Chapter XI: 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.

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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}).