A MUSHROOM FAIR IN LENT
I HAD been out one morning looking at St Saviour’s and tasting the March
sunshine, and I returned to the Kislovka unexpectedly. Nicholas, taken
by surprise, was grinding at mathematics very gloomily. I had never seen
him so despondent, so melancholy. He looked at me very sadly when I sat
down beside him and began to chat.
“Why are you going to leave me?” he asked. I had told him that I should
not remain in Moscow beyond Easter, and we were then in Lent. “Why will
you not wait till June and then we can go to Lisitchansk together; and
we will walk to the Caucasus, or we will walk across Europe to Calais
and get back to England?”
Poor boy! There was no answer that would please him. Moscow had no
attraction for me once the snow was off the ground and the country lay
open, tempting me. Moscow was too comfortable a place; but that I had
not English friends it was as comfortable as London, and I was—“full of
malice against the seductions of dependency.”
Whilst I was sitting talking to Nicholas I noticed that the mirror in
the room had been covered over with newspapers, and I wondered why.
“Why is the mirror covered up?” I asked.
Nicholas looked at it absent-mindedly, and then blushed.
“Oh, I was walking up and down and didn’t want to see myself,” he
replied. “Every time I got up to that wall I saw my silly face till I
got quite angry and covered it up.”
I comforted him.
He cheered up, but when I said I was going out again he put on his
things to come with me, and implored me not to leave him all day or he
might commit suicide. “What shall we do then?” I asked. “Let’s go down
to the Mushroom Fair on the quayside; but first we’ll have some lunch.”
The pious Russian eats no meat in Lent. Once the Carnival, with its
burst of drinking and feasting, is over, the Day of Forgiveness past (a
sort of Old Year’s Night festival), and Ash Wednesday has signalised
itself by a day-long tolling of bells for prayers, the true Slav enters
upon a time of rigorous self-denial. Nominally he lives wholly upon
Lenten oil; in actual practice he generally manages to find something
more sustaining—different sorts of porridge, fruit jellies, mushroom
soups and the like. Nicholas and I went into a students’ eating-house,
and neither of us were in the least orthodox in the matter of food. I
judged that my companion would be benefited by a large plate of roast
beef and gherkins and baked potatoes, and this we accordingly sat down
to.
Vegetables are expensive in Moscow at this season of the year—an
ordinary vegetarian restaurant dinner costs three or four shillings—and
there is, therefore, a first-rate market for any of the past summer or
autumn’s produce that the peasant can bring in. About mid-March the
Moscow peasants’ Mushroom Fair takes place, and there is a grand
turnover of greasy roubles and copecks at that busy market. The country
peasant has awakened from his winter sleep to go on his first adventure
and work of the year, for as yet his fields are deep in snow and Jack
Frost will not be vanquished for another month. The mushrooms that, with
the help of his wife and children, he gathered in the autumn are all
frozen together in the casks at the back of his izba; the planks and
boards of his sledge, van and market stall lie frozen together among the
drifts and icicles. A rough jaunt this year! March came in with great
winds and snowstorms. The track of the road is an even wilderness of
snow. Yet for the fifty or even one hundred miles that the peasant comes
to this honey fair he finds his road, and battles gaily forward. Through
drift, over stream, skirting the great forest, he goes on with many a
slip and tumble, the dry snow blowing up and down in a Russian snow
mist. Wrapped up in sacking and sheepskin, he sits among his casks and
trestles, sings or sleeps or talks to his horse, every now and then
standing up and pulling the horse round by his rope reins with a
“Gently, Vaska,” or “Curse you, Herod.”
During the first week in Lent he arrives at Moscow, and every year at
that time one may see the long line of stalls and booths newly rigged
up on the quayside of the river, below the Kremlin walls. This year it
has snowed heavily every day, and the wind had blown the stalls about
and drifted the snow over the merchandise. It was snowing when
Nicholas and I arrived, and the large flakes were settling on the
honey and the oil and the mushrooms, and dissolving as we watched
them. We kicked our way through the deep snow on the uneven ground,
with a merry crowd laughing and chaffering. The Moscow old-wife was
very busy. She is a fat, rank, jolly woman, more like the old-wives of
Berwick than those of any other place in Europe, perhaps. Figure the
old gossips buying, gingerly sampling and tasting, dipping in a huge
vat of soaking mushrooms and taking a Rabelaisian mouthful from a
great wooden spoon, or holding a dripping yellow-green mushroom
between a fat thumb and fore-finger. There were also women in charge
of some of the stalls—peasant wives, fat, laughing, healthy women. The
wind blew fresh against the rosy cheeks of a gay crowd, for the market
was truly half a revel and a game. It was a fair, but quite a strange
one. What an array of clumsy casks, all these full of very
mushy-looking mushrooms soaking in oil or vinegar. Then there were
ropes of dried mushrooms, tied as we tie daisy-chains in England. But
it is not only a Mushroom Fair. At the corner by the bridge there was
a huge pile of bright red berries; the peasant in charge insisted on
calling me Prince. The scene remains quite vivid in my memory. These
were cranberries; they can be stewed into a fine-looking pudding.
_Kisel_: sour jelly, they call it; it is bright crimson and looks too
good to eat. Boys were running about with stuffed birds—crows,
magpies, jays—that the country youths stuffed in the autumn. One could
buy all sorts of things, even inlaid chess-tables and hand-made
chess-men. At one side a youth was selling calico that had been in a
fire; there was a crowd about him and a Petticoat-Lane-like-bidding
going on. Next to him was a place for buying plaster saints and holy
pictures. The next stall was occupied by a man with hot pies—piping
hot yellow puffs full of mushroom and cauliflower—and, _vis-à-vis_, a
huge steaming samovar from which a thirsty throng were getting tea at
1d. a glass. Perhaps the most Russian sight was the huge piles of
clumsy wooden implements hacked out of pine with the all-useful adze.
A sea of Russian basins, of chests, trays, and all kinds of boxes.
Then there was the pottery department, a fine place for buying queer
pots. If you wished to buy mushrooms in oil you had first to go and
buy a pot; you obtained a strange brown vase, looking like a Roman
urn. You wanted to buy jam—you must first buy a pot. A stall over the
way is heaped up with honey—hard, frozen honey. We were invited to
buy. “Only fivepence a pound,” said the man. We bought half a pound
and received it in a piece of newspaper, a sheet of the _Novoe
Vremya_. Most of the customers of the fair bought green rush baskets
for a few pence, and in these put dried mushrooms, dried fruits for
compôte, cranberries and the like. The vendor of the honey had driven
in from Toula, a town in the vicinity of Tolstoy’s estate. I thought I
might get some first-hand information about the great novelist, so I
asked:
“How is Tolstoy?”
“I don’t know. Who is he? Is he a wrestler?” he replied.
Evidently the prophet was not unknown but in his own country.
This fair is a great chance to see the Russian peasant with his own
produce. Visitors to Moscow in Lent are seldom shown this really
interesting sight, much more humanly interesting than the Kremlin, the
churches and museums. For Russia can boast of very little antiquity in
her civilisation or her buildings. Much more interesting than her little
past is her present.
At the fair all is Russian—even the oranges and lemons come from the
groves of South Russia and the Caucasus. One gets another glimpse of the
Russian harmony, the harmony of which the winter, the forests, the
church, the peasants, the beggars are integral parts. This Russian life
is actually organic, and all that is of it is necessarily akin to all.
This picture is undiscordant. Happy, rude, contented Russia! All these
old-world folk are like grown-up children playing shop with mudpies.
What careless laughter rings about this snowy fair; what absurd wit and
earthly humour! Crowds of jokes are about—mostly of the low Chaucerian
kind. Indeed, one cannot help asking how much this fair has changed
since the fourteenth century. Nature has turned out mushrooms,
cranberries, crab-apples, oranges, honey, Russian men and women in just
about the same cast as she does to-day—and probably even the hand-made
chess-men differed little from these on sale now. The world does not
change very much.
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