were heads of Christ in the possession of the Russian Church older or nobler than the ivory carvings, the frescoes, or easel pictures which are found in Italy and other Southern or Western nations. And I was, I confess, disappointed not to meet with any data which could materially enlarge or enrich this most interesting of subjects. As to priority of date, it seems to be entirely on the side of the Roman catacombs and the Latin Church; moreover, in Russia, as I before frequently remarked, chronology is untrustworthy, inasmuch as comparatively modern works assume and parody the style of the most ancient. The heads of Christ in Russia, one of which has been just described, are, as already said, more or less servile reproductions of Byzantine types. Still the typical form is found under varying phases; the general tendency in these replicas of anterior originals would appear to be towards the mitigation of the asperities in the confirmed Byzantine formulas. Thus the more recent heads of the Saviour in the churches of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Troitza and Kief, assume a certain modern manner, and occasionally wear a smooth, pretty and ornamental aspect. In these variations on the prescriptive Eastern type, the hair usually flows down upon the shoulders, as with the Greek and Russian Priests in the present day. As to the beard, it is thick and full, or short and scant, but the cheeks are left uncovered, and show an elongated face and chin.
These Russian heads of the Saviour in softening down the severe and aged type common to Byzantium, assume a physiognomy not sufficiently intellectual for the Greatest of Teachers. These "images" in fact inspire little reverence except with blind worshippers; they are mostly wrought up and renovated, so as to fulfil the preconceived conditions of sanctity: undefined generality, weakness, smoothness, and blackness, are the common characteristics of these supposititious heads of the Saviour. It will thus again be easily understood how opposite has been the practice of the Eastern and Western Churches; it is a striking fact that at the time when, in Italy, under Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and others, the mystery of a God manifest in the flesh had been as it were solved by a perfected art, this Russian Church was still under bondage to the once accepted but now discarded notion that the Redeemer ought to be represented as one who had no form or comeliness. Art in the Western world gained access to the beautiful, the perfect, and the divine, as soon as it was permitted to the painter or the sculptor to develop to uttermost perfection the idea of the Man-God. All such conceptions of the infinite, whether it be that of Jupiter in pagan periods, or of Christ under our divine dispensation, have always been the life and inspiration of the arts. But in Russia ignoble heads of Christ convinced me that such life and inspiration were denied. And I look upon the head of Christ as the turning point in the Christian art of a nation. If that head be conceived of unworthily there is no possibility that prophets, apostles, martyrs, shall receive their due.
Fig. 20LA LAVRA, KIEF.
LA LAVRA, KIEF.
ANTONIO GALLENGA
Nijni-Novgorod, or Lower New-town, is older than Moscow, and only not so old as Novgorod the Great, which was a contemporary of Venice, and was still new when the semi-fabulaus Ruric and his Varangians are supposed to have given their name to Russia.
Nijni-Novgorod, which everybody here calls simply "Nijni," dates from 1222; and mention of its fair occurs, we are told, in 1366, since which epoch its celebration has suffered very rare and only violent interruption.
To understand why this venerable spot should have been for so many years, and should be still, so extensively favoured by the world's trade, it is hardly necessary to see it. We only need bear in mind that Nijni lies near the confluence of the Oka and the Volga, two of the greatest rivers of this Russia which alone of all countries of Europe may be said to have great rivers; the Volga having a course of 2,320 miles, and the Oka, a mere tributary, of 850 miles.
It is the position which the Saöne and the Rhone have made for Lyons; the position for which St. Louis is indebted to the Mississippi and Missouri; the position which Corientes will soon owe to the Parana and the Paraguay.
Nijni lies at the very centre of that water communication which joins the Caspian and the Black Sea to the White Sea and the Baltic, and which, were it always summer, might almost have enabled Russia to dispense with roads and railroads.
But Nijni is, besides, the terminus of the railway from Moscow. That line places this town and its fair in communication with all the lines of Russia and the Western World, while the Volga, with its tributary, the Kama, leads to Perm, and the Pass of the Ural Mountains, and the vast regions of Siberia and Central Asia.
Nijni-Novgorod is thus one of the most important links between the two great continents, the point of contact between Asiatic wealth and European industry; and its fair the best meeting-place for the interchange of commodities between the nations that still walk, ride, or row at the rate of three to five miles an hour, and those who fly on the wings of steam at the rate of thirty to fifty.
The site of Nijni is somewhat like what I still remember of St. Louis after a seventeen years' interval. We travelled from Moscow over a distance of 273 miles in thirteen hours. For the last hour or two before we reached our journey's end, we had on our right the river Oka and a hilly ridge rising all along it and forming its southern bank.
On alighting at the station we drove through a flat, marshy ground, intersected by broad canals, to a triangular space between the Oka and the Volga at their confluence, where the fair is held.
We went through the maze of bazaars and market buildings, of rows of booths, shops and stalls, eating and drinking sheds, warehouses and counting-houses. We struggled through long lines of heavy-laden country carts, and swarms of clatteringdroskies, all striving to force their way along with that hurry-skurry that adds to confusion and lessens speed; and we came at last to a long pontoon bridge, over which we crossed the Oka, and beyond which rises the hill-range or ravine, on the top and at the foot of which is built the straggling town of Nijni-Novgorod.
Nijni-Novgorod is a town of 45,000 inhabitants, and, like most Russian towns, it occupies a space which could accommodate half a million of people. Like many old Russian towns, also, it is laid out on the pattern of Moscow, as far as its situation allowed; and, to keep up the resemblance, it boasts a Kremlin of its own, a grim, struggling citadel with battlemented walls and mediæval towers over its gates, with its scores of Byzantine churches, most of them with their five cupolasde rigueur, clustering together like a bunch of radishes—one big radish between four little radishes—but not as liberally covered with gilding as those which glisten on the top of sacred buildings in St. Petersburg or Moscow; down the slopes and ravines are woods and gardens, with coffee-houses and eating-houses, and other places of popular entertainment.
It is a town to be admired on the outside and at a distance as a picture, but most objectionable as a residence on account of its marvellous distances and murderous pavement, a stroll on which reminds you of the martyrdom of those holy pilgrims who, to give glory to God, walked with dry peas in their shoes.
The pavements are bad in Nijni town, but worse in Nijni fair, for if in the former all is hard, sharp, uneven flint, in the latter, what is not wood is mud, and what is not mud is dust, for heavy showers alternate with stifling heat; and, after a three hours' drought one would say that these good people, who live half in and half out of a swamp, and who drink anything rather than water, can never spare a poor drop to slake the pulverized clay of their much trodden thoroughfares.
With all these drawbacks, however, and even with the addition of its villainous smells, this is an interesting and striking spot. No place can boast of a more sublime view than one can get here from the Imperial Palace and Terrace, or from the church-domes or spires on the Kremlin; or, even better, from the Esplanade of Mouravief's Folly—a tower erected by the well-known General of that name on the highest and foremost ravine, and on the summit of which he had planned to place a fac-simile of the famous Strassburg clock, but constructed on so gigantic a scale that hours and minutes, the moon's phases, the planets' cycles and all besides, should be distinctly visible from every locality of the town and fair for miles and miles around.
From any of those vantage-grounds on the hill look down. The town is at your feet; the fair—a city, a Babylon of shops—stretches beyond the bridge; the plain, a boundless ocean of green, field and forest, dotted here and there with church-spires and factory-shafts at prodigious distances; and the two broad rivers, bearing the tribute of remote regions from north and south in numberless boats and lighters, and neat gallant steamers; the two streams meeting here at right angles just below the pontoon-bridge where an immense five-domed church of recent construction has been reared to mark and hallow the spot.
Down at the fair, in the centre of its hubbub, rises the governor's summer-place. The governor dwells there with his family during the few weeks of the fair (mid-August to mid-September), coming down hither from the Imperial Palace in the town Kremlin, and occupying the upper floor. The whole basement, the entrance-hall, and all passages—with the exception of a narrow, private, winding staircase—are invaded by the crowd and converted into a bazaar, the noisiest in the fair, where there is incessant life and movement, and music and hurly-burly at every hour between noon and night—a lively scene upon which his Excellency and his guests and friends look down from the balcony after their five o'clock dinner, smoking their cigarettes, and watching the policemen as they pounce like trained hawks on the unwary pick-pockets prowling among the crowd.
Of this immense mass of strangers now in Nijni, the town itself, and especially the upper town, sees and hears but little.
The fair has its own ground, on its own side of the bridge, its own hotels and lodging-houses, its own churches, chapels, theatres, eating, gambling, and other houses, its long straight streets and boulevards, and pleasure as well as business resorts.
It has its fine Chinese Row, though Chinamen have lately discontinued their attendance; it has rich traders' temporary homes, fitted up with comfort, and even taste and luxury; and it has its charity dormitory, a vast wooden shed, built by Court Ignatieff, and bearing his name, intended to accommodate 250 houseless vagrants, but alas! in a place where there must be 20,000, if not 200,000 persons answering that description.
Of women coming to this market the number is comparatively small—one, I should say, for every 100 men; of ladies not one in 10,000, or 100,000.
Of those who muster sufficiently strong at the evening promenade on the Boulevard, indigenous or resident, for the most part, rather the look than the number is formidable; and it is here in Nijni, as it is generally in Russia, that a Mussulman becomes convinced of the wisdom of his Arabian prophet, who invented the yashmak as man's best protection, and hallowed it; for of the charms of most Russian women, blessed are those who believe without seeing!
In working hours only men and beasts are to be seen—a jumble and scramble of men and beasts: car-loads of goods; piles of hogsheads, barrels, bales, boxes, and bundles, merchandise of all kinds, of every shape, colour, or smell, all lying in a mass topsy-turvy, higgledy-piggledy; the thoroughfares blocked up, the foot-paths encumbered; chaos and noise all-pervading; and yet, by degrees, almost imperceptibly, you will see everything going its way, finding its own place; for every branch of trade has, or was at least intended to have, here its appointed abode; and there are Tea Rows; Silversmiths and Calico Streets; Fur Lanes; Soap, Candle, and Caviare Alleys; Photograph, Holy Images, and Priestly Vestments Bazaars; Boot, Slop, Tag and Rag Marts and Depositories—all in their compartments, kin with kin, and like with like; and everything is made to clear out of the way, and all is smoothed down; all subsides into order and rule, and not very late at night—quiet.
The Tartars do the most of the work.
They are the descendants of the old warriors of Genghis Khan and Timour the Lame, of the ruthless savages who for 200 years overran all Russia, spreading death and desolation wherever their coursers' hoofs trod, making slaves of the people, and tributary vassals of their Princes; but, who by their short-sighted policy favoured the rise of that dynasty of Moscow Grand Princes, who presently became strong enough to extend their sway both over Russ and Tartar.
The great merchants of Moscow and St. Petersburg or their representatives and partners come here for a few days, partners and clerks taking up the task by turns, according as business allows them absence from their chief establishments.
They bring here no goods, but merely samples of goods—tea, cotton, woollen and linen tissues, silk, cutlery, jewellery, and generally all articles of European (home Russian) manufacture.
They have most of them good apartments in the upper floors of their warehouses; they see their customers, mostly provincial retail dealers; they show their samples, drive their bargains, receive orders, attend on 'Change (for they have aBourseat the fair, near the bridge), smoke indoors (for in the streets that indulgence is forbidden all over the fair for fear of fire), lunch or dine together often by mutual invitation.
They are gentlemenly men, young men for the most part (for their elders are at home minding the main business), young Russians or Russified Germans, some of whom adopt and even affect and exaggerate Russian feeling and habits; young men to whom it seems to be a principle that easy-made money should be readily spent; leisurely, business young men, who sit up late and get up later, take the world and its work and pleasure at their ease; understand little and care even less about politics; profess to be neither great readers nor great thinkers; but are, as a rule, free-handed, hospitable, sociable, most amiable, and anything rather than unintelligent men.
Of all the articles of trade which come to court public favour in Nijni, the most important and valuable is tea; and although the Moscow merchants, by the excellence of their sea-faring tea, chiefly imported from Odessa or through England, have almost entirely driven from the market the caravan tea, still about one-tenth of the enormous quantity of tea sold here is grown in the north of China, and comes overland from Kiakhta, the city on the border between the Asiatic-Russian and the Celestial Empire.
I was curious to compare the taste of some of the very best qualities of both kinds, and was brought to the conclusion, confirmed by the opinion of gentlemen interested in the sale of sea-faring tea, that, although some of their own is more high-flavoured and stronger, there is in the Kiakhta tea an exquisite delicacy, which will always receive in its favour a higher price. The difference, I am told, mainly arises from the fact that the caravan tea, exposed to the air during its twelve months' journey in loose and clumsy and much-shaken paper and sheep-skin bundles, gets rid of the tannin and other gross substances, a process of purification which cannot be effected in the necessarily sealed and hermetically-closed boxes in which it reaches Europe by the sea-route; so that if sea-faring tea, like port-wine, easily recommends itself to the taste and nerves of a strong, hard-working man, a dainty, refined lady will give preference to a cup of Kiakhta tea, as she would to a glass of Château Yquem.
The interest of a European, however, would be chiefly attracted by what is less familiar in his own part of the world; and, short of an actual journey to the remote regions of Siberia and Central Asia, nothing is calculated to give him a more extensive idea of the produce of those Trans-Uralian Russian possessions than a survey of the goods they send here for sale.
What astonishes a stranger at first sight is the quantity. You may walk for hours along yards and sheds, the repositories of iron from Siberia. You pass hundreds of shops of malachite and lapis-lazuli, and a variety of gold and silver work and precious stones from the Caucasus, cut with all the minute diligence of Asiatic skill. You will see Turkish carpets, Persian silks, and above all things the famous Orenburg shawls, so finely knitted, and with such patience that one can (they say, but I have not made the experiment), be made to pass through a lady's ring, though they be so broad on all sides as to wrap the lady all around from head to foot.
One may, besides, have his choice of hundreds and thousands of those delightful curiosities and knickknacks, recommendable less for their quaintness than for the certainty one feels that there is no possible use in the world they may be put to.
There is no novelty at Nijni; no new shape, pattern, or colour just coming out to catch popular favour; no unknown mechanical contrivance; no discovery likely to affect human progress and brought here for the entertainment of the intelligent, un-commercial visitor. There are only the shop-keeper and his customer, though it is a wholesale shop and on a very large scale.
The fair, moreover, has not the duration that is generally allowed for an Exhibition.
Fig. 21NIJNI-NOVGOROD (BRIDGE OF THE FAIR).
NIJNI-NOVGOROD (BRIDGE OF THE FAIR).
Though officially opened on the 27th of July, the fair does not begin in good earnest till the 18th of August; and it reaches its height on the 27th, when accounts are settled, and payments ensue; after which, goods are removed, and the grounds cleared; only a portion of the business lingering throughout September.
About half a score of days, out of the two months during which the fair is held, are all that may have attraction for the generality of strangers. And although many come from all parts of Russia, and from foreign countries, I do not think they tarry here for pleasure beyond two or three days.
It would be interesting to anticipate what change a few weeks will effect in this scene which is now so full of life, bustle, and gaiety; this stage, where so great a variety of human beings from nearly all regions of the world, with their money or money's worth, with their hopes and fears, their greed and extravagance, all their good and evil instincts and faculties at play.
In a few weeks the flags will be furled, the tents struck; the pontoon-bridge removed; the shops closed; hotels, bazaars, and churches, all private and public edifices, utterly deserted and silent; and every house stripped of the last stick of valuable furniture; every door locked, barred, and sealed; the place left to take care of itself.
For autumn rains and spring thaws must set in, when the seven or eight square miles of the ground of the fair, as well as the country to an immense extent, will be under water.
The Great River—Kasan, Tsaritzin—Astrakhan
ANTONIO GALLENGA
It is hardly possible to travel on the Volga without falling in love with the great river at first sight.
The range of low hills which we had on our right as we descended the Oka continued now on the same side as we came down the Volga. The Volga, however, has nothing of the wild, erratic instincts of its tributary. It is a grand, calm, dignified stream, keeping to its course as a respectable matron, and gliding down in placid loveliness, without weir or leap, fall or rapids, or break of any kind—a fine, broad, almost unrippled sheet of water, with an even, steady, and grandly monotonous flow, like that of the stanzas of Tasso.
Its width, so far as eye can judge, does not greatly exceed that of the Thames at Gravesend, but it is always the same from the bridge at Twer above Moscow to the only other bridge, one mile in length, between Syzran and Samara; everywhere the same "full bumper" for a run of 2,000 English miles.
Though the Volga is numbered among the European rivers, and has its sources on the Valdaï hills between the European cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, it is a frontier stream, and seemed intended to form the natural line of demarcation between two parts of the world—between two worlds.
Up to the middle of the Sixteenth Century, Kasan was the advanced guard of the Tartar hordes. These wandering tribes, which, profiting by dissensions among the Russian princes, overcame and overran all Russia, weakened in their turn by division, fell back from the main part of the invaded territory, but still held for some time their own on the Volga, from Kasan to Astrakhan, till they were utterly routed and brought under Russian sway by Ivan the Terrible.
Even then, however, though their strength was broken, their spirit was untamed. The men of high warrior caste who survived their defeat sought a refuge among their kindred tribes further east, at Samarkand, Bokhara, and Khiva, where the Russians have now overtaken them; but a large part of the mere multitude laid aside without giving up their arms, passively accepted without formally acknowledging the Tsar's sway, and abided in their tents,—swallowed at once, but very leisurely digested, by the all-absorbing Russian civilization.
Large bodies of the nation, however, migrateden massefrom time to time, the lands they left vacant being rapidly filled up by bands of Cossacks, and by foreign (chiefly German), colonists.
For more than three centuries, though already mistress of Siberia and victorious in remote Asia, Russia proper might be considered as ending at the Volga; so that most of the older and most important towns south of Kasan and north of Astrakhan, such as Simbirsk, Syzran, Volsk, Saratof, Kamyshin, and Tsaritzin, lie on the right, or Russo-European bank of the stream.
Tsaritzin is at the head of the Delta of the Volga, and it lies 580 versts above Astrakhan, which is said to be at the river's mouth, but which is still 150 versts from the roadstead or anchorage, called the Nine Feet Station; the spot on the Caspian where sea navigation really begins.
At Tsaritzin we might have fancied ourselves in some brand-new town in one of the remote backwoods of America. It was nothing of a place before the railway reached it. No one can foretell what it may become before the locomotive travels past it. For under present circumstances all the postal service, the light goods and time-saving passenger traffic from all parts of Russia to Astrakhan, the Caspian and the Trans-Caspian region, orvice versâ, must pass between the Tsaritzin pier on the Volga and the platforms of the Tsaritzin railway station.
We did not see much of the upstart town, for the horrible clouds of thick, dung-impregnated dust would not allow us to keep our eyes open. But we perceived that almost every trace of what was once little better than a second rate fortress and a village was obliterated; the old inhabitants were nowhere, and a bustling set of new settlers were sharing the broad area among themselves, taking as much of it as suited their immediate wants, and extending it to the utmost limits of their sanguine expectations; drawing lines of streets at great distances, tracing the sides of broad squares and crescents, and laying the foundations of what would rise in time into shops and houses, hotels, bazaars, theatres and churches.
Tzaritzin when we saw it was merely the embryo of a city. Those that may visit it a score of years hence will tell us what they find it.
Two more nights and a day down the sluggish waters of the main channel of the Volga landed us on the tenth day after our departure from Nijni-Novgorod, at Astrakhan, where we stayed a whole week.
From Tsaritzin to Astrakhan the Volga flows through the Steppe, the great Asiatic grass desert extending from the Caucasus to the frontier of China. The wild tenants of this wilderness, the various tribes of Tartars, once the terror of East and West, were like a vast ocean of human beings swayed to and fro by nomadic and predatory instincts, which for centuries threatened to overwhelm and efface every vestige of the world's civilization.
The Russians who were first invested and overpowered by the flood, were able by the valour and more by the craft of their princes, first to stem the tide, then to force it back, and in the end to rear such bulwarks as might for ever baffle its fury, and prevent its further onset.
Such bulwarks were once the strong places of Kasan and Astrakhan, the former seats of Tartar hordes, which the Tsars of Moscow made their bases of operations for the indefinite extension of their civilized empire over Tartar barbarism.
For the experience of centuries had proved that the Steppe was not everywhere and altogether an irreclaimable land, nor the Tartars an utterly untameable race.
Astrakhan, like Kasan, is a Russian town, of whose 50,000 inhabitants one-fourth or one-fifth at least are tamed Tartars, and the sands around which can be made to yield grapes and peaches, and a profusion of melons and watermelons. Beyond the immediate neighbourhood, over the whole province or "Government" of Astrakhan, stretches the vast land of the Steppe, the wide and thin pasture-grounds on which the Tartar tribes roam at will with their flocks; a pastoral set of men; without fixed homes, and, in our sense of the word, without laws; and yet perfectly harmless and peaceful—exempt, at least till very lately, from military service, and only paying a tribute of 45,000 roubles, at so much a head for each horse, ox, or camel, ranging over an extent of 7,000,000 dessiatines (20,000,000 acres) of land, an area of 224,514 kilometers, or about half of that of France, with a population, including that of the capital, of 601,514 inhabitants.
Astrakhan is a modern town, with the usual broad, straight streets, most of them boasting no other pavement than sand, with brick side-walks, much worn and dilapidated, and, like those of Buenos Ayres and many other American cities, so raised above the roadway as to require great attention from those who do not wish to run the risk of broken shins.
The town has its own Kremlin, apart from the citadel. The Kremlin is a kind of cathedral-close, with the cathedral and the archbishop's palace, and several monasteries and priests' habitations. The whole town, besides, and the environs, as usual in Russia, muster more churches than they can number priests or worshippers.
In a walk of two or three miles I took outside the town and as far as the cemeteries, I had a scattered group of at least half a score of churches all around me, but there was scarcely a human habitation within sight.
The governor's palace is a low building over a row of shops in the main square of the city. The square itself and the thoroughfares were enveloped in thick clouds of blinding dust, almost as troublesome as that of Tsaritzin; but on the whole, the place is less unclean than one might expect from a population made up of Russians, Tartars, Calmucks, Persians, Armenians and Jews.
The Volga and the hundred channels which constitute its delta, and the northern shores of the Caspian Sea into which they flow, yield more fish than the coasts of Norway and Newfoundland put together. The nets employed in catching them would, if laid side by side on the ground in all their length, extend over a line of 40,000 versts, or twice the distance from St. Petersburg to Tashkend and back. The annual produce of these Astrakhan fisheries—sturgeon, sterlet, salmon, pike, shad, etc.—amounts to 10,000,000 puds of fish (the pud thirty-six English pound weight) of the value of 20,000,000 roubles, the herrings alone yielding a yearly income of 4,000,000 roubles. With the exception of the caviare, which is sold all over the world, the produce of these fisheries, salted or pickled, is destined for home consumption, and travels all over the empire, although as far as I have been, I have found everywhere the waters equally well-stocked by nature with every description of fish; a provident dispensation, since the Russian clergy, like the Roman Catholic, are indefatigable in their promotion of what they call "the Apostles' trade," by their injunction of 226 fast or fish days throughout the year.
The Delta of the Volga and the Caspian Sea lie twenty-five metres below the level of the Black Sea.
The city of Astrakhan, placed on the left bank of the main channel of the Delta, and, as I said, 150 versts above its anchorage, becomes like an island in the midst of a vast sea when the Volga comes down in its might with the thaw of the northern ice in late spring; and most of its lowest wards would be overwhelmed were it not for the dikes that encompass it like a town in Holland.
The eight principal branches and the hundred minor channels and outlets of the Delta, breaking up the land into a labyrinth of hundreds of islets, are then blended together in one watery surface, out of which only the crests of these islets emerge with isolated villages, with log-huts and long whitewashed buildings, and high-domed churches, all dammed and diked up like the town itself—Tartar villages, Calmuck villages, Cossack villages, all or most of them fishers' homes and fishing establishments—a population of 20,000 to 30,000 souls being thus scattered on the bare sand-hills and dunes; men of all race, colour, and faith, all employed in the same fishing pursuit; the Tartars and Calmucks usually as rank and file, the Russians and other Europeans as overseers, foremen, and skilled labourers.
From Astrakhan, the queen of the Steppes, to Tiflis the queen of the Caucasus, we had a choice of routes.
Tourists from England, or from any part of Western Europe, may easily visit the great mountain-chain on which Prometheus was found, by crossing the Black Sea from Constantinople or from Odessa, and landing at Poti, where the Russians have constructed a railway to Tiflis, once the capital of Georgia, now the residence of the Governor-General of the whole Caucasus region.
A traveller from the north, bound to the same goal, can take the train at Moscow, and come down by rail,viaRostov-on-the-Don, all the way to Vladikavkas, a distance of 1,803 versts; and about 200 additional versts, by post, over a good military road, and across the main Caucasian chain, will bring him from Vladikavkas to Tiflis.
But we had descended the Volga, and were now near its mouth. We had to go down the Volga to the Nine Feet Station below Astrakhan, embark there on the Caspian Sea, and cross over either to Baku, whence we could go by post round the mountain-chain at its southern extremity as far as Tiflis; or land at Petrofsk, and travel along the chain to Vladikavkas and the good military road across the chain to Tiflis.
We gave our preference to the last-named route.
We left Astrakhan at ten in the evening on board a heavy barge belonging to the Caucasus and Mercury steam-navigation company, towed by a tug down stream at the rate of five or six miles an hour.
We were all that afternoon and night, and part of the following day, descending the main channel of the Volga, and it was past noon before we reached the Nine Feet Station, for so they call the roadstead above which vessels of more than nine feet draught dare not venture.
All sight of land, of the seventy larger islands of the Delta, and even of the minor islets, and of the lowest sand-banks, had been lost for several hours, and we were here in the open sea, though scarcely beyond the boundary that the Creator has elsewhere fixed between land and water. For the Station which, if I can allow myself an apparent Irishism, is a moveable one, has to be pushed forward almost day by day as the sands of the Volga silt up far beyond the choked-up lands of the Delta, encroaching with a steady inroad on the depths of the waves; the Steppe everywhere widening as the sea dwindles, and suggesting the thought that the whole region that is now Steppe must in remote ages have been sea, and that whatever is now sea, must in time become Steppe.
Indeed, it seems not impossible to calculate how many years or centuries it may take for the sands of the Volga, aided by those of the Ural and the Emba on the eastern, and of the Kuma, the Terek, and the Kur or Kura, with its tributary the Aras, on the western shore, to fill up the land-locked Caspian, though its extreme depth, according to the Gazetteers, is 600 feet, and the area covered by it probably exceeds 180,000 square miles, a surface as large as that of Spain.
Kasan, once the residence of a redoubted horde, was probably, under Tartar sway, in a great measure a mere encampment, chiefly a city of tents; for whatever the guide-books may say, there is no positive evidence of its present buildings belonging to a date anterior to the Russian Conquest.
Its situation probably recommended itself to the Tartars chiefly on the score of strength; for although it stands high above the river, its present distance from it is at least three miles, and it is surrounded by a sandy and marshy plain, intersected by the channels of the Kasana river, erratic water-courses which may have proved sufficient obstacles to the onset of an invader, but which raise no less serious hindrances to the conveyance of goods from the landing-place to the town; an inconvenience hitherto not removed by the tramway, as it as yet only carries passengers.
Kasan is on the main line of communication between Central Russia and Siberia.
The travellers bound to that bourne embark here on steamers that go down the Volga as far as its confluence with the Kama, a tributary stream, and thence ascend the Kama, which is navigable all the way to Perm. From Perm a railway runs up to the Pass of the Ural mountains to Ekaterinenburg, probably to be in course of time continued to Tiumen, Tobolsk, Tomsk, Irkutsk, the Baikal Lake, the Chinese frontier at Kiakhta, the banks of the Amoor, and the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
Along this route it is calculated that some £3,000,000 worth of merchandise are brought yearly from Siberia down the Kama and up the Volga to the Nijni-Novgorod fair.
Kasan is a highly flourishing city. It has a population of 90,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, one-fourth of whom are Tartars.
These descendants of the old Nomad race are now here at home, and live in the city perfectly at peace with their Russian fellow-subjects, though being Mahometans, they have distinct, if not separate, quarters, and mosques and a burial-ground of their own. It would seem impossible for two races which have so little reason for mutual good-will, to show so little disposition to quarrel. But it should be remembered that Sclav and Tartar were not in former times so far asunder in manners, in language, in polish, nor so free from admixture in blood as the Russians fondly believe.
The town has its Kremlin, on the site of the old citadel, with its cathedral and other churches, and several "telescope towers," if they may be so called, built on several stories, dwindling in size from floor to floor as they rise one above the other, so that one can conceive how they might easily sink into one another and shut up like a spy-glass. The great brick tower of Pier Crescenzi in Rome is such a tower; and here are many in the same style at Moscow and in most other old Russian cities. Kasan has several public edifices of some pretension: the Admiralty; the University—one of the seven of the Empire, etc. But we had enough of it all after two or three hours, and were glad to shun the heat of the rest of the day in the cool sitting-room of Commonen's Hotel, which alone may be taken as a voucher for the high degree of civilization reached by Kasan.
We gave even less time to the other cities of the Volga, not thinking it always worth while to alight at all the stations, though the steamer stopped at some of these for many a long, weary hour.
With the exception of Kasan, Samara, and Astrakhan, the most important cities are, as I said, on the right or Russian bank of the River; and three of them, Syzran, Saratof, and Tsaritzin, are connected by various railways with Moscow and all the other important centres of life in the Empire.
The Volga, which between Nijni-Novgorod and Kasan flows in an almost straight easterly direction, takes a turn to the southward after leaving Kasan and the confluence of the Kama; but it makes a loop below Simbirsk, turning eastward to Samara, and again west to Syzran, after which it resumes its southerly course to Saratof, Tsaritzin, and Astrakhan.
The railway from Moscow to Syzran, upon reaching Syzran, crosses the Volga on an iron bridge, one verst and a half, or one English mile, in length, and high enough to allow the largest steamer pass without lowering its funnel—a masterpiece of engineering greatly admired by the people here, who describe it as the longest bridge in Russia and in the world.
We went under it at midnight by a dim moonlight which barely allowed us to see it looming in the distance not much bigger than a telegraph-wire drawn all across the valley, the gossamer line of the bridge and all the landscape round striking us as dreamlike and unreal.
After crossing the river the railway proceeds to Samara, and hence 419 versts further to Orenburg, a large and thriving place on the Ural river, the spot from which the straightest and probably the shortest way is, or will be, open to all parts of Siberia or Central Asia; preferable, I should think, to that of Perm and Ekaterinenburg above-mentioned, which is now the most frequented route.
Beyond Syzran and Samara the river scenery, which has hitherto been verdant, assumes a southerly aspect; the hill-sides sloping to the river have a parched and faded brown look; the hill-tops are bared and seamed with chalky ravines; every trace of the forests has disappeared; and it is only at rare intervals that the banks are clad with the verdure of the new growth.