I
Moscow is a city of slow historical growth, and down to the present
time its different parts have wonderfully well retained the features
which have been stamped upon them in the slow course of history. The
Trans-Moskva River district, with its broad, sleepy streets and its
monotonous gray painted, low-roofed houses, of which the entrance-gates
remain securely bolted day and night, has always been the secluded
abode of the merchant class, and the stronghold of the outwardly
austere, formalistic, and despotic Nonconformists of the ‘Old Faith.’
The citadel, or Kreml is still the stronghold of Church and State; and
the immense space in front of it, covered with thousands of shops and
warehouses, has been for centuries a crowded beehive of commerce, and
still remains the heart of a great internal trade which spreads over
the whole surface of the vast empire. The Tverskáya and the Smiths’
Bridge have been for hundreds of years the chief centres for the
fashionable shops; while the artisans’ quarters, the Pluschíkha and
the Dorogomílovka, retain the very same features which characterized
their uproarious populations in the times of the Moscow Tsars. Each
quarter is a little world in itself; each has its own physiognomy,
and lives its own separate life. Even the railways, when they made an
irruption into the old capital, grouped apart in special centres on
the outskirts of the old town their stores and machine-works and their
heavily loaded carts and engines.
However, of all parts of Moscow, none, perhaps, is more typical than
that labyrinth of clean, quiet, winding streets and lanes which lies at
the back of the Kreml, between two great radial streets, the Arbát and
the Prechístenka, and is still called the Old Equerries’ Quarter--the
Stáraya Konyúshennaya.
Some fifty years ago, there lived in this quarter, and slowly died
out, the old Moscow nobility, whose names were so frequently mentioned
in the pages of Russian history before the time of Peter I., but who
subsequently disappeared to make room for the new-comers, ‘the men of
all ranks’--called into service by the founder of the Russian state.
Feeling themselves supplanted at the St. Petersburg court, these nobles
of the old stock retired either to the Old Equerries’ Quarter in
Moscow, or to their picturesque estates in the country round about the
capital, and they looked with a sort of contempt and secret jealousy
upon the motley crowd of families which came ‘from no one knew where’
to take possession of the highest functions of the government, in the
new capital on the banks of the Nevá.
In their younger days most of them had tried their fortunes in the
service of the state, chiefly in the army; but for one reason or
another they had soon abandoned it, without having risen to high rank.
The more successful ones obtained some quiet, almost honorary position
in their mother city--my father was one of these--while most of the
others simply retired from active service. But wheresoever they might
have been shifted, in the course of their careers, over the wide
surface of Russia, they always somehow managed to spend their old age
in a house of their own in the Old Equerries’ Quarter, under the shadow
of the church where they had been baptized, and where the last prayers
had been pronounced at the burial of their parents.
New branches budded from the old stocks. Some of them achieved more
or less distinction in different parts of Russia; some owned more
luxurious houses in the new style in other quarters of Moscow or at
St. Petersburg; but the branch which continued to reside in the Old
Equerries’ Quarter, somewhere near to the green, the yellow, the pink,
or the brown church which was endeared through family associations,
was considered as the true representative of the family, irrespective
of the position it occupied in the family tree. Its old-fashioned head
was treated with great respect, not devoid, I must say, of a slight
tinge of irony, even by those younger representatives of the same stock
who had left their mother city for a more brilliant career in the St.
Petersburg Guards or in the court circles. He personified, for them,
the antiquity of the family and its traditions.
In these quiet streets, far away from the noise and bustle of the
commercial Moscow, all the houses had much the same appearance. They
were mostly built of wood, with bright green sheet-iron roofs, the
exteriors stuccoed and decorated with columns and porticoes; all were
painted in gay colours. Nearly every house had but one story, with
seven or nine big, gay-looking windows facing the street. A second
story was admitted only in the back part of the house, which looked
upon a spacious yard, surrounded by numbers of small buildings, used
as kitchens, stables, cellars, coach-houses, and as dwellings for
the retainers and servants. A wide gate opened upon this yard, and a
brass plate on it usually bore the inscription, ‘House of So-and-So,
Lieutenant or Colonel, and Commander’--very seldom ‘Major-General’
or any similarly elevated civil rank. But if a more luxurious house,
embellished by a gilded iron railing and an iron gate, stood in one of
those streets, the brass plate on the gate was sure to bear the name of
‘Commerce Counsel’ or ‘Honourable Citizen’ So-and-So. These were the
intruders, those who came unasked to settle in this quarter, and were
therefore ignored by their neighbours.
No shops were allowed in these select streets, except that in some
small wooden house, belonging to the parish church, a tiny grocer’s or
greengrocer’s shop might have been found; but then, the policeman’s
lodge stood on the opposite corner, and in the daytime the policeman
himself, armed with a halberd, would appear at the door to salute
with his inoffensive weapon the officers passing by, and would retire
inside when dusk came, to employ himself either as a cobbler or in the
manufacture of some special stuff patronized by the elder servants of
the neighbourhood.
Life went on quietly and peacefully--at least for the outsider--in
this Moscow Faubourg Saint-Germain. In the morning nobody was seen in
the streets. About midday the children made their appearance under the
guidance of French tutors and German nurses, who took them out for a
walk on the snow-covered boulevards. Later on in the day the ladies
might be seen in their two-horse sledges, with a valet standing behind
on a small plank fastened at the end of the runners, or ensconced in
an old-fashioned carriage, immense and high, suspended on big curved
springs and dragged by four horses, with a postillion in front and two
valets standing behind. In the evening most of the houses were brightly
illuminated, and, the blinds not being drawn down, the passer-by could
admire the card-players or the waltzers in the saloons. ‘Opinions’
were not in vogue in those days, and we were yet far from the years
when in each one of these houses a struggle began between ‘fathers and
sons’--a struggle that usually ended either in a family tragedy or in
a nocturnal visit of the state police. Fifty years ago nothing of the
sort was thought of; all was quiet and smooth--at least on the surface.
In this Old Equerries’ Quarter I was born in 1842, and here I passed
the first fifteen years of my life. Even after our father had sold
the house in which our mother died, and bought another, and when again
he had sold that house, and we spent several winters in hired houses,
until he had found a third one to his taste within a stone’s-throw of
the church where he had been baptized, we still remained in the Old
Equerries’ Quarter, leaving it only during the summer to go to our
country-seat.