reddish-yellow Club of the Nobility, representing still another fashion
in architecture, which was very popular during the last century for
palaces and grand mansions,--the Corinthian peristyle upon a solid,
lofty basement. It is not an old building, but was probably copied from
the palace of the Empress Elizabeth, which stood on this spot. Elizaveta
Petrovna, though she used this palace a great deal, had a habit of
sleeping in a different place each night, the precise spot being never
known beforehand. This practice is attributed, by some Russian
historians, to her custom of turning night into day. She went to the
theatre, for example, at eleven o'clock, and any courtier who failed to
attend her was fined fifty rubles. It was here that the populace
assembled to hurrah for Elizaveta Petrovna, on December 6, 1741, when
she returned with little Ivan VI. in her arms from the Winter Palace,
where she had made captive his father and his mother, the regent Anna
Leopoldina. It may have been the recollection of the ease with which she
had surprised indolent Anna Leopoldina in her bed-chamber which caused
her to be so uncertain in her own movements, in view of the fact that
there were persons so ill-advised as to wish the restoration of the
slothful German regent and her infant son, disastrous as that would have
been to the country.
We must do the Russians who occupy the building at the present day the
justice to state that they uphold religiously the nocturnal tradition
thus established by Elizaveta Petrovna, and even improve upon it. From
six o'clock in the evening onward, the long windows of the club, on the
_bel etage_, blaze with light. The occasional temporary obscurations
produced by the steam from relays of _samovari_ do not interfere
materially with the neighbors' view of the card-parties and the final
exchange of big bundles of bank-bills, which takes place at five o'clock
or later the next morning. Even if players and bills were duly shielded
from observation, the _mauvais quart d'heure_ would be accurately
revealed by the sudden rush for the sledges, which have been hanging in
a swarm about the door, according to the usual convenient custom of
Vanka, wherever lighted windows suggest possible patrons. Poor,
hard-worked Vanka slumbers all night on his box, with one eye open, or
falls prone in death-like exhaustion over the dashboard upon his
sleeping horse, while his cap lies on the snow, and his shaggy head is
bared to the bitter blasts.
Later on, the chief of police lived here, and the adjoining bridge,
which had hitherto been known as the Green Bridge, had its name changed
to the Police Bridge, which rather puzzling appellation it still bears.
A couple of blocks beyond this corner of the Nevsky, the Moika and the
Grand Morskaya, the Nevsky Prospekt ends at the Alexander Garden, backed
by the Admiralty and the Neva, after having passed in its course through
all grades of society, from the monks at the extreme limit, peasant
huts,--or something very like them, on the outskirts,--artistic and
literary circles in the Peski quarter (the Sands), well-to-do merchants
and nobles, officials and wealthy courtiers, until now we have reached
the culminating point, where the Admiralty, Imperial Palace, and War
Office complete the national group begun at the church.
When, in 1704, Peter the Great founded his beloved Admiralty, as the
first building on the mainland then designed for such purposes as this,
and not for residence, it was simply a shipyard, open to the Neva, and
inclosed on three sides by low wooden structures, surrounded by
stone-faced earthworks, moats, and palisades. Hither Peter was wont to
come of a morning, after having routed his ministers out of bed to hold
privy council at three and four o'clock, to superintend the work and to
lend a hand himself. The first stone buildings were erected in 1726,
after his death. In the early years of the present century, Alexander I.
rebuilt this stately and graceful edifice, after the plans of the
Russian architect Zakharoff, who created the beautiful tower adorned
with Russian sculptures, crowned by a golden spire, in the centre of the
immense facade, fourteen hundred feet long, which forms a feature
inseparable from the vista of the Prospekt for the greater part of its
length, to the turn at the Znamenskaya Square. On this spire, at the
present day, flags and lanterns warn the inhabitants of low-lying
districts in the capital of the rate at which the water is rising during
inundations. In case of serious danger, the flags are reinforced by
signal guns from the fortress. But in Peter I.'s day, these flags and
guns bore exactly the opposite meaning to the unhappy nobles whom the
energetic Emperor was trying to train into rough-weather sailors. To
their trembling imaginations these signal orders to assemble for a
practice sail signified, "Come out and be drowned!" since they were
obliged to embark in the crafts too generously given to them by Peter,
and cruise about until their leader (who delighted in a storm) saw fit
to return. There is a story of one unhappy wight, who was honored by the
presence aboard his craft of a very distinguished and very seasick
Persian, making his first acquaintance with the pleasures of yachting,
and who spent three days without food, tacking between Petersburg and
Kronstadt, in the vain endeavor to effect a landing during rough
weather.
When the present Admiralty was built, a broad and shady boulevard was
organized on the site of the old glacis and covered way, and later
still, when the break in the quay was filled in, and the shipbuilding
transferred to the New Admiralty a little farther down the river, the
boulevard was enlarged into the New Alexander Garden, one of the finest
squares in Europe. It soon became the fashionable promenade, and the
centre of popular life as well, by virtue of the merry-makings which
took place. Here, during the Carnival of 1836, the temporary cheap
theatre of boards was burned, at the cost of one hundred and twenty-six
lives and many injured persons, which resulted in these dangerous
_balagani_ and other holiday amusements being removed to the spacious
parade-ground known as the Empress's Meadow.
If we pass round the Admiralty to the Neva, we shall find its frozen
surface teeming with life. Sledge roads have been laid out on it, marked
with evergreen bushes, over which a _yamtschik_ will drive us with his
_troika_ fleet as the wind, to Kronstadt, twenty miles away. Plank
walks, fringed with street lanterns, have been prepared for pedestrians.
Broad ice paths have been cleared, whereon the winter ferry-boats ply,
--green garden-chairs, holding one or more persons, furnished with warm
lap-robes, and propelled by stout _muzhiks_ on skates, who will
transport us from shore to shore for the absurdly small sum of less than
a cent apiece, though a ride with the reindeer (now a strange sight in
the capital), at the Laplanders' encampment, costs much more.
It is hard to tear ourselves from the charms of the river, with its
fishing, ice-cutting, and many other interesting sights always in
progress. But of all the scenes, that which we may witness on Epiphany
Day--the "Jordan," or Blessing of the Waters, in commemoration of
Christ's baptism in the Jordan--is the most curious and typically
Russian.
After mass, celebrated by the Metropolitan, in the cathedral of the
Winter Palace, whose enormous reddish-ochre mass we perceive rising
above the frost-jeweled trees of the Alexander Garden, to our right as
we stand at the head of the Nevsky Prospekt, the Emperor, his heir, his
brothers, uncles, and other great personages emerge in procession upon
the quay. Opposite the Jordan door of the palace a scarlet, gold, and
blue pavilion, also called the "Jordan," has been erected over the ice.
Thither the procession moves, headed by the Metropolitan and the richly
vestured clergy, their mitres gleaming with gems, bearing crosses and
church banners, and the imperial choir, clad in crimson and gold,
chanting as they go. The Empress and her ladies, clad in full Court
costume at midday, look on from the palace windows. After brief prayers
in the pavilion, all standing with bared heads, the Metropolitan dips
the great gold cross in the rushing waters of the Neva, through a hole
prepared in the thick, opalescent, green ice, and the guns on the
opposite shore thunder out a salute. The pontoon Palace Bridge, the
quays on both sides of the river, all the streets and squares for a long
distance round about, are densely thronged; and, as the guns announce
the consecration, every head is bared, every right hand in the mass,
thousands strong, is raised to execute repeated signs of the cross on
brow and breast.
From our post at the head of the Prospekt we behold not the ceremony
itself but the framework of a great national picture, the great Palace
Square, whereon twenty thousand troops can manoeuvre, and in whose
centre rises the greatest monolith of modern times, the shaft of red
Finland granite, eighty-four feet in height, crowned with a
cross-bearing angel, the monument to Alexander I. There stand the
Guards' Corps, and the huge building of the General Staff, containing
the Ministries of Finance and of Foreign Affairs, and many things
besides, originally erected by Katherine II. to mask the rears of the
houses at the end of the Nevsky, and rebuilt under Nicholas I., sweeping
in a magnificent semicircle opposite the Winter Palace. Regiments
restrain the zeal of the crowd to obtain the few posts of vantage from
which the consecration of the waters is visible, and keep open a lane
for the carriages of royalty, diplomats, and invited guests. They form
part of the pageant, like the Empress's cream-colored carriage and the
white horses and scarlet liveries of the Metropolitan. The crowd is
devout and silent, as Russian crowds always are, except when they see
the Emperor after he has escaped a danger, when they become vociferous
with an animation which is far more significant than it is in more noisy
lands. The ceremony over, the throngs melt away rapidly and silently;
pedestrians, Finnish ice-sledges, traffic in general, resume their
rights on the palace sidewalks and the square, and after a state
breakfast the Emperor drives quietly home, unguarded, to his Anitchkoff
Palace.
If we glance to our left, and slightly to our rear, as we stand thus
facing the Neva and the Admiralty, we see the Prefecture and the
Ministry of War, the latter once the mansion of a grandee in the last
century; and, rising above the latter, we catch a glimpse of the upper
gallery, and great gold-plated, un-Russian dome, of St. Isaac's
Cathedral, which is visible for twenty miles down the Gulf of Finland.
The granite pillars glow in the frosty air with the bloom of a Delaware
grape. We forgive St. Isaac for the non-Russian character of the modern
ecclesiastical glories of which it is the exponent, as we listen eagerly
to the soft, rich, boom-boom-bo-o-om of the great bourdon, embroidered
with silver melody by the multitude of smaller bells chiming nearly all
day long with a truly orthodox sweetness unknown to the Western world,
and which, to-day, are more elaborately beautiful than usual, in honor
of the great festival. We appreciate to the full the wailing cry of the
prisoner, in the ancient epic songs of the land: "He was cut off from
the light of the fair, red sun, from the sound of sweet church-bells."
On the great Palace Square another characteristic sight is to be seen on
the nights of Court balls, which follow the Jordan, when the blaze of
electric light from the rock-crystal chandeliers, big as haystacks,
within the state apartments, is supplemented by the fires in the heater
and on the snow outside, round which the waiting coachmen warm
themselves, with Rembrandtesque effects of _chiaro-oscuro_ second only
to the picturesqueness of _dvorniki_ in their nondescript caps and
shaggy coats, who cluster round blazing fagots in less aristocratic
quarters when the thermometer descends below zero.
When spring comes with the magical suddenness which characterizes
Northern lands, the gardens, quays, and the Nevsky Prospekt still
preserve their charms for a space, and are thronged far into the night
with promenaders, who gaze at the imperial crowns, stars, monograms, and
other devices temporarily applied to the street lanterns, and the fairy
flames on the low curb-posts (whereat no horse, though unblinded, ever
shies), with which man attempts, on the numerous royal festival days of
early summer, to rival the illumination of the indescribably beautiful
tints of river and sky. But the peasant-_izvostchik_ goes off to the
country to till his little patch of land, aided by the shaggy little
farm-horse, which has been consorting on the Prospekt with thoroughbred
trotters all winter, and helping him to eke out his cash income, scanty
at the best of times; or he emigrates to a summer resort, scorning our
insinuation that he is so unfashionable as to remain in town. The
deserted Prospekt is torn up for repairs. The merchants, especially the
goldsmiths, complain that it would be true economy for them to close
their shops. The annual troops of foreign travelers arrive, view the
lovely islands of the Neva delta, catch a glimpse of the summer cities
in the vicinity, and dream, ah, vain dream! that they have also really
beheld the Nevsky Prospekt, the great avenue of the realm of the Frost
King and the White Tzar!*
* From _Scribner's Magazine_, by permission.
III.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE RUSSIAN CENSOR.
In spite of the advantage which I enjoyed in a preliminary knowledge of
the Russian language and literature, I was imbued with various false
ideas, the origin of which it is not necessary to trace on this
occasion. I freed myself from some of them; among others, from my theory
as to the working of the censorship in the case of foreign literature.
My theory was the one commonly held by Americans, and, as I found to my
surprise, by not a few Russians, viz., that books and periodicals which
have been wholly or in part condemned by the censor are to be procured
only in a mutilated condition, or by surreptitious means, or not at all.
That this is not the case I acquired ample proof through my personal
experience.
The first thing that an American does on his arrival in St. Petersburg
is to scan the foreign newspapers in the hotels eagerly for traces of
the censor's blot,--_le masque noir_, "caviare,"--his idea being
that at least one half of the page will be thus veiled from sight. But
specimens are not always, or even very often, to be procured with ease.
In fact, the demand exceeds the supply sometimes, if I may judge from my
own observations and from the pressing applications for these
curiosities which I received from disappointed seekers. The finest of
these black diamonds may generally be found in the inventive news
columns of the London dailies and in the flippant paragraphs of "Punch."
Like the rest of the world, I was on the lookout for the censor's work
from the day of my arrival, but it was a long time before my search was
rewarded by anything except a caricature of the censor himself in
"Kladderadatsch." That it was left unmasked was my first proof that that
gentleman, individually and collectively, was not deficient in a sense
of humor. The sketch represented a disheveled scribe seated three
quarters submerged in a bottle of ink, from the half-open cover of which
his quill pen projected like a signal of distress. This was accompanied
by an inscription to the effect that as the Russian censor had blacked
so many other people, he might now sit in the black for a while himself.
Perhaps the censor thought that remarks of that sort came with peculiar
grace from martinet-ruled Berlin. About this time I received a copy of
the "Century," containing--or rather, not containing--the first
article in the prohibited series by Mr. Kennan. I made no remonstrance,
but mentioned the fact, as an item of interest, to the sender, who
forthwith dispatched the article in an envelope. The envelope being
small, the plump package had the appearance of containing a couple of
pairs of gloves, or other dutiable merchandise. Probably that was the
reason why the authorities cut open one end. Finding that it was merely
innocent printed matter, they gave it to me on the very day of its
arrival in St. Petersburg, and thirteen days from the date of posting in
New York. I know that it was my duty to get excited over this incident,
as did a foreign (that is, a non-Russian) acquaintance of mine, when he
received an envelope of similar plump aspect containing a bulky
Christmas card, which was delivered decorated with five very frank and
huge official seals, after having been opened for contraband goods. I
did not feel aggrieved, however, and, being deficient in that Mother Eve
quality which attributes vast importance to whatever is forbidden, I
suggested that nothing more which was obnoxious to the Russian
government should be sent to me.
But when a foreigner offered the magazine to me regularly, unmutilated,
I did not refuse it. When a Russian volunteered to furnish me with it,
later on, I read it. When I saw summaries of the prohibited articles in
the Russian press, I looked them over to see whether they were well
done. When I saw another copy of the "Century," with other American
magazines, at the house of a second Russian, I did not shut my eyes to
the fact, neither did I close my ears when I was told that divers
instructors of youth in Petersburg, Moscow, and elsewhere were in
regular receipt of it, on the principle which is said to govern good men
away from home, viz., that in order to preach effectively against evil
one must make personal acquaintance with it. I was also told at the
English Bookstore that they had seven or eight copies of the magazine,
which had been subscribed for through them, lying at the censor's office
awaiting proper action on the part of the subscribers. What that action
was I did not ask at the time, in my embarrassment of riches. It will be
perceived that when we add the copies received by officials, and those
given to the members of the Diplomatic Corps who desired it, there was
no real dearth of the "Century" at any time.
About this time, also, I had occasion to hunt up a package of
miscellaneous newspapers, which had lingered as such parcels are apt to
linger in all post-offices. In pursuance of my preconceived notions, I
jumped to the conclusion that the censor had them, regardless of the
contingency that they might have been lost out of Russia. I called to
ask for the papers. The official whom I found explained, with native
Russian courtesy, that I had come to the wrong place, that office being
devoted to foreign matter in book form; but that, in all probability,
the papers had become separated from their wrapper in the newspaper
department (which was heedless) when they had been opened for
examination, and hence it had been impossible to deliver them. Still,
they might have been detained for some good reason, and he would
endeavor to find some record of them.
While he was gone, my eyes fell upon his account-book, which lay open
before me. It constituted a sort of literary book-keeping. The entries
showed what books had been received, what had been forbidden, what was
to be erased, whose property had been manipulated, and, most interesting
of all, which forbidden books had been issued by permission, and to
whom. Among these I read the titles of works by Stepniak, and of various
works on Nihilism, all of which must certainly have come within the
category of utterly proscribed literature, and not of that which is
promptly forwarded to its address after a more or less liberal
sprinkling of "caviare." As I am not in the habit of reading private
records on the sly, even when thus tempted, I informed the official on
his return of my action, and asked a question or two.
"Do you really let people have these forbidden books?" "Certainly," was
his half-surprised, half-indignant reply. "And what can one have?"
"Anything," said he, "only we must, of course, have some knowledge of
the person. What would you like?"
I could only express my regret that I felt no craving for any prohibited
literature at that moment, but I told him that I would endeavor to
cultivate a taste in that direction to oblige him; and I suggested that,
as his knowledge of me was confined to the last ten minutes, I did not
quite understand how he could pass judgment as to what mental and moral
food was suited to my constitution, and as to the use I might make of
it. He laughed amiably, and said: "_Nitchevo_,--that's all right; you
may have whatever you please." I never had occasion to avail myself of
the offer, but I know that Russians who are well posted do so, although
I also know that many Russians are not aware of their privileges in this
direction. It is customary to require from Russians who receive
literature of this sort a promise that they will let no other person see
it,--an engagement which is as religiously observed as might be
expected, as the authorities are doubtless aware.
I did not pursue my search for the missing papers. I had allowed so much
time to elapse that I perceived the uselessness of further action; they
were evidently lost, and it mattered little as to the manner. Shortly
afterwards I received the first of my only two specimens of censorial
"caviare." It was on a political cartoon in a New York comic paper. I
sent it back to America for identification of the picture, and it was
lost between New York and Boston; which reconciled me to the possible
carelessness of the Russian post-office in the case of the newspapers
just cited.
My next experience was with Count Lyeff N. Tolstoy's work entitled
"Life." This was not allowed to be printed in book form, although nearly
the whole of it subsequently appeared in installments, as "extracts," in
a weekly journal. I received the manuscript as a registered mail packet.
The author was anxious that my translation should be submitted in the
proof-sheets to a philosophical friend of his in Petersburg, who read
English, in order that the latter might see if I had caught the sense of
the somewhat abstract and complicated propositions. It became a problem
how those proof-sheets were to reach me safely and promptly. The problem
was solved by having them directed outright to the censor's office,
whence they were delivered to me; and, as there proved to be nothing to
alter, they speedily returned to America as a registered parcel. My own
opinion now is that they would not have reached me a whit less safely or
promptly had they been addressed straight to me. The bound volumes of my
translation were so addressed later on, and I do not think that they
were even opened at the office, the law to the contrary notwithstanding.
All this time I had been receiving a New York weekly paper with very
little delay and no mutilation. But at this juncture an amiable friend
subscribed in my name for the "Century," and I determined to make a
personal trial of the workings of the censorship in as strong a case as
I could have found had I deliberately desired to invent a test case. I
may as well remark here that "the censor" is not the hard-worked,
omnivorous reader of mountains of print and manuscript which the words
represent to the mind of the ordinary foreigner. The work of auditing
literature, so to speak, is subdivided among such a host of men that
office hours are brief, much of the foreign reading, at least, is done
at home, and the lucky members of the committee keep themselves
agreeably posted upon matters in general while enjoying the fruits of
office.