FOREST SCENES.
From Holgomory to Kargopol, from Kargopol to Vietegra, we pass through
an empire of villages; not a single place on a road four hundred miles
in length that could by any form of courtesy be called a town. The
track runs on and on, now winding by the river bank, now eating its
way through the forest growths; but always flowing, as it were, in one
thin line from north to south; ferrying deep rivers; dragging through
shingle, slime, and peat; crashing over broken rocks; and crawling up
gentle heights. His horses four abreast, and lashed to the tarantass
with ropes and chains, the driver tears along the road as though he
were racing with his Chert--his Evil One; and all in the hope of
getting from his thankless fare an extra cup of tea. It is the joke of
a Russian jarvy, that he will "drive you out of your senses for ten
kopecks." From dawn to sunset, day by day, it is one long race through
bogs and pines. The landscape shows no dikes, no hedges, and no gates;
no signs that tell of a personal owning of the land. We whisk by a
log-fire, and a group of tramps, who flash upon us with a sullen
greeting, some of them starting to their feet. "What are those
fellows, Dimitri?"
"They seem to be some of the runaways."
"Runaways! Who are the runaways, and what are they running away from?"
"Queer fellows, who don't like work, who won't obey orders, who never
rest in one place. You find them in the woods about here everywhere.
They are savages. In Kargopol you can learn about them."
At the town of Kargopol, on the river Onega, in the province of
Olonetz, I hear something of these runaways, as of a troublesome and
dangerous set of men, bad in themselves, and still worse as a sign. I
hear of them afterwards in Novgorod the Great, and in Kazan. The
community is widely spread. Timashef is aware that these unsocial
bodies exist in the provinces of Yaroslav, Archangel, Vologda,
Novgorod, Kostroma, and Perm.
These runaways are vagabonds. Leaving house and land, throwing down
their rights as peasants and burghers, they dress themselves in rags,
assume the pilgrim's staff, retire from their families, push into
forest depths, and dwell in quagmires and sandy rifts, protesting
against the official empire and the official church. Some may lead a
harmless life; the peasants helping them with food and drink; while
they spend their days in dozing and their nights in prayer. Even when
their resistance to the world is passive only; it is a protest hard to
bear and harder still to meet. They will not labor for the things that
perish. They will not bend their necks to magistrate and prince. They
do not admit the law under which they live. They hold that the present
imperial system is the devil's work; that the Prince of Darkness sits
enthroned in the winter palace; that the lords and ladies who surround
him are the lying witnesses and the fallen saints. Their part is not
with the world, from which they fly, as Abraham fled from the cities
of the plain.
Many of the peasants, either sympathizing with their views or fearing
their vengeance, help them to support their life in the woods. No door
is ever closed on them; no voice is ever raised against them. Even in
the districts which they are said to ravage occasionally in search of
food, hardly any thing can be learned about them, least of all by the
masters of police.
Fifteen months ago the governor of Olonetz reported to General
Timashef, minister of the interior, that a great number of these
runaways were known to be living in his province and in the adjoining
provinces, who were more or less openly supported by the peasantry in
their revolt against social order and the reigning prince. On being
asked by the minister what should be done, he hinted that nothing else
would meet the evil but a seizure of vagabonds on all the roads, and
in all the forest paths, in the vast countries lying north of the
Volga, from Lake Ilmen to the Ural crests. His hints were taken in St.
Petersburg, and hundreds of arrests were made; but whether the real
runaways were caught by the police was a question open to no less
doubt than that of how to deal with them when they were caught--according
to the new and liberal code.
Roused by a sense of danger, the Government has been led into making
inquiries far and near, the replies to which are of a kind to flutter
the kindest hearts and puzzle the wisest heads. To wit: the Governor
of Kazan reports to General Timashef that he has collected proof--(1.)
that in his province the runaways have a regular organization; (2.)
that they have secret places for meeting and worship; (3.) that they
have chiefs whom they obey and trust. How can a legal minister deal
with cases of an aspect so completely Oriental? Is it a crime to give
up house and land? Is it an offense to live in deserts and lonely
caves? What article in the civil code prevents a man from living like
Seraphim in a desert; like Philaret the Less, in a grave-yard? Yet, on
the other side, how can a reforming Emperor suffer his people to fall
back into the nomadic state? A runaway is not a weakness only, but a
peril; since the spirit of his revolt against social order is
precisely that which the reformers have most cause to dread. In going
back from his country, he is going back into chaos.
The mighty drama now proceeding in his country, turns on the question
raised by the runaway. Can the Russian peasant live under law? If it
shall prove on trial that any large portion of the Russian peasantry
shares this passion for a vagabond life--as some folk hope, and still
more fear--the great experiment will fail, and civil freedom will be
lost for a hundred years.
The facts collected by the minister have been laid before a special
committee, named by the crown. That committee is now sitting; but no
conclusion has yet been reached, and no suggestion for meeting the
evil can be pointed out.
Village after village passes to the rear!
Russ hamlets are so closely modelled on a common type, that when you
have seen one, you have seen a host; when you have seen two, you have
seen the whole. Your sample may be either large or small, either
log-built or mud-built, either hidden in forest or exposed on steppe;
yet in the thousands on thousands to come, you will observe no change
in the prevailing forms. There is a Great Russ hamlet and a Little
Russ hamlet; one with its centre in Moscow, as the capital of Great
Russia; the second with its centre in Kief, the capital of Little
Russia.
A Great Russ village consists of two lines of cabins parted from each
other by a wide and dirty lane. Each homestead stands alone. From ten
to a hundred cabins make a village. Built of the same pine-logs,
notched and bound together, each house is like its fellow, except in
size. The elder's hut is bigger than the rest; and after the elder's
house comes the whisky shop. Four squat walls, two tiers in height,
and pierced by doors and windows; such is the shell. The floor is mud,
the shingle deal. The walls are rough, the crannies stuffed with moss.
No paint is used, and the log fronts soon become grimy with rain and
smoke. The space between each hut lies open and unfenced; a slough of
mud and mire, in which the pigs grunt and wallow, and the wolf-dogs
snarl and fight. The lane is planked. One house here and there may
have a balcony, a cow-shed, an upper story. Near the hamlet rises a
chapel built of logs, and roofed with plank; but here you find a flush
of color, if not a gleam of gold. The walls of the chapel are sure to
be painted white, the roof is sure to be painted green. Some wealthy
peasant may have gilt the cross.
Beyond these dreary cabins lie the still more dreary fields, which the
people till. Flat, unfenced, and lowly, they have nothing of the
poetry of our fields in the Suffolk and Essex plains; no hedgerow
ferns, no clumps of fruit-trees, and no hints of home. The patches set
apart for kitchen-stuff are not like gardens even of their homely
kind; they look like workhouse plots of space laid out by yard and
rule, in which no living soul had any part. These patches are always
mean, and you search in vain for such a dainty as a flower.
Among the Little Russ--in the old Polish circles of the south and
west, you see a village group of another kind. Instead of the grimy
logs, you have a predominant mixture of green and white; instead of
the formal blocks, you have a scatter of cottages in the midst of
trees. The cabins are built of earth and reeds; the roof is thatched
with straw; and the walls of the homestead are washed with lime. A
fence of mats and thorns runs round the group. If every house appears
to be small, it stands in a yard and garden of its own. The village
has no streets. Two, and only two, openings pierce the outer
fence--one north, one south; and in feeling your way from one opening
in the fence to another, you push through a maze of lanes between
reeds and spines, beset by savage dogs. Each new-comer would seem to
have pitched his tent where he pleased; taking care to cover his hut
and yard by the common fence.
A village built without a plan, in which every house is surrounded by
a garden, covers an immense extent of ground. Some of the Kozak
villages are as widely spread as towns. Of course there is a church,
with its glow of color and poetic charm.
From Kief on the Dnieper to Kalatch on the Don, you find the villages
of this second type. The points of difference lie in the house and in
the garden; and must spring from difference of education, if not of
race. The Great Russians are of a timid, soft, and fluent type. They
like to huddle in a crowd, to club their means, to live under a common
roof, and stand or fall by the family tree. The Little Russians are of
a quick, adventurous, and hardy type; who like to stand apart, each
for himself, with scope and range enough for the play of all his
powers. A Great Russian carries his bride to his father's shed; a
Little Russian carries her to a cabin of his own.
The forest melts and melts! We meet a woman driving in a cart alone; a
girl darts past us in the mail; anon we come upon a wagon, guarded by
troops on foot, containing prisoners, partly chained, in charge of an
ancient dame.
This service of the road is due from village to village; and on a
party of travellers coming into a hamlet, the elder must provide for
them the things required--carts, horses, drivers--in accordance with
their podorojna; but in many villages the party finds no men, or none
except the very young or the very old. Husbands are leagues away;
fishing in the Polar seas, cutting timber in the Kargopol forests,
trapping fox and beaver in the Ural Mountains; leaving their wives
alone for months. These female villages are curious things, in which a
man of pleasant manners may find a chance of flirting to his heart's
content.
Villages, more villages, yet more villages! We pass a gang of soldiers
marching by the side of a peasant's cart, in which lies a prisoner,
chained; we spy a wolf in the copse; we meet a pilgrim on his way to
Solovetsk; we come upon a gang of boys whose clothes appear to be out
at wash; we pass a broken wagon; we start at the howl of some village
dogs; and then go winding forward hour by hour, through the silent
woods. Some touch of grace and poetry charms our eyes in the most
desolate scenes. A virgin freshness crisps and shakes the leaves. The
air is pure. If nearly all the lines are level, the sky is blue, the
sunshine gold. Many of the trees are rich with amber, pink and brown;
and every vagrant breeze makes music in the pines. A peasant and his
dog troop past, reminding me of scenes in Kent. A convent here and
there peeps out. A patch of forest is on fire, from the burning mass
of which a tongue of pale pink flame laps out and up through a pall of
purple smoke. A clearing, swept by some former fire, is all aglow with
autumnal flowers. A bright beck dashes through the falling leaves. A
comely child, with flaxen curls and innocent northern eyes, stands
bowing in the road, with an almost Syrian grace. A woman comes up with
a bowl of milk. A group of girls are washing at a stream, under the
care of either the Virgin Mother or some local saint. On every point,
the folk, if homely, are devotional and polite; brightening their
forest breaks with chapel and cross, and making their dreary road, as
it were, a path of light towards heaven.
We dash into a village near a small black lake.