TOWNS.
A town is a community lying beyond the canton and volost, in which
people live by burgher right and not by communal law. Unlike the
peasant, a burgher has power to buy and sell, to make and mend, to
enter crafts and guilds; but he is chained to his trade very much as
the rustic is chained to his field. His house is built of logs, his
roads are laid with planks; but then his house is painted green or
pink, and his road is wide and properly laid out. In place of a free
local government, the town finds a master in the minister, in the
governor, in the chief of police. While the village is a separate
republic, the town is a parcel of the empire; and as parcel of the
empire it must follow the imperial code.
Saving the great cities, not above five or six in number, all Russian
towns have a common character, and when you have seen two or three in
different parts of the empire, you have seen them all. Take any
riverside town of the second class (and most of these towns are built
on the banks of streams) from Onega to Rostoff, from Nijni to
Kremenchug. A fire-tower, a jail, a fish-market, a bazar, and a
cathedral, catch the eye at once. Above and below the town you see
monastic piles. A bridge of boats connects the two banks, and a poorer
suburb lies before the town. The port is crowded with smacks and
rafts; the smacks bringing fish, the rafts bringing pines. What swarms
of people on the wharf! How grave, how dirty, and how pinched, they
look! Their sadness comes of the climate, and their dirt is of the
East. "Yes, yes!" you may hear a mujik say to his fellow, speaking of
some neighbor, "he is a respectable man--quite; he has a clean shirt
once a week." The rustic eats but little flesh; his dinner, even on
days that are not kept as fasts, being a slice of black bread, a
girkin, and a piece of dried cod. Just watch them, how they higgle for
a kopeck! A Russ craftsman is a fellow to deal with; ever hopeful and
acquiescent; ready to please in word and act; but you are never sure
that he will keep his word. He has hardly any sense of time and space.
To him one hour of the day is like another, and if he has promised to
make you a coat by ten in the morning, he can not be got to see the
wrong of sending it home by eleven at night.
The market reeks with oil and salt, with vinegar and fruit, with the
refuse of halibut, cod, and sprats. The chief articles of sale are
rings of bread, salt girkins, pottery, tin plates, iron nails, and
images of saints. The street is paved with pools, in which lie a few
rough stones, to help you in stepping from stall to stall. To walk is
an effort; to walk with clean feet a miracle. Such filth is too deep
for shoes.
A fish-wife is of either sex; and even when she belongs of right to
the better side of human nature, she is not easy to distinguish from
her lord by any thing in her face and garb. Seeing her in the sharp
wind, quilted in her sheep-skin coat, and legged in her deer-skin
hose, her features pinched by frost, her hands blackened by toil, it
would be hard to say which was the female and which the male, if
Providence had not blessed the men with beards. By these two signs a
Russ may be known from all other men--by his beard and by his boots;
but since many of his female folk wear boots, he is only to be safely
known from his partner in life by the bunch of hair upon his chin.
In the bazar stand the shops; dark holes in the wall, like the old
Moorish shops in Seville and Granada; in which the dealer stands
before his counter and shows you his poor assortment of prints and
stuffs, his pots and pans, his saints, his candles, and his packs of
cards. Next to rye-bread and salt fish, saints and cards are the
articles mostly bought and sold; for in Russia every body prays and
plays; the noble in his club, the dealer at his shop, the boatman on
his barge, the pilgrim by his wayside cross. The propensities to pray
and gamble may be traced to a common root; a kind of moral fetichism,
a trust in the grace of things unseen, in the merit of dead men, and
even in the power of chance. A Russian takes, like a child, to every
strange thing, and prides himself on the completeness of his faith.
When he is not kneeling to his angel, nothing renders him so happy as
the sight of a pack of cards.
Nearly every one plays high for his means; and nothing is more common
than for a burgher to stake and lose, first his money, then his boots,
his cap, his caftan, every scrap of his garments, down to his very
shirt. Whisky excepted, nothing drives a Russian to the devil so
quickly as a pack of cards.
But see, these gamblers throw down their cards, unbonnet their heads,
and fall upon their knees. The priest is coming down the street with
his sacred picture and his cross. It is market-day in the town, and he
is going to open and bless some shop in the bazar; and fellows who
were gambling for their shirts are now upon their knees in prayer.
The rite by which a shop, a shed, a house, is dedicated to God is not
without touches of poetic beauty. Notice must be given aforetime to
the parish priest, who fixes the hour of consecration, so that a man's
kinsfolk and neighbors may be present if they like. The time having
come, the priest takes down his cross from the altar, a boy lights the
embers in his censer, and, preceded by his reader and deacon, the pope
moves down the streets through crowds of kneeling men and women, most
of whom rise and follow in his wake, only too eager to catch so easily
and cheaply some of the celestial fire.
Entering the shop or house, the pope first purges the room by prayer,
then blesses the tenant or dweller, and lastly sanctifies the place by
hanging in the "corner of honor" an image of the dealer's guardian
angel, so that in the time to come no act can be done in that house or
shop except under the eyes of its patron saint.
Though poor as art, such icons, placed in rooms, have power upon men's
minds. Not far from Tamboff lived an old lady who was more than
commonly hard upon her serfs, until the poor wretches, maddened by her
use of the whip and the black hole, broke into her room at night, some
dozen men, and told her, with a sudden brevity, that her hour had come
and she must die. Springing from her bed, she snatched her image from
the wall, and held it out against her assailants, daring them to
strike the Mother of God. Dropping their clubs, they fled from before
her face. Taking courage from her victory, she hung up the picture,
drew on her wrapper, and followed her serfs into the yard, where,
seeing that she was unprotected by her image, they set upon her with a
shout, and clubbed her instantly to death.
In driving through the town we note how many are the dram-shops, and
how many the tipsy men. Among the smaller reforms under which the
burgher has now to live is that of a thinner drink. The Emperor has
put water into the whisky, and reduced the price from fifteen kopecks
a glass to five. The change is not much relished by the topers, who
call their thin potation, dechofka--cheap stuff; but simpler souls
give thanks to the reformer for his boon, saying, "Is he not good--our
Tsar--in giving us three glasses of whisky for the price of a single
glass!" Yet, thin as it is, a nippet of the fiery spirit throws a
sinner off his legs, for his stomach is empty, his nerves are lax, and
his blood is poor. If he were better fed he would crave less drink.
Happily a Russian is not quarrelsome in his cups; he sings and smiles,
and wishes to hug you in the public street. No richer comedy is seen
on any stage than that presented by two tipsy mujiks riding on a
sledge, putting their beards together and throwing their arms about
each other's neck. A happy fellow lies in the gutter, fast asleep;
another, just as tipsy, comes across the roadway, looks at his
brother, draws his own wrapper round his limbs, and asking gods and
men to pardon him, lies down tenderly in the puddle by his brother's
side.
The social instincts are, in a Russian, of exceeding strength. He
likes a crowd. The very hermits of his country are a social crew--not
men who rush away into lonely nooks, where, hidden from all eyes, they
grub out caves in the rock and burrow under roots of trees; but
brothers of some popular cloister, famous for its saints and pilgrims,
where they drive a shaft under the convent wall, secrete themselves in
a hole, and receive their food through a chink, in sight of wondering
visitors and advertising monks. Such were the founders of his church,
the anchorets of Kief.
The first towns of Russia are Kief and Novgorod the Great; her
capitals and holy places long before she built herself a kremlin on
the Moskva, and a winter palace on the Neva. Kief and Novgorod are
still her pious and poetic cities; one the tower of her religious
faith, the other of her imperial power. From Vich Gorod at Kief
springs the dome which celebrates her conversion to the Church of
Christ; in the Kremlin of Novgorod stands the bronze group which
typifies her empire of a thousand years.