FROM ST. PETERSBURG TO MOSCOW.
MY roughest railroad ride in Europe was from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
It did not improve the road to be told, as I was, that it was built by
American engineers; but it did jolt me so naturally that I felt at home
as soon as we were under way. And there was a slight infusion of a
familiar morality in the excuse made for the present condition of the
road, that the managers of it under the government were seeking to buy
it, and were letting it run down that they might get it at a lower
figure!
A great throng of friends were at the station to take leave of the
passengers about to set off for Moscow. It is a ride of about twenty
hours; hardly a journey to call for as much leave-taking as with us
demands a voyage over sea. The journey of four hundred miles includes
the whole night and part of two days, and only one train a day, with no
good place to stop for the night, so that we are literally shut up to
the necessity of going through at once. The arrangements for sleeping
are of the rudest kind. Into the cars the passengers brought pillows and
blankets, preparing to make themselves as comfortable as circumstances
would permit. The fare through was $15, and my little trunk of less than
fifty pounds weight was $1.50 extra. As soon as we were off, a man
decorated with three medals entered with an armful of newspapers for
sale, and as many bought them and read them as in a car going out of New
York or Boston. It was a good sign. Small thanks are due to the
government from the press, however. It is subjected to the strictest
censorship. No foreign papers are allowed to come into the country,
unless they are _subscribed for_ by permission, and _then_ they are
interdicted if any thing dangerous to the existing order of things is in
them. Nothing unfriendly to good morals is allowed to be printed, and an
excellent regulation requires the examination and approval of all plays
before they can be put upon the stage. These barbarians of the north
will not have the luxury of the “dirty drama” which is so fascinating to
the highly cultivated Parisians and New Yorkers.
A lady and gentleman entered the car as we were just starting, and could
not get a double seat; it was a long car like our own, with seats on
each side of the passage. They could find separate seats, but they were
to ride all night, and of course desired to sit side by side. They
sought to make exchanges, but in vain. Seeing their distress, my son and
I agreed to separate and surrender our places to them. Their gratitude
was equal to their surprise. “We were French, they were sure.” Not at
all. “Ah no, we were English.” By no means. “And pray, would we tell
them of what nation?” AMERICANS: and they were nearly overcome with
pleasure, and poured out their grateful acknowledgments.
At Lubanskaia we stopped to dine, and you will be more amused by reading
the names of some of the places we touched in passing, than by the names
of the dishes we had for dinner. Thus we passed through Kolpinskaia,
Sablinskaia, Ouschkinskaia, Babinskaia, Tehondoskaia, Volkhooskaia,
Guadskaia, Mainvisheskaia, Bourgurnskaia, Borooenskaia, Okouloviskaia,
Zarebchenkeskaia, Kaloschkooskaia, Ostaschkooskaia, Reschchilkooskaia,
Paadsulnelchookaia; but I am getting a headache in copying them out of
the time-table, and will spare you. Wales is nothing to Russia for hard
names.
The station-houses are well built, and refreshment rooms well supplied;
so that you get comfortable meals on the route.
At Tver we crossed the Volga, and here we had the first sight of that
famous river. It is at this point downward navigable for steamers, and
we might step on board of one and steam away two thousand miles to
Astrachan! Tver is a place of remarkable historical interest, which
lingers around the cathedral and the monastery in which a bishop was
murdered by order of John the Terrible, though his death was reported as
occasioned by the fumes of a stove.
As night drew on we learned that one car in the long train was fitted up
for sleeping, and we were glad to pay a couple of roubles apiece for the
chance of a horizontal nap. Toward midnight the process of
reconstruction commenced. The long car is divided into four
compartments, each eight feet square; across each side is swung a shelf,
the seats below are converted into berths, and two more are made _up_ on
the floor; a pillow of homœopathic proportions is assigned to each
passenger, and unless a man is afraid it will get into his ear he takes
it. By a ladder of seven steps I ascended to the topmost perch, and
there sought to rest. Alas! the search was vain. My refuge in
sleeplessness is to old-time hymns, and Watts often composes me to
slumber as his cradle lullaby did when the best of mothers sang it in my
infancy. But now the only lines that haunted me were these, and
perfectly descriptive of my present experience,—
“So when a raging fever burns,
We shift from side to side by turns;
And ’tis a poor relief we gain,
To change the place and keep the pain.”
For half a dozen Russians sat together in this little chamber; all
smoking, all laughing, all talking, and in that jargon of a language
worse to hear than any other that ever crashed upon my auricular nerves.
There was no railroad law to be invoked to stop them. We were two, they
were six. They wanted to smoke and talk all night; we were invalids,
fighting for a wink of sleep. As the night wore on, they grew more
earnest. At frequent stops by the way they rushed out and returned
fortified with strong drink; the smoke, the breaths, the smells, the
talk became intolerable. I put my woe-begone visage over the edge of the
shelf, and arresting their attention by a groan, asked if any of them
spoke the French language? A military officer in uniform rose and said
he did. Then in tearful accents I said, “You behold two American
travellers who have paid for these luxurious couches to get a little
rest in their weary travels. If you gentlemen are to keep up this
discourse, sleep is as impossible as if we were under the tortures of
the Inquisition; is it too much to hope that you will soon suffer this
discourse of yours to come to an end for the night, to be renewed at
some future day.” Before my speech was finished he had begun to laugh,
and assuring me of his regret that we had been disturbed, he represented
to his friends the wishes of two _Amerikaners_, and they soon turned in.
In the morning, looking down from the shelf, I counted thirty-two stumps
of cigars lying on the floor, in one quarter, and at least a hundred
must have been consumed in that one compartment.
At half-past seven we stopped for coffee. A forlorn-looking set of men
and women crept out for fresh air and refreshment. They had been badly
stayed with, all of them. But the longest night has its morning, and so
had this. The coffee was good; we paid five times as much for it as it
was worth, even there, but we were comforted with the beverage. At one
end of the car was a wash-bowl and water, and over it a notice: “Towel,
5 copakes; soap, 15 copakes,”—so for about 20 cents you could have the
use of everybody’s towel and soap!
The face of the country improves as we get on. More trees, more hills,
more culture, and signs of thrift on every hand.
Into the car came a venerable ecclesiastic of the Greek type. A heavy
gold cross was suspended from his neck and hung on his broad breast; and
his gray hair rested in curls on his shoulders. The scarlet and gold on
his robes attracted the eye of the stranger, but he seemed to challenge
no special attention from the people with whom he came in contact. We
called him the Patriarch Nicon at once, for he came in upon us as at
Krukova, which is the station where we would stop, if we had time to
make a visit at the Monastery of New Jerusalem, or Voskresenski, which,
being interpreted, meaneth Resurrection. This monastery was founded in
1657 by the Patriarch Nicon, whose story is told by Dean Stanley in his
lectures on the Greek Church, and condensed into the travel books in the
hands of wanderers in these wilds.
At this village of the Resurrection, Nicon, a patriarch of the Greek
Church, was wont to stop in his journeys through the country, and in
1655 he built a church here, and the Czar of all the Russias did him the
honor to come to its consecration and name it the New Jerusalem. Nicon
obtained a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at old Jerusalem,
and he made one like it here. He found hills and vales and brooks like
those in the Holy Land, and gave them names to correspond, which they
bear to this day, though two hundred years have since gone by. The river
Istra became Jordan, and he made a little one for Kedron, and called a
village at a distance Nazareth, and one nearer by was Bethany; and with
these sacred associations he gathered around him the odor of sanctity,
and with it came dreams of power and glory, such as priests are apt to
have when they leave the service of God and substitute their own
imaginings for the teachings of his word. The Czar saw what he was at,
and soon let him down from his Jerusalem. The Patriarch began to claim
civil as well as sacerdotal power. Just as the Bishop of Rome became a
king as well as priest, so Nicon would sway a sceptre as well as a
shepherd’s crook. He put stringent laws upon his inferior clergy, and
they became restive under his authority. He rode into town on an ass in
profane imitation of Christ, and the people could not see the sense of
being compelled to cast their garments in the way of him who was so
unlike the meek and lowly Jesus whom they would have loved to honor. His
tyranny drove them to revolt, and many sects sprang up which even now
continue to maintain their existence in the empire and in a certain
hostility to the regular Greek Church of the empire. Nicon grew more and
more despotic, as his enemies grew formidable in numbers and power. He
seized in the houses of the nobles, wherever he could find them, all
pictures not painted in the style that pleased his royal will. In all
his dealings with them he claimed the authority of the sovereign. He was
fast becoming the pope of the north. At last the Emperor, no longer
willing to acknowledge the lordly assumptions of this proud subject,
refused to honor his festivals with the royal presence, or to recognize
the Patriarch as spiritual father. Nicon was enraged at this slight, and
thinking to humble the Czar, threw off his robes of office, resigned his
crozier, and retired to his monastery at Resurrection. The sepulchre
would have been a more fitting place for retirement. Hither he supposed
the Czar would hasten, and with apologies, penitence, and tears beseech
him to return and resume his reign. He reckoned without his host. The
Czar could make and unmake such ecclesiastics, and he put another man in
his place, and left poor Nicon to chew the cud of regret in his
ignominious solitude. He stood it six years, and then sent word to the
Czar that, after long fasting and prayer, he had been honored with a
vision of the prophet Jonah, in a dream, who had told him it was his
duty to resume his seat on the patriarchal throne of Moscow. But the
Czar could not see it. Jonah said nothing to him about it, and he had an
idea that unhappy Nicon might, indeed, have had a great many dreams of
the same kind, but that Jonah was not the man to make patriarchs for
him. He called a council of Eastern patriarchs, presided in the midst of
it himself, and this council came very naturally to the decision that
Nicon should be degraded and banished to a monastery in Novgorod. The
next Czar who came to the throne pardoned Nicon, who soon after died.
Such was the sad career of a great genius, whose brief reign was
signalized by the aggrandizement of the Russian Church, for he magnified
five patriarchates,—Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and
Moscow. And now his remains are lying in the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, which he built, in the chapel of Melchisedek, at the foot of
the Golgotha, and over his tomb hang the heavy chains which, to mortify
his body, he wore around his person, while he put heavier chains on the
souls of those whom he reduced beneath his ghostly power.
I think there is a lesson in the life and death of such a man, and that
we may read in it the workings of human ambition and pride, even under
the garments of holy offices; we see the conflict between church and
state, whenever they are allied, and the doom that awaits the men who
pervert the institutions of religion to their own glory and the
oppression of others.
We are now approaching Moscow. Two thousand miles by rail we have come.
The whole region over which we are now passing seems to be one dead
level of lowly toiling, dreary living, without one sign of such
enterprising life and energy as we would find in France or England, not
to speak of that young world in the West, to which freedom seems to have
taken her flight.
The train is moving slowly into town. We have come to Moscow. We are at
the gates of the Kremlin!