THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA.
Gogol, the greatest of Russian humorists, has a passage in one of his
books, where in exile he cries out to his country to reveal the secret
of her fascination.
“What is the mysterious and inscrutable power which lies hidden in you?”
he exclaims. “Why does your aching and melancholy song echo unceasingly
in one’s ears? Russia, what do you want of me? What is there between you
and me?” This question has often been repeated, not only by Russians in
exile, but by foreigners who have lived in Russia.
The country is so devoid of the more obvious and unmistakable signs of
glamour and attraction. As Gogol says, not here are those astonishing
miracles of nature which are made still more startling by the triumphs
of art.
In Russia there are no
“Congesta manu prœruptis oppida saxis,
Fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros”;
no
“old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers”;
no “noble wreck in ruinous perfection,” where “the stars twinkle through
the loops of time”; no “castle, precipice-encurled in a gash of the
wind-grieved Apennine”; no “rose-red city half as old as time.”
There are none of those spots where nature, art, time, and history have
combined to catch the heart with a charm in which beauty, association,
and even decay are indistinguishably mingled; where art has added the
picturesque to the beauty of nature; and where time has made magic the
handiwork of art; and where history has peopled the spot with countless
phantoms, and cast over everything the strangeness and the glamour of
her spell.
Such places you will find in France and in England, all over Italy, in
Spain, and in Greece, but not in Russia. Russia is a country of
colonists, where life has been a continual struggle against the rigour
and asperity of the climate, and whose political history is the record
of a long and desperate struggle against adverse circumstances; whose
oldest city was sacked and burnt just at the moment when it was
beginning to flourish; whose first capital was destroyed by fire in
1812; whose second capital dates from the seventeenth century; whose
stone houses are rare in the country, and whose wooden houses are
perpetually being destroyed by fire.
A country of long winters and fierce summers, of rolling plains,
uninterrupted by mountains and unvariegated by valleys.
And yet the charm is there. It is a fact which is felt by quantities of
people of different nationalities and races; and it is difficult, if you
live in Russia, to escape it, and once you have felt it you will never
be free from it. The aching, melancholy song, which Gogol says wanders
from sea to sea throughout the length and breadth of the land, will for
ever echo in your heart, and haunt the recesses of your memory.
It is impossible to analyze charm, for if charm could be analyzed it
would cease to exist; and it is difficult to define the charm which is
attached to places where there is so little of that startlingly obvious
beauty of nature or art whose appeal is instantaneous; where there is no
playground of romance, and no abodes haunted by poetic or historical
ghosts and echoes.
But to those who have never been to Russia, and who will perhaps never
go there, Turgeniev’s descriptions of the country will give an idea of
this unique and peculiar magic. For instance, the description of the
summer night, when on the plain the children tell each other bogey
stories; or the description of that other July evening, when out of the
twilight from a long way off on the plain, a child’s voice is heard
calling, “Antropka-a-a,” and Antropka answers, “Wha-a-a-a-a-at”; and far
away out of the immensity comes the answering voice, “Come ho-ome;
because daddy wants to whip you.”
Turgeniev will afford to those who wish to travel in their armchair
magical glimpses of just those particular episodes, pictures, incidents,
sayings and doings, touches of human nature, phases of landscape, shades
of atmosphere, which constitute the charm of Russian life.
Whereas those who will actually travel in Russia itself will recognize
not only that what he writes is true to nature, but that incidents such
as those he records and causes to live again by means of his
incomparable art are a frequent and common experience to those who have
eyes to see.
The picturesqueness peculiar to countries rich in a long tradition of
art, and in varied and conflicting historical associations, may be
absent in Russia; but this does not mean that beauty is absent, and its
manifestations are often all the more striking from their lack of
obviousness.
I was favoured with such a glimpse this summer. I was staying in a small
wooden house in Central Russia, not far from a railway, but isolated
from all other houses, and at a fair distance from a village. The
harvest was nearly done. The heat was sweltering. Everything was parched
and dry. The walls and ceilings were black with flies. One had no wish
to venture out of doors until the evening.
The small garden of the house, which was gay with asters and sweet peas,
was surrounded by birch trees, with here and there a fir tree in their
midst.
Opposite the little house a broad pathway, flanked on each side by a row
of tall birch trees, lead to the margin of the garden, which ended in a
rather steep grass slope, and a valley, or rather a dip, likewise
wooded, and on the other side of the dip, on a level with the garden,
there was a pathway half hidden by trees; so that from the house, if you
looked straight in front of you, you saw a broad path, with birch trees
on each side of it, forming as it were a proscenium for a distant view
of trees; and if anybody walked along the pathway on the other side of
the dip, although you saw no road, you could see their figures in
outline against the sky, as though they were walking across the back of
a stage.
Just as the cool of the evening began to fall, out of the distance came
a rhythmical song, very high, and ending on a note that seemed to last
for ever, piercingly clear and clean. Then the music came a little
nearer, and one could distinguish first a solo chanting a phrase, and
then a chorus taking it up, and finally, solo and chorus became one,
reaching a climax on one high note, which went on and on, getting purer
and stronger, without any seeming effort, until it eventually died away.
The tone of the voices was so high, so pure, and at the same time so
peculiar, so strong and unusual, that it was difficult at first to
decide whether the voices were high tenor men’s voices, womanly
sopranos, or boyish trebles. They were quite unlike, both in range and
quality, the voices of women you usually hear in Russian villages. The
music drew nearer, and it filled the air with a stateliness and a calm
indescribable. And presently, in the distance, beyond the dip between
the trees, and in the centre of the natural stage made by the garden, I
saw against the sky figures of women walking slowly in the sunset, and
singing as they walked, carrying their scythes and their wooden rakes
with them; and once again the high, pure phrase began, to be repeated by
the chorus; and once again chorus and solo melted together in a high and
infinitely long-drawn-out note, which seemed to swell like the sound of
some crystal clarion, to grow purer and more single, and to go on and
on, until it ended suddenly and sharply, like a frieze ends. And this
song seemed to proclaim rest after toil, and satisfaction for labour
accomplished. It was like a hymn of praise, a broad benediction, a grace
sung for the end of the day, the end of the summer, the end of the
harvest. It seemed the very soul and spirit of the breathless August
evening.
Slowly the women walked past and disappeared into the trees once more.
The glimpse was but momentary, yet it sufficed to conjure up a whole
train of thoughts and pictures of rites, ritual, and custom—of pagan
ceremonies older than the gods, of rustic worship and rural festival
older than all creeds. And as another verse of what sounded like a
primeval harvest hymn began, the brief vision of the reapers, erect,
stately, full of dignity, sacerdotal and majestic in the dress and with
the attributes of toil, added to the impression made by the high quality
and pure concent of the singing, and one felt as if one had had a vision
of another phase of time, a glimpse into an older and remoter
world—older than Virgil, older than Romulus, older than Demeter—a world
where the spring, the summer, and the autumn, harvest time and sowing,
the gathering of fruits, and the vintage, were the gods; a gleam from
the golden age, a breath from the morning and the springtide of the
world.
The place seemed to become a temple in the quiet light of the
evening—august, sacred, and calm—and the procession of those stately
figures, diminutive in the distance, was like the design on an archaic
vase or frieze; and the music seemed to seal a sacrament, to be the
initiation into some immemorial secret, into some far-off mystery—who
knows, perhaps the Mystery of Eleusis?—or older mysteries, of which
Eleusis was but the far-distant offspring? The music passed, the singing
died away in the distance, and one felt inclined to say,—
“Is it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep?”
When I say that the singing evoked thoughts of Greece, the thing is less
fantastic than it seems. In the first place, in the songs of the Russian
peasants the Greek modes are still in use—the Dorian, the Hypo-dorian,
the Lydian, the Hypo-phrygian. “_La musique, telle qu’elle était
pratiquée en Russie au moyen âge_” (writes M. Soubier in his _History of
Russian Music_), “_tenait à la tradition des religions et des mœurs
paiennes._” And in the secular as well as in the ecclesiastical music of
Russia there is an element of influence which is purely Hellenic.
It turned out that the particular singers I heard on that evening were
not local singers, but a guild of women reapers who had come from the
government of Tula to work during the harvest. Their singing, although
the form and kind of song was familiar to me, was quite different in
quality from any that I had heard before; and the impression made by it
is unforgettable.
If the aspect of nature in Russia is, broadly speaking, monotonous and
uniform, this does not mean that beauty manifests itself infrequently.
Not only magic moments occur in the most unpromising surroundings, but
beauty is to be found in Russian nature and landscape at all times and
all seasons in a multitude of shapes.
Personally I know nothing more striking than a long drive in the evening
twilight at harvest time over the immense hedgeless rolling fields in
Russia, through stretches of golden wheat and rye variegated with
millet, still green and not yet turned to the bronze colour it takes
later; when you drive for miles over monotonous and yet ever-varying
rolling fields, and when you see the cranes, settling for a moment, and
then flying off into space.
Later in the twilight, great continents of dovelike lilac clouds float
in the east, and the west is suffused with the dusty and golden
afterglow of the sunset, and the half-reaped corn and the spaces of
stubble are burnished and glow in the heat, and smouldering fires of
weeds burn here and there; and as you reach a homestead you will perhaps
see by the threshing machine a crowd of dark men and women still at
their work, and in the glow from the flame of a wooden fire and the
shadow of the dusk, in the smoke of the engine and the dust of the
chaff, they have a Rembrandt-like power; and the feeling of space,
breadth, and air and immensity grows upon one; and the earth seems to
grow larger, and the sky to grow deeper, and the spirit is lifted,
stretched, and magnified.
The Russian poets have celebrated more frequently the spring and
winter—the brief spring with the intense green of the birch trees, the
uncrumpling fern, the woods carpeted with lilies of the valley, the
lilac bushes, and the nightingale, which in Russia is the bird of
spring, later the briar, which flowers in great profusion; and the
winter with its fields of snow scintillating in the sunshine, when the
transparent woods are black against the whiteness, or, when covered with
snow and frozen, they form an enchanted fabric, a fantastic tracery of
powdered shapes, gleaming against the stainless blue, or when, after a
night of thaw, the brown branches emerge once more covered with airy
threads and drops of sparkling dew.
Wonderful, too, is the sunset and twilight of the winter evening after
the first snow has fallen in December, when the new moon rises above and
is poised, like a silver sail, or a gem, in a sea of azure that is
suffused, as it grows nearer the earth, with a rosy blush. The white
rays of the new moon looking down from the sky flood the sheets of snow
with radiance, and lend them an intenser purity; and lastly, with a
tinge of cold blue in their whiteness, they show up in bold relief the
wooden houses, the red roofs, and all the furniture of toil; and these
practical and prosaic household things—these objects and attributes of
everyday life—assume a strange largeness and darkness as they loom
between the snow and the faintly blushing and lustrous sky, as unreal
and portentous as the conjured visions of a magician.
The beauty and exhilaration of winter has been well sung by the Russian
poets, and the long drives in sledges under a leaden sky, to the
monotonous tinkle of the sledge bell, and the whistling blizzard with
its demons that lead the horses astray in the night; and as for the
spring, whose invasion after the melting of the snows is so sudden,
whose green robes are so startling in their intensity, and whose
conquest of nature is so sudden and so swift, it has evoked some of the
finest pages of Russian literature, in prose as well as in verse.
But there will be some who will enjoy more than anything in Russia the
summer afternoons on some river, where the flat banks are covered with
oak trees, ash, and willow, and thick undergrowth, and where every now
and then perch rise to the surface to catch flies, and the kingfishers
skim over the surface from reach to reach. Perhaps you will take a boat
and row past islands of rushes, and a network of waterlilies, to where
the river broadens, and you reach a great sheet of water flanked by a
weir and a mill. The trees are reflected in the glassy surface, and
nothing breaks the stillness but the grumbling of the mill and the cries
of the children bathing.
And then, if you are near a village, all through the summer night you
will hear song answering song, and the brisk rhythm of the accordion; or
to the interminable humming, buzzing burden of the three-stringed
_balalaika_, verse will succeed to verse of an apparently tireless song,
and the end of each verse will seem to beget another and give a keener
zest to the next; and the song will go on and on, as if the singer were
intoxicated by the sound of his own music.
But the peculiar manifestations of the beauty of nature in a flat and
uniform country are not enough to account for the overwhelming
fascination of Russia. That is a part of it, but that is not all. And
against that in the other scale you must put dirt, squalor, misery,
slovenliness, disorder, and uninspiring wooden provincial towns, the
dusty or sodden roads, the frequent gray skies, the long and heavy
sameness.
The _advocatus diaboli_ has a strong case. He could, and often does,
draw up an indictment proving to you that Russia is a country with a
disagreeable climate—an arid summer producing uncertain harvests which
sometimes result in starvation, an intolerably long winter, a damp and
unhealthy spring, and a still more unhealthy autumn: a country whose
capital is built on a swamp, where there are next to no decent roads,
where the provincial towns are overgrown villages, squalid, squatting,
dismal, devoid of natural beauty, and unredeemed by art: a country where
internal communications off the big railway lines are complicated and
bad; where on the best lines accidents happen owing to sleepers being
rotten; where the cost of living is high, and the expense of life out of
all proportion to the quality of the goods supplied; where labour is
dear, bad, and slow; where the sanitary conditions in which the great
mass of the population live are deplorable; where every kind of disease,
including plague, is rampant; where medical aid and appliances are
inadequate; where the poor people are backward and ignorant, and the
middle class slack and slovenly; and where progress is deliberately
checked and impeded in every possible way: a country governed by chance,
where all forms of administration are arbitrary, uncertain, and
dilatory; where all forms of business are cumbersome and burdened with
red tape; and where bribery is an indispensable factor in business and
administrative life: a country burdened by a vast official population,
which is on the whole lazy, venal, and incompetent: a country where
political liberty and the elementary rights of citizenship do not exist;
where even the programmes of concerts, and all foreign newspapers and
literature, are censored; where the freedom of the Press is hampered by
petty annoyances, and editors are constantly fined and sometimes
imprisoned; where freedom of conscience is hampered; a country where the
only political argument which can be used by a private person is
dynamite, and where political assassination is the only form of civic
courage: a country of misrule: a country where there is every licence
and no law; where everybody acts regardless of his neighbour; where you
can do everything and criticize nothing; and where the only way to show
you have the courage of your convictions is to spend years in prison: a
country of extremes, of moral laxity, and extravagant self-indulgence; a
people without self-control and without discipline; always finding
fault, always criticizing, but never acting; jealous of anything or
anybody who emerges from the ranks and rises superior to the average;
looking upon all individual originality and distinction with suspicion;
a people slavish to the dead level of mediocrity and the stereotyped
bureaucratic pattern; a people which has all the faults of the Orient
and none of its austerer virtues, and none of its dignity and
self-control; a nation of ineffectual rebels under the direction of a
band of time-serving officials: a country where those in power are in
perpetual fear, and where influence may come from any quarter—where
nothing is too absurd to happen: a country, as was said in the Duma, of
unlimited possibilities. I do not think the _advocatus diaboli_ can put
the case stronger than that. He would call as his witnesses the greatest
Russian writers of the past, and the most prominent Russians of the
present in political life, art, literature, and science. He would call
countless moralists and satirists, and prove that the Russian God is the
God of all that is topsy-turvy, and of everything which is in its wrong
place and as it should not be. And he would laugh at all the reformers,
and tell them to reform themselves; and he would end his indictment with
a smile, and murmur, “_Doux pays!_” Of course the case of the _advocatus
diaboli_ is as unfair as possible, otherwise it would not be the case of
the _advocatus diaboli_. And the defence could make a strong
counter-case refuting some of these statements, qualifying all of them.
But the defence can do better than that. It can point out that the very
strength of the case of the _advocatus diaboli_ constitutes its
weakness; because if you say to him: “I know all that, and you can make
your case still stronger, if you choose. I admit all that; and in spite
of all, and in some cases even because of it, Russia has for me an
indescribable fascination; in spite of all that, I love the country, and
admire and respect its people.”
What can he answer to that? Nothing, I think. If you admit the faults,
and add that they seem to you the negative results of positive qualities
so valuable as to outweigh them altogether, the case of the _advocatus
diaboli_ breaks down altogether. That is my point of view about Russia.
I perceive countless faults and drawbacks, some which may be the
fortuitous result of bad government, and only temporary, and which will
disappear, as other worse things have already disappeared, with the
march of time; and others which may be innate and radical—the result of
original sin, and the way in which the Russian character expresses its
indispensable dose of original sin, and inseparable from it and
ineradicable. There may be many more which I do not even perceive. But
this does not affect me, because I have realized and experienced the
result of other qualities and virtues which seem to me greater and more
important than all the possible faults put together, and magnified to
any extent; and the net result of this is that the country has for me an
overpowering charm, and the people an indescribable attraction.
And the charm exercised by the country as a whole is partly due to the
country itself, and partly to the mode of life lived there, and to the
nature of the people. The qualities that do exist, and whose benefit I
have experienced, seem to me the most precious of all qualities; and the
virtues the most important of all virtues; and the glimpses of beauty
the rarest in kind; the songs and the music the most haunting and most
heart-searching; the poetry nearest to nature and man; the human charity
nearest to God.
This is perhaps the secret of the whole matter, that the Russian soul is
filled with a human Christian charity which is warmer in kind and
intenser in degree, and expressed with a greater simplicity and
sincerity, than I have met with in any other people anywhere else; and
it is this quality being behind everything else which gives charm to
Russian life, however squalid the circumstances of it may be, which
gives poignancy to its music, sincerity and simplicity to its religion,
manners, intercourse, music, singing, verse, art, acting—in a word, to
its art, its life, and its faith.
Never did I realize this so much as once when I was driving on a cold
and damp December evening in St. Petersburg in a cab. It was dark, and I
was driving along the quays from one end of the town to the other. For a
long time I drove in silence, but after a while I happened to make some
remark to the cabman about the weather. He answered gloomily that the
weather was bad and everything else too. For some time we drove on again
in silence, and then some other stray remark or question of mine
elicited from him the fact that he had had bad luck that day in the
matter of a fine. The matter was a trivial one, but somehow or other my
interest was half aroused, and I got him to tell me the story, which was
a case of ordinary bad luck and nothing very serious; but when he had
told it, he gave such a profound sigh that I asked whether it was that
which was still weighing upon him. Then he said “No,” and slowly began
to tell me a story of a great catastrophe which had just befallen him.
He possessed a little land and a cottage in the country not far from St.
Petersburg. His house had been burnt. It was true he had insured, but
the insurance was not sufficient to make any sensible difference. He had
two sons, one of whom went to school, and one who had some employment
somewhere in the provinces. The catastrophe of the fire had simply upset
everything. All his belongings had perished. He could no longer send his
boy to school. His other son, who was in the country, had written to say
he was engaged to be married, and had asked his consent, advice, and
approval. “He has written twice,” said the cabman, “and I keep silence
(_i ya molchu_). What can I answer?” I cannot give any idea of the
strength, simplicity, and poignancy of the tale as it came, hammered out
slowly, with pauses between each sentence, and a kind of biblical and
dignified simplicity of utterance and purity of idiom which is the
precious privilege of the poor in Russia. The words seemed to be torn
out from the bottom of his heart. He made no complaint; there was no
grievance, no whine in the story. He just stated the bald facts with a
simplicity which was overwhelming. And in spite of all, his faith in
God, and his consent to the will of Providence, was unshaken, certain,
and sublime. This was three years ago. I have forgotten the details of
the story, which were many; but the impression remains of having been
face to face with a human soul, stripped and naked, and a human soul in
the grip of a tragedy, as dignified as that of Prometheus, as touching
as that of King Lear, and as full of faith as that of Job. And this
experience, which brought one in touch with the divine, is one which, I
submit, could only in such circumstances occur in Russia.
When I say that for me Russia has a unique and overwhelming charm, I
mean that for me this charm arises from my love of the Russian people;
and this love is not a predilection for the curious, the picturesque,
the remote, and the unusual, but the expression, the homage, the
acknowledgment, the admiration of those qualities which I believe to be
the “captain jewels” in the crown of human nature.
“Those foreigners,” wrote a Russian journalist not long ago, “who come
to Russia and rave about the people, nevertheless in their hearts
despise us. They admire in us qualities which they regard as primeval
and barbarian; they look upon us as good-natured and pleasant savages.”
I should like to assure that writer, or any other Russian who chances to
read these pages, that, whatever people may think, what I love and
admire in the Russian people is nothing barbaric, picturesque, or
exotic, but something eternal, universal, and great—namely, their love
of man and their faith in God. And this seems to me of a kind and of a
degree that makes all dissection of vices and enumeration of failings,
all carping criticism and captious analysis, an idle business. It may be
a profitable employment for the Russians to blame and to criticize
themselves, and it is one in which they are constantly occupied. It is
less important in the case of a foreigner writing for foreigners, and on
a country about which much prejudice has existed in the past and many
falsehoods have been written; for him it is important to recognize and
to point out the sunshine of which his countrymen are ignorant, and not
to analyze the spots on the sun. For it is the people who admire whose
observation is profitable, and it is those who see and feel the sunshine
who feel and see the truth; for the sunshine and not the sun-spots is
the important fact about the sun.
Nevertheless, the expression of an admiration for certain qualities in a
foreign people is always a delicate task. And often foreigners are
justly irritated for being praised for the qualities which they least
want to be praised for. Nothing is more irritating than the
condescending tone which some people adopt in praising certain elements
which meet with their approval in foreign countries. When, for instance,
Anglo-Saxons say to the Latin races: “Keep to your past; keep to your
superstitions, your relics, your ruins, and your associations; remain
artistic and picturesque; but keep your hands off battleships,
aeroplanes, telephones, tramcars, and steam ploughs; leave those
practical things to us. You cannot deal with them. You are charming as
you are. Do not try to be modern, you spoil the whole effect by doing
so.” This is often the attitude of people to the Spaniards and the
Italians, and it is a maddening attitude. Or to the Irish they say: “You
are amusing, why should you be competent? Why should you try and deal
with the serious business of politics?” And such talk to an Irishman is
more than maddening. Or supposing foreigners were to say to the English,
to the countrymen of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Gainsborough, and Constable: “Don’t bother about writing poetry or
painting pictures, stick to your counters and your cotton-mills, you
people of shopkeepers; leave art to us,” we should resent it. This
attitude of mind arises from what a French writer calls “_un optimisme
béat_”—a sort of open-mouthed, weak-chinned satisfaction with oneself
and all things, which is hopeless and infuriating. And when this
attitude is blent with a tincture of rancid unction or a dose of gushing
and indulgent sentimentalism—when, for instance, people condescend to
patronisingly rave about the ritual of such an institution as the
Catholic Church it is more intolerable still.
It is for this reason I wish to make myself quite clear on this point.
If, as I hope, I have escaped the pitfall of giving the impression that
Russians are interesting as exotic and barbaric specimens, as
thinly-civilized savages, I none the less wish not to incur the
suspicion that, in admiring in them the qualities of the heart, I am
overlooking in them the qualities of the head, or assuming the absence
of sterner stuff, and of the tougher and more practical virtues. I do
not wish it to be thought that I am saying to them, “Be good, sweet
child; let those who will be clever.” It is not necessary to point out
their cleverness and all it stands for. We all know they are clever. I
wish to point out that I think they are good as well; and that their
goodness is more important than their cleverness, because in general
goodness is a rarer as well as a greater thing than cleverness. This may
be a truism, but modern life has given to most truisms the appearance of
startling paradoxes.
Take, on the one hand, the most striking examples among examples of
energy and practical achievements—of men, deeds, and facts—which the
Latin and Anglo-Saxon races can show, and Russia need not fear to hold
her own.
Take any one of the faults which Russian critics hold up as the curse of
the country, and it is easy to show that though the accusation may be
true, it is not the whole truth; that the contrary is true also, and the
exceptions startling. Russians, for instance, often single out laziness
and the want of practical energy as a national failing. Well and good;
but the defence of Sevastopol, the creation of the Trans-Siberian
Railway, and the transport of troops over a single line during war time,
are examples of abnormal energy in the domain of achievement; and in the
persons of Peter the Great, Suvorov, and Skobeliev, Russia has given to
the world examples of terrific and explosive energy. Stern stuff must
exist somewhere in the Russian character, or else the Russian empire
would not be there to testify to the fact. The Russian empire is the
result of something, and it is there.
On the other hand, take those crying faults which Russian critics single
out and deplore as being the sorest plague-spots and the weakest points
in the national life and character, and you will find it easy to match
them in the other countries of Europe and in America. And you will often
find that what is attributed to the evils of a particular form of
government is very often really the result of original sin, and common
to all countries under different forms and names.
But my point is that while, as far as the general category of faults and
qualities, virtues and vices is concerned, the Russians are on a par
with other countries, and no worse if no better, they have, _ceteris
paribus_, a peculiar and unique gift of goodness and faith in the nature
of their people which is difficult to match in any other country,
although you will find something like it in America.
That is why I have dwelt less on that stern stuff and those tough and
stubborn qualities which must be common to all great nations, and whose
existence naturally and inevitably follows from the very fact of a
nation being a great nation. Such qualities must be taken for granted.
Did they not exist, there would be no such thing as the Russian empire.
That is why I disregard them here, and have chosen to dwell more on
those qualities which I believe to be peculiar to Russia, and which I
believe to be also a source of greatness. I happen also to think these
latter qualities to be more important in themselves.
I hope now that I have made it plain that it is on account of a humble
admiration for these special qualities, which by no means excludes a
serious recognition and respect for all other general qualities, and not
on account of any fantastic whim, condescending self-complacency, or
hypocritical sense of superiority, that with regard to Russia I echo the
words which R. L. Stevenson once addressed to the deaf ear of a French
novelist: “_J’ai beau admirer les autres de toute ma force, c’est avec
vous que je me complais à vivre._”
THE END.
-----
Footnote 1:
From this will be seen the difference between a Russian absentee
landowner and an English landlord. The English landlord is essentially
a partner in the farming, even if he does not farm the land himself,
because he will always sink a certain amount of capital in buildings
and their upkeep, whereas the Russian absentee landowner invests no
capital in anything: he merely receives the rent. In some cases even
the land taxes are paid by the tenant.
Footnote 2:
Besides this hereditary nobility there was what is called personal
nobility, which was not hereditary. (This fact is without any great
importance; it simply means that when bureaucracy was established in
Russia it was necessary to distinguish between higher and lower grades
of public servants, and personal nobility simply conferred rights of
independence, at a time when only nobles and public servants possessed
any such recognized rights.)
Footnote 3:
It is perhaps as well to note here that the Russian law
counterbalances this state of affairs by giving the right to women,
even during the lifetime of their husbands, of enjoying and
administrating their own property. The Russian woman is not a minor in
the eyes of the law as in France.
Footnote 4:
See page 114.
Footnote 5:
Contrary to this last provision, the clause was taken advantage of by
the Government in 1907 to make a new electoral law which changed the
nature of the franchise. This was illegal, and according to the
fundamental laws, a _coup d’état_.
Footnote 6:
The number varies from three to twelve.
Footnote 7:
Besides the Council of Ministers, there are various other deliberative
institutions, such as a Military Council, an Admiralty Council, an
Imperial Defence Council, a Financial Committee, and a Court of
Chancery.
Footnote 8:
By a recent law which came into force in January 1914 the _zemskie
nachalniki_ are being abolished in certain portions of Russia and
replaced by elective Justices of Peace.
Footnote 9:
The peasants of each Canton elect a candidate, and the elected
candidates in their turn elect from amongst themselves the number of
members required. The nobility, the merchants, and any peasants who
are outside the Commune—that is to say, private landowners—are elected
by property qualification; they have to possess so many acres, or so
much immovable property, or a commercial or industrial establishment
of a certain assessed value. People who own not less than one-tenth of
the necessary property qualification, also persons who are less than
twenty-five years of age, and women, may take part in the election by
proxy.
Footnote 10:
The Government or Provincial Zemstvo Assembly is composed of a certain
number of members, fixed by the law, elected by the District
Assemblies:—
Of all the marshals of the nobility;
Of all the presidents of the districts;
Of the chairman and members of the government council;
Of representatives of the clergy;
Of the heads of the local branches of the Department of Agriculture.
Footnote 11:
Cheerfulness, _not_ gaiety.
Footnote 12:
_Russkoe Slovo_: “At the Music Hall: G. Bayan,” September 14 (27),
1913.
Footnote 13:
There is also in Lent the Mass of the Presanctified.
Footnote 14:
It is very improbable that anything of the kind will occur.
Footnote 15:
These are more or less in a state of decay, and in spite of periodic
spurts of activity brought about by various stimuli, such as
Government grants, they always lag behind the Zemstvo schools, as they
are a nuisance to the clergy themselves, who rarely have time to
attend to them.
Footnote 16:
I quote these figures from the Russian Year Book, compiled by Dr.
Howard Kennard, for 1913.
Footnote 17:
University education is _the_ education in Russia. It has a
traditional pretension to be superior to all other (specialized)
education, owing to its encyclopædic and philosophical character. The
Russian characteristic of knowing something about everything and
having vast _aperçus_ is fostered by it. The university is to the
Russian student what Paris is to the Frenchman, what Athens was to the
ancient world. The student often misses the lectures of his own course
and attends the lectures of other faculties, and this is encouraged by
the professors, who did the same when they were young. In Russia,
erratic and sporadic information is preferred to systematic and narrow
knowledge.
Footnote 18:
According to a new law, which comes into force on January 1, 1914, a
higher village court has been created for the consideration of appeals
from the Canton Court, consisting of the local justice of peace as
chairman, and the presidents of the Canton Courts of the district as
members.
Footnote 19:
Nishni-Novgorod, Kazan, Saratov, Kishniev, and the district (_yiezd_)
of St. Petersburg.
Footnote 20:
This officer is to be abolished by the new law. At present he
exercises the same judicial functions as the zemsky nachalnik, with
the difference that his jurisdiction is in the town districts, that of
the zemsky nachalnik in the country districts.
Footnote 21:
It has been widely affirmed that there has never been a peasant jury
in Kiev before.
Footnote 22:
The word _knut_ is the ordinary word for whip.
Footnote 23:
Private attorneys (_chastnye povierenye_) plead before a specific
court from which they have received a special licence. They are not
required to take a university degree.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BY MAURICE BARING.
WHAT I SAW IN RUSSIA. 1s. net.
“The experiences and impressions of a most accomplished travel-writer,
journeying to the battlefield of Liao-yang and back.”
_The Pall Mall Gazette._
“The volume is made up from three of the author’s earlier books, and
contains those sections which he regards as of permanent interest. The
reader will find that they give a fascinating account of modern life
in Russia as viewed from various standpoints.”
_The Queen._
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS.
THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA. _First Published, June 1914._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
● The caret (^) serves as a superscript indicator, applicable to
individual characters (like 2^d) and even entire phrases (like
1^{st}).