By DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI

THE DEATH OF THE GODS. Authorized English Version by Herbert Trench. 12o

THE ROMANCE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI: THE FORERUNNER. (The Resurrection of the Gods.) Authorized English Version from the Russian. 12o. With 8 Illustrations

—— Artist’s Edition, with 64 illustrations. 2 vols., 8o

PETER AND ALEXIS. Authorized English Version from the Russian. 12o

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
New York London

PETER and ALEXIS

The Romance of Peter the Great

BY
DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI

AUTHOR OF “THE DEATH OF THE GODS” (THE EMPEROR JULIAN)
AND “THE ROMANCE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI”

Sole Authorised Translation from the Russian

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press

PREFATORY NOTE

This remarkable novel, the first by Merejkowski on a purely Russian theme, completes the already famous historical Trilogy, of which The Death of the Gods, and The Forerunner, or Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, were the two former instalments. For some account of the author, and of the main idea underlying the Trilogy, the reader is referred to the English preface to The Death of the Gods.

These novels, which may be read independently of each other, have been very successfully translated into all the principal European languages; and the exclusively authorized English translations of them, published in England by Messrs. Archibald Constable, and in the United States by Messrs. Putnam, are being again issued in new editions respectively in both countries.

The present translation, although it is feared much like Heine’s “stuffed moonbeam,” has been made direct from the Russian original, and pains have not been spared to render it exact. Thanks are due to Mr. W. R. Morfill, Reader in Russian to the University of Oxford, for his kind assistance on one or two difficult points.

A word of explanation is due to the English and American public with regard to the purpose of the present work.

No one who knows Merejkowski personally, no one who reads his story with a fair mind, will imagine for a moment that it is written to please or to amuse the “young person.” It is intended for men and women. It is a simple and earnest psychological study of the most moving episode in the life of the greatest of the Romanoff princes. It is a sketch, vivid and true, of classes and conditions,—of court and society,—of peasants and wild religious beliefs—in Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century. As regards the bulk of her population she has not materially changed.

Russia at that time lay in a position relative to Europe precisely analogous to that occupied by Japan thirty-five years ago. The vaster country, as the reader will see, was beginning, through the person of its sovereign, humbly to learn of the civilised West, just as Japan began to do so also through her sovereign’s efforts in 1868.

But in this book a strange additional feature of interest for the present moment is a psychological feature. The character of the Romanoff family is a persistent one; and in the course of this novel, with its single terrific scene, dull indeed will be the reader who does not step by step more clearly discern in the soul of the luckless Alexis the very lineaments and complexion of Nicholas, the now living occupant of the Russian throne. This is the key to the book. Possibly before another year has expired, perhaps even before these words are being read, he will occupy the throne no longer; and the forces that may remove him would be essentially the same forces as those which decided the fate of Alexis.

London, September, 1905.

CONTENTS

Book I
THE VENUS OF PETERSBURG

CHAPTER I

“Antichrist is coming. He, the last of devils, has not yet come himself; but the world is teeming with his progeny. The children are preparing the way for their father. They twist everything to suit the designs of Antichrist. He will appear in his own due time, when everywhere all is prepared and the way smoothed. He is already at the door. Soon will he enter!”

Thus spake an old man of fifty, a clerk, judging by his clothes, to a young man, who, wrapped in a nankeen dressing gown, with slippers on his bare feet, was seated at a table.

“And how do you know all this?” asked the young man. “Of that day it is written: Neither the Son, nor the angels know; but you seem to know.”

He yawned, and then after a moment’s silence asked:

“Do you belong to the heretics—the Raskolniks?”

“No, I am an Orthodox.”

“Why did you come to Petersburg?”

“I have been brought here from Moscow, together with my account books. An informer reported me for taking bribes.”

“Did you take them?”

“I did. I was not compelled to, neither did I do it for the sake of extortion, but in all fairness, and with a clean conscience, being satisfied with whatever was freely given me for the clerk-work I did.”

He said it so simply that it was evident he did not consider bribe-taking necessarily a fault.

“The informer could add nothing to the proof of my guilt, which was disclosed by the entries made in certain agents’ books, showing that they had for years been wont to give me trifling sums, amounting in all to two hundred and fifteen roubles; and I have nothing wherewith to repay the sum. I am poor, old, sad, wretched, disabled, destitute; and unable any longer to do my work, I beg to be discharged of it. Most merciful Highness! open your bowels of compassion unto me, and protect a defenceless old man; cause me to be exempted from this unjust payment! Have mercy upon me, I beseech you, Tsarevitch Alexis Petrovitch!”

Alexis had met this old man some months ago in Petersburg, at St. Simeon and St. Anne’s Church. Noticing him because of his unshaven, grizzled beard—so unusual for clerks—and his zealous reading of the Psalms in the choir, the Tsarevitch had asked him his name, position, and whence he came.

The old man had introduced himself, as a clerk of the Moscow Arsenal, Larion Dokoukin by name. He had come from Moscow and was now staying in the house belonging to the woman who made the consecrated bread at St. Simeon’s; he had mentioned his poverty, the informer’s disclosure, and also, almost in his first words, had referred to Antichrist. The Tsarevitch had been touched by the pitiable condition of the old man and told him to come to his house, promising to help him with money and advice. Now that he stood before him in his torn coat he looked the very image of a beggar. He was one of those poor ordinary clerks, nicknamed in Russia “inky souls,” “pettifoggers.” Hard were his wrinkles as though fossilized, hard the cold look in the small dim eyes, hard his neglected grizzled beard, his face colourless and dull as the papers which he had been copying and had pored over may be for thirty years in his office. He had accepted bribes from agents “in all fairness”; he may have even been guilty of roguery, and this was the conclusion he had suddenly arrived at: Antichrist is coming!

“Is he not simply an impostor?” surmised the Tsarevitch, looking steadily at him. There was nothing deceitful or sly in this face, but rather something artless and helpless, sombre and stubborn, as with people who are possessed by an idée fixe.

“There was yet another reason for my coming here,” added the old man, and then stopped short, unable to continue; the idée fixe was slowly working its way through his hard features. He cast down his eyes, fumbled with one hand in his breast pocket, pulled out some papers, which had apparently slipped into the lining through the pocket-hole, and gave them to the Tsarevitch.

They consisted of two thin, greasy, quarto booklets, filled with the large legible handwriting of a clerk.

Alexis began to read them carelessly, but gradually became more and more absorbed.

At the beginning came passages from the Holy Fathers, the prophets, and the Apocalypse, with reference to Antichrist and the end of the world. Then followed an appeal to the chief clergy of great Russia, and of the world, together with a prayer that they would forgive him, Dokoukin, his impudence and rudeness for thus writing this without their fatherly blessing, prompted as he had been solely by much suffering, sorrow and zeal for the Church, and with a further prayer that they would also intercede on his behalf with the Tsar and entreat him to show mercy unto himself, and vouchsafe him a hearing. Then followed what was evidently Dokoukin’s main idea, “God has ordained man to be master of himself (to exercise self-will, to be autonomous,)” and at the end came an accusation against the Tsar Peter:

“Nowadays we are cut off from this divine gift—life absolute and free; as well as deprived of houses, markets, agriculture, handicrafts and all the old established trades and laws, and, what is worse still, of Christian religion. We are hunted from house to house, from place to place, from town to town; we are insulted and outraged. We have changed all our customs, our language and dress; we have shaved our heads and beards, we have basely defiled ourselves; we have lost all that was characteristic both of nature and bearing, and in no wise differ now from the foreigners; we have once and for all mingled with them, got used to their ways, broken our Christian vows, and forsaken the holy churches. We have turned away from the East, and directed our footsteps toward the West, we have travelled along strange and unknown paths and have perished in the land of oblivion. We have adopted strangers and have showered good gifts upon them, while our own countrymen are left to die of hunger, to be beaten on distraint and ruined absolutely by unbearable taxation. It is inexpedient to give utterance to everything; more becoming is it to place a bridle on one’s tongue. But the heart is sore distressed to see the desolation of the New Jerusalem, and the troubled people smitten with insufferable scourges!”

“All this,” ran the conclusion, “is done unto us for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ. O Secret Martyrs! fear not, neither despair, but rise valiantly and arm yourselves with the cross to repel the power of Antichrist. Suffer for the Lord’s cause, bear all patiently for yet a little while! Christ will not forsake us. Unto Him be praise now and ever more, world without end, Amen.”

“What was your reason for writing this?” asked the Tsarevitch, when he had read through the booklet.

“A little while ago I dropped a letter like this in the porch of St. Simeon’s,” answered Dokoukin, “but those who found the letter simply burnt it, neither reporting it to the Tsar nor making any inquiries about it. This petition here I think of nailing up somewhere in the Trinity Church, near the Tsar’s palace, so that whoever reads it may be informed and may report it to his Majesty. And I wrote this to bring about a reform, so that the Tsar, should he once come to himself again, might amend his ways.”

“A cheat,” flashed across Alexis’ mind, “and possibly an informer. Why in the devil’s name did I thus commit myself?”

“Are you aware, Dokoukin,” said the Tsarevitch, looking straight into his face, “are you aware of the fact that it is my duty, as citizen and son, to report these, your seditious and rebellious writings, to my father the Sovereign? And the twentieth article of the military regulations reads: ‘Whosoever shall use seditious language against his Majesty shall forfeit his life by having his head cut off.’”

“It is for you to decide, Tsarevitch. For myself I am willing to suffer for Christ’s sake.”

He said it in the same unpretentious manner as when he was speaking about bribes. Alexis eyed him yet more closely. Before him was the same ordinary clerk, the pettifogger, with the same cold look and dull face. Only somewhere deep in his eyes something was again struggling forth.

“Are you in your right senses, old man? Consider what you are about! Once in the torture chamber, there will be an end of joking; you will be hanged by the ribs and smoked to death like Gregory of Talitsa.”

Gregory of Talitsa was one of those prophets, preaching the approach of the judgment day, who had declared that Tsar Peter was the Antichrist, and for this reason he had suffered the cruel death of being smoked on a slow fire.

“With God’s help I am ready to give up my life,” answered the old man. “To-day, to-morrow, we all must die once. It is meet to have done something good with which to come before God, lest death should be our lot there also.”

His manner remained as simple as before, yet there was something in the calm face and subdued voice which inspired the conviction that this arsenal clerk, discharged for having yielded to bribery, would really meet death without flinching, like one of those “Secret Martyrs” he mentioned in his petition.

“No,” the Tsarevitch promptly decided, “he is neither a cheat nor a spy, but either mad or, in truth, a martyr.”

The old man hung his head, and added in a yet lower tone, as if to himself, forgetful of the other’s presence: “God has commanded man to be master of himself.”

Alexis rose and, without another word, tore a page from the booklet, lit it at a lamp which was glimmering before the images, uncovered the draught hole, opened the stove door, shoved in the papers, and waited; he stirred them from time to time till they were reduced to ashes, then went up to Dokoukin, who all the time stood watching him, laid his hand on his shoulder and said:—

“Listen, old man, I will report you to none. I see you are an honest man; I trust you. Tell me, do you wish me well?”

Dokoukin did not reply, yet his look made words unnecessary.

“If you do, then banish all this nonsense from your head! Never even dare so much as think of writing such seditious letters; this is not the time for them. If it were known you had been to see me, I too should fare ill. Go, God be with you, and don’t come again. Don’t talk with any one about me. Should you be questioned, keep your own counsel, and leave Petersburg as quickly as possible. Now will you remember what I tell you?”

“What else can one do but obey you?” said Dokoukin, “the Lord knows I am your faithful servant unto death.”

“Don’t fret about the informer’s report,” continued Alexis, “I’ll put in a word where it is necessary, rest assured you shall be exempt from it all. Now go—or no, wait, give me your handkerchief.”

Dokoukin handed him a dark blue chequered handkerchief, faded, full of holes, as miserable looking as the owner. Alexis opened a drawer in his small walnut wood desk, which stood next to the table, took from it without counting about twenty roubles in silver and copper—a whole treasure for the destitute Dokoukin—wrapped the money in the handkerchief, and gave it back with a kindly smile.

“Take this for thy journey. On thy return to Moscow order a mass at the Archangel Cathedral, and have God’s servant Alexis remembered. Only be careful and don’t let it be known who this Alexis is!”

The old man took the money, yet neither thanked him nor stirred. He stood as before, with his head hung down. At last he lifted his eyes, and began in a solemn voice a speech which he had probably prepared beforehand:—

“As of old God quenched Samson’s thirst by means of an ass’s jawbone, so to-day has not the same God used my ignorance as a means to convey something useful and refreshing to you?”

But he suddenly broke down, his voice gave way, his solemn speech stopped short, his lips trembled, he staggered and fell at Alexis’ feet.

“Have mercy, our Father, listen to us, poor, groaning, and lowliest of slaves! Work zealously for the Christian faith; build up, control, give to the Church peace and unity of spirit. Tsarevitch! Fair child of the Church, our sun and Russia’s hope! the world is waiting to be enlightened by thee. The scattered sons of God rejoice in thee. Who but thou can succour us? We all are lost without thee, our beloved! have mercy!”

The old man knelt before Alexis, embracing his knees, weeping, and covering his feet with kisses. The Tsarevitch listened, and this desperate prayer seemed to gather into itself and give expression to the wrongs of all those who were perishing, outraged, and goaded to despair, a cry from the whole people for help.

“Enough, enough, old man,” he said, stooping and trying to lift him. “Am I then blind and deaf? Does not my heart ache for you? The sorrow is common to us. I feel the same as you do. Should God once grant me to rule over this country, I will do all I can to ease the people’s lot. Neither will I then forget you; I need faithful servants. And meanwhile bear patiently, and pray God to speed the fulfilment, for His holy will worketh in all things.”

He helped him up. The old man looked very weak and pitiful; but his eyes glowed with such joy, as though he already beheld the salvation of Russia. Alexis embraced, and kissed him on his forehead. “Good-bye, Dokoukin, we shall meet some day, God willing. The Lord be with thee!”

When Dokoukin left, the Tsarevitch returned to his leather arm-chair—which was old and well-worn, with the hair stuffing peering through the holes, yet remarkably soft and comfortable, and there he sank into a kind of doze or torpor.

Alexis was twenty-five years old, tall, slim, narrow across the shoulders and in the chest; his face, too, was thin and strangely long, as if drawn out and pointed at the chin; it looked old, sickly, and sallow, like the face of people who suffer from kidney disease; his mouth was very small, pitiful and child-like; long tufts of straight black hair surrounded his large open arched brow. Such faces are common among monastic novices, country deacons, and choristers. Yet when he smiled his eyes would light up with intelligence and kindliness; his face would suddenly become young and handsome and shine as with some soft inner light. At such moments he resembled his grandfather, the gentle Tsar Alexis.

As he was now, wrapped in a dirty dressing gown, worn-out slippers on his bare feet, sleepy, unshaven, his hair unkempt, he little looked like Tsar Peter’s son. Last night’s drinking bout had given him a severe headache; the best part of the day had gone while he slept it off; it was well on towards evening when he got up. His disarranged couch, with its large crumpled feather bed and sheets, could be seen through the open door in the next room.

Upon the writing table there lay scattered before him sundry rusty mathematical instruments, covered with dust; a broken antique censer filled with frankincense, a tobacco grater, meerschaum pipes, an empty hair-powder box, now used as an ash tray, piles of paper and books, all in a muddle; notes on Baronius’ “Universal Chronicle,” in Alexis’ own handwriting, were covered up by a heap of packet tobacco; a half eaten cucumber was lying on the open page of a tattered book, whose title ran: “Geometry or Earth—measurement by root and compass, for the instruction of knowledge-loving painstakers”; a well picked bone was left on a pewter plate, and close by a sticky liqueur glass with a fly buzzing in it. Innumerable flies were crawling and buzzing in black swarms over the walls, hung with torn, dirty grass-green oilcloth, over the smoked ceiling, and the dim panes of the double windows, which had been left in regardless of the hot June weather.

Flies were buzzing all around him, and drowsy thoughts swarmed like flies in his mind. He remembered the fight which had ended last night’s drinking bout; Jibanda struck Sleepyhead, Sleepyhead Lasher, and then Father Hell. Starling and Moloch had rolled under the table. These were nicknames which Alexis had given to his boon companions, “for his private diversion.” Alexis also remembered beating and pulling somebody’s hair, but who this somebody was, he could not recall. Last night it had amused him, to-day he felt ashamed and miserable over it.

His head was again beginning to ache. He longed for another glass to cure this drunken headache; but he was too lazy to go and get one, too lazy even to call out to his servants. Yet the next moment he would be obliged to dress, pull on his tight-fitting uniform, buckle his sword, put on the heavy wig, which would only intensify his headache, and present himself at the Summer Garden for a masque where all were ordered to appear, under threat of terrible punishment for the defaulter.

He heard the voices of children skipping and playing in the courtyard. A sickly ruffled green-finch twittered plaintively from time to time in his cage over the window. The pendulum of a tall upright English striking clock, an old present from his father, was ticking monotonously. Seemingly interminable, melancholy runs of scales reached his ears from the apartment overhead. It was his wife the Crown Princess Charlotte, who was playing on a tinkling old German spinet. All at once he remembered how last night, when drunk, he had railed about her to Jibanda and Lasher: “I am encumbered with a devil of a wife. Come when I will to her, she is always bad tempered, and will not speak to me. Such a mighty personage!” “This won’t do,” he thought now, “I talk too much when I am drunk, and afterwards I am sorry for it.” Was it her fault that, when but a child, she was forced to marry him, and by what right did he mock her? Sick, lonely, abandoned by all, in a foreign land, she was as unhappy as himself. Yet she loved him, perhaps she was the only one who did love him. He remembered their recent quarrel; how she had called out: “The lowest cobbler in Germany treats his wife better than you do!” He had angrily shrugged his shoulders:—“Go back to Germany then, God speed you!” “Yes, I would, if I were not——” She had not continued, but had burst into tears pointing to herself: she was with child. How well he remembered those pale blue eyes, swollen with tears trickling down her cheeks, washing off the powder she, poor girl, had specially put on for him. Her usually plain features had become haggard and plainer yet during pregnancy: a pathetic, helpless face. And yet he himself loved her, or at any rate he pitied her, at times with some strange, hopeless, desperate, poignant, well nigh overwhelming feeling of pity. Why then did he torture her? Was he bereft of all sense of sin and shame? He would have to answer for her before God.

The flies seemed quite to distract him. A hot slanting ray of the red setting sun, coming through the window, just caught his eyes.

At last he altered the position of his arm-chair, turned his back to the window, and fixed his eyes on the stove. It was a huge stove, built of Russian glazed tiles imitated from the Dutch, clamped together at the corners with brass. It was decorated with carved pillars, flowered recesses, and sockets. Various curious animals, birds, human beings, and plants were represented on a white ground in thick red, green, and dark violet colours; under each design there was an inscription in Slavonic characters. The colours glowed with unusual brightness in the glare of the setting sun, and for the hundredth time Alexis looked at these designs with drowsy curiosity and read over the inscriptions: under a man with a musical instrument the legend: “I make melody;” under a man sitting in an arm-chair with a book, “Improving the mind;” under a full blown tulip the words: “My scent is sweet;” under an old man kneeling before a beauty the words: “No love for an old man!” under a couple sitting under a tree the words: “Taking good counsel together;” a birch elf, French comedians, a Japanese priest, the goddess Diana and the legendary bird Malkothea.

Meanwhile the flies go on buzzing; the pendulum ticks; the green-finch pipes in a melancholy tone; the sound of scales from above, the voices of children rise from the court below. The sharp red ray of sunlight grows duller and fainter, the coloured figures assume life, the French comedians play leap-frog with the birch elf, and the Japanese priest winks at the bird Malkothea.

Everything begins to lose precision; his eyelids grow heavy, and but for the large sticky black fly, no longer buzzing in the glass, but in his head, all would be so quiet, so peaceful, in this dark red gloom.

Suddenly a shudder went through him; he started up. “Have mercy upon us!” The words seemed to thunder within him with violent force. He cast a look round his untidy room, and at himself, and his cheeks, bathed a moment since in the red blaze of the setting sun, were now glowing with shame. A goodly Hope of Russia indeed! Brandy, sleep, indolence, lies, filth, and a ceaseless craven fear of his father.

Was it really too late? Was this really to be the end? Could he but shake himself free, and run away! “Suffer for Christ’s sake,” again Dokoukin’s words came to his mind,—“God willed man to be master of himself.” Yes, he would join them ere it is too late. They, the Secret Martyrs, are calling and waiting for him.

He started up as if really intending to act upon his impulse—to do something irrevocable; as he stood there, indecisive, his heart sank with foreboding.

The slow melodious brass chime of the clock rang out through the stillness. It struck nine. When the last stroke had died away, the door was gently pushed open, and a head peered into the room; it was his valet, the aged Ivan Afanássieff.

“It is time to be going. Would you not like to get ready?” He muttered it in his usual grumpy voice, as if he were chiding Alexis.

“No thank you, I am not going,” said Alexis.

“As you please. The order was for everyone to be present; your father will again be wrathful.”

“Go, go.” Alexis was going to turn him out of the room, when looking at this ruffled, unkempt, unshaven, unwashed, sleepy face, he suddenly remembered, that it was this man he had pulled by the hair on the previous night.

Alexis fixed on him a long perplexed gaze, as if he had only at this moment fully awakened.

From the window the last ray of sunlight had died away; immediately the room lost all its brightness, and grew dreary; it seemed as if some monstrous grey cobweb, which up to that moment had been lurking in the dirty ceiling, was now gradually descending, filling the space with a dense net of dinginess.

The head continued to peer through the door, as if it had stuck there, moving neither to nor fro.

“Have you at last decided whether you will dress or not?” repeated Ivan in a yet gruffer voice.

Alexis waved his hand in utter helplessness.

“I will, it’s all the same!” and seeing the head did not disappear, but apparently awaited further orders, he added:

“Just another glass of orange liqueur. My head is splitting from last night’s drinking bout——”

The old man said nothing, yet his look plainly intimated, “It is not your head which ought to be aching after last night.”

Left to himself, the Tsarevitch clasped his fingers, stretched out his arms till all the joints cracked, and yawned. Shame, fear, sorrow, repentance, thirst for immediate heroism, all dissolved in this slow, hopeless yawn, which neither pain nor contortions could repress, which was more awful than any sob or groan.

In an hour’s time, washed and shaved, with hardly any trace of drink about him, dressed in a tightly-fitting officer’s uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, of green cloth with red facings and golden galoon, he was wending his way to the Summer Palace along the Neva in a six-oared boat.

CHAPTER II

It was the twenty-sixth of June, 1715; a festival in honour of Venus had been arranged for that day in the Summer Garden. Her statue, newly arrived from Rome, was to be placed in the pavilion overlooking the Neva.

“I will have a braver garden than the French King at Versailles,” boasted Peter. When away on campaigns, at sea or in foreign lands, the Tsaritsa used to supply him with news about his favourite nursling: “Our garden has come on beautifully, better than last year. The avenue leading from the palace is almost entirely overshadowed with maple and oak trees. Whenever I go out, I am grieved not to have you, my heart’s joy, with me. Our garden is gradually becoming green, there is already a strong smell of resin in the air,”—she was referring to the scent of the trees just bursting into leaf.

The Summer Garden, in fact, was laid out on the same plan as the renowned park at Versailles, with smoothly shorn trees, flower beds in geometrical figures, straight canals, square lakes, swans, islets, bowers, ingenious water-sprays, endless avenues, prospects, high leafy hedges, and espaliers which resembled the walls of some grand reception hall. Here people were encouraged to walk about, and when tired to seek rest and seclusion, for which a goodly number of benches, pavilions, labyrinths and green lawns were provided.

Yet, nevertheless, the Tsar’s garden was far inferior to the gardens at Versailles.

The pale northern sun drew but puny tulips from the fat Rotterdam bulbs. Only the humbler boreal flowers grew freely, such as, for instance, Peter’s favourite, the scented tansy, double peonies, and melancholy bright dahlias. Young trees, brought here with incredible trouble by sea and by land even a distance of 1,000 miles—from Prussia, Poland, Pomerania, Denmark, and Holland—were also far from flourishing; the foreign soil nourished their roots but scantily. On the other hand, as at Versailles, all along the main alleys marble busts and statues were placed. Roman emperors, Greek philosophers, Olympian gods and goddesses seemed to look at one another in amazement, unable to understand how they got into this wild country of the “Hyperborean Barbarians.” These statues, however, were not the antique originals, but feeble imitations by second-rate Italian and German masters. The gods appeared to have only just taken off their wigs and embroidered coats, the goddesses their lace-trappings and robes; they seemed to wonder at their scarcely decent nakedness, and resembled affected cavaliers and dames who had been taught the delicacies of French politeness at the court of Louis XIV. and the Duke of Orleans.

Alexis was walking along one of the side alleys, which led from the large lake in the direction of the Neva. He was accompanied by a funny, hobbling, bow-legged creature, who wore a shabby foreign-cut coat, a huge wig and a flurried confused expression, like some one suddenly aroused from his sleep. He was the head of the Armoury department and of the new Printing Works, the first master-printer in Petersburg—Michael Avrámoff.

The son of a deacon, at the age of seventeen, Avrámoff had been taken straight from the Breviary and Psalms to a trading vessel at Kronslot; the vessel was bound for Amsterdam with a cargo of tar, skins, leather, and a dozen “Russian youths,” who had been selected by Peter’s command from “sharp youngsters,” for instruction abroad. After some study of geometry and more at classic mythology, Avrámoff had received commendations and a diploma from his teachers. Not stupid by nature, he seemed to have been stunned and baffled by a too sudden transition from the Psalms and Breviary to the Fables of Ovid and Virgil, and never to have recovered. His mind had undergone something like a fit of convulsions to which little children are subject, when suddenly startled from their sleep, and ever since his face had retained that expression of stupefaction.

“Tsarevitch, I confess to you, as before God,” spoke Avrámoff in a monotonous whining tone, like the buzzing of a gnat, “my conscience is uneasy, in that being Christians we yet worship idols.”

“What idols?” asked the Tsarevitch in amazement.

Avrámoff pointed to the marble statues along both sides of the alley.

“Our fathers and forefathers placed holy icons in their houses and along the roads, but we are ashamed to do likewise, and set up shameless idols instead. When God’s images have God’s power in them, the devil’s images in like manner will surely hold the devil’s power. In the Most Foolish Conclave with the Kniaz-Pope we have been serving the drunken god Bacchus; and now, to-day, we are preparing to worship that dissolute and obscene goddess Venus. These ceremonies are termed masquerades and are not accounted to us for sin; for, they say, these gods have never existed, and their lifeless statues are placed in house and garden solely for the sake of ornament. But that is where folk fatally err; because these ancient gods do really and verily exist.”

“You believe in their existence?” Alexis’ surprise increased.

“Your royal Highness, according to the witness of holy men, I believe that the gods are evil spirits, who, being cast out of their temples in the name of the Crucified, sought refuge in dark and desert places, there pretending to be dead and non-existent till their hour should come. But when ancient Christianity grew feeble and a new infamy had sprung up, then these gods began to regain life, and leave their hiding places; just as various worthless creeping things, scarabees and such like poisonous vermin, emerging from their eggs sting people, so the evil spirits emerging from their larvae, these ancient idols, sting and ruin Christian souls. Do you remember Father Isaac’s vision, recorded in the Holy Fathers? How beautiful young men and maidens with faces bright as the sun, catching hold of the saint’s hands, whirled him away in a mad dance to the strains of sweet music, and how when they had tired and dishonoured him they left him almost dead, and disappeared? Then the Holy Father knew that he had been visited by the ancient Greek and Roman gods, Jove, Mercury, Apollo, Venus and Bacchus. Now the evil ones appear unto us sinners to-day, but in disguise, so to speak. And we welcome them, and mingling with them in obscene masquerades, we prance and dance, till in the end, we shall all rush headlong into some deep Tartarus, or, like a herd of swine, into the sea; ignorant fools, not to realize that these beautiful, new, radiant, white devils are far more dangerous than the most churlish and blackest Ethiopian monstrosities!”

It was almost dark in the garden, though it was but the middle of June. Low, black, oppressive storm-clouds crept over the sky. Neither the fireworks nor the festival had as yet been started. The air was as still as in a room. Distant heat lightnings lit up the horizon, and each flash revealed marble statues of almost painfully dazzling whiteness among the green espaliers on both sides of the alley—it seemed as though white phantoms were flitting along the glades.

After all Avrámoff had been telling him the Tsarevitch looked at them with a new feeling. “Really,” he thought, “they are just like white devils.”

Voices became audible. By the sound of one of them, not loud but slightly husky, and also by the red glowing spot, which to all appearance came from the Dutch clay pipe, and disclosed the gigantic stature of the smoker, Alexis recognised his father. He swiftly turned the corner of the alley into a side path leading to a maze of lilac and box shrubs. “Like a hare,” he angrily termed his action, which though almost instinctive was nevertheless cowardice.

“What in the devil, Avrámoff, are you always talking about?” he continued, feigning annoyance in order to cover his shame. “Excess of reading seems to have muddled your brain.”

“I speak the pure truth, your royal Highness,” retorted Avrámoff, not in the least hurt, “I have myself experienced the power of those evil spirits; it was Satan who enticed me when I asked your father, the Tsar, to let me print Ovid and Virgil. I have already issued one book with drawings of the gods and their mad doings, and ever since I seem to have been beside myself, and subject to insatiable lechery. The Lord has forsaken me, and all sorts of strange gods, especially Bacchus and Venus, have begun to haunt my dreams.”

“In what guise?” asked Alexis, his curiosity now aroused.

“Bacchus appeared to me in the shape of Martin Luther the heretic, just as you see him in paintings, a red-faced German with a belly as round as a beer barrel. Then Venus took the form of a girl whom I had known during my stay in Amsterdam: a nude body, white as foam, scarlet lips and impudent eyes. And when I awoke in the bath-house, for this devil’s work happened there, the sly witch had changed to the priest’s serf girl, Akoulína, who reviling me for hindering her having a bath, impudently struck me across the face with a bunch of wet birch twigs, and jumping into a snow drift in the yard—it happened in winter—she melted away in thin air.”

“But this might very possibly have really been Akoulína,” laughed the Tsarevitch.

Avrámoff was going to retort but stopped short. Again voices became audible. Again a blood-red spot glimmered in the darkness. The narrow path of the dark maze had again brought father and son together in a place too narrow to avoid one another. Again the desperate thought flashed across Alexis’ mind to hide himself somewhere, to slip through, or again dart as a hare into the low wood. But it was too late; Peter had already caught sight of him from a distance, and called out:

“Zoon!”

The Dutch “Zoon” signifies son; he called him thus only in rare moments of graciousness. Alexis was all the more surprised, as of late his father had quite given up talking to him either in Dutch or Russian.

He advanced towards his father, took his hat off, made a low bow, and kissed first the lappet of his coat, then the hard horny hand. Peter was attired in a well worn commander’s uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. It was of dark green cloth with red facings and brass buttons.

“Thank you, Aliósha,” said Peter, and Alexis’ heart thrilled at this long unheard “Aliósha.” “Thank you for the present you sent me. It came just in the nick of time. My own supply of oak, which was being floated down on a raft from Kazan, perished in a storm on the Ládoga. But for your present, we should scarcely have finished our new frigate before the autumn; the wood was of the best and strongest, like yours—true iron. It is long since I have seen such exceptionally good oak!”

The Tsarevitch knew that nothing pleased his father more than good timber for ship-building. On his own estate in the Poretzkoye district of the Novgorod government, Alexis had for some time secretly reserved a fine plantation of oak for the day when he should be in special need of his father’s favour. When he learnt that they would soon be wanting oak in the dockyard, Alexis had the timber felled and floated on a raft down the Neva just in time to supply his father. It was one of those timid, awkward services, which he had rendered frequently at one time, but of late more and more rarely. However, he did not deceive himself; he knew it would soon be forgotten, like all his previous services, while increased severity would follow this momentary tenderness.

Nevertheless a bashful joy flushed his face; his heart throbbed with mad hope. He muttered something in a low, halting tone, about “always glad to give my father pleasure,” and stooped again to kiss his hand. But Peter raised his head with both his hands. For one instant Alexis saw the familiar face, so terrible yet so dear to him, with its full round cheeks, the curly moustache, and the charming smile which flitted across the curved, almost femininely tender lips, he saw the large, dark, lucid eyes, which so fascinated him that he used to dream about them, as a love-sick youth would dream about the eyes of a beautiful woman. He recognised the odour familiar from his childhood: a mixture of strong tobacco, brandy, sweat, and something else, not disagreeable, a smell of soldiers’ barracks, which usually filled his father’s working room, “the office.” He felt the touch, familiar also to him from his earliest years, of the hard, slightly bristly chin with the dimple in the centre, which seemed strangely out of place on this formidable face. He remembered, or was it only a dream, kissing this odd dimple, saying with delight: “It is just like Granny’s,” when as a child his father used to take him on his knees.

Peter, kissing his son on the forehead, said in his broken Dutch speech:

“Good beware ú!”

This slightly stiff Dutch “you” in place of “thou” sounded to Alexis charmingly amiable.

He seemed to have felt and seen all this in a flash of lightning. The lightning faded away and all disappeared. Peter had already passed a good way on, his head thrown back as was his wont, slightly twitching his shoulder, waving his right hand in a soldierly manner, walking at his usual rapid pace, which was so quick that those who accompanied him were obliged to keep up by running.

Alexis went in the opposite direction following the same narrow path of the dark maze. Avrámoff kept close behind; he again began talking, but now about the Archimandrite of the Alexander Monastery, the Tsar’s chaplain Theodosius Janovski, whom Peter had appointed “Administrator of Religious Affairs,” and had thus raised above the first prelate, the aged occupant of the Patriarchal throne,—Stephen Javorsky. Theodosius was suspected of leanings towards Lutheranism, of secretly plotting to abolish the worship of icons, relics, the keeping of fasts, monasteries, the Patriarchate and other ancient statutes and customs of the Orthodox Church. Others surmised that Theodosius was dreaming of himself becoming Patriarch.

“This Theodosius is a veritable atheist and a most insolent pagan,” Avrámoff continued. “He has wormed his way into the hard-worked monarch’s holy confidence and enthralled him. He boldly destroys Christian laws and traditions, and introduces an ambitious, luxurious, epicurean, almost swinish way of living. He, this mad heresiarch, tore the crown off the wonder-working Kazan icon of the Virgin; ‘Sexton, a knife!’ he cried, cut the wire, tore off the embossed golden ornament, and put the spoil in his pocket, barefacedly, before the eyes of all; and those who saw it were amazed and bewailed such impudence. Meanwhile he, the unclean vessel, the obscene one, turned away from God, made a compact with Satan, and, mad goat that he is, even wanted to spit and trample on the Life-giving Cross, the Saviour’s image!”

The Tsarevitch gave no heed to Avrámoff’s prattle. He was musing over and trying by arguments to choke this unreasonable, and as it now seemed, childish joy. What was he expecting? What was he hoping for? A reconciliation with his father? Was it possible? Did he himself really wish for one? Had not something taken place, which could never be forgotten or forgiven? He remembered hiding himself in cowardly fear a moment ago; he remembered Dokoukin and his “denunciatory petition against Peter,” and many other far more terrible, unanswerable denunciations. It was not for his own sake merely that he had rebelled against his father. And yet, a few kind words, one smile, had sufficed to melt and soften his heart. He is again willing to fall at his father’s feet, forget and forgive everything and himself implore for pardon, as if he alone were the guilty one. He is ready, for another such caress, another such smile, to surrender his soul to him anew. “Is it possible,” he thought almost terrified, “that I love him so much?” Avrámoff continued talking like a gnat humming in one’s ear. The Tsarevitch caught his last words: “When St. Mitrofane of Voronesh saw Bacchus, Venus and other gods standing on the roof of the Tsar’s palace, he said: ‘I cannot enter the house until the Tsar orders these idols, which mislead the people, to be taken down.’ And the Tsar, honouring the holy man, had them all removed. That’s how it was in the past; but to-day, who dares speak the truth to the Tsar? Not Theodosius the unclean one, who turns icons into idols. Woe unto us! It has come to such a pass that, this very day, at this very hour the Virgin’s holy picture will be replaced by a devilish, mischievous image of Venus! And the monarch your father——”

“Leave me alone, you fool,” the Tsarevitch exclaimed wrathfully. “All of you leave me alone! What are you always at me for? Damnation!” and he used some ribald expressions. “What have I to do with you? I neither know nor desire to know anything. Go and complain to my father: he will see to your rights—”

They were approaching the Skipper’s square near the fountain in the middle alley. A crowd had gathered there. They soon attracted attention and many an ear tried to catch their conversation. Avrámoff had paled, he seemed to have shrunk and grown shorter, and eyed Alexis with a furtive look, the look of a child frightened in his sleep, who at any moment might be taken by a fit of convulsions. Alexis felt sorry for him.

“Don’t fear, Avrámoff!” he said with a kind, bright smile, which recalled not his father’s, but the smile of his grandfather Alexis. “Never fear—I won’t denounce you, I know you love me—and my father. Only don’t talk such a lot of trash again!” And with a sudden shadow over-casting his countenance, he added in a lower tone: “Even if you should be right, what is the good of it; who wants truth nowadays? The lash cannot vie with the axe; nobody will listen to you, nor to me.”

Between the trees flashed the first lights of the illuminations: many-coloured lanterns, firepots, pyramids of tallow candles placed in the windows and between the carved pillars of the open roofed gallery overlooking the Neva.

Everything had been very ingeniously and plentifully decorated. The gallery consisted of three long narrow pavilions, in the centre of which, under a glass dome, specially constructed by the French architect Leblond, a place of honour had been prepared—a marble pedestal for the Venus of Petersburg.

CHAPTER III

“I have purchased a Venus,” wrote Beklemísheff to Peter from Italy. “She is highly prized in Rome. The statue differs in no wise from the celebrated Florentine Venus, and is even in better preservation. She was found by some workmen, who discovered her when digging the foundation for a new house; she had been over two thousand years in the ground. She has for a long time stood in the Papal Garden. I have had to conceal her for fear of eager purchasers. I am as yet uncertain whether they will let her go. However, she already belongs to your Majesty.”

Peter entered into communication with Clement XI. through his plenipotentiary Savva Ragousínsky and the Cardinal Ottobani, seeking permission to remove the statue to Russia. For a long time the Pope would not agree to this. The Tsar was even ready to carry the Venus off by stealth. At last, after many diplomatic negotiations and wirepullings, the permission was obtained.

“Captain,” wrote Peter to Jagushinski, “the superb statue of Venus must be taken from Leghorn to Innsbruck by land, and thence by water along the Danube to Vienna, under the care of a special guard. And have her addressed to yourself in Vienna. As the statue is of repute there also, it would be advisable to have a carriage stand made with springs on which she may be conveyed to Cracow, and thus avoid all risk of damage, from Cracow she might be sent on by water.”

Along seas and rivers, over hills and dales, through towns and deserts, and finally across the miserable settlements, dark forests and bogs of Russia, everywhere carefully watched, by Peter’s will, now rocked on the sea waves, now on carriage-springs in her dark box, as in a cradle or coffin, the goddess journeyed from the Eternal City to the newly-born town of Petersburg.

When she had safely arrived, the Tsar, much as he would have liked a look at the statue, which he had been expecting for so long, and about which he had heard so much, nevertheless overcame his impatience and resolved not to open the box until the first solemn appearance of Venus at the festival in the Summer Garden. Small boats, wherries, canoes, punts, and other new-fashioned river-craft came to the wooden steps which led straight down to the water, and moored at the iron rings of the poles which had been driven in close to the shore. The newly arrived guests came up the steps to the Central Pavilion; here, in the flare of numerous lights, an ever-increasing crowd, sumptuously arrayed, was moving to and fro. The men wore coloured velvet and silk coats, three-cornered hats, swords, stockings and buckled shoes with high heels; on their heads towered large wigs, arranged in magnificent but unnatural curls—black, fair, and occasionally powdered. The ladies wore large, wide-hooped skirts—robes rondes—after the latest Versailles fashion, with long trains, beauty spots and rouge on their faces, lace, feathers, and pearls in their hair. But in this resplendent throng there could be also seen military uniforms of plain coarse cloth, even the short jackets of sailors and skippers, and the tarry boats and leather caps of Dutch mariners.

The crowd separated to allow a strange procession to pass. Strong Royal Grenadiers were bending under the weight of a long, narrow packing-case, very much like a coffin, which they bore on their shoulders. Judged by the size of the coffin, the body was of superhuman height. They placed the case on the ground.

The Tsar without any help proceeded to open it, handling the joiners’ tools with great rapidity and skill. He was in a hurry, and pulled at the nails with such impatience that he severely scratched one hand. The people thronged round on tiptoe, trying to catch a glimpse over one another’s shoulders.

The Privy Councillor, Peter Tolstoi, who had lived for many years in Italy, a learned man and a poet—he was the first to translate Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Russian—was describing to the ladies around him, the ancient ruins of the Venus temple.

“On my way to Castello-di-Baia, near Naples (the town had fallen into ruins and its site was overgrown with wood) I saw a shrine dedicated to the goddess Venus. The temple was built in first-rate style, with tall pillars; the arches were decorated with representations of the pagan gods. I also saw there other shrines dedicated to Diana, Mercury, and Bacchus. The cursed tormentor Nero had sacrificed to them in those places, and he is now atoning in hell for his inordinate devotions.”

Peter Tolstoi opened his mother-of-pearl snuff-box—on its lid was represented three lambs, and a shepherd loosening the girdle of a sleeping shepherdess—offered the snuff-box to the pretty Princess Tsherkassky, took a pinch himself, and added with a languid sigh:

“During my stay in Naples (I remember it so well!), I was inamorato with a certain cittadina Francesca, celebrated for her beauty. She cost me over 4,000 roubles; and to this day I cannot free my heart from that tender recollection.”

He spoke Italian so well that he liked interspersing his native speech with Italian words: “inamorato” for in love; “cittadina” for citizen’s wife, and so on.

Tolstoi was seventy, yet did not look more than fifty, so strong, alert and fresh was he. The Tsar had often expressed the opinion that Tolstoi’s politeness towards ladies “could outdo that of any younger devotee of Venus.” A feline suppleness of gait, a low velvety voice, velvety amiable smile, velvety eyebrows, amazingly thick, black and possibly painted: “He is all velvet, yet not without spikes,” people used to say of him. Even Peter himself, as a rule so careless with regard to his “eaglets,” thought it wise “to keep a stone close at hand when dealing with Tolstoi.” There was many a dark, wicked, and even bloody stain on the conscience of this polite worthy, but he knew the secret of effacing all traces of his misdoings.

The last nails gave way, the wood cracked, the lid was lifted, and the case opened. At first something of a greyish yellow tint struck the eyes, something which suggested the dust of putrefied bones. These were pine shavings, chips, felt, and combings of wool which had been put there for soft packing. Peter with both hands was routing among them, and when at last he came to the marble body, he joyfully exclaimed:

“Here she is!”

The lead was already being melted for the soldering of the iron tie-rods which were to fix the foot of the statue to the pedestal. The architect Leblond busied himself in getting ready a kind of hoist with steps, ropes, and pulleys. But the statue had first to be raised by hand out of the case.

The servants were assisting Peter. When one of them clasped “the naked wench” in coarse joke, the Tsar rewarded him with such a ringing buffet on the ears, that every one present at once felt a certain respect for the goddess.

Flakes of wool were falling off the smooth marble, like grey clods of earth, while again, just as two hundred years ago in Florence, the risen goddess was emerging from her tomb.

The ropes tightened, the pulleys squeaked, she rose higher and higher. Peter stood on a ladder, and fixing the statue to the pedestal, he held her with both arms, as in an embrace.

“Venus in the embrace of Mars!” Leblond, the emotional lover of classics, could not help ejaculating.

“How beautiful they both are!” exclaimed a young maid of honour belonging to the Crown Princess Charlotte’s household. “Were I the Tsaritsa, I should be jealous.”

Peter was almost as tall as the statue, and his human face remained noble in the presence of this divine one: the man was worthy of the goddess.

A last tremor, a last vibration, and she stood immovably upright and firm on the pedestal.

It was the work of Praxiteles: Aphrodite Anadyomene, the Foam-born, and Urania the Heavenly, the ancient Phoenician Astarte, the Babylonian Mellita, the Mother of Life, the great foster mother, she who had scattered the seed of stars over the blue vault, and shed the Milky-way from her breast.

She was the same now, as on the hillside in Florence where Leonardo da Vinci’s pupil had looked at her with superstitious fear; or, yet earlier, when in the depths of Cappadocia, in the forsaken temple near the old castle of Macellum, her last true worshipper had prayed to her, that pale boy in monk’s attire, the future Emperor Julian the Apostate. She had remained the same innocent yet voluptuous goddess, naked and not ashamed. From that very day when she rose from her millennial tomb far away in Florence, she had progressed further and further, from age to age, from people to people, halting nowhere, till in her victorious march she had at last reached the limits of the earth, the Hyperborean Scythia, beyond which there remains nought but chaos and darkness. And having fixed herself on the pedestal she for the first time glanced with a look of surprised curiosity around this strange new land, these flat moss-covered bogs, this curious town, so like the settlements of nomads; at this sky, which was the same day and night, these black, drowsy, terrible waves so like the waves of the Styx. This land resembled but little her radiant Olympian home; it seemed as hopeless as the land of Oblivion, the dark Hades. Yet the goddess smiled as the sun would have smiled had he penetrated into Hades.

Peter Tolstoi, yielding to the entreaties of the ladies, declaimed some verses dedicated to Cupid, taken from Anacreon’s ancient hymn to Eros.

Cupid once upon a bed

Of roses laid his weary head;

Luckless archer, not to see

Within the leaves a slumbering bee!

The bee awak’d—with anger wild

The bee awak’d, and stung the child.

Loud and piteous are his cries;

To Venus quick he runs, he flies!

“Oh, mother!—I am wounded though—

I die with pain—in sooth I do,

Stung by some little angry thing,

Some serpent on a tiny wing—

A bee it was—for once I know

I heard a rustic call it so.”

Thus he spoke, and she the while

Heard him with a soothing smile;

Then said, “My infant, if so much

Thou feel the little wild bee’s touch,

How must the heart, ah Cupid! be,

The hapless heart that’s stung by thee!”

The ladies, who had never heard any poetry except sacred chants and psalms, were charmed.

It came very appropriately, for the next moment Peter himself, as the signal to begin the fireworks, lit and started a flying machine in the shape of Cupid bearing a burning torch. Along an invisible wire Cupid glided down from the gallery to a raft on the Neva, where screens had been erected for “fire diversions” in wicker work designs, and with his torch he set the first allegory on fire—two flaring red hearts on an altar of dazzling light. On one of them was traced in green light a Latin P, on the other a C—Petrus, Caterina. The two hearts merged into one, the inscription appeared: “Out of two I create one.” Venus and Cupid blessed the wedlock of Peter and Catherine.

Another configuration appeared, a transparent luminous picture with two designs; on the one side the god Neptune looking towards Cronstadt, the newly erected fortress in the sea, with the inscription “Videt et stupescit—He sees and is amazed.” On the other—Petersburg, the new town amidst marshes and woods, with the inscription “Urbs ubi sylva fuit.”

Peter, a great lover of fireworks, managing everything himself, explained the allegories to the audience.

With pealing hiss, in sheaves of fire, numerous rockets soared into the heavens, and there, in the vaulted darkness, dissolved into a rain of slowly dropping and fading red, blue, green and violet stars. The Neva reflected and multiplied them in her black mirror. Fiery wheels were set turning; fiery jets sprang forth; serpents began to hiss and twirl; water and air balls, bursting like bombs, crashed with a deafening noise. A fiery hall appeared with blazing pillars, flaming arches and staircases, and in its centre, dazzling as the sun, shone forth the last tableau: a sculptor—was it the Titan Prometheus?—standing before an unfinished statue, which he is hewing with chisel and hammer out of a block of marble. Above on a pediment was the All-seeing Eye in a glory, with the inscription, “Deo adjuvante.” The stone block represented ancient Russia. The statue, although unfinished, already bore the semblance of the goddess Venus—she was the new Russia. The sculptor was, in fact, Peter himself. This tableau did not quite succeed: the statue burnt down too quickly and crumbled at the sculptor’s feet. He seemed to beat the air; then the hammer too crumbled away, and the hand remained still. The All-seeing Eye grew dim; it leered suspiciously and gave an ominous wink.

No one, however, paid any attention to this; all were occupied by a new spectacle. In clouds of smoke, illumined by a rainbow of Bengal lights, there appeared a huge monster, neither horse nor dragon; with pointed wings and fins, and its tail covered with scales, it came swimming along the Neva from the fortress towards the Summer Garden, towed by a flotilla of rowing boats. In a gigantic shell on the monster’s back, sat Neptune, with a long white beard and a harpoon at his feet—sirens and tritons blowing trumpets: “The tritons of the Northern Neptune sound the fame of Russia’s Tsar wherever they go,” explained one of the onlookers, the chaplain of the fleet, Gabriel Boushínsky. The monster was dragging after it six pair of empty barrels tightly bunged, with the cardinals of the “most Foolish Conclave” sitting astride, one on each barrel, securely strapped so as to prevent their falling into the water; they swam in this procession, pair after pair, loudly blowing their cow horns. After this followed a raft made up entirely of such barrels; it carried a huge tub filled with beer on which the Kniaz-Pope, prelate of Bacchus, floated in a wooden ladle as in a boat; Bacchus himself sat on the edge of the tub. Accompanied by strains of solemn music, this huge water machine slowly approached the Summer Garden, stopped at the Central Pavilion, where the gods landed.

Neptune turned out to be the Tsar’s court jester, the old boyar Tourgenev; the sirens, with their long fish-tails dragging after them, like long trains, almost concealing their feet, were serf girls; the tritons, the stable-men of the Admiral Apraksin; the Satyr or Pan accompanying Bacchus was the French dancing master of Prince Ménshikoff; the adroit Frenchman executed such gambols, that one could believe he had goat’s legs like a real faun. In Bacchus, wearing a tiger’s skin and a wreath of artificial grapes, with a sausage in one hand and a brandy bottle in the other, they recognised Konon Kárpoff, the leader of the court choristers; he was exceptionally fat and had a ruddy face; to make him appear more real, he had for three whole days been pitilessly filled with brandy, so that, according to his companions, “he had grown like a ripe cranberry,” and thus become a veritable Bacchus.

The gods surrounded the statue of Venus. Bacchus, reverently supported by the cardinals and the mock-Pope, fell on his knees before the statue, bowed before her very low, and proclaimed in a thunderous bass voice, worthy of a cathedral precentor: “Most honourable mother Venus, thy humble servant Bacchus, born of Semele, the creator of wine and joy, petitions thee against thy son Eros. Do not allow him, that mad Eros, to hurt us thy people, to ruin our souls, to wound our hearts; may it please thee, Gracious Queen, to be merciful unto us.” The cardinals responded with “Amen.” Drunk as he was, by force of habit Kárpoff was just going to start a church hymn in response, but was checked in time.

Then the Kniaz-Pope, the Tsar’s aged tutor, a boyar and table-companion in Tsar Alexis’ time, Nikíta Zotoff, in a burlesque mantle of red velvet trimmed with ermine, on his head a threefold tiara crowned with the indecent figure of a naked Eros, placed before the statue, on a brazier made of kitchen turnspits, a round brass pan, such as was commonly used for preparing hot punch. Pouring some brandy into it, he lit it. On long poles, bending with the weight, the Tsar’s grenadiers brought in a tub of peppered brandy. Besides the clergy, who were present at this festival, as at all similar burlesques, all the guests, both cavaliers and dames and even young girls, were obliged to approach the tub one by one; they had to accept a large wooden spoonful of brandy, were expected to all but empty it, and pour the few remaining drops on the altar fire. Then the cavaliers kissed Venus; the older ones her foot, the younger ones her hand, while the ladies greeted her with ceremonious courtesy. The ceremonies, every detail of which had been thought out and arranged for by the Tsar, had to be punctiliously gone through under pain of severe punishment, even lashing. The old Tsaritsa Proscovy, Peter’s sister-in-law, his brother John’s widow, also drank brandy from the tub and curtsied before Venus. She, as a rule, tried to please Peter and yielded to all his new-fangled ideas; it was of no use trying to sail against the wind. Yet when the dignified old dame, dressed in her dark widow’s jerkin—Peter allowed her to wear the old style of dress—made the curtsey after the foreign manner before “the shameless naked wench,” she felt very uneasy at heart.

“I would rather be dead than see all this!” thought she. The Tsarevitch also humbly kissed the hand of Venus. Avrámoff tried to hide himself, but he was soon found out and brought back by force; although he quaked, and paled, and shuddered, and sweated, and almost swooned, when, kissing Satan’s image, he felt his lips touch the cold marble, yet he accurately performed the ceremony, watched by the keen eye of the Tsar whom he feared even more than the “white devils.”

The goddess seemed to look down upon these desecrations of the gods, this play of the barbarians, without the least wrath. They adored her involuntarily, even in this scoffing; the burlesque tripod became a real altar on which in the flickering bluish flame, thin as the serpent’s sting, burnt the soul of Dionysus, her brother god. And illumined by this flame the goddess smiled her subtle smile.

The banquet began. At the top end of the table, under a canopy made of hop foliage and whortleberries, which grew on the hillocks of the native marshes and took the place of the classic myrtle, sat Bacchus astride a barrel from which the Kniaz-Pope filled the glasses with wine.

Tolstoi, addressing himself to Bacchus, declaimed another poem by Anacreon.

When Bacchus, Jove’s immortal boy,

The rosy harbinger of joy,

Who, with the sunshine of the bowl,

Thaws the winter of our soul;

When to my inmost core he glides,

And bathes it with his ruby tides,

A flow of joy, a lively heat,

Fires my brain, and wings my feet!

’Tis surely something sweet, I think,

Nay, something heavenly sweet, to drink!

Sing, sing of love, let music’s breath

Softly beguile our rapturous death,

While, my young Venus, thou and I

To the voluptuous cadence die!

Then waking from our languid trance,

Again we’ll sport, again we’ll dance.

“It’s plain from the verses,” remarked Peter, “that Anacreon was a lordly drunkard and took life mighty easily.”

After the customary toasts for the welfare of the fleet, the Tsar and the Tsaritsa, the Archimandrite Theodosius Janovski stood up with solemn air, glass in hand. Notwithstanding the Polish expression of self-esteem on his face—he belonged to the minor Polish nobility—notwithstanding the blue decoration ribbon, and the diamond panagia with the Emperor’s likeness on one side and the crucifix on the other, with the diamonds more in number and larger on the former than the latter, notwithstanding all this, Theodosius, to quote Avrámoff’s account, “had the appearance of some monstrosity,” of a starveling or an abortion. He was small, thin and angular; in his tall mitre with its long folds of black crêpe, his very wide pall with wide open sleeves, he greatly resembled a bat. Yet when he joked and especially when he scoffed at sacred things, which usually happened when he was drunk, his sly eyes would sparkle with such wit, such impudent mirth, that the miserable face of the bat-like abortion became almost attractive.

“This will not be a flattering oration,” said Theodosius, turning to the Tsar, “but I speak the truth from my heart: by your Majesty’s actions we have been led from the darkness of ignorance into the lighted theatre of fame, from death into life, and have even joined the throng of civilised nations. Monarch! you have renewed and revived everything, and more yet, given new life to your subjects. What was Russia in olden times? What is she to-day? Let us consider the houses: old rough huts have been replaced by bright palaces; withered twigs by blooming gardens. Let us consider the fortifications: here have we things which prior to this we have not even beheld on charts!”

He went on talking for a long time “about laws, free learning, arts,” the fleet, these armed arks, the reformation and the new birth of the Church.

“And thou,” he exclaimed in conclusion, brandishing his arms in the heat of rhetoric, so that the wide sleeves, like black wings, made him still more like a bat, “And thou, City of Peter! young in thy supremacy! How great is the renown of thy founder! In a place where nobody even as much as dreamt of human habitation, in a short time a city has been erected worthy to hold the monarch’s throne. ‘Urbs ubi sylva fuit.’ A city in place of a wood. And who will not praise the position of this city? The district not only excels in beauty the rest of Russia, but even in other countries the like cannot be found! On a cheerful site art thou erected! Verily a metamorphosis, a change in Russia hast thou accomplished, O Majesty!”

Alexis listened, and looked at Theodosius attentively. When the later mentioned the “cheerful site” their eyes met for an instant, and the Tsarevitch seemed to discern a spark of mockery in the orator’s eyes. He remembered how Theodosius had often in his hearing, during his father’s absence, reviled this “cheerful site” and termed it a “devil’s bog,” “a devil’s haunt;” for some time already it seemed to the Tsarevitch that Theodosius was laughing at his father, almost in his very face, only disguised so cleverly and adroitly that no one save he, Alexis, noticed it; and every time on a similar occasion, Theodosius would exchange quick cunning looks with him, as if he saw in him an accomplice.

Peter, according to his custom, replied simply and concisely to the ceremonious oration:

“I am eager that the people should know how the Lord hath helped us hitherto. Yet we must not slacken our efforts; but taking up whatever burden God lays before us, work for the good and advantage of the community.”

And returning to ordinary conversation he gave in Dutch (so that the foreigners present could follow him) an exposition of the thought he had lately heard from the philosopher Leibnitz, and which had greatly struck him, “the rotation of sciences:” all science and art were born in the East and in Greece, thence they travelled to Italy, France, Germany, and lastly through Poland they came into Russia. “Now our turn has come; from us they will again return to Greece and to the East, their birthplace, completing a perfect circle in their wanderings. This Venus,” concluded Peter, lapsing into Russian, with a naïve declamatory eloquence, natural to him, “this Venus has come to us from there, from Greece. Our soil has been ploughed with the plough of Mars, and the seed has been scattered. We now await a good return which Thou, O Lord, vouchsafe unto us! May our harvest come soon and not like that of the date palm, whose fruit is never seen by those who plant it. May Venus the goddess of all that is loveable, domestic felicity, and national concord, ally herself to-day with Mars. May the union be for the glory of Russia.”

“Vivat, vivat, vivat, Peter the Great, the father of his country, the Emperor of all Russia!” shouted the guests raising their glasses of Hungarian wine. The Imperial title, announced publicly neither to Europe nor even to Russia, was accepted here in the circle of “Peter’s Eaglets.”

In the left wing of the gallery, the ladies’ pavilion, the tables had been pushed aside and dancing begun. The music of war trumpets, hautboys, and kettledrums of the Simeon and Preobrazhensky regiments, coming from behind the trees of the Summer Garden, softened by distance and perhaps by the charm of the goddess, sounded here at her feet, like the delicate flutes and violes d’amour of Cupid’s kingdom, where lambs graze on soft meadows and shepherds loosen the girdles of shepherdesses.

Peter Tolstoi, who was dancing in the minuet with Princess Tsherkassky, hummed in his mellow voice to the strains of the music:

’Tis time to cast thy bow away,

We all are, Cupid, in thy sway.

Thy golden love-awaking dart

Hath reached and wounded every heart.

And affectedly curtsying to the cavalier, as the rule of a minuet demanded, the pretty princess responded with the languid smile of a Chloe to the aged Daphnis. Meanwhile in the dark alleys, bowers, in all the secluded nooks of the Summer Garden, whispers, rustlings, kisses, sighs of love were heard; the goddess Venus had begun her reign in the Hyperborean Scythia.

In an oak grove, apart from the rest, so that none could overhear them, a group of servants and pages, belonging to the Tsar’s household, were discussing the love exploits of their friends, the court ladies or maidens, after the manner of true Scythians and Barbarians.

In the presence of women they were shy and bashful, but when by themselves they spoke about “women” with brutal shamelessness.

“The wench Hamilton spent a night with the master,” calmly announced one of them.

It was Mary Hamilton, the Tsaritsa’s lady in waiting.

“The master is gallant, he can’t live without mistresses,” remarked another.

“It is not her first either,” retorted a page, a boy of about fifteen, deliberately spitting and again puffing the pipe which made him sick: “Before the master’s time she had a child by Golitsin.”

“And how do they manage to get rid of the brats?” the first one queried in amazement.

“And the husband does not know what his wife is after!” giggled the lad. “I saw with my own eyes just now, from behind the shrubs, how Billy Mons made love to our mistress!”

Wilhelm Mons was the Tsaritsa’s Kammerjunker, a foreigner of low origin, yet very adroit and handsome.

Huddling closer together, they began to speak about the strange rumour, which said that, quite lately, when cleaning a stopped up pipe of one of the fountains in the royal garden, the body of an infant was found, wrapped in a palace napkin.

The Summer Garden possessed the inevitable “grotto,” met with in all French gardens; it was a square edifice on the banks of the river Fontanna, rather awkward from the outside, suggesting a Dutch church, while the inside resembled a cave, laid out with large shells, mother of pearl, corals and porous stones; numerous fountains and water jets flowed into marble basins with that abundance of water, too great for the damp city of Petersburg, yet so dear to the heart of Peter.

Here staid old men, senators, and dignitaries, were also conversing about love and women.

“In olden days true wedlock was sacred, whereas nowadays, lust is considered gallantry, even by the husbands themselves, who with a calm heart watch their wives make love to others and call us fools for staking our honour on so weak a spot. They have given women their freedom; just wait a bit, they will soon master every one of us,” grumbled the oldest among them.

A younger one remarked that “free intercourse between the sexes is agreeable natural to all men, not fossilised by ancient customs. The real love passion, unknown in barbarous ages, had begun to possess sensitive hearts;” that “nowadays marriage boorishly reaps in one day all the flowers love tenderly rears for years; and jealousy is the pest of love.”

“Fair women have always been facile,” decided a middle-aged man, “but no doubt the devils themselves have set up their abode inside the ribs of the present giddy generation. They will hear of nothing but love-making.”

“And little girls, stirred by this example, begin to flirt, and only can’t do it, poor things, because they are too innocent. Oh! how the desire to please dominates women!”

Here entered her Majesty Catherine, attended by the Kammerjunker Mons and Mary Hamilton, her lady in waiting, a proud Scotchwoman with the face of Diana. The least elderly of the two old men, aware that Catherine was listening to their conversation, began amiably to defend the ladies.

“Truth herself proves the dignified nature of womankind by the fact, that God, at the end of His work, on the last day created Adam’s wife, as if without her the world were incomplete. Woman’s body alone is composed of all that is most charming in the universe. Add to these advantages her beauty of mind, and how can we help wondering at her perfection, and what excuses can be given by him who does not show due deference to her? Should there be some weakness about women, it is right to remember, how delicately they are made.” The oldest of the speakers only shook his head. His face clearly expressed that he was not convinced, that in his opinion “woman was as far removed from a human being, as a crab was from a fish; a woman and the devil make a fine match.”

In the opening, between the cloven clouds, on the transparent melancholy sky bathed in golden-emerald, appeared the narrow sickle of the newborn moon; it cast a gentle beam into the depths of a dark alley, where near a fountain surrounded by the semicircle of a tall clipped hedge, on a wooden bench, at the foot of a marble Pomona, there sat a solitary girl of seventeen. She wore a wide dress of pink taffeta embroidered with small yellow florets; she had a slender waist and a fashionable head-dress; yet so Russian and simple was her face, that it was evident she had only recently left a calm country life, where she had grown up surrounded by nurses, under the thatched roof of an old house. Casting a timid look around her, she undid two or three buttons of her frock and swiftly pulled out a roll of paper, hid in her bosom and warm from the contact. It was a love missive from her nineteen year old cousin, who by the Tsar’s command had first been torn from the same peaceful spot, sent to Petersburg, then placed in the navy school connected with the admiralty, and a few days ago had been sent on a man-of-war with other gardes-marines, either to Cadiz or Lisbon—to quote his own expression “to the world’s end.” By the light of the white night and the moon the young girl read the note, written on ruled lines in large round childish characters:

“My heart’s treasure, my angel Nástia. I would like to know why you did not send me the last kiss. Cupid the thief has wounded my heart with his arrow. I suffer greatly, my heart’s blood is frozen.”

A heart was drawn with blood instead of ink between the lines, the same was pierced by two arrows; red spots stood for drops of blood.

Then followed verses probably copied from somewhere—

Remember Joy, our merry talk,

Sweet words during every walk,

How long is it since last I saw thee?

Come my fair dove, come fly to me.

Should my wish be not in vain,

Mad with joy I’d be again.

Having read the love letter, Nástia carefully rolled it up, hid it again in her bosom, hung her head and covered her face with a handkerchief, scented with “Cupid’s sighs.”

When she looked up again, a black cloud resembling a monster with gaping mouth had almost swallowed the narrow moon. His last beam reflected itself in the tear which hung on the young girl’s eye-lash. She watched the moon disappearing and hummed to herself the only love-song she knew—how it became known to her no one could say:—

Wherever I roam, and wherever I go,

My heart it feels heavy, my spirits are low,

And I, like a dove without wings, must make moan,

For what is in life when my dearest is gone?

Young am I and yet shedding tear after tear

For the sweetheart who left me in loneliness here....

Everything about her was strange and artificial, “after the manner of Versailles,” the fountain, Pomona, the espaliers, her dress of pink taffeta strewn with yellow florets, her hair arrangement “Budding pleasure,” and the scent “Cupid’s sighs.” Only she herself with her quiet grief and gentle song had remained simple, Russian, just as she had been under the thatched roof of her father’s country house.

Close to her, from the dark alleys, bowers and every possible nook of the Summer Garden, there continued to come whispers, rustles, kisses and love-sick sighs.

The sound of the minuet, wafted across like shepherds’ flutes and violes d’amour from Venus’ kingdom, with the languid melody:—

’Tis time to cast thy bow away,

Cupid, we all are in thy sway.

Thy gol’en love-awaking dart

Has reached and wounded every heart!

In the pavilion, round the Tsar’s table the conversation continued. Peter was talking with the monks about the origin of Hellenic Polytheism; he could not conceive how the ancient Greeks, who had displayed sufficient knowledge about natural laws and mathematical principles, could at the same time call their soulless idols gods, and believe in them.

Here Michael Avrámoff could no longer contain himself, he mounted his hobby and began to prove that the gods exist, that they are in reality evil spirits.

“You talk about them as if you yourself had seen them,” said Peter.

“Not I, but others have really seen them, your Majesty,—beheld them with their own eyes,” exclaimed Avrámoff triumphantly. He took out of his pocket a fat leather pocket book, found in it two old cuttings from the Dutch newspapers and began to read, translating them into Russian:—

“We are informed from Spain that a stranger has brought with him to Barcelona a Satyr, a man covered with wool as with bark, and having goat’s horns and hoofs. He eats bread and milk, does not speak, but only bleats like a goat. This deformity attracts many visitors.” The second: “In Jutland fishermen have caught a siren or mermaid. The monster has a human body with a fish’s tail. The skin is pale yellow, the eyes are closed, the hair on the head is black. A membrane connects the fingers just like a goose’s foot. The fishermen pulled their net to the shore with great difficulty, breaking it in many places. Then the people made a huge tub, filled it with salt water and put the mermaid into it; they did this in the hope of preserving her from putrefying. This is reported on account of the many rumours current concerning maritime wonders, not all trustworthy, but this one may be believed, because the astonishing sea-monster has been caught.—Rotterdam, April 27, 1714.”

Printed matter was as a rule believed in, especially foreign news, for if foreigners lie, where could truth be found at all? Many of the people present not only believed in ghosts, nymphs, were-wolfs, water, house, and wood spirits, but had also seen the like with their own eyes. If wood spirits exist, why should not Satyrs also exist, if nymphs exist why should not mermaids with fish tails also? And why should not other gods, even this very Venus, also have true being?

The company were hushed, silenced; something strange and terrifying seemed to pass through the air; all suddenly became conscious of doing something they ought not to do.

Lower and lower sank the sky shrouded in black clouds. Brighter and brighter grew the bluish flashes of thunderless lightning. And these sudden flashes of light in the dark vault seemed to reflect the bluish flame on the altar which continued to glow at the feet of the statue; or else in the vault, as in an overturned bowl of a gigantic altar, hid by a bank of clouds, black as charcoals, there glowed the Bacchantic flames, sallying forth from time to time in the shape of lightning. The fire of the sky and the flame on the altar, responding to one another, seemed to hold converse about some terrible mystery unrevealed to mankind, yet already enacting itself in earth and sky.

The Tsarevitch, who was sitting not very far from the statue, gazed intently at her, for the first time after the reading of the newspaper cuttings. The nude white body of the goddess seemed so familiar to him, he was almost sure he had seen it before now, and even more than seen it—these very dimples on the shoulders, this virginal curve of the back appeared to him in his most passionate, secret visions, visions he felt ashamed to confess even to himself. Suddenly he remembered to have seen this same curve, these same dimples on the shoulder of his mistress, the serf girl Afrossinia. He felt dizzy, probably from the wine, the heat, the close atmosphere, and all this monstrous festival, so like a nightmare. He glanced again at the statue, and suddenly the white nude body, in the double light of the red smoky illumination vessels and the bluish flame of the tripod, appeared so real, terrible and enticing to him, that he was obliged to cast down his eyes. Was it indeed possible that the goddess Venus should appear to him also, as she did to Avrámoff, in the guise of a were-wolf—the serf girl Afrossinia? He crossed himself in thought.

“Not the Hellenes are to be wondered at, who, ignorant of the Christian law, bowed before lifeless idols,” rejoined Theodosius, continuing the conversation interrupted by the reading, “but, rather we Christians, who, ignorant of true reverence for icons, worship them as idols!”

This started one of those conversations which Peter specially delighted in, about all sorts of false wonders and signs, the deceitfulness of monks, the possessed, nervous epileptic women, saintly madmen, old wives’ tales, and the superstition of Russian priests. Again Alexis had to listen to all these oft-repeated odious tales: about the shift of the Queen of heaven, which the monks had brought from Jerusalem, as a gift to Catherine, and which was supposed could neither burn nor rot. When the material was experimented on it turned out to be woven of a special fireproof fibre—amianth: about the incorruptible body of the Finnish girl von Grot, whose skin “was like prepared pigshide and when pressed returned like a ball to its shape”; and about other false relics made of ivory which Peter had ordered to be sent in to the Petersburg Kunstkammer as a memento of “superstition now being exterminated by the zeal of the clergy.”

“Yes, there is much deception in the Russian Church concerning miracles,” concluded Theodosius, in his tone of plaintive malignity. He mentioned the last false wonder on record. In a small church near Petersburg an image of the Virgin had appeared, which shed tears, prophesying as it were great mishaps, even the final destruction of the new city. Peter, informed of it by Theodosius, went himself to the church, examined the icon, and exposed the deception. This had happened quite recently. The icon had not yet been sent into the Kunstkammer, and it had meanwhile been kept in the Tsar’s Summer Palace, a small Dutch house, here in the garden, only at a distance of about two yards from the gallery, on the corner between the Fontanna and the Neva. The Tsar, desirous showing it to his guests, ordered one of his servants to fetch the icon. When the man returned Peter left the table and coming out in front of the statue, where there was more room, he, leaning with his back against the marble pedestal and holding the image in his hand, began to give a careful and elaborate explanation of the deceptive mechanism. The guests again thronged round him, crowding, rising on tiptoe, striving to catch a glimpse across one another’s shoulders and heads, just as at the beginning of the festival, when the case containing the statue was being opened. Theodosius was holding the candle.

The icon was an old one. The face was dark, almost black; only the large sorrowful eyes, swollen as with tears, seemed alive. Alexis had always loved and honoured this image of “God’s mother, the Joy of all the sorrowing.”

Peter removed the silver trimming set with priceless gems; it came off easily, having been already loosened during the first examination. He then unscrewed the brass screws, which fastened a small piece of new limewood to the back of the icon. In its centre was fixed a smaller piece; it moved easily on a spring, a pressure of the hand was sufficient to work it. Removing both boards Peter pointed to two little cavities hollowed out in the wood just against the eyes of the image. Two tiny sponges soaked with water were placed in them, the water oozed through the almost imperceptible holes bored in the eyes, forming drops which looked like tears.

Peter proved it by an experiment; he moistened the sponges, put them into their cavities, pressed the board and the tears began to flow.

“This is the source of these miraculous tears,” said Peter. His face was as calm as if he had just been describing a curious trick of nature, or some unusual object in the Kunstkammer.

“Yes, there is much deception,” repeated Theodosius with a quiet smile.

All were hushed. Somebody moaned in a low voice, probably a drunkard in his sleep. Someone else tittered so curiously and unexpectedly, that everybody turned round almost in terror. Alexis longed to go away. But some strange torpor held him, as in a nightmare, when the legs refuse to carry one or the voice to cry out. In this lethargy he stood and watched Theodosius holding the light, Peter nimbly and adroitly fingering the wood of the image, the tears trickling down the sorrowful face, and over all there towered the white, terrible alluring body of Venus. He looked on, and an anguish like mortal sickness seized his heart and almost choked him. And it seemed to him that this torture would never end,—that it always had been, and would be.

Suddenly there was a blinding flash of lightning; as if a fiery abyss had yawned above their heads. And through the glass cupola a burning light, painfully white, whiter than the sun, bathed the marble statue. Almost at the same instant a short, deafening peal of thunder was heard, as though heaven’s vault had been cloven and fallen into ruin. A darkness, black and impenetrable, followed the lightning. Suddenly a storm broke out, and moaned, and hissed, and rolled in the darkness; high wind together with pouring rain and hail; in the pavilion a general confusion ensued. The piercing shrieks of women were heard—one of them was laughing and crying in hysterics. The terrified people fled, from what, they knew not, knocking, falling and crushing one another. Somebody moaned in despair, “St. Nicholas! Holy Mother, have mercy upon us.” Peter, letting the icon drop, hurried away in search of Catherine. The flame from the overturned tripod, going out, flared up for the last time like the forked sting of a serpent, in the shape of an azure tongue, lighting up the face of the goddess. It alone had remained calm amid the storm, darkness and terror. Someone stepped on the icon. Alexis, stooping to lift it, heard the wood crack. The image had broken in two.

Book II
ANTICHRIST

CHAPTER I

A coffin of pinewood tree

Stands ready prepared for me;

Within its narrow wall

I’ll await the trumpet call.

This was the song of certain heretics, the raskolniks called—“The Coffin-liers.” “Seven thousand years after the creation of the world,” said they, “the second coming of Christ will take place; and should it not happen we will burn the Gospels themselves; as for the other books it is not worth believing them.” And they left their houses, lands, goods, and cattle, and every night went out into the fields and woods, put on clean shirts and shrouds, laid themselves in coffins hollowed out of tree trunks, and saying mass waited, expecting at every moment the trumpet call of the Judgment. Such was their idea of “meeting Christ.”

Opposite the headland formed by the Neva and the lesser Neva, in the widest part of the river, close to Gagarin’s hemp warehouse, among the rafts, barges, and cargo boats, stood the oak-rafts belonging to Tsarevitch Alexis. They had come from Nishigorod to Petersburg for the Admiralty dockyard.

On the night of the Venus festival in the Summer Garden an old bourlak was sitting at the rudder of one of these rafts; though it was summer he still wore a torn sheepskin coat and bast shoes. They called him “foolish John,” and he passed for a simpleton. For thirty years, day by day, month by month, year by year, he would sit every night till dawn waiting to “meet Christ,” always chanting the same song of the coffin-liers. Sitting quite close to the water on the very edge of the raft, bending over and with both hands clasped round his knees, he looked in expectation on the bits of golden-emerald sky which gleamed through the black torn clouds. His fixed eyes looking from under matted grey hair and his immovable face were filled with terror and hope; slowly swaying from side to side, he sang in a long drawn melancholy voice:—

A coffin of pinewood tree

Stands ready prepared for me;

Within its narrow wall

I’ll await the trumpet call.

When the angels blow,

From the graves will go

Those who in them lie,

To God’s throne on high.

Two roads are there to take,

Beware which choice you make!

One leads to heaven fair,

One to old Satan’s lair!

“Ivan! come to supper!” they called from the other side of the raft. A fire was burning there on stones which had been put together in imitation of a stove, and over it hung on three sticks an iron kettle boiling fish-soup. Ivan did not heed, but went on singing. The group which sat talking round the fire comprised, beside the boatmen and bourlaks, the aged schismatic Cornelius, who preached of self-burning and was now on his way to the Kershen forests beyond the Volga; his disciple, a runaway Moscow scholar named Tichon Zapólsky; Alexis Furlong, a gunner, deserter from Astrachan; the caulker Ivan Boudlóff, a sailor under the Admiralty, also a deserter; the clerk Larion Dokoukin, an old woman Vitalia belonging to the “runners,” who to quote her own words “led the life of a bird,” always on the move, soaring everywhere, staying nowhere; her companion Kilikeya the Barefooted, an epileptic woman, who had a “satanic suggestion” in her abdomen; and many other “people in hiding” who had fled to save themselves from the heavy taxation, soldiering, the cat-o’-nine tails, forced labour, tearing of nostrils, beard shaving, crossing with two fingers, or some of the other terrors of Antichrist.

“I feel sick at heart,” said Vitalia, an alert old woman, wearing a dark loose neckerchief who, though wrinkled, was red-cheeked as an autumn apple. “And, I know not why, the days seem so dark; the sun does not seem to shine as it used to.”

“The times are sad, the fear of Antichrist is invading the world, hence this sorrow and heaviness,” explained Cornelius, a haggard old man with a broad pleasant face, pock-marked and, apparently, mole-eyed. In reality he had piercingly sharp sight; he wore a “heretic” cape, in shape somewhat monkish, a black under-cassock which had turned brown, and a leather belt with a thong. And whenever he moved, his iron chain, weighing a hundred weight and made of crosses which deeply scored into his flesh, would clang its links together. “I too, father Cornelius, begin to see that these are the last days,” groaned the woman. “The world’s sands are running short; they say the end will come about the middle of the eighth thousand years.”

“No,” retorted the old man with decision, “it won’t even last as long as that.”

“Lord be merciful unto us,” sighed one of the company, “God knows His own time; all we can do is to say—God have mercy upon us.”

And they all lapsed into silence. Clouds had again covered up the opening of the sky which had become as dark as the Neva. The distant lightning grew brighter and brighter; with each flash the thin taper pinnacle of the Peter and Paul fortress shone forth like a streak of pale gold, and was reflected in the Neva; the flat stone battlements which seemed to be sunken into the banks, and the group of stucco buildings clustering around: mercantile and garrison depôts, hemp sheds and magazines, stood out in black relief. In the distance, on the opposite shore, the lights of the Summer Garden glittered through the trees. As a last breath of the late Northern spring a smell of pine, birch, and aspen was wafted across from the Lake of Keivoussary. The small group of people on the flat and scarcely visible raft, lit up by a red fire, between the black thunder clouds and the dark surface of the river seemed lonely and forsaken, as if hanging in the air midway between two skies and two abysses.

When all had stopped talking such silence ensued, that only the monotonous rippling of the stream under the logs was audible, while from the other end of the raft came along the water the same old melancholy song:—

A coffin of pinewood tree

Stands ready prepared for me;

Within its narrow wall

I’ll await the trumpet call.

“Friends, is it true,” began Kilikeya, a young woman with a delicately transparent, almost waxen face, and feet terrible to look at, being black as the roots of an old tree (she always went about barefoot even in the keenest frost), “is it true what I heard to-day in the market, that there is no Tsar in Russia; that the present Tsar is not the right one, neither a Russian nor of royal blood, but either a foreigner or foreigner’s son, or a Swedish changeling?”

“Neither Swede nor foreigner, but a damned Jew of the tribe of Dan,” declared Cornelius.

“O Lord, Lord,” again somebody sighed heavily, “see how the royal race has degenerated!”

They began to discuss who Peter was: whether a Swede, a foreigner, or Jew.

“The devil knows who he is. Whether a witch has hatched or the damp bred him, one thing is certain: he is a were-wolf,” declared the sailor, a young man of about thirty years old, with a wide-awake, intelligent expression on his face, once probably handsome, now disfigured by the branded forehead and torn nostrils.

“Ay! My friends, I know, I know positively everything concerning the Tsar,” replied Vitalia; “I learnt from an old wandering beggar woman, and the choristers of the Ascension told me just the same. When our Tsar, the pious Peter, was abroad visiting foreign countries he came across the Glass Kingdom; this Glass Kingdom is ruled by a maiden, who, making sport of him forced him to sit on a red hot tin, and then, having shut him up in a barrel with nails, cast him into the sea.”

“No, not in a barrel, but he was laid in a trunk,” some one corrected.

“Well, it does not matter whether it was a barrel or a trunk, but the fact remains that he has been lost ever since, neither seen nor heard of. And in his stead the sea vomited up a Jew of the tribe of Dan, born of an ill-conditioned wench, and nobody knew him. And on his coming to Moscow he began to do as a Jew would; he declined the Patriarch’s blessing, would not go to the holy relics in Moscow, aware that the holy place would refuse his approach. Neither did he do honour to the tombs of former pious Tsars, for the simple reason that they were strangers to him and hateful in consequence. He saw no one of the royal family, neither the Tsaritsa nor the Tsarevitch nor the Tsarevenas, fearing they would detect him and say: ‘You don’t belong to us, you are not the Tsar, but a cursed Jew.’ He did not show himself to the people on New Year’s Day, fearing detection, just as Gregory had been detected by the people; he does not keep fast days nor go to church, nor does he wash in the bath-house on Saturdays, but lives dissolutely in a house with the foreigners. Nowadays a foreigner is an important personage in Muscovy; the sorriest foreigner stands higher than a boyar, higher even than the Patriarch himself. He himself, the cursed Jew, publicly dances with foreign courtesans; drinks wine not to the glory of God, but in an indecent ugly way, like a common toper, reeling on the ground and using bad language when drunk. For the amusement of foreigners, or, more likely, for the outraging of all Christian customs, he publicly calls his drink-companions by holy names, one, the most holy Patriarch, others again, Bishop and Archbishop, himself Archdeacon, thus defiling sacred names by applying them to shameful things.”

“The abomination of desolation, predicted by Daniel, has come to pass,” concluded Cornelius.

Other voices from the crowd chimed in:

“And the Tsaritsa Eudoxia, who is shut up in the Sousdal nunnery, tells us: ‘Have patience, keep to the Christian faith, this is not my Tsar—he is a stranger.’

“He is trying his best to make the Tsarevitch imitate him, but he can’t succeed; and that is why the Tsar wants to rid himself of him, and prevent his coming to the throne.”

“O Lord, Lord! what a trouble God has sent—the father rises against the son, the son against his father.”

“What father is he to him! The Tsarevitch himself says this man is neither father nor Tsar to me.”

“The Tsar loves the foreigners; the Tsarevitch does not love foreigners: ‘Give me time,’ says he, ‘and I will soon get rid of them.’ A foreigner once came to him and began to talk in an unknown language. The Tsarevitch burnt his clothes and scorched him; the foreigner complained to the Tsar; ‘Why do you go to him?’ was the answer, ‘while I live you will be unhurt.’”

“This is so! they all say when our Tsarevitch comes to the throne then the Tsar and his company will have to do their best to save themselves.”

“Truly, truly, it is so,” affirmed several voices cheerfully, “the Tsarevitch dearly loves the ancient ways.”

“A righteous man!”

“Russia’s Hope!”

“Many old women’s tales pass current among our folk nowadays; they cannot all be believed or trusted,” began Ivan Boudlóff, and at once his calm matter of fact words riveted the attention of the whole group. “But I must say, be he Swede or foreigner or Jew—the devil knows best—one thing is certain, ever since God sent him to rule over us we have seen no happy days; life has become hard; there is no peace. Take us mariners and soldiers. It is fifteen years since we began fighting the Swede, we have not disgraced ourselves anywhere, but have shed our blood freely; and yet to this day we see no peace. Summer and autumn we are sent to roam on the seas, the winter is spent among rocks, we are dying of sheer hunger. And the country is ruined to such an extent that in some places not even a sheep remains to the peasant. They say: ‘A clever head, a clever head.’ If he were clever, he would be able to understand his people’s needs. Where does he show his cleverness? He gave us a proof in his civic laws, the institution of the Senate. Yet what good comes of it? Not only more wages are wanted; but ask the people with law-suits if any one of them has been promptly attended to—— Ah! what is the use of talking? The whole nation is outraged. He so arranges matters as to drag the last bit of Christianity from our souls, the last bit of life from our bodies. How is it that God tolerates so much cruelty? But this is not happening in vain; a change will come, sooner or later, the blood will come over them.”

Suddenly one of the audience who had remained silent all this while, a woman named Elena with a simple, kind face, started defending the Tsar. “We don’t know how to express it,” she said, in a low voice, as if to herself, “but we continually pray—O Lord, bring the Tsar back to our Christian faith!”

Her timid attempt was silenced however, by indignant voices crying:—

“He is no Tsar! only a mock-Tsar; he has squandered himself, goes about as if beside himself.”

“He has become quite a Jew, he can no longer live without a sip of blood from time to time. The day he drinks blood, that day he is content and merry, but the day he gets none he can neither eat nor drink.”

“Glutton! he will have eaten everybody soon, for himself there is no extermination.”

“May the earth engulph him!”

“Fools! Curs!” interposed with fury the gunner Alexis Furlong, a red-haired man of huge height, with a face now suggesting a beast, now a child, “fools, for not knowing how to defend yourselves! All of you are doomed soul and body; you will be mashed up like worms in a cabbage. As for me nothing would please me better than to cut him up into little bits.”

Elena weakly sighed and made the sign of the cross; these words, she confessed afterwards, made her feel hot all over. The others looked with terror at Alexis, while he, fixing his bloodshot eyes on one spot, and clenching his fist, added slowly as if lost in thought,—and there was something yet more terrible in this measured tone than in his fury:—

“I am surprised that no one has finished him off before now. He is always about alone. There are plenty of chances to cut him up half a dozen times over.”

Elena grew pale, she wanted to say something, but her moving lips could not articulate a sound.

“Thrice have there been attempts to kill the Tsar,” said Cornelius, “but every time has failed: evil spirits attend and protect him.”

A fair, puny soldier, with an idiotic, haggard, sickly face, quite a boy, a deserter named Petka Jisla, began to talk hurriedly, stuttering and sobbing like an infant. He told them that three ships had brought branding-irons from abroad to brand people with. Strict watch was kept over them, nobody was allowed near; sentinels being stationed by them on the Cotline island.

These were the new recruit marks introduced by Peter, about which the Tsar wrote in 1712 to the general plenipotentiary Prince James Dolgorúki:—“to mark recruits, prick a cross with the needle on the left hand and rub in powder.”

“The marked men receive bread, those who have no marks go without, no matter if they starve. Ah! brethren, brethren, it is a sorry business.”

“Famine will bring us all unto the son of perdition to worship him,” affirmed Cornelius.

“Some have been already marked,” continued Petka, “I among them, lost man that I am.”

With evident difficulty he lifted with his right hand the left which hung powerless at his side, brought it to the light, and showed the recruiting mark, stamped with the government stamp.

“When stamped, the hand at once began to wither, first the left only, now the right has began; try as I may to raise and bless myself with it, I cannot.”

His companions looked terror-stricken at the dark spot, which seemed like a number of pock marks on the pale yellow, withered, lifeless hand. This was the human brand, the black cross of the crown.

“That is it, quite right,” declared Cornelius, “the sign of Antichrist. It is written: ‘he will mark them on the hand, he, who receives this mark, will lose the power to bless himself with the sign of the cross; yet his hand will be paralyzed not by chains, but by an oath, and no repentance shall be granted unto such.’”

“Brethren! brethren! what have they done unto me? Had I but known in time they should never have had me alive. They have spoilt a human body; marked a man like cattle.” Petka sobbed convulsively, and large tears rolled down his childish pathetic face.

“Friends,” ejaculated Kilikeya, as if struck by a sudden thought, “all this seems to point to one fact, that our Tsar Peter is himself the——”

She did not finish, the terrible word seemed to die on her lips.

“And what did you think?” Cornelius looked at her with his little sharp piercing eyes. “He is that very one Himself.”

“No, never fear, the veritable one has not yet appeared. He might be his forerunner,” tried to put in Dokoukin. But Cornelius stood up, the chain of iron crosses clanking; he lifted his hand, raised his two fingers in the “schismatic” way, and triumphantly announced:—

“Listen ye Orthodox, this is He who reigns, who has had dominion over you since the year 1666, the year of the Beast. In the beginning, the Tsar Alexis together with the Patriarch Nikon renounced the faith, and in so doing became the forerunner of the Beast. Now following in their footsteps Tsar Peter has finally uprooted all piety; he has annihilated the Patriarchate; claimed the Church and divine power, and, against our Lord Jesus Christ, has declared himself supreme head of the Church, the absolute pastor. And vieing with the supremacy of Christ, about whom it is written:—‘I am the first and the last,’ he called himself Peter the First. In the year 1700, on the first day of January, the new year’s day of the ancient Roman god Janus, at a firework entertainment he proclaimed on a screen—‘My time has now come.’ And he assumed unto himself the name of Christ, in the hymn sung at church in memory of the Poltava victory over the Swedes. And on his return to Moscow, he had young children in white robes placed on triumphal arches and taking part in the procession, to glorify him and sing, ‘Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest. Lord God appear to us!’—as by God’s will, the Jewish children had praised our Lord Jesus Christ on his entry into Jerusalem. Thus by his title he had elevated himself above every Name of God. For it has been said: under the name of Simon Peter there will appear in Rome the proud prince of this world, Antichrist, and in Russia, which is the third Rome, that Peter has appeared who is the son of darkness, the blasphemer and enemy of God, that is Antichrist. And as it is written: in all things will the false prophet strive to resemble the Son of God, so also does the aforesaid Peter, glorifying himself, say: ‘I am a father to the fatherless, a shelter for the wandering, a helper to those in trouble, a defence to the oppressed’; he has built hospitals for the sick and the aged; schools for the young; the simple and ignorant Russian people he has in a short time made shrewd and clever, and in all knowledge equal to other European nations. He has expanded the Empire, he has reinstated what was stolen, restored what had fallen to ruins, glorified what had been humbled, renewed the old; he has roused those sleeping in ignorance; and has created what was not. ‘I am gracious, meek, and merciful. Come unto me, and worship me, the living and Almighty God, for I am God, there is none other God but me.’ Thus the Beast feigns goodness; he about whom it is written, ‘That Beast is terrible and is like unto none.’ Thus a cruel wolf, masked under a sheepskin, will one day spring forth and swallow everyone. Listen then, ye Orthodox, to the word of the prophet: Go, go forth, go forth from Babylon, oh! my people and save yourselves, for there is no salvation in cities for the living; flee, persecuted faithful ones, who have no present abode, but are seeking the Coming. Flee into the woods, the deserts, hide your heads under the earth, in hills and caverns, in the earth’s abysses; for brethren you yourselves see, that we have reached the utmost evil. Antichrist himself has come, and with him the world is ending. Amen.”

He finished. A blinding flash of lightning suddenly lit up the man from head to foot, and to those who were looking at him, the small man seemed almost a giant in this glare, and the roll of the dull, as if subterranean thunder, seemed to be the echo of his words, which had filled heaven and earth.

He finished, and all around him remained silent. Again was heard the dreamy ripple of the stream under the logs, and the languid melancholy song of Ivan wafted across from the other end of the raft:—

Ye hollowed oak trunks, ye will prove

Fit house for us who on earth did move,

Night approacheth, endeth day,

And Death his scythe doth lay

To the root of all that live....

The song made the silence only more intense, more awful. Suddenly, with a rumbling and a hiss, up soared a rocket, dissolving in the dark vault into a rain of iridescent stars. The Neva reflecting them doubled their number in her black mirror. Fireworks flared, screens with transparent pictures were lit, fiery wheels began to whirl, fountains of fire surged forth, and halls appeared, resembling a temple of white sun-like flame. And from the Pavilion overlooking the Neva, where the Goddess already stood, along the smooth surface of the waters, came the cry of the revellers—“Vivat! Vivat! Vivat! Peter the Great! Father of his country! Emperor of all the Russians!” and music rang forth in the air.

“This, brethren, is the last of the signs,” exclaimed Cornelius, pointing with his outstretched arm to the rocket. “As St. Hippolitus testifies: ‘Antichrist will be glorified, praised by sundry songs and many voices and loud crying. And a light greater than all lights will surround him, the master of darkness. Night will be changed into day, and day into night; the sun and the moon will become red as blood, and he will take the fire away from the heavens.”

In the centre of the luminous hall appeared the statue of Peter the Sculptor of Russia, in the image of the Titan Prometheus.

“And all will fall down before him,” concluded Cornelius, “and exclaim ‘Vivat! Vivat! Vivat! who is like unto the Beast? who is able to make war with him; he has brought us fire from the heavens!’”

Nearly all on the raft watched the fireworks terror-stricken. And when, shrouded in clouds of smoke, illumined by many coloured bengal-lights, there appeared the sea monster, with prickly fins and wings and tail covered with scales, floating along the Neva from the fortress towards the Summer Garden, they deemed this to be the Beast, coming up out of the depths, as predicted in the book of Revelation. Every moment they expected to see Antichrist coming towards them on the water, or flying through the air on wings of fire, amidst thunder and lightning, and armies of evil spirits with him.

“Friends, friends,” sobbed Petka, trembling like a leaf, and his teeth chattering, “I feel frightened; we speak about him, but is he himself not somewhere close by? See how we are all troubled!”

“I don’t know where you get all this old woman’s fear. Ram a pike down his throat, and that’ll finish him,” boastingly began Furlong; but he too grew pale, and began to quake when Kilikeya, who was sitting next to him, suddenly called out in a piercing voice, fell on the ground, twisting her body in convulsions, and began to shriek.

Kilikeya had been injured in her childhood. Once, so she herself was wont to relate, her stepmother had poured out some soup in a wooden bowl, and passed it to her to eat—reviling her at the same time, saying, “there, sup it up, the devil be with you,” and three weeks later she fell ill, and it seemed to her that something had begun to growl audibly within her, like a dog, so that everybody could hear it. And really an evil spirit did seem to growl with human and animal voices within her. She had been imprisoned according to the Tsar’s law, concerning such nervous women; she had been questioned, judged, even whipped. She had signed promises, not to call out again under pain of punishment with the lash or of being convicted to lifelong labour in the weaving mill. Yet lashes could not cast out demons, and she continued to have fits.

Kilikeya moaned: “I feel sick, so sick,” and then she would laugh, and cry, and bark like a dog and bleat like a sheep, and croak like a frog, grunt like a pig, and many other animals did she imitate.

The watch dog, which lived on the raft, roused by these unwonted sounds came out of its kennel: a hungry, lean cur, with sunken flanks and prominent ribs; it walked up to the edge of the raft, and paused at the side of Ivan, who continued to chant, neither seeing nor hearing anything around him, and the dog lifting its muzzle into the air, its tail between its legs, howled piteously at the fireworks. The howl of the dog and the howl of the sick woman blended into one.

They poured water on Kilikeya. Cornelius bending over her, was reciting incantations for the driving out of demons, blowing and spitting on her face, and lashing it with his leather thong. At last she grew calmer, and fell into a heavy swoon-like slumber. The fireworks had died away. The embers of the fire were faintly glowing; darkness reigned once more. Nothing had happened; Antichrist had not appeared; the fear had passed away. Yet the distress they all felt was more terrible than any fear. They sat as before on the low raft, whose black outlines scarcely stood out against the dark water and the black heavens; their little group, lonely and forlorn, suspended as it were, somewhere in space twixt the two skies. All was quiet, the raft motionless, and yet it seemed to them, they were being precipitated into and were sinking down, engulphed in this gloom, as in some yawning black abyss, the jaws of the Beast itself, the inevitable end of all things. And into this black oppressive darkness, luminous with the blue tremulous heat-lightning, floated from the Summer Garden the music of the minuet, tender as the languid sighs of the kingdom of Venus, where the shepherd Daphnis loosens the girdle of Chloe,

’Tis time to cast thy bow away,

Cupid, we all are, in thy sway.

Thy golden love-awaking dart

Hath reached and wounded every heart!

CHAPTER II

On the Neva, near the rafts of the Tsarevitch, stood a large barge, which had come from Archangel, laden with Holmogorian pottery. Her owner, the rich merchant Poóshnikoff, belonging to the heretics of the sea coast, gave shelter in his barge to deserters of the old faith, who were obliged to be in hiding. The space between the decks and the poop was divided up into little cells. In one of these Elena had found shelter.

Elena was a peasant woman, the wife of a foreman in the Moscow Mint, Maxim Yereméyeff, a secret iconoclast. When the leader of the iconoclasts, the barber Thomas, was burnt, Maxim fled to the southern towns, leaving his wife behind. It was difficult to decide whether she herself was a heretic or an Orthodox, for she crossed herself with two fingers after the advice of some old man who used to visit her, saying: “thou canst not move God with three fingers,” while yet frequenting Orthodox Churches and confessing to Orthodox priests. Notwithstanding the terrible rumours about Peter, Elena believed he was the true Russian Tsar and loved him. She prayed that she might be allowed to behold his Majesty, and for this reason she had come to Petersburg. One thought only possessed her: that God might grant the Tsar repentance, bring him back to his father’s faith, make him cease from persecuting the people of the old faith, and thus give them, in their turn, a chance of joining the Orthodox church. Elena had composed a special prayer for the unification of the church, which she meant to have shown to her confessor, but could not find the courage, as it seemed so badly written. She visited monasteries, she engaged an old woman for six weeks to read the acathistus for the Tsar at the Ascension church and at another dedicated to the Virgin of Kazan. She herself would kneel two or three thousand times a day for him. But all this did not seem sufficient for her, and she resolved on a last desperate remedy. She made her nephew Vassia, a lad of fourteen, write out the prayer she had composed for the Tsar and the uniting of the church, sewed a cover for an icon, and putting the prayer in the lining, gave it to a priest in the Church of the Assumption, making no mention of the hidden letter.

After the conversation on the raft, Elena returned to her cell on the barge, and when she recalled all she had heard that night about the Tsar, she for the first time asked herself whether after all it was not true, that God could not be moved for such a Tsar.

For a long time she lay motionless in the oppressive darkness of her cabin cell, her eyes wide open, bathed in cold sweat. At last she got up, lit a remnant of a wax church taper and placed it in the corner of the closet before the icon of the Virgin, hung on the wooden partition. It was the same Virgin whom Peter had been exhibiting at the foot of Venus. She knelt, bowed to the ground three hundred times and began to recite with tears and sighs that same forlorn prayer, now sewn into the cover of the icon, at the church of the Assumption.

“Hear me, thou Holy Church, with all the hosts of Cherubim and Seraphim, with all the companies of prophets, patriarchs, saints and martyrs, the Gospels, and all the sacred words that compose the Gospel, remember ye our Tsar Peter! Hear me, Holy Apostolic Church, together with all local images and little icons, with all apostolic books and holy lamps, the censers and candles, the sacred coverings and goodly palls, the stone walls and iron slabs, all fruitful trees and flowers! I implore thee, beautiful sun, pray thou the Lord for our Tsar Peter, and thou young moon with thy stars! O sky and thy mists! O terrible clouds and stormy winds and breezes! O fowls of the air! blue sea, great rivers, small brooks and lakes! pray ye the heavenly King for our Tsar Peter! Fish of the sea, cattle in the fields, beasts of the wood, meadows, forests, mountains all the earth’s increase, pray ye the heavenly King for our Tsar Peter!”

A thin partition separated Elena’s closet from a more spacious cell occupied by Cornelius and his disciple Tichon. Not a word did Tichon say during the conversation on the raft, yet he had followed it with greater interest than any one else. When the group had dispersed, Cornelius went ashore to confer with some other heretics about the approaching great self-burning, “the Red Death,” of thousands of persecuted people belonging to the old faith; a rite which was to take place in the woods beyond the Volga. Tichon had returned to his floating cell alone, and had gone to bed. Yet like Elena in the adjacent compartment, he could not sleep, but kept thinking over what he had heard that night about the Tsar. He felt that his future hung on these thoughts, that the moment was approaching which, like a sword, would cleave his life in twain. “It seems now as though I were on a knife’s edge,” he said to himself, “on whichever side I fall, in that direction will I go.”

Together with thoughts about the future rose memories of the past.

Who was this Tichon?

Tichon was the only son, the last offspring of the once noble family of the princes Zapólsky, long since fallen into disgrace and poverty. His mother died at his birth, his father, a leader of the Streltsy, took part in the mutiny against Peter, supporting the Miloslavskis, ancient Russia and the old faith. During the terrible trial of 1698 he was sentenced, tortured in Preobrazhensky torture chamber, and then executed on the Red Square in the Kremlin. All his other relatives and friends were also executed or banished. The orphaned Tichon, but eight years old, remained in the charge of his attendant, Yemelian Pahómitch. The child was weak and puny, and suffered from fits like one “possessed.” He loved his father with passionate tenderness. Anxious for the boy’s health, Pahómitch kept from him the knowledge of his father’s death, by telling Tichon that his father had gone away on business to his distant patrimony in the Sarátoff government. But the child cried and pined, and glided like a shadow about the large empty house, his heart foreboding some calamity. At last he could bear it no longer. One day, having again vainly sought to learn the truth, he ran out of the house by himself, hoping to reach the Kremlin where an uncle of his lived, and to ask him about his father. The uncle was, however, no longer alive; he had been executed at the same time as Tichon’s father.

At the Spasski gate the boy met large carts laden with corpses of the executed Streltsy, thrown together anyhow, half naked. Like slaughtered cattle, fresh from the slaughterhouse, they were taken to a common grave, the refuse pit, and there buried together with filth and carrion, by the express order of the Tsar. Beams stuck out from the walls of the Kremlin, on which numerous bodies hung like “Polti,” a salt Astrachan fish which is hung in bundles to dry in the sun.

The people all day long silently crowded the Red Square, not daring to come near the place of execution, but looking on from afar. Making his way through the crowd, Tichon perceived near the Lóbnoye place some long thick logs surrounded by pools of congealed blood. These served for the executioners’ blocks. The victims crowding against one another, as many as thirty men at once, would lay their heads on the logs in rows. While the Tsar was drinking in a hall with windows overlooking the square, his boyars, fools and favourites were chopping off heads. Once the Tsar, dissatisfied with the way they did their work—the hands of the inexperienced headsmen were trembling—ordered twenty of the victims to be brought to his banqueting table, and there slew them with his own hands to the accompaniment of jeers and music. He drank a glass of wine, chopped off a head; glass after glass, head after head. Wine and blood flowed together.

Tichon saw the gallows erected in the shape of a cross for the mutinous Streltsy priests. The hangman was Nikíta Zotoff, the mock patriarch. A great number of wheels with the mutilated bodies still hanging to them; iron spikes and stakes with half putrefied heads. The Tsar’s command forbade their being taken off till they had completely rotted. The air was one awful stench. Crows hovered over the place in large flocks.

The boy fixed his eyes on one of the heads. It stood out black against the transparent azure of the sky, all strewn with cloudlets of delicate rose and golden hue; while further off, the domes of the Kremlin churches glowed like living embers. The evening bell rang out in the still air. Suddenly Tichon felt the sky, the domes, the very earth go from under his feet, while he himself was falling into some bottomless abyss: he had recognised his father’s face in that head with black sockets for eyes.

The drum rolled, a division of the Preobrazhensky regiment came round the corner; it accompanied carts with fresh victims. The condemned sat in white shirts with calm faces, holding lighted tapers in their hands. A tall man on horseback rode in front of them. His face too was calm, yet terrible. This was Peter. Tichon had never seen him before, but he at once recognised him, and it seemed to the child that the dead head of his father with its blank eye-sockets was looking straight into the Tsar’s eyes. The next moment he swooned. The crowd falling back in terror would have crushed the boy, had not an old man noticed him. This man, an old friend of Pahómitch, a certain Gregory of Talitsa, lifted him up and carried him home. In the night Tichon had a fit such as he never had before. It was a wonder he survived.

This Gregory of Talitsa, a poor unknown scribe, who lived by copying books and manuscripts, was one of the first to prove that Tsar Peter was the Antichrist. This was the charge brought against him at his trial, “that prompted by too great a zeal against Antichrist, and a doubtful heretic fear, he began to spread among the people evil words of blame and slander against the Tsar.” Having compiled booklets about the “coming of Antichrist,” and “the end of the world,” he thought of printing and freely distributing them among the people, in order to rouse them against the Tsar. Gregory often used to visit Pahómitch and talk with him about the Tsar, the Antichrist, and the last days. The monk Cornelius, who was living in Moscow at that time, took part in these conversations. Young Tichon used to listen to these old men, who, like three illboding crows, would collect at dusk in the empty house and caw: “the end of the world is drawing nigh; hard times, evil years have come; true faith, the stone wall, the strong pillar of Christ, has disappeared—Christianity has perished. Antichrist will come at the consummation of time; the whole world will be set on fire and burn sixty ells deep into its crust, because of our great transgressions.” And then they would relate a vision of “some vile serpent, which creeps and wriggles about, hanging down from the archdeacon’s shoulder instead of the holy stole during the service in a Niconian church; or at night, coiling round the walls of the Tsar’s dwelling, slips its head inside, and whispers into the Tsar’s ear.” These melancholy conversations would pass into still more melancholy songs:

Christ, the heaven’s eternal King,

Whose glory through the world doth ring,

Bids us, his beloved people,

In lone deserts, shady caves,

Darksome forests, refuge take;

Bury deep ourselves in sand,

Strewn with ashes walk the land,

Die in hope and never fear,

For God’s kingdom draweth near!

Tichon listened with special eagerness to tales about the secret settlements, amid dark forests and bogs beyond the Volga, and about the legendary and invisible city—Kitesh on the Lake of Light. The site of the city appeared to be a lonely wood; yet there were churches, houses, monasteries, and numbers of people. In summer church bells are heard at night ringing on the lake’s surface and the clear waters reflect the golden domes of the churches. There the true kingdom on earth is, in peace, quiet and eternal joy; holy fathers have flourished there, like lilies, cypresses and date palms, like pearls and heavenly stars. From their lips unceasing prayer to God rises like the breath of sweet-scented thyme and choice incense, and at night their prayer is visible like fiery sparkling pillars, and the light is so strong that it is possible to read and write without a candle. God loves and cherishes them as the apple of His eye, and His invisible hand is ever over them. And they shall experience neither sorrow nor affliction from the Beast; only for us sinners do they grieve day and night for our apostasy and Russia’s, and for the dominion of Antichrist over us. One road only leads to this invisible city. It is narrow, surrounded by all sorts of wonders and terrors, and winds among thickets, through woody dales, and no one can find it, except those whom God Himself leads to this serenely quiet refuge. Listening to the tales, Tichon longed to be in these dark forests and lone deserts. With inexpressibly sweet melancholy would he repeat after Pahómitch the poem about prince Joseph, the young hermit:—

Fair solitude! my heart’s desire,

Through forest and mire,

Over hill, dale, and peak,

Will I wander and seek

A place for my hut.

Thou emerald vault,

Under thee will I roam

To full heart’s delight.

Thy cuckoo’s call

Shall teach me all,

Dry roots will be

Eden’s food for me,

Thy sparkling springs

Mine only drink.

From earliest childhood Tichon was subject to a strange sensation, quite unlike anything else; a feeling of almost painful anguish, coupled with a delicious sweetness: it seemed ever new, yet ever familiar, and generally intimated the approach of a fit. Terror and surprise mingled with a reminiscence as from some other world, but the prevalent elements were curiosity and expectation, and a desire, that what was about to happen should happen quickly. He never mentioned this to any one, and even if he would, he could not have found words to express it. Later on, when his consciousness and thinking power increased, this sensation became tinged with thoughts about the end of the world and the second coming.

At times the most sinister croaking of the old men would leave him unmoved, while something unexpected, a colour, a sound, a scent could rouse in him the same feeling with sudden force. His house stood on the slope of the Sparrow hills, beyond the river Moscow. The garden abruptly terminated in a steep cliff. From this spot the whole of Moscow could be seen: a mass of black log structures—very much like a village—and towering above them, the white stone walls of the Kremlin and the countless golden domes of churches. Hence, too, the boy would often watch those grand and terrible sunsets, which sometimes occur in a late, stormy autumn. In the clouds, which appeared now livid blue, purple, black or flaming red, now as it were bloody, he fancied he could discern at one time a giant serpent which had coiled round Moscow, at another a Beast with seven heads with a woman sitting on it, having a cup in her hand full of abominations: now he saw the host of angels pursuing demons, wounding them with arrows of fire and causing streams of blood to flow over the heavens, or again the radiant Zion, the invisible city, which descending out of heaven, was resplendent with the glory of the coming Lord. It seemed as though the mystery, destined to be revealed on earth, was already being enacted in the heavens. And the familiar presentiment of the final end of all things entranced the boy. This same presentiment was also roused by everyday occurrences, even by the merest trifles; by the smell of tobacco; by the first sight of a Russian book printed in Amsterdam by order of Peter, in the new civil characters; by the signs over the new shops in the German quarter; by a special form of wig, which had long, curious locks like Jew’s ringlets or dog’s ears; or by the peculiar expression on Russian faces, recently bearded, now clean-shaven.

One day, Yereméich, the beekeeper, an old man of eighty years, who lodged in their garden, was captured by the royal commissioners at the town gate; they forcibly shaved off his beard and cut short the lappets of his coat according to the regulation measure. The old man returned sobbing like a child, fell ill and shortly died of grief. Tichon loved the old man and was sorry for him, yet when he first caught sight of him, clean-shaven, with his coat shortened, sobbing most piteously, the boy burst into a laugh, but one so strange and unnatural that Pahómitch dreaded another fit. In this laugh, too, there was the fear of the end of the world.

Once in winter a comet appeared, “a star with a tail,” so Pahómitch called it. The boy all the time longed to see it, yet did not dare to look; he used to purposely turn away his head, and close his eyes. But one night he saw it quite unexpectedly, when Pahómitch was carrying him across a snowdrifted lane to the bath-house. At the end of this lane between the black log-houses, rising just above the white snow, at the very edge of the dark blue sky, sparkled a large, delicately transparent star; it seemed to be gliding away, as it were, into infinite space. It was not terrible, on the contrary so familiar, so welcome, so fair, that he gazed and could not gaze enough. The old feeling, stronger than ever, clutched his heart with unendurable terror and delight. He stretched himself towards the star, as if now only awakening, with a tender, dreamy smile. At the same time Pahómitch felt terrible convulsions shake the little body. A cry escaped the boy; he had his second epileptic fit.

At the age of sixteen, he was compelled, together with other children belonging to the nobility, to attend the school of “Mathematical, Nautical, that is Maritime, and cunning Arts.” The school was located in the Súkharev tower, where James Bruce was engaged on astronomical observations. The astronomer was considered to be a sorcerer and magician: a squinting woman, who sold soaked apples in a street close by, had seen Bruce one winter’s night flying from the tower straight to the moon, astride of a telescope. Nothing in this world would have induced Pahómitch to send the child to this cursed place, but the boys were taken there by force.

Minors,[1] who had been in hiding on their estates, some even married, babes of thirty or forty years of age, had been brought hither by compulsion, and now sat next to children on the same bench. They learnt from the same book, which had a picture representing a teacher beating with rods a schoolboy laid across a bench. Below ran the inscription, “Let every boy learn in quiet.” All the primers were well supplied with verses about the rod:

God bless the woods for evermore,

Of useful rods the living store;

Birch is for youth the needful kind,

Nought but stiff oak brings age to mind.

It was prescribed by a royal ukase that a number of strong soldiers should be chosen from the Guards Regiment, one of whom, lash in hand, should be present in each room during the lessons; and should one of the pupils misbehave, he was to be lashed, irrespective of his rank or family. But neither rods nor lashes could knock learning into their heads; both young and old learnt badly. Sometimes in moments of despair they would sing, “the Song of Babylon.” The older ones, their voices hoarse with excessive drink, would start:

We with school life can’t agree,

The use of rods is far too free.

The shriller young voices chimed in:—

Sorry and sad

Is every lad.

then both high and low would join in the chorus.

Tichon would have learnt little in the school had he not attracted the attention of one of his teachers, the Pastor Glück, a native of Königsberg. Glück, who had acquired a kind of Russian from a runaway Polish monk, came to Russia “to teach,” quoting his own words, “the Muscovy youths, who were soft and impressionable as clay.” He was soon disillusioned however, not so much by the youths themselves, as by the Russian method employed in training them, “like horses,” knocking knowledge into their heads with whips. Glück was kind and clever in spite of being a drunkard; sorrow drove him to drink, because not only Russians but even Germans considered him mad. He was engaged upon an enormous task, the writing of commentaries on “Newton’s Commentary to the Apocalypse”; a book in which all Christian revelations concerning the end of the world were proved by minute astronomical calculations, based on the laws of gravitation, laid down in Newton’s recently published “Philosophæ Naturalis Principia Mathematical.”

He discovered in his pupil Tichon an extraordinary gift for mathematics; he loved him dearly, as his own kin.

After a glass or two, he would converse with Tichon as with his dearest friend, forgetful of his age. He used to tell him about the new teachings in philosophy; about Bacon’s “Magna Instauratio,” Spinoza’s “Geometrical Ethics,” Descartes’ “Vortices,” “The Monads of Leibnitz”; but the greatest inspiration kindled in him when talking about the great discoveries in astronomy, made by Copernicus, Kepler and Newton. The boy could not follow all he heard, yet he listened to these accounts of scientific wonders as eagerly as he did to the talks of the three old men about the legendary town.

As to Pahómitch, he considered all foreign science, especially astrology and astronomy, blasphemous. “The damned Copernicus rivals God Himself,” he used to say, “he has lifted the heavy globe into the air; it is nothing but a dream, all this nonsense about the sun and the stars being fixed while the earth alone goes round; it is clean contrary to Holy Writ. Theologians laugh at him.”

“True philosophy,” Pastor Glück was wont to say, “is not only useful, but even necessary to faith. Many of the Holy Fathers excelled in philosophy. Knowledge of nature does not impede Christianity, and God honours him who strives to explore nature. To reason about the created tends to the glory of the Creator, for it is written; ‘the heavens declare the glory of God.’”

A vague instinct, however, told Tichon that this reconciliation between knowledge and faith was not quite as simple and easy even to Glück, as the latter believed, or tried to believe. It was not without reason, that sometimes, after a learned debate with himself about the plurality of worlds and the incomprehensibility of cosmic space, the drunken old man, oblivious of his pupil’s presence, would in exhaustion lay his bald head on the table-edge, his wig awry, dazed not so much with wine, as by the confusing metaphysical thoughts, and groan, repeating Newton’s celebrated words:—

“O Physica—save me from Metaphysica!”

One day Tichon found on his teacher’s table a manuscript collection of Spinoza’s letters, which had been brought from Holland. Tichon, nineteen at that time and about to leave school, could read Latin fluently. He opened the book, the first lines he chanced to see were these: “There is much in common between man’s nature and God’s, as between the constellation of the Dog and the dog, the barking animal. For I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would in like manner say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle, that the Divine nature is in an eminent manner circular.” And in another letter concerning the Eucharist: “Oh, foolish youth! Who has so bewitched you as to make you believe in the possibility of swallowing something holy and eternal? as if holy and eternal things could remain in your bowels! Stupendous are the sacraments of your church, they are contrary to reason!” Tichon closed the book, he read no further. For the first time in his life thought had roused in him the old feeling of terror at the end of all things, which so far had only been called forth by external impressions.

In the Súkharev tower, James Bruce had a well-stocked library, a cabinet of mathematical, mechanical and other instruments, also a collection of natural objects: animals, insects, plants, various ores and minerals, antiquities, old coins, medals, cut stones, larvae, and foreign, as well as Russian curiosities. Bruce had commissioned Glück to catalogue all the books and objects. Tichon helped him, and spent whole days in the library.

One bright summer evening he was sitting on the top of a folding library ladder, which moved on wheels, before a wall ranged with books from top to bottom; he was sticking numbers on the backs of books, comparing the new catalogue with the old illiterate one, in which the names of foreign books were copied out in Russian characters. Through the high windows, glazed after the manner of old Dutch houses with little round pieces of glass fixed in a network of lead, the slanting rays of sunshine fell like sheaves of luminous dust upon the sparkling brass instruments; on the heavenly spheres, astrolabes, compasses, bevels, draught compasses, measurement scales, levels, telescopes, microscopes; the various stuffed birds and animals, the huge bone from a mammoth’s head, monstrous Chinese idols and marble statues of beautiful Hellenic gods; the interminable rows of books uniformly bound in leather and parchment. Tichon enjoyed his work, here among the books. There reigned the calm, soothing peace of a wood, or of some old cemetery, which, forsaken by men, is lovingly visited only by sunshine. No sound interrupted the stillness save the evening chimes, which suggested the bells of the legendary town Kitesh, and the voices which came through the open door of the adjoining room where Bruce and Pastor Glück, having finished their supper, now sat talking and smoking over their wine.

Tichon had just fastened new numbers on some quarto and octavo volumes which were described in the old catalogue under No. 473 as The Philosophy of Francis Bacon in English, 3 vols.; under No. 308, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, by Descartes, in Dutch; under No. 532, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, by Isaac Newton. Returning the books to their places, Tichon found at the back of the shelf an old mouse-eaten octavo, No. 461, Leonardo da Vinci, a treatise on painting, in German. This was the first German translation of Trattato della Pittura, issued at Amsterdam, in the year 1582; a leaflet with a wood-cut portrait of Leonardo had been placed in the book. Tichon gazed intently at this face, strange, unknown, and yet so familiar, as if he had once seen it in a dream. He thought that Simon the magician, who could fly in the air, must surely have had a similar face.

The voices in the neighbouring room seemed to grow louder and louder, Bruce was disputing some matter with Pastor Glück. They spoke in German. Tichon had learnt the language from the pastor; a few stray words struck him; his curiosity was aroused and he remained, with Leonardo’s book still in his hand, trying to catch the drift of their conversation.

“How is it you don’t see it, Reverend Sir, that Newton was no longer in his right senses when he wrote his Commentaries on the Apocalypse?” said Bruce. “Later on he himself confesses it, in a letter addressed to Bentley, on September 13, 1693, ‘I have lost my coherency of thought and no longer feel the old vigour of reason,’ in other words, he simply went into his dotage.”

“Your Excellency, I would rather be mad with Newton than reasonable with the rest of us bipeds!” exclaimed Glück, tossing off another glass of wine.

“There is no accounting for taste, my good sir,” continued Bruce, with a dry, short, wooden laugh, “but here’s something more curious still. At the time Newton wrote his Commentaries, in Muscovy, the other extremity of the world, barbarians called ‘Raskolniks,’ have in their turn compiled Commentaries on the Apocalypse, and come to very much the same conclusions as Newton. Daily expecting the Day of Doom, and the Second Coming, some lay themselves in coffins and say their own funeral service; others burn themselves. They are hunted and persecuted; for my part I would say of these unfortunate people, in the words of Leibnitz, ‘I do not like savageries, and would prefer to let everybody live in peace.’ As for those who are calmly awaiting the end of the world, their error seems to me quite innocent. Another thing strikes me as most curious, that the extreme West and the extreme East, the greatest enlightenment and the greatest ignorance, meet in these Apocalyptic deliriums. It is enough to suggest that the end of the world is drawing nigh and that we shall all go to the devil very soon!”

Again he laughed his sharp, wooden laugh and then added something Tichon could not hear, but it was evidently something very heterodox, for Pastor Glück, whose wig had, as usual at the end of his supper, slipped to one side of his drowsy head, suddenly jumped up in a fury, pushed back his chair and was going to run out of the room. Bruce kept him back, however, and a few kind words reassured him: he was the only patron Glück had. He loved and esteemed him for his disinterested pursuit of knowledge; yet, being himself a sceptic, or as many asserted a thorough atheist, he could not see the poor Pastor, the Don Quixote of astronomy, without being tempted to tease him and scoff at the unlucky commentaries on the Apocalypse—the reconciliation of science and religion.

Bruce was of opinion that one or the other had to be chosen—either faith without knowledge, or knowledge without faith.

He filled Glück’s glass and, in order to console him, began to inquire about the details of Newton’s Apocalypse. At first the old man answered reluctantly, but after a while he related with enthusiasm Newton’s conversation with his friend concerning the comet of 1680. “One day, when asked about it, instead of giving a direct answer he opened his Principia and pointed to a place where it was said ‘Stellae fixae refieri possunt. Fixed stars can be renewed by comets falling upon them.’ ‘Why did you not write about the sun as plainly as you did about the stars?’ ‘Because the sun concerns us more,’ replied Newton, and then added with a laugh, ‘For the rest, I have said sufficient for those who desire to understand.’

“As a moth attracted by the light, so will the comet fall into the sun and increase the solar heat to such an extent, that everything on earth will be consumed by fire. As it is written in the Holy Scriptures: ‘The heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burnt up.’ Then the prophecies will be accomplished both of him who believed, and of him who knew.

“‘Hypotheses non fingo!’” he concluded with an inspired air, repeating Newton’s great saying.

Tichon was still listening, and the ancient prophetic cawings of the three old men seemed to fit in with the most exact deductions of science. Closing his eyes, he saw a lonely lane, banked up with snowdrifts, and at its end, rising just above the white snow, between the black houses, on the very edge of the dark blue sky, a large, delicately-transparent star. And again, just as in childhood’s days, the familiar sensation clutched his heart with unbearable fear and joy. He dropped Leonardo’s book, which in its fall caught the tube of the astrolabe, and with a loud crash they both fell to the ground. In hurried Glück. He knew Tichon was subject to fits, and perceiving him at the top of the ladder, pale and trembling, hastened to him, caught him in his arms, and helped him down. This time the fit did not come on. Bruce too had come in. They sympathetically tried to make Tichon talk; but he remained silent, he felt that it was impossible to discuss this with anybody.

“Poor lad!” said Bruce apart to Glück, “I feel almost convinced that our talk has frightened him, they are all alike here, one idea seems to possess them—the thought about the end of the world. I have noticed of late that the madness seems to spread among them like an epidemic. God alone knows where this unhappy people will end!”

On leaving the school, Tichon was expected to enter the ranks of the army, like other young men belonging to the nobility. Pahómitch had died. Glück was preparing for a journey to Sweden and England, commissioned by Bruce to buy new mathematical instruments. He invited Tichon to accompany him. Tichon, forgetting all his childish superstitions and Pahómitch’s warnings, gave himself with ever increasing love to the study of mathematics. His health had improved and his fits did not recur. A long-cherished curiosity drew him to foreign lands, almost as mysterious to him as the invisible legendary town. Thus, owing to Bruce’s intervention, Tichon Zapólsky, scholar of the Navigation School, was by the Tsar’s decree ordered, along with other Russian youths, to finish his studies abroad. They arrived with Glück in Petersburg in the beginning of June, 1715. Tichon was twenty-five years old, the same age as the Tsarevitch Alexis, yet he looked a mere boy. The trading vessel, which was to take them to Stockholm, was due to leave Kronslot in a few days.

Suddenly all in Tichon’s life had changed! Petersburg, in its general aspect so unlike Moscow, had startled Tichon. For days he would wander about the streets looking in amazement at the endless canals, prospects, houses erected on piles, driven into the yielding mud of the marshes, all in a row, along a straight line, according to a law, which forbade any new building either to go beyond or fall short of the prescribed line, modest whitewashed huts amidst woods and waste lands, often roofed in the Finnish manner with turf and birch-bark, palaces of elaborate structure, after the Prussian fashion, melancholy garrison dépôts, ammunition stores, sheds, churches with Dutch spires, and striking clocks—everything was flat, ordinary, colourless, very much like a dream-vision. At times, on dull mornings, it seemed to him that the city, shrouded in a muddy yellow mist, would lift with the fog and vanish like a dream. In the legendary city that which is, remains invisible, while here in Petersburg on the contrary, the visible is that which is not; yet both cities were equally visionary. And again there arose within him that strange feeling, which he had not experienced for a long time—the presentiment of the end. Only it no longer resolved itself into ecstasy and fear, but oppressed him with a more definite anguish.

One day, on the Troïtsa Square near the Four Frigates coffee house, he met a tall man wearing the leather jacket of a Dutch skipper. And just as in Moscow, on the Red Square near the Lóbnoye Palace, where his father’s head on the spike had looked with its empty eye-socket straight into that tall man’s very eyes, Tichon again recognised him—the Tsar Peter. The terrible face suddenly explained to him the terrible town—they both bore the same impress.

That same day he met the monk Cornelius; he was delighted to see him and did not leave him again. He slept the night in the old man’s cell and spent his days on the rafts and barges among the “hidden runaway folk.” He listened to their tales about the lives of great hermits, who lived in the north, in the woods along the sea coast, the Onega and Olonetz where Cornelius, on leaving Moscow, had spent many years; about terrible burnings, where many thousands had sought a fiery death. From the barge Cornelius was now going to preach the Red Death in the woods beyond the Volga. Tichon had not studied in vain; much of what these people believed he no longer could believe; he thought differently, but felt the same as they, and what was more important still—common to them all was the presentiment of the end. That about which he never could speak, which none of the learned would have comprehended, these people understood and by it alone they lived. All he remembered Pahómitch telling him in his earliest childhood now suddenly had revived in his soul with new force. Again he felt drawn to the woods, the deserts, the secret settlements and peaceful refuges. Again through the air of the white night he seemed to hear over the Neva the bells of that visionary city, in the chimes of the Dutch clocks, again with languid melancholy and yearning he would repeat the ballad about Prince Joseph:—

Fair solitude! my heart’s desire

Through forest and mire

Over hill, dale, and peak....

He had to decide, to choose one or the other course: either to return to the world and live there like all men, serve a man who had destroyed his father and was likely to destroy the whole of Russia; or once for all turn his back upon the world, become a beggar, a wanderer, one of those “hidden, runaway folk,” who have here no continuing city, but seek one to come; to the West with Pastor Glück, or to the East, the legendary city, with Cornelius the monk. Which should he choose? whither should he go? he had not yet made up his mind; he wavered, tarried with the final decision. He seemed to wait for something. But this night, after the conversation on the raft about Peter, the Antichrist, he felt that it was impossible to delay any longer. The ship was sailing for Stockholm in the morning, and on the morrow Cornelius, threatened with arrest, was obliged to flee from Petersburg. He urged Tichon to come with him.

“I am just upon the sword-edge,” he again thought, “and whichever side I happen to fall on, in that will I abide. There is but one life, one death; a second blunder won’t mend the first.”

Yet at the same time Tichon felt powerless to decide, and that two destinies, like the two ends of a deadly noose, joined and tightening, seemed to press and strangle him. He got up, took from the shelf a manuscript—“The Meditations of St. Hippolitus concerning the second coming,” and in order to escape from thought, began looking at the title pictures by light of the oil-lamp burning before the image. One of them represented Antichrist, sitting on a throne, wearing the green uniform of the Preobrazhensky regiment with red facings and brass buttons; on his head, a three-cornered hat and a sword by his side: his face resembled that of Tsar Peter, and he was pointing forward with his hand. In front of him, to the right, columns of the Preobrazhensky and Simeon Guards were marching towards a monastery among dark woods. Far above, on a hill with three caves, some monks were praying. The soldiers, guided by quaint blue demons, were climbing up the mountain slope. Below ran the legend: “Then will he send into the hills and caves and holes of the earth his armies of evil spirits to seek out those who hide from his sight and bring them to worship him.” On another picture soldiers were shooting at monks who were bound: “These are falling by Satan’s hand.”

Behind the wooden partition Elena continued to sigh and weep, praying to the heavenly King for the Tsar Peter. Tichon laid down the book and fell on his knees before the icon. Yet he could not pray. Anguish seized him, such as he had never felt before. The flame of the burnt-out lamp flared up a last time and then went out; gloom surrounded him, and something seemed to creep up and clutch his throat with a dark, soft, warm hairy paw. He grew short of breath. His body was bathed in a cold sweat. And again it seemed to him he was flying headlong, sinking down into some black gloom, into an abyss—the jaws of the Beast itself. “It does not really matter,” thought Tichon, the thought flashed on his mind with unbearable clearness, it did not really matter which of the two paths he chose, go east or go west, here or there, at either extremity of the earth there ruled the one foreboding—“The end is approaching.” For as the lightning comes from the east and shineth even unto the west, so should also the coming of the Son of man be. And it seemed to him that he—Tichon—had already beheld this encircling lightning. “Even so, come Lord Jesus!” he exclaimed. At that very instant the cell window was lit up with a terrible white light. A deafening crash followed. It seemed as though the sky was rent and falling. It was the same lightning which had so startled the Tsar Peter that he let the icon drop at the foot of Venus. Elena heard, through the howling, hiss and rumbling of the storm, a terrible unearthly scream. Tichon for the third time in his life was seized with an epileptic swoon.

He recovered consciousness on the deck of the barge, where he had been brought from the close cell to revive. It was early morning, blue sky above, white mist below. A star was glistening in the east through the mist, it was the star of Venus. On the isle of Keivoussary, crowning the dome of the house of Boutourlin, the Metropolitan of the Thrice-Drunken Conclave, stood the gilt statue of Bacchus. Lit up by the first ray of the rising sun, it glowed like a red star through the mist. The earthly star exchanged mysterious glances with the heavenly one. The mist became roseate, as if blood were entering the pale bodies of phantoms. The marble body of the goddess, in the middle pavilion overlooking the Neva, glowed as if alive. She smiled her eternal smile at the sun, rejoicing that he rose even here amid the hyperborean night. The body of the goddess shone ethereal and roseate in the shroud of mist, the mist glowing like the body of the goddess. The mist was her body. In her all existed, and she in all.

Tichon remembered the thoughts that had thronged his mind during the night, and he felt in his soul a calm determination not to return to Pastor Glück, but to escape with Cornelius.

The storm had shifted the barge and its bow was now touching the raft where the conversation about Antichrist had taken place last night. Ivan had found time to get his sleep and he was again sitting in the same place as last night singing the same song. And music, (or was it only phantom music?) the sounds of the minuet subdued by the mist:—

’Tis time to cast thy bow away,

Cupid, we all are in thy sway.

mingled with Ivan’s melancholy, drawling song, as, his face turned to the east and the dawn, he sang of the eternal setting, the end of all days:

Hollowed oak trunks, ye will prove

Fit house for us, who on earth did move,

Night approacheth, endeth Day,

And cruel Death his scythe doth lay

To the root of all that live!

CHAPTER III

On the banks of the Neva, near the Church of Mary the Mother of all the Sorrowing, next to the house belonging to the Tsarevitch Alexis, stood that of Tsaritsa Martha, the widow of Tsar Peter’s stepbrother Fédor. Fédor died when Peter was ten years old. The Tsaritsa, eighteen at the time of her wedding, had been married only four weeks. The death of her husband sent her out of her mind and she spent thirty-three years in seclusion. She never left her apartments, and neither knew nor saw anybody. At foreign courts she was believed to be dead long since. Petersburg she had only caught sight of through her windows: its whitewashed huts, built after the Dutch and Prussian manner, its church spires, the Neva with its barges and rafts seemed to her an absurd nightmare. Dreams were her reality.

She imagined herself to be living in the Moscow Kremlin, in the old Terems, and that looking through the window, she would see the high Ivan Tower and the Church of the Annunciation. Yet she never did look out of her window, afraid to dispel her dream, afraid of the daylight. Continual darkness reigned in her apartments; the windows were draped. She lived by candle-light. The curtains and screens of ancient tradition hid the last Russian Tsaritsa from the people’s sight. The solemn, pompous ceremony of a Tsar’s Court was strictly observed here. The servants were not allowed to enter further than the hall. Here time stood still, here nothing had changed since the days of the gentle Tsar Alexis. Her crazy mind was possessed of one idea: she believed her husband, the Tsar Fédor, was alive; that he was now at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem praying for Russia, which was being invaded by Antichrist, accompanied by countless armies of Poles and pagan foreigners. There is, she thinks, no Tsar in Russia; he, who calls himself Tsar, not being the true one. He is a pretender, a were-wolf, a Gregory Otriópieff, a runaway artillery man, an alien. But the Lord has not finally forsaken his faithful Orthodox. At the consummation of time, he, Fédor, the only true Tsar of Russia, “the fair sun,” will return with a terrible luminous host, and the foreign troops will flee before him as night fleeth; he will sit with his Tsaritsa on the ancestral throne and re-establish truth and justice. All the people will come and bow before him, and Antichrist, together with all his foreigners, will be overthrown. Soon thereafter will be the second coming of Christ, the end of the world. All this is drawing nigh, is at the door.

About two weeks after the Venus festival in the Summer Garden, Tsarevna Maria invited Alexis to Tsaritsa Martha’s house. This was not the first time they had arranged to meet there. The aunt used to supply him with news and letters from his mother, the Tsaritsa Eudoxia, the first wife of Peter, who had been banished to the Sousdal nunnery under the name of Elena.

On entering the house of Tsaritsa Martha, Alexis was obliged to grope his way for some time along dark wood corridors, halls, chambers, ground floors and staircases. There was a smell of wood oil, old mouldering furniture, dust and the rot of age in the air. The house teemed with small cells, chambers, secret rooms, side rooms and closets. They sheltered the old wives and daughters of Boyars, chambermaids, nurses, housekeepers, laundresses, furriers, saintly madmen, mendicants, wanderers, pilgrims, fools and idiots, orphaned girls, old story tellers and musicians, who were skilled to accompany their ancient legends by melancholy string music. Decrepit servants in faded coats, grizzled and shaggy, well nigh moss-grown, caught hold of Alexis’ lappets, kissing his hand and his shoulder. Blind, dumb, lame, grey with age, almost featureless, they all followed him, gliding along the walls like phantoms; they thronged, swarmed, and crept about in the dark passages like woodlice in damp cracks. He met the fool Shamira, who was always pinching and grinning with the fool Polly. The oldest of the boyars’ wives, Soundóuleya Vahrameyevna, the favourite of the Tsaritsa, now in her second childhood, like her mistress, and fat, yellow, trembling like a jelly, fell at his feet; and for some reason or other began to bewail him, as though he were dead. Alexis felt uncomfortable. He remembered his father saying: “Tsaritsa Martha’s house has been transformed by piety into a hospital for the maimed and mad, for hypocrites and rascals.”

He sighed with relief on entering the light, airy corner room where his Aunt Marya Alexeyevna was expecting him. The windows looked out upon the blue sunny space of the Neva with its vessels and barges. The walls were bare and the logs of which they were built showed as in a village hut. The sole ornaments were the icons and the lamps which glimmered before them. Wooden seats ran along the walls. His aunt rose from the table at which she was sitting, and tenderly embraced the Tsarevitch. She was dressed after the old fashion in a head-dress and a jerkin of dark, quiet colour with brown spots. Her face was ugly, pale, slightly bloated, like that of an old nun. Yet in the ill-tempered lips, the clever, sharp, piercing eyes, there was something which suggested the Tsarevna Sophia—the evil brood of the Miloslavskis. Like Sophia, she too hated her brother and all he did; she loved the old times. Peter had spared her; he called her “old crow,” because she was always cawing evil to him.

Maria gave Alexis a letter from his mother. It was an answer to the son’s recent note, all too short and laconic: “Mother, farewell! Please do not forget me in your prayers.” Alexis’ heart throbbed, as he began to decipher the lines of the familiar writing, scrawled in awkward, childish characters.

“Tsarevitch Alexis, God be with thee! I, poor woman, am grieved to death, that thou hast forsaken me in my sorrow, forgotten me who bore thee. I tended thee, yet thou hast so soon forgotten me! But for thee, I should not live in such tribulation and poverty. Sad, very sad, is my life, I would I had never been born. I know not why so much suffering has fallen to my lot. Yet I have not forgotten thee; but am always praying the Holy Virgin to keep thee pure and well in body and soul. There is an image here of the Kazan Virgin for which a church has been built. For thy sake I had this image brought to my house, and at night I have myself taken it back, carrying it on my shoulders. And on May 23, I had a vision. The heavenly Queen appeared to me, pure and radiant, and promised to petition her Son, our Lord, to turn my sorrow into joy. And I heard, unworthy though I be, the radiant Virgin speak these words; ‘Thou hast honoured my image and carried it back to my church, I will exalt thee and protect thy son.’ And thou, my joy, my own child, let the fear of God dwell in thine heart. Write me, darling Aliósha, if only one line to still my sobs; let me rest from my sorrow, have mercy upon me, thy mother and slave. I pray thee write. I greet thee devoutly.”

When Alexis had finished reading the letter, his aunt gave him presents, sent by his mother—a small image; a handkerchief which the lowly sister Elena had embroidered with her own hand; and two small limewood cups, for drinking vodka. These humble presents touched him even more than the letter.

“You have quite forgotten her,” said Maria, looking him straight in the face. “You neither write nor send her anything.”

“I dare not write,” replied the Tsarevitch.

“Why not?” she retorted with vivacity, and her sharp eyes seemed to sting him, “And even if it did mean a little suffering, what matter? It’s for your mother, and no one else.”

He remained silent. Then she began telling him in a low voice all she had learnt from Michael, a half-witted saint, who had come from Sousdal, “Their joy is ever buoyant: visions, signs, prophecies and voices from the images do not cease. Job of Novgorod says: ‘Some ill is awaiting thee in Petersburg. Yet I feel that God will deliver thee; thou shalt see what will happen.’ It was revealed unto Vissàrion, the old man who lives immured in the Jaroslav wall, that we are on the eve of a change. Either the Tsar will die, or Petersburg fall. And St. Demetrius appeared to the Bishop of Rostov, Dositheus, prophesying that there should be tribulations and that the fulfilment will soon come.

“Soon, soon,” concluded Marya, “for many are they who cry: ‘Revenge, O Lord! and speed Thy fulfilment.’”

Alexis knew that the fulfilment meant his father’s death.

“Remember my words,” she cried with prophetic voice. “Not for long will Petersburg exist! it will soon perish.” And looking out of the window upon the small white houses among the green marshes, she repeated malignantly: “Sink it! Woe to it! Let it sink back thither whence it came, the devil’s bog. Sprung up like a toadstool, it will rot like one. Not even its site will be known, the damned place!”

The old crow was started on her cawing.

“Old woman’s tales,” said Alexis, waving his hand hopelessly; “we have heard not a few of such prophecies and they have all turned out to be rubbish.”

She was going to reply, but glancing at him with her sharp piercing eye, she said:—

“What’s the matter with you Tsarevitch? Are you ill? have you been drinking?”

“I am forced to it. The day before yesterday at a formal launching, they carried me out senseless. I would much rather have been a convict in exile or ill in bed than there!”

“You should take medicine or feign illness to escape such launchings? seeing you know your father’s ways.”

Alexis remained silent, then he sighed heavily: “Ah Marya! Marya! I am much troubled. I hardly know what to do with myself, so troubled am I. No man could stand this without God’s help. I would be glad to hide myself somewhere, run away from all this.”

“Where can you escape from your father? his arm is long. You will be found out anywhere.”

“I am sorry,” continued Alexis, “that I did not follow Kikin’s advice and go to France or to the Emperor. There my life would be more peaceful, till God wills otherwise. Many in my position have found refuge in flight; only there is no pretext for going away. I really don’t know what will become of me, auntie dear; I want nothing, only give me freedom and let me live quietly. Or that they should give me leave to become a monk. I would abdicate the throne, and would live in retirement away from everything. I would choose some quiet, plain country seat, and there end my days.”

“Enough, enough, Alexis! the Tsar is not immortal after all. He too will die in God’s good time. They say he suffers from epileptic fits; such people never live long. God will grant the end. I feel sure it won’t tarry much longer. Wait, I say—the time of our rejoicing will also come. You are beloved by the people, they drink your health, calling you Russia’s Hope. The crown will not pass you by.”

“What is the good of it, Marya? I believe it is my fate in any case to be a monk. Nothing awaits me but the cowl, either in my father’s life, or later after his death, when they will treat me as they did Basil Shúisky, who was forced to become a monk, and then imprisoned. My life is likely to be a gloomy business.”

“How can we help it? One hour’s suffering and the issue is a whole life. Be patient, Alexis.”

“I have borne it patiently for a long while, I can no more,” he burst out, unable to contain himself any longer. His face had grown pale and convulsed. “Would it had an end! This weariness is worse than death; my head seems to be always on the edge of the block. And why all this, O Lord? What have I done to him? Did I not try my very best to please my father? When quite a child I was dragged about on campaigns, half killed with work, made to do sentry duty in the frost, drink vodka till my head swam, I wonder I came out of it alive. I bore it all patiently. I spared neither health nor life. And he never even pitied, not even so much as addressed a kind word to me. He is always angry, and looks as fierce as a beast. It makes no difference what you do for him. If you tore yourself in two, all he would say would be, ‘Why not in four?’ Well, never mind, put it down to my fault, let it be granted that I disappoint him. Who is responsible for it that I was born such as I am? I am not a fool by nature, and he knows it. Were I a fool, I would have a little better life. But I live according to my own lights, not his. He cares nothing for the people, I sympathize with the people. That is the reason why I am in disgrace. ‘Do not do the good you would, but the evil I will.’ Two men in the world are like unto God: The Muscovy Tsar and the Pope of Rome—their will is their law. I would not mind if this were all; in old days he used to scold and beat me, yet it always seemed that he considered me; that I was not quite a stranger to him. But do you know what he has devised of late? He neither scolds, nor beats me, not even touches me; all he does, is to remain silent. I talk to him; he neither heeds nor sees, but looks past me, as if I did not exist. And this lasts for months, years! I am no longer a human being in his eyes, but some creature worse than a dog. Now, is this fair? After all I am his son, his flesh and blood. Even the serpent does not eat its young. He has no fear of God. I know what it is he wants—my death. To me he is not a father, but a monster, a blood-sucker, a torturer. Ay, it would have been better if he had killed me at once. And what does all this mean? O Lord! what is he trying to do with me? What?”

He was going to add something, but his voice broke; all he could do was to falter faintly “O Lord! Lord!”

He dropped his arms on the table, covered his face and pressed his head between the palms of his hand; he did not weep, only seemed to sink down, shrink and contract, as from some severe inward pain, and a convulsive tearless sob shook his whole frame.

Tsarevna Marya bent over him; on his shoulder she laid her small white, firm, powerful hand; the Tsarevna Sophia had hands just like these.

“Don’t be fainthearted, Tsarevitch,” said she, with gentle severity in her kind voice. “Do not murmur against God. Remember Job! It is good to trust in the Lord, for our life and going forth are in His hand. He can turn evil into good. When God is with me what can men do unto me? Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear, for the Lord will not forsake me! Trust in Christ, my darling Aliósha! He will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able to bear.”

She stopped; and he too had grown quiet under the touch of this fond, firm hand, and the sound of these old, familiar pious words.

Somebody knocked at the door. In came Soundóuleya Vahrameyevna sent by the Tsaritsa Martha to fetch them. Alexis raised his head; his face though very pale was almost calm. He glanced at the image and the faintly glimmering lamp, crossed himself piously, and said:—

“You are right, aunt; God’s will worketh in all things. Moved by the prayers of the Holy Virgin and all the Saints, God will judge between us according to His righteous will. This was, and is, my hope.”

“Amen!” said Marya. They got up and together went into the Tsaritsa Martha’s private apartments.

CHAPTER IV

Notwithstanding the sunny day, it was quite dark in the room, and the candles were burning. Not a ray could find its way through the windows, blocked up with felt, hung with tapestries. The close air was saturated with calamite, yarrow brandy, rose water, and perfumes added to the fuel for scent. The room was crowded with seats, dressers, cupboards, boxes, hampers, chests, coffers, treasure chests bound with strips of iron, cypress-wood trunks filled with various furs, dresses and linen: “the white treasury.” In the middle of the room towered the Tsaritsa’s bed, overhung by a canopy, the bed-curtain made of red satin, interwoven with a pale green and gold design, with a quilt of gold embossed tissue, lined with sable and surrounded by a border of ermine. Everything was sumptuous, but old, worn and dilapidated, and looked as though it would crumble into dust at the first breath of fresh air. Through the open door a glimpse of the private chapel could be caught; it was flooded by the light of lamps, which burned before the images, trimmed with gold and silver, and studded with priceless gems. Here numerous relics were kept: crosses, panagias, triptychs, little boxes, shrines with relics, myrrh, leaven, miracle-working ointments, holy water in waxed cloths, saucers of cassia; holy chrism in lead vessels, blessed by Patriarchs; tapers lit with fire from heaven; sand from the Jordan; bits of the burning bush, and the oak of Mamre; some of the Holy Virgin’s milk; an azure stone—part of the sky on which Christ had stood; a stone in a cloth case “diffusing a perfume, but what sort of stone is unknown.” Other treasures were the leg wrappers of Paphnuti Borovsky; a tooth of Antipas the Great, a charm against toothache which Ivan the Terrible had appropriated from the reliquary of his murdered son.

Tsaritsa Martha was sitting near the bed, in a gilt arm-chair, which resembled a throne, with a double-crested eagle and crown carved on the back. Although the green glazed stove, richly ornamented with festoons and mouldings, had been well heated, the sickly, shivering old woman wrapped herself in a warm jacket, lined with Arctic fox. A pearl fringe and strings hung over her forehead, from under the golden headgear. Her face was not old, but it seemed lifeless as stone. According to the old custom of Muscovy’s Tsaritsas, white and rouge were thickly laid on her face, and made it yet more lifeless. Only the eyes seemed alive; they were transparently lucid, but with a curious blind look resembling that of night birds in daylight.

A monk sat at her feet on the floor relating something to her.

When the Tsarevitch and his aunt came in, the Tsaritsa Martha greeted them kindly, and invited them to listen to this pilgrim of God. He was of small stature, and had a child-like, cheerful face; his voice, too, was cheerful, melodious and pleasant. He was describing his pilgrimages, the settlements of monks on Athos and Solovki; he compared the Russian monastery with the Greek and gave the preference to the Greek.

“The monastery on Mount Athos is called the garden of the Holy Virgin, and the Holy Mother herself is ever beholding it from the heavens, she provides for, and keeps it from destruction. And with her help the settlement flourishes, and brings forth visible and invisible fruit; the visible fruit is fair, the invisible is that of souls saved. And any one, who has once penetrated within the garden, the forecourt of Paradise, and has beheld its nature and beauty, will not, I believe, have any desire to leave it. The air is pure, and the high hills and mountains, the warmth and light of the sun, the variety of trees and fruits, and the nearness of the longed-for land, Jerusalem, maintain a perpetual joy.

“The Solovetzky Isle on the contrary inspires fear and exasperation; it is melancholy, dark, and cold as Tartarus.

“There are features about that island which harm the soul. Sea-gulls, white birds, live there in great numbers; all the summer long they multiply, breed and build their nests on the ground near the paths, along which the monks go to church. And great is the mischief caused by these birds to the monks. First they lose their tranquillity. Secondly, watching the birds play and flutter and pair, they delight in it, and their passions are aroused. Thirdly, women, maidens, and nuns often visit the monastery.

“Mount Athos is free from any such temptations; neither seagulls nor women come near it. One woman only floating on the wings of an eagle, the holy Church, soars over that delightful desert, until the fulness of time appointed by the Lord shall be reached; and to Him be glory for ever and ever—Amen.”

When he had finished, the Tsaritsa begged all to leave the room, even Marya; and remained alone with Alexis.

She scarcely knew him, and could not remember what relationship existed between them; even his name she repeatedly forgot, and simply called him grandson. Yet she loved and pitied him with a strange prophetic pity, as if his fate, unknown to himself, were revealed to her.

She looked at him for a long time in silence, with her lucid motionless gaze, which seemed to be dimmed by a film, like the eyes of nightbirds. Then she sadly smiled, and began to gently stroke his face and hair with her hand.

“My poor orphan! neither father nor mother to protect thee! The cruel wolves will devour the lamb; the black crows will peck the white dove to death. I am sorry for thee, my loved one; thou wilt not live long.”

These wandering words of the last Tsaritsa, who seemed here in Petersburg a pathetic phantom of ancient Muscovy, this decaying splendour, this quiet warm room, where time seemed at a standstill, all filled Alexis’ soul with the chill of death, and memories of his fair distant childhood. He felt a sweet melancholy pain gnawing at his heart. He kissed the pale meagre hand, with its thin fingers, from which the ancient, heavy royal rings kept dropping off. She bent her head, as if musing, turning over her coral beads; beads which ward off evil spirits, for coral grows in the shape of a cross.

“Everything, everything is troubled; times are growing evil!” she again began with increasing alarm. “Have you read, grandson, in the Scriptures: ‘Children, these are the last days? Have you heard he is coming and is already in the world’? This has been said about him, the son of Perdition. He is already at the threshold, soon will he come in! I can’t tell whether I shall live to see my beloved, my fair sun, the pious Tsar Fédor. Could I but just look at him, if only a glance when he comes in power and glory to wage war with the unfaithful, and having conquered them will sit on the throne of glory, and all the people will bow before him saying: ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’”

Her eyes brightened up, but in the next moment a dull film seemed to come over them, like ashes over live charcoal.

“Ah! No, I shall not live to see him. I have provoked God’s wrath. My heart has a presentiment that trouble is coming. I am sick at heart, grandson. And my dreams have been ill-omened of late.”

She furtively glanced round, then bringing her lips to his ear, she whispered:

“Do you know, grandson, what I dreamt quite recently? Whether it was a dream or a vision, I can’t tell for certain, but he, he, himself, none other than himself, came to me.”

“Who, Tsaritsa?” asked Alexis.

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you see it? Listen then, grandson, how it was I dreamt that dream. Perhaps you will then understand. It seemed to me, as if I were lying on this very bed, as it were expecting something. Suddenly the door was thrown open, and he appeared. I at once recognised him. Tall, stout, a short foreign coat, in his mouth a pipe; his face clean shaven, with whiskers like a cat. He came up, looked at me and remained silent. I also kept silent, waiting for what would happen next; I felt so sick at heart, so weary—— I tried to cross myself; but could not lift my hand; I tried to recite a prayer, my tongue would not move. I lay there, as if dead. He took my hand, and felt it; I shuddered. I glanced at the holy image, the image too seemed to have taken a new shape: it was no longer the blessed Saviour, but an unclean German, with bloated blue face, like that of a drowned man. And meanwhile I heard him saying to me:—

“‘You are sorely ill, Martha. Would you like me to send you my doctor? Why are you staring at me like this? Do you not recognise me?’ I answered, ‘How could I fail to recognise you? I know you—I have seen many like you.’ ‘Well, if you know me tell me who I am,’ said he. ‘There is no mistaking who you are: a foreigner, a foreigner’s son, a drummer.’ Upon this he grinned and chuckled like a mad tom cat. ‘You are completely gone mad, old woman, that is quite evident. I am neither a foreigner, nor a drummer, but the divinely anointed Tsar of all the Russias, your own dead husband’s, the Tsar Fédor’s, stepbrother.’ Now I was roused, I could hardly restrain myself from spitting in his face, and calling: ‘Thou dog! cur’s pup; pretender, Gregory Otriópieff, anathema, this is who thou art!’ But then, ‘it isn’t worth while,’ thought I, ‘why should I rail at him? He is not even worth spitting on. It is but a dream, an evil apparition, which by God’s will, I am now enduring. I’ll just blow with my lips and it will all disappear and disperse.’ ‘And if you are the Tsar,’ said I, ‘What is your name?’

“‘Peter is my name,’ he answered. When I heard the name ‘Peter,’ it was as though a light had flashed upon me. ‘Ah!’ thought I, ‘is this who you are? well, just wait.’ And seeing my tongue would not move, I, not being a fool, began in my mind to recite the holy adjuration.

“‘Satan! thou fiend, get thee away from me, into empty space, thick forests, deep precipices, into bottomless seas, upon prodigious, uninhabited hills, on which the glory of God’s face never shines. Cursed! disappear from me into Tartarus, bottomless hell, the infernal regions of Gehenna. Amen! Amen! Amen! I blow at thee, I spit on thee.’ When I had finished my imprecation, he had disappeared: the earth seemed to have engulfed him, not a trace of him was left, only a smell of tobacco. I awoke, cried out. In hurried Soundóuleya Vahrameyevna, sprinkled me with holy water, burnt some incense; I got up, walked into the chapel, fell down before the holy Queen, only then having remembered and thought it over, I realized who he had been.”

While she was speaking the Tsarevitch gradually realised that it was his father who had been to see her, not in a dream, but in reality. At the same time the maundering of the woman seemed to catch hold of and infect him.

“Well, and who was it, Tsaritsa?” he repeated with a trembling yet eager curiosity.

“Don’t you see? Have you forgotten what is said in Ephraim’s book, about the second coming, ‘there shall come a proud prince of this world, under the name of Simon Peter, who shall be the Antichrist.’ Do you hear, his name is Peter? It is he Himself, no doubt.”

She fixed on him her eyes dilated with fear, and repeated in a choking whisper: “It is he, himself, Peter! the Antichrist, the Antichrist!”

Book III
THE PRIVATE JOURNAL OF THE TSAREVITCH ALEXIS

CHAPTER I
THE DIARY OF FRÄULEIN ARNHEIM, MAID OF HONOUR

May 1, 1714.

A cursed country, a cursed people! Brandy, blood, and dirt! It is difficult to say which is the ruling characteristic. Dirt, perhaps. The Danish King had good reason to say: “The next time ambassadors from Muscovy come to me, I will have pig-sheds erected for them, for any place they occupy, even a short time, is rendered uninhabitable for at least six months by the stench.” A Frenchman describes the Muscovite as a human being according to Plato; a featherless biped possessing all human qualities except cleanliness and common sense.

And these stinking savages, these baptized bears, more pitiable still when changed into apes of Europeans, consider themselves the only human beings, the rest of mankind beasts. Especially for us Germans they feel an inborn and invincible hatred; our touch alone defiles them. Lutherans are little better than Satan himself in their eyes. I would not remain another moment in Russia were it not for my duty of loyalty, and devotion to her Highness, my most gracious mistress and dear friend, the Crown Princess Sophia Charlotte. Whatever may happen, I will not forsake her!

I will write this diary in the languages I usually speak, German and French. But some of the jokes, proverbs, songs, text of ukases and bits of conversation, I will give in Russian and afterwards translate them.

My father, a pure German, belongs to an ancient family of Saxon Knights. My mother was a Pole. With her first husband, a Polish nobleman, she had lived for a long time in Russia, not far from Smolensk, and knew the Russian language well. I was brought up in Torgau, at the court of the Queen of Poland, which was frequented by many Muscovites. I have been familiar with the sound of Russian speech since my childhood. I speak badly; I don’t like the language, but understand it well.

I have decided to keep a diary in order to ease my heart, when it is too heavy: imitating the talker of old, who, not daring to confide his secret to people, whispered it to the marsh-reeds.

I should not like these notes ever to become public, but I rejoice to think that they will one day be read by a man whose opinion I value more than anything else in the world—that of my great teacher, Gottfried Leibnitz.

His letter came just as I was thinking about him. He asks me to find out about the salary which he claims on the strength of his position in the Russian service, as Geheimer Justiz-Rath. I fear he will never see the money. Reading his letter I almost wept for joy and sadness, when I remembered our quiet walks and talks in the galleries of the Salzdallen Castle, along the lime avenues of Herrenhausen, where the gentle breezes among the trees and the murmur of fountains seemed to be ever singing our favourite song from “The Mercure Galant.”

“Chantons, dançons, tout est tranquille

Dans cet agréable séjour.

Ah! le charmant asile!

N’y parlons que de jeux, de plaisirs et d’amours.”

I remembered the teacher’s words which at that time I almost believed: “I am a Slav as you are; we ought to rejoice that we have Slavonic blood in our veins. A great destiny awaits the race. Russia will link Europe to Asia and reconcile the East and the West. This country is like a new stewpot which has not yet absorbed any foreign flavour; a sheet of white paper, whereon you can write anything you like; virgin soil which will be broken up, and ploughed to receive new seed. Russia might in time even lead Europe, since she may avoid those errors which are too deeply rooted in us.” An inspired look lit up his face as he concluded, “I seem called by Providence to be a Russian Solon—the lawgiver of a new world. To gain supremacy over the mind of such a man as the Tsar, and direct it for the good of the people is of more worth than the gaining of a hundred battles.”

Alas! My poor great dreamer! Could you but know and see all I have learnt and seen in Russia!

Even now as I am writing, sad and stark reality reminds me that I am no longer in the delightful refuge at Herrenhausen, that German Versailles, but in the depth of Muscovite Tartary.

Through the window, screams, shouts, and quarrellings reach me from below; the servants of our neighbour, Princess Natalia, are fighting ours; Russians fighting Germans. I see, alas! the union between Asia and Europe, the East and the West, as it really is.

In ran our secretary, pale and trembling, his dress in tatters, his face bleeding. On seeing him the Crown Princess almost swooned. The Tsarevitch was sent for, but he was suffering from his habitual complaint—drunkenness.

May 2.

We occupy the palace of the Crown Prince Alexis, situated on the banks of the Neva, a whitewashed, two-storied house with a red-tiled roof. The accommodation is so limited that nearly the whole of her Highness’s retinue had to be lodged in the neighbouring houses, hired by the Senate for that purpose. One of them had neither doors, windows, stoves, nor furniture of any sort. Her Highness was obliged to finish it at her own expense, and add stables to it.

Yesterday, the proprietor of the house, a certain Gedeónoff, returned; he is in Tsarevna Natalia’s service: he ordered our servants to be turned out, and our things to be thrown into the yard. Then he began to lead her Highness’s horses out of the stables and put in his own instead. The Crown Princess ordered the stables to be taken down so as to remove them to another place. But when the Stallmeister brought the workmen, Gedeónoff sent some of his, who beat ours and chased them away. When the Stallmeister threatened to report this to the Tsar, Gedeónoff answered laughingly: “Report as much as you like; I will forestall you!”

But worst of all is the fact that he assures us, he does everything by order of the Tsarevna. This Tsarevna is an old maid, and the vilest tempered creature in the world. She is very amiable to our face, but when our back is turned, every time her Highness’s name is mentioned she spits, saying: “The German minx! what airs she gives herself! The time will come when she will have to cultivate a little modesty!”

Thus our grooms are obliged to sleep in the open. So limited is the accommodation in the whole town that the men could not be lodged elsewhere, even for a hundred pieces of gold. When this is mentioned to the Tsar, all he replies is, that in a few years time there will be houses enough. But they won’t be needed then, at least not for our people, who, for the most part, will probably have died.

They would not believe in Europe if they knew what poverty is ours. The money for the maintenance of the Crown Princess is paid so irregularly and scantily that it never suffices. At the same time everything is frightfully dear here; we have to pay for things four times as much as in Germany. We are in debt to all our tradesmen; they will soon stop supplying us. To say nothing of servants, we ourselves are sometimes short of candles, firewood, even food. Nothing can be got out of the Tsar, he is always busy. The Tsarevitch is always drunk. “The world is full of misery,” her Highness said to me to-day, “ever since the age of six I have known no happiness, and no doubt Providence has still greater misfortunes in store for me.” With an absent look, as if she already beheld this future, she repeated: “I shall not escape it,” and with such calm resignation that I found no words to comfort her and could only silently kiss her hand.

Suddenly a cannon shot was heard. We were obliged to make haste and get ready for a pleasure party on the Neva, a “Water Assembly.”

It is the custom here, on hearing the gun signal or seeing the flags hung out at different parts of the town, for all barges, yachts, wherries, boyers, to assemble at the fortress. A fine is imposed for non-appearance.

We set out at once in our boyer with ten oarsmen. Together with other boats we kept rowing for a long time up and down the Neva, always following the Admiral, daring neither to lag behind nor overtake, for fear of being fined. Fines are imposed here for everything.

There was music; a band of trumpets and cornets. The bastions of the fortress re-echoed the sounds of the music.

We were sad as the music was, and the cold, pale blue river with its flat banks, the pale blue sky, transparent as ice, the gleam of the golden pinnacle on the Church of St. Peter and Paul, (built of wood, but painted yellow to suggest marble,) the melancholy chiming of the striking clocks, all intensified our dejection, which was of quite a different nature from anything I had hitherto experienced, except in this city.

And yet the view is pleasing enough. Along the low quay, paved with black tarred piles, runs a line of pale pink brick houses of elaborate design, resembling Dutch churches with pointed turrets, garret windows on the high roofs, and spacious latticed vestibules. You might fancy a real town lay behind them. But next behind them stand poor huts roofed with birch-bark and turf, and, further back, a wilderness inhabited by wolves and deer. On the sea front, windmills just as in Holland. Everything is bright, almost dazzling, and, at the same time, pale and cheerless. It seems to be run up, made just for the time being. It is a phantom town, a dream.

The Tsar with all his family were in a special boyer; he stood at the rudder and steered. The Tsaritsa and Princesses wore dimity jackets, red skirts, round oil-skin caps, everything after the Dutch fashion—they looked like real sailors’ wives from Saardam. “I am inuring my family to the water; those who want to live with me must not be afraid of water,” said Peter. He generally takes them with him; especially in cold weather. He locks them in a cabin and steers the whole time against the wind, until he has well rocked them, and “salvo honore,” made them sea sick; then only is he content!

We were afraid lest it might be decided to go to Kronslot. Those who took part in one such excursion last year (they think of it with terror even to this day), were overtaken by a storm, and narrowly escaped drowning; then they went aground fast on a sand bank, and remained there for several hours up to the waist in water. At last they succeeded in reaching an island, a fire was made, and, quite naked (they had been obliged to take their wet clothes off), wrapped themselves in coarse sledge covers obtained from the peasants, and in this way they spent a whole night, warming themselves at the fire, without drink or food—new Robinson Crusoes.

But this time Providence favoured us; the red standard on the Admiral’s boyer was lowered, a sign that the excursion was over.

We returned along the canals, viewing the town. Canals are very numerous here. “God grant me a long life, and Petersburg will become a second Amsterdam!” boasts the Tsar. “Arrange everything as it is done in Holland,” these are common words in the Tsar’s ukases, in reference to the building of the town. The Tsar has a passion for straight lines, everything that is straight and regular seems beautiful to him. If it were possible he would have had the whole town built according to rule and compass. The inhabitants are urged to build in lines, no building either to exceed or fall short of a fixed line, so that the streets and lanes may all be regular and straight. Houses which go beyond the line are ruthlessly pulled down.

The Tsar’s pride is the interminably long, straight Nevsky Prospect, which cuts through the town. The street is still quite waste amid solitary marshes, yet it is already planted with three or four rows of lime-trees, like an avenue. It is kept very clean, being swept every Saturday by captive Swedes.

Many of these geometrical lines of imaginary streets are almost without houses. Waymarks alone stand there; others, already built on, bear traces of the plough and furrows of recent cultivation.

Though the houses are erected of brick, according to Vitruvius’ directions, yet so hurried and precarious has been the work that they threaten to fall. When a carriage passes they tremble. The swampy soil has no resistance. The Tsar’s enemies predict that some time the whole town will be engulphed.

One of our companions, the old Baron Loewenwold, the High Commissioner of Livonia, an amiable and clever man, told us a number of curious incidents about the beginning of the town. In order to raise the first earth rampart of the Peter and Paul fortress, dry earth was needed; none was to be had anywhere near, all being marsh, mud and moss. Then they devised the plan of carrying the soil for the bastions from distant places in old bast sacks and mats, or even simply in the skirts of their tunics. At this Sisyphean labour two-thirds of the poor wretches perished; more especially in consequence of the godless peculation and faithlessness of those in whose keeping they were. For months they never saw any bread, which is often difficult to procure even for money in this forlorn place. They lived on cabbage and turnips, suffered from diarrhoea and scurvy, swelled with hunger, froze in their earthen habitats, which resembled the holes of animals, and died like flies. The erection of the fortress on the Pleasure Island (appropriate name!) cost the lives of hundreds of thousands who were driven here by force like cattle from all parts of Russia. In fact this unnatural city, this pleasant “Paradise,” as the Tsar called it, is built on human bones! They pay no ceremonies here either to the living or the dead. I myself have seen in various parts of the town the body of a workman wrapped in a mat, carried on a pole by men, or, bare as it was, simply laid on a sledge and taken to the cemetery, where it was buried without any rite. Such a number of the poor folk die here daily that there is no time to give them all Christian burial.

One hot summer day, rowing on the Neva, we noticed grey patches on the azure surface; they turned out to be masses of dead midges—which abound in the neighbouring marshes. These came from Lake Ládoga. One of the oarsmen scooped up a hatful of them.

While listening to Loewenwold’s tales about the building of Petersburg I closed my eyes, and before me rose a vision of countless human bodies, very grey and small, like these masses of dead midges floating on the Neva, a mass without beginning or end, of persons whom nobody knows and nobody remembers.

On my return home I sat down to write this diary in my small room, a veritable bird’s cage, in the attic, just below the roof.

It felt close, I opened the window, in rushed the smell of spring, also of tar and pine shavings. On the banks of the Neva two carpenters, a young man and an old one, were repairing a boat. Nothing but the hammering was heard, and the monotonous melancholy song which the younger man was singing over and over again. Here are the few words I was able to catch:

In the town Saint Petersburg

On the river Neva,

On the glorious Basil Isle,

A sailor rigged his ship, O!

Gazing up towards the evening sky, pale green, transparent and cold as ice, I listened to this melancholy song, so like a wail, and myself was moved almost to tears.

May 3.

To-day her Highness went to see the Tsaritsa; she complained about Gedeónoff, and also asked for a more regular payment of the money. I was present at the interview.

The Tsaritsa was amiable as usual.

“Czaarishe Majestät Euch sehr lieb,” she said to the Crown Princess in her broken German, during the conversation.

“Believe me, his Majesty is very fond of you. ‘Truly Catherine,’ said he, ‘your daughter-in-law is exceedingly pleasing both in appearance and temperament.’ ‘Your Majesty,’ said I, ‘you love your daughter more than me.’ ‘No,’ he answered and laughed, ‘not more, but very soon I will love her as much. My son,’ said he, ‘is really not worthy of so good a wife.’”

We concluded from these words that the Tsar was not over fond of his son.

When her Highness almost tearfully interceded for her husband, the Tsaritsa promised to be his advocate, always with the same amiability, assuring her that she loved her as her own child, and had she carried her under her heart, she could not have loved her better.

I don’t like this Russian sentimentality: it is honey on the knife’s point.

Yet it appears that her Highness does not deceive herself; she once said in my presence that the Tsaritsa was worse than the rest: “pire que tout le reste.”

To-day, coming home from the interview, she remarked, “she will never forgive me if I bear a son.”

One day when our conversation had turned on the Tsaritsa, an old peasant woman whispered into my ear, “She has no business to reign; she was neither born to it, nor is she a Russian. And we know how she was taken prisoner, brought into the camp with only a chemise on, and given into custody. The man on duty, our officer, gave her a coat. The Lord alone knows of what rank she is; they say she used to wash shirts in Finland.”

I could not help remembering this to-day when her Highness, in greeting the Tsaritsa, was going to stoop and kiss her dress, according to court etiquette. It is true the Tsaritsa did not allow it to come to that, but herself embraced and kissed her. Yet, what an irony of fate, that a Princess of Wolfenbüttel, heiress of the great Guelphs, who contested the German Imperial Crown in days when the houses of Hohenzollern and Hapsburg had never yet been heard of, should kiss the dress of this woman who once was a laundress!

May 4.

After warm sunny days it has suddenly turned wintry again, with cold wind, wet, snow and rain. Ice from the Ládoga is floating down the Neva. We are told, however, that snow falls here even as late as June.

Our palace has been so neglected that even its roof has proved unsound; to-night, during a severe rainfall, water came through the ceiling in her Highness’s bedchamber; a good thing it did not come on the bed; but there was a pool on the floor.

The ceiling is decorated with a painted allegory; a burning altar entwined with roses; on both sides Cupids bearing two coats of arms; the Russian Eagle and the Brunswick Steed. Between them, two clasped hands and the inscription, “Non unquam junxit nobiliora fides.” “Never did fidelity join two nobler beings.” The damp has formed a black spot just over the altar, and cold dirty water kept dripping from Hymen’s flame.

I remembered the wedding speech made by the archeologist Eckhardt, in which he tried to prove that both bride and bridegroom descended from the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus. A fine country, where rain falls on the nuptial couch of the descendant of the Porphyrogene!

May 5.

At last the Crown Prince has appeared. He lives in the other half of the house, quite separate from us, and often weeks pass by without our ever seeing him. The pair have had a ‘scene.’ I heard it all from the adjacent room where her Highness had expressly wished me to remain.

To all her prayers and complaints in regard to the Gedeónoff affair and the keeping back of money, he answered, shrugging his shoulders,

“Mich nichts angehn. Bekümmere mich nicht an Sie. This matter is no business of mine. I do not trouble myself about your money affairs.”

Then he burst out reproaching her for complaining to his father about him.

“Are you not ashamed of yourself?” sobbed her Highness. “Spare at least your own honour! In Germany you would not find a cobbler or tailor, who would allow himself thus to treat his wife.”

“You are no longer in Germany but in Russia.”

“I am only too well aware of this. Yet if only everything were carried out that was promised.”

“Who promised?”

“Did not you with the Tsar sign the marriage contract?”

“Halten Maul! Ich habe sie nichts versprochen. Hold your tongue! I promised you nothing. You very well know that you were forced upon me!”

He jumped up; the chair he had sat on fell to the ground.

I almost rushed to her rescue, I was afraid he would strike her. I hated him to such an extent at that moment, that I believe I could have killed him.

“Das danke ihnen der Henker! May the headsman reward you for this!” exclaimed the Crown Princess, beside herself with anger and sorrow.

Swearing at her in an odious manner, he left the room, slamming the door.

It seems all that is wild and base in this country is incarnate in this man. Only one thing I find hard to decide. Which is he, a fool or a scoundrel?

Poor Charlotte! Her Highness, who daily shows me greater friendship, quite beyond my deserts, has herself desired that I should so call her. Poor Charlotte, when I came to her, she threw herself into my arms, and remained silent for a long while, trembling all over. At last she said sobbing:

“If only I were not with child and could, without hindrance return to Germany, I would gladly agree to live there on dry bread and water. I am well nigh losing my reason. I pray God to give me strength, so that I may not be tempted to do something desperate!”

And after awhile she gently added, weeping in her wonted submissiveness, which frightens me more than all her despair:—

“I am the unhappy victim of my family. They have profited nothing from my sacrifice, while I myself am slowly dying of grief.”

We were both crying when they came to tell us it was time to go to the masquerade. Suppressing our tears we began to dress. Such is the custom here: willy nilly, be merry thou must.

The masquerade took place in the open air in the Troitsky Square, near the “hôtellerie.” The square is very low, marshy, and covered with mud, which never dries; part of it had been covered with beams, and wooden planks on the top of these. On the platform thus formed the masqueraders crowded. Happily the weather had again suddenly changed; it was a calm, warm evening. But towards night a thick mist, white as milk, rose from the river and enveloped the square. Many, and especially those ladies who had on extremely thin costumes, were catching cold from the damp, and began to sneeze and cough. Instead of medicine they were given brandy; grenadiers as usual carried it round in buckets. In the white shroud of mist, illumined by the greenish light of the slowly fading twilight—later on in July twilight lasts the whole night through—all these masqueraders, harlequins, pagliazzi, shepherdesses, nymphs, Chinese, Arabs, bears, cranes, and dragons, seemed grotesque and terrible phantoms.

Here also, close to the platform on which we were dancing, black posts with iron points were visible, and on them remained the almost putrefied heads of decapitated criminals. The stench from these heads mingled with the resinous perfume of young pine shoots and birch buds, which now fills the city. And again it seemed, as it always does in this place, all was but a mirage!

May 6.

An unexpected reconciliation! When I approached the half open door, leading to her Highness’s apartment, I saw by chance, in the mirror that she was sitting in an arm-chair, while the Crown Prince, stooping over her and holding her head with both his hands, was kissing her upon the brow with deferential tenderness. I was going to retire, but she too caught sight of me in the mirror and signed to me with her hand. I understood that she wished me to stay, as I did last time, in the next room. The poor girl probably wanted to parade her happiness.

“‘Der Mensch, der sagen, ich sie nicht lieb habe, lügt wie Teufel!’, He who says, I don’t love you lies like the devil!” said the Tsarevitch; I divined that they were talking of one of those slanders about her Highness, which circulate here so freely, (she is even accused of unfaithfulness to her husband). “I believe in you, I know you are good; and those who speak evil about you are not worth your little finger.”

He enquired after her affairs, her troubles, her health, her condition, with such sympathy, and his words and features were so full of intelligence and kindness that he seemed to me quite another being. I could scarcely believe my eyes and ears, remembering what had passed in the same room only yesterday.

When he left and we were alone, Charlotte said to me:

“What a strange man he is, not in the least what he seems. Nobody knows him. How he loves me! Ah, my dear Juliana, give me love, and all will be well, I can endure everything! And when a child will be born unto me, I pray God it may be a son, I shall be quite happy!”

I did not answer; I had not the courage to undeceive her; she was already so happy, but for how long? poor, poor woman!

Perhaps I am unfair to the Tsarevitch? May be, he is really different from what he seems.

He is the most reserved of men. When he is not drunk, he sits buried among his old books: he is supposed to be studying Universal History, and Theology, not only Russian, but also the Catholic and Protestant; he is said to have read through the German Bible eight times: or else he holds converse with monks, pilgrims, friars, and people of the lowest class.

One of his servants, a certain Fédor Yevarlakóff, an intelligent young fellow, a great lover of literature—he borrows from me various books, even Latin ones—told me one day something concerning the Crown Prince, which I at once set down in my note book, a gift from dear Leibnitz, which I always carry with me.

“The Tsarevitch is warmly attached to the priests and the priests to him. He reveres them like God, and they call him a saint; they always beatify him to the people.”

I remember Leibnitz telling me, that on being introduced to him in the summer of 1711, at the ducal castle of Wolfenbüttel, he had a long conversation with the Tsarevitch on his favourite subject: the union of the East with the West, China and Russia with Europe, and that later on he had sent him, through his tutor Baron Huissen, an abstract of the letters about Chinese affairs, Leibnitz asserted that, contrary to all rumours spread about the Tsarevitch, he is very clever, only his intelligence is of a different kind to his father’s. “He probably takes after his grandfather,” remarked Leibnitz.

Her Highness had shown me a copy of the letter received by the Duke Ludwig Rudolf of Wolfenbüttel, her father, from the Berlin Royal Academy of Science. This letter mentions the possibility of spreading real Christian enlightenment throughout Russia in the near future, thanks to the special and marked inclination of the Crown Prince to all science and books.

I have also seen the report of meetings held by the same Academy, in 1711, when one of its members, the Co-Rector Frish, had declared: “The Tsar’s heir loves the sciences even more than the Tsar himself, and in his time he will patronise them no less.”

It seems strange! But I was looking at them both to-day in the mirror, as it were the mysterious mirror of fate, I seemed to distinguish in both faces, so unlike in appearance, one common trait—the shadow of some impending grief, as if they were victims, and great suffering were in store for them both. Or was this only fancy roused by that dark mirror?

May 8.

To-day we were present at the launching of a large seventy-gun man-of-war. The Tsar, dressed as a common shipwright, in a red knitted jerkin daubed with tar, axe in hand, was clambering about the hull props, seeing that all was in order, and paying no heed to danger:—only lately two men were killed at a launching. I remembered the Tsar’s words: “I toil like Noah at the Ark of Russia!” Taking his hat off before the chief Admiral, like a subordinate to his chief, he asked whether it was time to begin, and having received the order, he was the first to strike with his axe. A hundred more axes began to cut the props, at the same time the beams were drawn back which had supported the vessel on both sides in the stays. She glided along the greased cradle foot, first slowly, then like a dart, smashing the cradle foot into shivers, and floated out on the water, rolling and cutting the waves for the first time to the sound of music, cannon salutes, and shouting of the people.

A small boat took us to the new vessel. The Tsar was on board already; he had changed into the uniform of a naval officer, and decorated with a star and the pale blue ribbon of St. Andrew, he received the guests. All standing on the deck, “the newly born” ship was baptized with a first cup of wine. The Tsar made a speech. Here are some stray words I have remembered:—

“Our people resemble children, who never will learn their A B C unless they are made to; they grumble at the time, but once having mastered it, they are grateful. The occurrences of to-day prove this. Has not everything been done under compulsion? And yet words of gratitude are already heard for those undertakings which have borne fruit. If you disdain the bitter, neither shall you enjoy the sweet!”

Standing behind me, I overheard one of the fools, an old boyar, who was probably drunk, whisper to his neighbour, “We would rather not have your blessings when they have to be purchased by so many aches and pains.”

“We have,” continued the Tsar, “the precedents of the civilised nations in Europe, who also began in a small way. It is time for us also to make a start, first in little things, and later will come men who will not recoil before the greater tasks. I know I shall neither do it, nor see it done, for the number of our days is but short, yet will I make a beginning, then those who come after me will find it easier. As for us, we must content ourselves with the glory of having begun!”

I admired the Tsar, he looked so noble. We went down into the cabins, the ladies sat part from the men in an adjacent saloon, where, during the banquet, no man except the Tsar was allowed to enter. There was a small round window, hung with red damask, in the partition between the two saloons. I sat next to it; raising the curtain a little I could see and partly hear what went on in the men’s apartment. Some of the things I have put down in my note book.

Long narrow tables, arranged in the shape of a horse shoe, were laden with cold dishes; pickles and fumados, anything that would create intense thirst. The food is coarse, the wines are good. For the furnishing of these banquets the Tsar allows the Admiralty from his private purse one thousand roubles, a vast sum for this country. The guests sat down anyhow, without any distinction of rank, common seamen next to the highest dignitaries. At one of the tables presided the Kniaz-Pope, the mock Prince-pope, surrounded by his cardinals. He solemnly pronounced “Grace and peace be unto you, noble assembly! In the name of Bacchus, and Ivaska Khmelnitsky, and the Spirit of wine. The drunkenness of Bacchus be with you!”

“Amen,” responded the Tsar, who fills the position of Archdeacon to the Pope.

All guests approached in their turn his Holiness, bowed low before him, kissed his hand, and accepting a ladle of pepper-brandy drank it; this is pure spirit of wine—spiritus vini—poured over red Indian pepper. I should have thought that the mere threat of this brandy would be sufficient to extract confessions from the most hardened malefactor,—here they compel even ladies to drink it.

The health of all the members of the royal household was proposed; only the Tsarevitch and his wife were omitted, although they were present. Every toast was accompanied by the firing of cannon, and the shock of the firing was so great that the glass in one of the windows cracked.

The guests grew speedily intoxicated, especially as brandy was being secretly added to the wine. The air became close in the low cabins, crowded with people. The guests threw off their waistcoats, and pulled off one another’s wigs. Some huddled together and kissed one another, others quarrelled, especially the ministers and senators, who accused one another of bribe-taking, cheating and swindling.

“Your mistress costs you twice your salary!” screamed one.

“Have you forgotten the pickled cibarins?” retorted the other.

Cibarins were pieces of gold, which a cunning petitioner had offered in a small barrel under the guise of mushrooms.

“And how much hemp supplied to the Admiralty did you take off at a gulp, eh?”

“Ah, friends, what is the use of blaming one another? everybody longs for what is good; whether honourable or swindlers, all men are sinners.”

“Bribes are mere accidents!”

“To accept nothing from the petitioners is against nature.”

“Yet by law——”

“What is law but a carriage pole? you can swing it whichever way you like——”

The Tsar listened attentively. It is his custom, when all are drunk, to double the guards and let no one pass out of the door. At the same time, the Tsar, who is never drunk, much as he may take, tries purposely to provoke quarrels among them. He then learns what he could never have known otherwise. There is a proverb to this effect—“When rogues fall out honest men come by their own.” The banquet develops into a public inquiry into character.

The Most Serene Prince Ménshikoff quarrelled with the Vice-Chancellor Shafiroff; the Prince had called the latter a Jew.

“I am a Jew, but you are a pieman,” retorted Shafiroff, “Your father had not even a spoon to eat his soup with. You have been dragged up, ‘taken from the mire you have been made a sire’”—

“You dirty Jew, I’ll crack you on my nail like a flea, and nothing but a little moisture will remain.”

They went on railing at one another for a long time. Russians are as a rule very versatile in ribaldry; I think it is impossible to hear more obscene language anywhere else; the air is full of it. In one of the vilest expressions used by young and old, the term mother is coupled with the most obscene of terms: it is known as the ‘mother-word.’

Having exhausted their resources of abuse, the dignitaries began to spit into one another’s faces, while the guests stood round looking on and laughing. Here such scuffles are quite common, and involve no further consequences.

Prince James Dolgorúki had a tussle with the Prince Caesar Romodanovsky. These two venerable old men, both white with age, abused one another in most insulting terms, then tore one another’s hair, and began strangling and beating one another with their fists. When some of the onlookers tried to separate them, they drew out their swords.

“Ei! dat ist nitt permittet,” exclaimed the Tsar in Dutch, coming up and standing between them.

The Archdeacon Peter Mihailoff is commanded by the Pope “to pacify the guests by word and act during the uproar.”

“I want satisfaction!” moaned Prince James, “I have been sorely affronted.” “Comrade,” remonstrated the Tsar, “Where can you seek judgment against Caesar but from God? I myself am but a subject, and belong to his Majesty’s service. What is the affront after all? None of the assembly has remained untouched by Bacchus. Sauffen-rauffen, we drink, fight, sleep, and make friends.”

For punishment each of them was made to drink another bumper of pepper-brandy. Soon they both were rolling under the table.

Buffoons were shouting, grinning, spitting, not only at one another but also at decent people. A special chorus, called the Spring chorus, imitated the singing of all birds from the nightingale to the warbler, in such piercing, shrill notes that the walls resounded with a deafening noise. A wild dance-song was heard; its words almost meaningless recalled the screams of a witches’ sabbath—

Shinshan!

Shevergen!

Beat the pace, beat!

Don’t spare your feet!

In our ladies’ apartment the old drunken fool, the Princess Abbess Rjévskaya, a veritable witch, whirled away in a dance, lifting her skirts above her head and singing in a voice hoarse with drink:—

Tune up! tune up! my music sweet

Work on, work on my staff,

My father-in-law from the stove

Has fallen into a trough!

Had I but known this would occur

I would have placed him at the top,

And falling, he’d have broken his head....

The Tsaritsa, with her hair in disorder, covered with sweat, red and flown with wine, was watching her, and beat the time with her hands and foot, and laughed like mad. At the beginning of the orgie she tried to persuade her Highness to drink, using some curious sayings, which appear to be numerous on the subject in Russian. “Bumper on bumper is better than stroke upon stroke!” “Even cabbages flag without water!” “Even a hen must drink!” Yet, noticing that the Crown Princess was almost fainting, she left off, and even secretly added water to her wine and ours at the same time. To water wine is counted a great crime at such banquets.

Towards the end of the night—we had remained at table from six in the evening till four in the morning—the Tsaritsa several times went to the door and beckoned to the Tsar, saying:

“Isn’t it time to go home?”

“Never mind, Katinka, to-morrow is a holiday,” answered the Tsar.

Each time I lifted the curtain I saw something new in the men’s apartment.

Somebody walking across the table had stepped with his boot into a dish of fish brawn. The Tsar had only a moment before forced some of this fish down the Chancellor Golóvkin’s throat. Golóvkin could not bear fish; servants held his arms and legs; he struggled, choked, and grew very red. Having done with Golóvkin, the Tsar turned to the Hanoverian Resident, Weber; he fondled and kissed him, with one hand he supported his head, with the other he held a bumper to his lips, begging him to drink it. Then taking off his wig, he kissed now the front, now the back of his head. He lifted his lips and kissed his teeth. They say the reason of this tenderness was the Tsar’s desire to get out of the Resident a diplomatic secret, Moussin Pushkin, who was being tickled below the neck, squealed like a young pig brought to the knife. He is very ticklish. The Tsar is trying to accustom him to it.

The great Admiral Apraksin burst into a flood of tears. The privy councillor Tolstoi crept about on all fours; it turned out afterwards that he was not so drunk as he pretended; he did it to escape more drink. A bottle had cut open the Vice Admiral Cruis’ head. Prince Ménshikoff had fallen to the ground; he seemed comatose; his face had grown livid. People busied themselves round him and tried by rubbing to revive him, lest he should die—death is not an unusual ending to such orgies. The Tsar’s chaplain, the Archimandrite Theodosius, was sick; “I shall die, holy Mother!” he piteously moaned. The Kniaz-Pope was snoring; his head lay on the table in a pool of wine.

Hissing, roaring, the noise of breaking china, bad language, boxes on the ear, which no longer called forth any attention, seemed to fill the air. A stench prevailed as in the vilest tavern. Had anyone come down from the outside he could not have helped vomiting.

My head swam. I seemed at times to lose consciousness. The human faces all looked beast-like; the Tsar’s the most terrible of all. Large and round, with staring eyes, slightly oblong and prominent, with pointed moustaches standing out, it was the face of a tiger or a huge wild cat. Calm and disdainful, his look was clear and piercing. He alone had remained sober; and was now with curiosity peering into the vilest mysteries, into the bared soul of human beings, which lay turned inside out before him in this inquisition chamber, where the instrument of torture was wine.

The Kniaz-Pope was roused and lifted from the table. The Kniaz-Caesar had also had time to sleep off his worst. They were made to dance together; incapable of standing on their feet they had to be propped up on both sides. The pope wore a mock tiara crowned by a nude Bacchus, in his hands he held a cross made of pipes. The Caesar, wearing a mock crown, held a sceptre in his hand. The Tsarevitch lay on the ground dead drunk, between these two fools, these phantoms of ancient dignity—the Russian Tsar and the Russian Patriarch. What happened next I don’t remember, and will not even try to recall, it was too disgusting.

On the neighbouring ships reveille was sounded. On ours too the roll of the drum was heard. The Tsar himself, who is an excellent drummer, was sounding retreat. This signified that a great battle had been waged with Bacchus, and he had remained victor. Grenadiers were bearing away drunken nobles, like bodies from a battle field.

When we saw the sky at last, it seemed to us we had escaped—to be grandiose—from hell; speaking vulgarly—from a cesspool.

May 9.

To-day the Tsar left Petersburg with a large fleet, he has gone to meet the Swedes.

May 20.

It is a long time since I wrote in this diary. Her Highness has been ill after the entertainment. I have not left her. And besides there is nothing worth writing about. Everything is so sad, that one feels inclined neither to talk nor think; let come what will!

May 25.

I was not far wrong, the truce did not last long. Again a black cloud has come between the Tsarevitch and her Highness. Again they do not meet for whole weeks. He too is ill. The doctors say it is consumption; I think it is brandy.

June 4.

The Tsarevitch came in dressed for a journey in a German travelling coat; he talked about things in general, and all at once said:

“Adieu, ich gehe nach Karlsbad.”

The Crown Princess was so taken aback that she could say nothing. She did not even ask for how long. I thought he was joking, but afterwards it appeared that almost immediately on leaving us, he had taken his seat in the coach and was gone. It is said he has really gone to Karlsbad for a cure.

And now we are left alone without Tsar or Tsarevitch. Her Highness does not receive any letters from her parents; they probably believe the slanders circulated about her and are displeased with her. We are forsaken by all.

July 7.

A letter from the Tsar to her Highness. “I do not wish to trouble you, nor act against my conscience, but the absence of your husband, my son, compels me to do so, in order to prevent the idle talk of loose tongues, which are wont to convert truth into lies. The fact of your pregnancy has been spread abroad; and therefore a certain arrangement must be made for the time when by God’s will you will be delivered. The Chancellor Golóvkin will acquaint you with the details of what you will be expected to conform to, and then the mouths of all slanderers will be closed.”

The arrangement was made. Her Highness was surrounded by three women: the Vice Chancellor’s wife, General Bruce’s wife, and the old fool Rjévskaya, the same who danced at the banquet. Her Highness was only slightly acquainted with them. These three shrews are continuously about her, ostensibly to take care of her, really to act as simple spies.

And what does all this mean? what are they frightened at? what deception is possible? surely not an exchange; a boy for a girl, by those who would like to see the inheritance assured to the offspring of the Tsarevitch. Or is it only an excess of amenity on the Tsaritsa’s part?

Only now we realize how much we are hated and suspected. Charlotte’s whole crime consists in being her husband’s wife. The father is against his son, and we stand between them as between two fires.

“I will obediently submit to your Majesty’s wish with regard to the appointment of these three women for my protection,” Charlotte replied, to the Tsar, “all the more as the thought of deceiving you or the Crown Prince had never entered my head. I am hurt by this strange and unmerited treatment. I thought the love and clemency so often promised me by your Majesty were sufficient safeguard against slander, and a warrant that the guilty ones should meet with due punishment. It is grievous that my enemies should be strong enough to incite such intrigues. God is my only refuge in this foreign land, and when abandoned by everybody else, He will hearken unto the sighs of my heart and put an end to my sufferings.”

July 12.

This morning at 7 o’clock her Highness was successfully delivered of a daughter. No news whatever from the Tsarevitch.

August 1.

The news of a Russian victory over the Swedes on July 27, has arrived; it is said an entire squadron under the command of Ehrenshild has been captured. The whole day long the bells are ringing and cannon firing. It is true they are not economical of their powder here; the most insignificant victory, the taking of three or four rotten galleys is sufficient excuse for firing off cannon, and at such a rate as though the world had been conquered.

September 9.

The Tsar has returned to Petersburg. Again a cannonade as though it were a besieged city. We are almost deaf. Endless triumphal processions, fireworks with boastful allegories: the Tsar is glorified as if he were a conqueror of worlds, a Caesar or an Alexander. Again an orgie; we thanked the Lord we were spared this time. Again, it is said, they drank like swine. Rain and mud. A low, dark and, as it were, impenetrable sky looks in through the windows. Wet crows perch cawing on the bare branches. Dreariness! Dreariness!

September 19.

I found the Crown Princess weeping over old letters the Tsarevitch had written her during their engagement. Crooked, broken characters on pencil lines, empty compliments, diplomatic amiabilities. And she, poor thing, shed tears in looking over them!

We learnt by chance that the Tsarevitch lives incognito in Karlsbad and will not return here before the winter.

September 20.

In order to forget myself, and not to think about our affairs, I have decided to write down everything I see or hear about the Tsar. Leibnitz is right—“quanto magis hujus Principis indolem prospicio tanto eam magis admiror”—The longer I watch this sovereign’s character the more I marvel at it.

October 1.

I have seen the Tsar forge iron in the dockyard smithy. The courtiers ministered to him, made the fire up, blew the bellows, carried the coal, soiling the silk and velvet of their gold-embroidered coats thereby.

“That’s right; that is as a Tsar ought to be! He does not eat his bread unearned. He works better than a ‘bourlak,’” said one of the bystanders, a common working man.

The Tsar was wearing a leather apron; his hair was tied up with a string; his sleeves were turned up and showed his bare sinewy arms: his face was smeared with soot. The tall smith, lit up by the red blaze of the furnace, resembled a Titan. His hammer hit the white, hot iron so hard that the sparks showered around, the anvil trembled and rang as if on the point of being smashed into shivers.

I remembered the words spoken by an old boyar:

“Sovereign, thou would’st forge a new Russia out of Vulcan’s iron. Hard work for the hammer! hard, too, for the anvil!”

“Time, too, is like hot iron; forge it at white heat!”

So runs one of the Tsar’s sayings. And he indeed forges Russia at white heat. He never rests; he is always hurrying somewhither. It seems as though he could not stop to rest even if he would. He is killing himself with feverish activity, an incredible tension of strenuousness, a ceaseless convulsiveness. The doctors say that his strength is undermined; that he won’t live long. He is always taking the Olonetz iron waters, yet at the same time he drinks brandy; thus the remedy does more harm than good.

The first impression he leaves on the observer is rapidity. He is all motion; does not walk, but runs. The Imperial Ambassador, Count Kinski—a pretty solid man—assures us that he would rather take part in battles, than have a two hours’ audience with the Tsar, because he is forced, in spite of his stoutness, to run after him all the time, so that he is bathed in sweat even in the severest Russian frost. “Time is like life,” repeats the Tsar. “Loss of time is death.”

Fire and water are his elements, he loves them like one born in them,—water like a fish, fire like a salamander. He has a passion for cannonades, and for various experiments with fire and fireworks. He always lights the fireworks himself, rushing into the flames; I was present once when he singed his hair. He says he is inuring his people to the smell of powder; but this is only an excuse, fire itself he simply loves.

His passion is as great for water. Although the offspring of Muscovy’s Tsars who never saw the sea, he yet began longing for it, when, but a child, he was secluded in the close terems of the Kremlin Palace, like a wild gosling in a hen-house.

He used to float in toy boats on artificial lakes. When at last he got to the sea he could not tear himself away from it again. He spends most of his time on water, he sleeps every day after dinner on his frigate; when ill he lives on board altogether, and sea-air generally cures him. During the summer he feels the lack of air, even among the large gardens of Peterhof, so he fitted himself up a bedroom in Monplaisir, a small house, washed by the Finnish Gulf; the windows of the bedroom look straight upon the sea. In Petersburg the Observatory is built on a sandbank in the mouth of the Neva. In the Summer Garden, also, the Palace is surrounded on two sides by water. Steps lead from the door straight down into the water, just as in Amsterdam and Venice. Once, during winter, when the Neva had already put on her ice-chains, and only before the Palace there remained a round, open ice-free space, about a hundred yards in circumference, he sailed on it up and down in a tiny boat, like a duck in a pool. When the whole river was covered with hard ice he ordered a space, about a hundred yards long and thirty yards wide, to be daily cleared and swept of the snow: I myself have seen him sliding along this surface in small pretty boyers, fitted with steel skates and bulge-ways. “We sail on the ice,” said he, “so as not to forget our nautical exercises during the winter.” Another time, at Moscow, in the Christmas holidays, he went along the streets in a huge sleigh—rigged in imitation of a real sailing vessel. He loves letting young geese and ducks, which the Tsaritsa gives him, go into the water. He delights in their glee as though he himself were a water bird.

He says his first thoughts about the sea date from his reading the narrative of the maritime expedition of Prince Oleg of Kieff to Constantinople, recorded by the Chronicler Nestor. If this be true he is only resuscitating the old in the new, the native in the foreign. From the sea, across the land to the sea—this is Russia’s course!

Sometimes it seems to me that the contradictions of his two beloved elements, water and fire, have merged in him into one being, strange and curious. I know not whether kind or cruel, divine or diabolic—but certainly inhuman.

A strange timidity occasionally besets him. I myself have seen him at a pompous reception of Ambassadors sitting on the throne, confused, blushing, perspiring, trying to gain courage by repeatedly taking snuff; he did not know what to do with his eyes, and even avoided his wife’s glances. When the ceremony was over and he was no longer obliged to stay on the throne, he was as merry as a schoolboy. The Markgravine of Brandenburg told me that at her first interview with the Tsar—who it is true was quite young at that time—he turned away, covered his face with his hands like a shy debutante, and did nothing but repeat, “Je ne sais pas m’exprimer”—“I cannot talk.” He soon recovered, however, and became almost too free. He expressed the desire to convince himself that the German ladies’ hard waists, which so surprised the Russians, were not caused by their bony nature, but by the whalebones in the stays. “Il pourrait être plus poli”—“He might have been a little more polite,” observed the Markgravine. Baron Manteuffel related to me the Tsar’s interview with the Queen of Prussia: “He was so amiable that before offering her his hand he put on a rather dirty glove. At the supper he surpassed himself. He neither picked his teeth, nor belched, nor uttered any other unbecoming noises (il n’a ni roté ni peté).”

When travelling about Europe he insisted that nobody should look at him, and that the roads and streets he had to pass should be quite empty. He entered houses and went out of them by secret ways; visiting museums by night. One day, in Holland, when he was obliged to pass through a hall where the members of the States-General were sitting, he asked the president to make the whole assembly turn their backs to him as he passed; and when respect for the Tsar would not allow them to do so, he pulled his wig down to his nose, hurried through the room and antechamber, and ran down the stair.

One day, rowing on the canal at Amsterdam, and noticing a boat with inquisitive spectators attempting to approach him, he fell into such a fury that he flung two empty bottles at the steersman’s head, and nearly brained him. A real savage! A Russian demon in a civilized Europe! A savage and a child! All Russians in general are children. The Tsar only pretends to be grown up when among them. I shall never forget how, at the village fair near Wolfenbüttel, the hero of Poltava rode on the wooden horses of a second-rate roundabout, tried to catch brass hoops on a stick, and enjoyed himself like a small schoolboy. Children are cruel. The Tsar’s favourite diversion is to force people into doing something for which they have an instinctive aversion. Those who cannot stand wine, butter, cheese, oysters, or vinegar, are on every possible occasion stuffed with them by the Tsar. Those who are ticklish are tickled by him. Many, to please him, pretend that they are unable to endure what he specially delights in administering. Sometimes these jokes are fearful, especially during the festivities in the Christmas holidays, the so-called Slavleniya. This amusement, an old boyar told me, is so terrible, that many prepare for it as for death. People are dragged by ropes from one ice hole to another; others are compelled to sit on the ice bare-buttocked; others again are killed by excessive drink. This is the way a creature alien to man, a faun or a centaur would play with men, maiming them and killing them unawares.

In the anatomical theatre at Leyden he was one day watching how the exposed muscles of a body were being saturated with turpentine. Noticing a look of extreme repulsion on the face of one of his Russian companions, the Tsar took him by the collar, bent him over the table, and insisted on his tearing the muscles off the body with his teeth. At times it is almost impossible to say where childish frolic ends and the cruelty of a beast begins.

Coupled with strange awkwardness and timidity he displays savage shamelessness, especially towards women. “Il faut que Sa Majesté ait dans le corps une légion de démons de luxure.” “His Majesty must incorporate a legion of sensual devils,” says the court physician Blumentrost. He presumes that the Tsar’s scurvy is the outcome of an older ailment which had troubled him in early youth.

To quote the expression of one of the “new Russians”—“The Tsar displays a political leniency with regard to sexual immorality”—the more sinners, the more recruits, and he needs recruits. He himself considers love to be only a natural instinct. Once during his stay in England, when a courtezan was not satisfied with her present of five hundred guineas, he said to Ménshikoff: “You think I am as great a spendthrift as yourself. For five hundred guineas old men serve me with zeal and brains, and this jade has served me damnably badly, you yourself know in what way.”

The Tsaritsa is not in the least degree jealous. He relates to her all his affairs of the heart, but always ends with the compliment, “and still you are better than the whole pack of them, Catherine!”

Strange rumours are circulated and voiced abroad with regard to the Tsar’s Denshiks. One of them, General Yagoushinsky, is supposed to have gained his master’s favours in ways which cannot be well talked about. The handsome Lefort, so says an amiable old gentleman about the Court, was so intimate with the Tsar that they had one mistress between them. It is rumoured that the Tsaritsa, before living with the Tsar, had been the mistress of Ménshikoff. Ménshikoff, in his turn, had taken in Catherine’s affections the place of Lefort. This man Ménshikoff, “risen from the mire,” who, in the Tsar’s own words, was conceived in lawlessness, born to sin, and is ending his life in rascality, has an almost inexplicable power over Peter. The Tsar will sometimes beat him like a dog, throw him to the ground, trample upon him; one would think it was all over, and yet, the next moment, they have again made peace, and are even kissing one another. I have myself heard the Tsar calling him his dear Alexasha, his own darling, and Ménshikoff returned the compliment. This ci-devant street pieman has become so insolent that he said one day to the Tsarevitch (true, he was drunk at the time), “You will see as little of the Crown as of your own ears. The crown is my property.”

October 8.

To-day, a Dutch merchant’s wife, who died of dropsy, was buried. The Tsar himself performed the operation of tapping her. They say her death was caused less by illness than by the operation. The Tsar was present at both funeral and commemoration banquet. He drank and enjoyed himself vastly. He considers himself a great surgeon. Persons about him unlucky enough to have a swelling or gathering do their best to conceal it, for fear the Tsar should begin cutting it. He has a strange liking for anatomy. He cannot see a body without having it dissected, and examines post mortem all the bodies of his relatives.

He delights in drawing teeth, having learnt the art in Holland from a travelling dentist. There is a bagful of rotten teeth extracted by the imperial forceps preserved in the Kunst-Kammer here.

In the face of suffering he displays cynical curiosity and a cynical kindheartedness. He has himself performed an intestinal operation on his page, an Arab.

His whole nature is a combination of strength and weakness. This is apparent at once even in his face: terrible eyes from which nothing escapes, one look of which suffices to make people swoon; lips, thin, delicate, almost feminine, with a cunning smile; a chin, soft, round, plump, with a dimple.

We are positively sick of hearing about the hat pierced with bullets at Poltava: I have no doubt that he can be brave, especially when victorious. All victors are brave. But has he always been as brave as it is believed?

The Saxon Engineer Hallart, who took part in the Narva campaign of 1700, tells me, that when the Tsar knew of the approach of Charles XII, he made over the command of the army to the Duc de Croy, with instructions hurriedly written, bearing neither date, nor seal, quite unintelligible, confused, and himself in great perturbation quitted the scene of action.

The Swedish prisoner, Count Pipper, has shown me a medal struck by the Swedes; on one side the Tsar is warming his hands at the fire of his cannons which are sending shells into the besieged Narva. The inscription is—“And Peter stood at the fire and warmed himself,” an allusion to the Apostle Peter in the court of the high priest! On the other side Russians are represented retreating from Narva; Peter in front, his crown tumbling from his head, his sword thrown away, wipes his tears with a handkerchief; and the inscription runs—“And going out, he wept bitterly.”

All this may be slander; yet why has no one even dared to invent slanders about Alexander or Caesar? Something similarly strange happened during the Pruth campaign. At the most dangerous moment, just before the battle, the Tsar was about to leave the army for the rear, under pretext of bringing up fresh forces. That he did not leave was only due to the retreat being cut off. He wrote to the Senate—that never, since he had been in service, had he been in such despair. Does not this again almost justify the legend that “going out, he wept bitterly?”

Blumentrost says that doctors know more about heroes than ever will go down to posterity;—it appears the Tsar cannot endure the slightest physical pain. During a serious illness which was expected to result in death, he was anything but heroic. “It is hardly credible,” exclaimed a Russian who had been praising the Tsar in my presence, “that a great and fearless hero should be afraid of so insignificant an insect as a cockroach.” When the Tsar travels about Russia, new huts are erected for him to sleep in, as it is difficult to find in Russian villages a dwelling without cockroaches. He is also afraid of spiders and other insects. I myself once observed how at the sight of a cockroach he trembled, his face became pale and contorted, as at a ghost or some supernatural monster; another moment and he would have swooned or fallen into a fit, like a tremulous woman. O to play a trick upon him, like those he plays on others! He would probably die of fright if he were stripped and half a dozen spiders and cockroaches were let loose on him. No doubt historians would never believe that the conqueror of Charles XII died from the touch of a cockroach’s legs. This dread in the presence of a small harmless creature is astonishing in a great Tsar before whom everybody trembles. I remembered the teaching about monads by Leibnitz; it almost would seem that it was not their physical, but their metaphysical pre-existent nature, which is alien to the Tsar’s nature. His fear was not only ludicrous but awful to me: it seemed as though I had suddenly penetrated some mystery.

One day a learned German, while making experiments before the Tsaritsa with an air pump, had placed a swallow under the glass dome. When the Tsar saw the little bird gasp, totter, and feebly flap its wings, he said:—

“Enough! Enough! don’t take away innocent life, the bird has done no harm.”

“I think her young ones are mourning for her in the nest,” added the Tsaritsa, and taking the swallow to the window she released and let it fly away.

Sentimental Peter! how strangely this sounds! And yet I saw something closely akin to sentiment flit across those delicate almost feminine lips, the plump and dimpled chin, when the Tsaritsa said in that simpering voice with mincing smile, “her young ones are mourning for her in the nest.”

Was it not on that very day that this terrible ukase was published? “His Imperial Majesty has deigned to observe that the nostrils of convicts sentenced to labour for life are only incompletely torn. His Majesty orders the nostrils to be taken off to the bone, so that in case the convicts should desert they could not hide themselves, but may easily be recognised and brought back.” And this among the Admiralty Regulations: “The body of him who commits suicide must be publicly hanged by the feet.”

“Is he cruel?” That is a question. “He who is cruel ceases to be a hero.” This is one of those sayings ascribed to the Tsar, which I do not quite believe; they seem to be uttered rather for posterity. Yet posterity will know that he, while sparing a swallow, tortured a sister to death, torments his wife, and it seems will, by degrees, murder his son.

Is he as artless as he seems? this too is doubtful. I know there are a number of stories in circulation with regard to the Tsar carpenter in Saardam. I must confess I never could listen to them without annoyance; they are too instructive, too much like pictures with explanations.

“Verstellte Einfalt;”—“Sham naïvete,” said a witty German about him. The Russians too have a proverb, “The simpleton beats the knave.”

In future all pedants and schoolchildren will certainly know that Tsar Peter darned his own stockings, mended his boots for economy’s sake. But it is doubtful whether they will ever be acquainted with a fact told me lately by a Russian timber merchant.

He said that a huge amount of unused oak timber was lying near Lake Ládoga, covered over with sand and rotting disused. And meanwhile men are lashed and hung for the offence of cutting down and stealing oak. Human life and blood are cheaper than oak wood. I might add, cheaper than torn stockings.

“C’est un grand poseur”—some one had said about him. One ought to watch him kiss the Prince Caesar’s hand when he has broken some buffoon’s regulation,—“Forgive, sovereign, forgive! We rough sailors are not well versed in ceremony.”

One can hardly trust one’s eyes; it is impossible to distinguish where the Tsar ends and the fool begins.

He has surrounded himself with masks. The Tsar Carpenter! ’tis a masquerade after the Dutch fashion?

And is not this new Tsar in his simplesse, in his carpenter’s disguise, really further removed from the common people, than were the ancient Tsars of Muscovy in their cloth of gold?

“Nowadays life is very hard,” complained the same merchant to me, “nobody is allowed to say anything; the truth never reaches the Tsar. It used to be much simpler in the old days.” I once heard the chaplain Theodosius praise him to his face for the dissimulation which, it appears, political teachers are supposed to lay down as the first duty of sovereigns.

I do not judge him; I only repeat what I hear and see. All see the hero, few the man. And even if I gossip it will be forgiven me, for I am a woman. Some one has said: “This man is very good and very bad;” as for me, I must once more repeat: “I know not whether he is better or worse than other men, but it sometimes seems to me that he is not quite human.”

The Tsar is pious. He reads the Acts, and sings with as much confidence as the priests themselves, seeing he knows the lauds and liturgies by heart. He composes prayers for the soldiers.

Sometimes during a conversation about military or state affairs he suddenly lifts his eyes to heaven, crosses himself and says a short prayer with evident devotion: “O God take not Thy grace from us in the days to come!” or, “Lord grant us Thy mercy, for in Thee have we put our trust!”

This is not hypocrisy. No doubt he believes in God, as he says he puts his trust in the “Lord, strong in battle.” Yet it would seem as if his God were not the God of the Christians, but of the pagans, Mars, or Nemesis—Fate herself. Never breathed a human being less like a Christian than Peter. What connection is there between the sword of Mars and the lilies of the Gospels?

I have just read a curious new book published in Germany under the title—Curieuse Nachricht von der itzigen Religion I. K. M. in Russland Petri Alezieviz und seines grossen Reiches, dass dieselbe itzo fast nach Evangelisch-Lutherischen Grundsätzen eingerichtet sei.

Here are a few extracts from it. “We are not far wrong in stating that his Majesty’s conception of true religion takes the form of the Lutheran faith.”

“The Tsar has abolished the Patriarchate, and, following the example of Protestant Princes, he has declared himself the chief Bishop, that is Patriarch of the Russian church. On his return from a journey to foreign countries he at once entered into discussions with his priests, and being convinced of their ignorance on questions of faith—indeed they could hardly read—he instituted schools where they might apply themselves more diligently to study.

“Now that the Russians are reasonably taught and educated in schools, all the superstitious beliefs and customs must of themselves disappear, for no one, except the most ignorant and simple-minded, can believe in such things. In these schools the system of teaching is quite Lutheran, and the young people are brought up according to the rules of true Christian religion. The monasteries are reduced in number, and therefore can no longer, as in olden times, shelter great numbers of idle folk, who are a burden to the state and a danger in times of revolt. Now, the monks are obliged to learn what is useful, and everything is ordered in a praiseworthy manner. Miracles and relics no longer command the reverence they formerly did; in Russia, as in Germany, people have begun to believe that there is much swindling in connection with religious ceremonial.”

I know the Tsarevitch has read this book. What must his feelings have been during the perusal!

I was present one day when, while at their wine in the oakgrove of the Summer Garden, where the Tsar likes to converse with the clergy, the Administrator of Spiritual Affairs, the Archimandrite Theodosius, was elaborating reasons: “Why and in what sense the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Christian, termed themselves Pontifex and high priests of the polytheistic faith.” It appeared that the Tsar was the head prelate, High Priest, and Patriarch. This Russian monk very skilfully and adroitly proved that, according to “Leviathan” by the English Atheist Hobbes, the maxim “Civitatem et ecclesiam eandem rem esse”—“the state and the church are one and the same”—certainly did not advocate converting the state into a church, but on the contrary, the conversion of the church into the state. The monstrous animal—Leviathan, fabric of the state—was swallowing up the Church of God, so that there would remain no trace of it. These discussions might serve as an interesting monument of monkish cringing and flattery before the sovereign.

It is said that already at the end of last year, 1714, the Tsar called together the spiritual and lay dignitaries, to whom he solemnly declared that he wishes to be the sole head of the Russian Church, and leaves it to them to establish a spiritual association under the name of the “Holy Synod.”

The Tsar is planning a campaign against India, in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. To imitate Alexander and Caesar, to unite the East with the West, to found a new world-wide monarchy, these are the Russian Tsar’s deepest and dearest desires.

Theodosius tells the Tsar, “You are the God of the Earth,” For this is the meaning of Divus Caesar.

At the Poltava celebrations the Russian Tsar was represented on one of the allegorical pictures as Apollo, the ancient Sun-God.

I learn that the dead heads which are still on the poles near Trinity Church, opposite to the Senate-house, were the heads of Raskolniks who have been beheaded for calling the Tsar “Antichrist.”

October 20.

An old invalid, an army captain, comes sometimes into our kitchen. He is a pathetic-looking moth-eaten creature; his head trembles, his nose is red, and he has a wooden leg; he terms himself a “granary rat.” I treat him to brandy and tobacco, and we talk about Russian military affairs.

He is very cheerful and sprinkles his speech with quaint sayings, such as “A soldier serves a hundred years yet does not earn a hundred sous;” “Grain is satisfying, water intoxicating;” “Shave with an awl, warm thyself with smoke.” He has three doctors—brandy, garlic and Death.

When almost a child he became a drummer boy; he has taken part in all the campaigns from Asoff to Poltava, and has been rewarded by the Father Tsar with a handful of nuts and a kiss on the head. When speaking of the Tsar he seems to become transfigured; and to-day he told me about the battle near the Red Farm.

“We stood firm for the House of the Holy Virgin, the Serene Majesty our Tsar, and the Christian Faith; we died for one another. We all cried with a great voice: ‘Lord God! Help us!’ Then we beat the Swedish regiments, both infantry and artillery, by the help of the prayers of the saints of Holy Moscow.”

He also attempted to repeat the Tsar’s speech to his army.

“‘Children I have begotten you in the sweat of my toil. The state cannot exist without you, any more than the body without a soul. You have shown your love to God, to me, and your country; you have not spared your lives.’” The old man suddenly started up on his wooden leg, his nose grew redder yet, a tear hung on its tip like a dewdrop on a ripe plum, and waving his old hat he exclaimed:

“Vivat! vivat! vivat! Peter the Great! Emperor of all the Russias!”

Up till now I had heard no one call the Tsar “Emperor,” yet I was not surprised. Such fire lit up the dim eyes of the “granary rat” that a cold shiver ran through me; a vision of ancient Rome seemed to flash before me; I heard the rustle of victorious standards, the trampling of brazen cohorts, the cries of soldiers, the acclamations of divine Caesar, ‘Divus Caesar Imperator!’

October 23.

We have been to the People’s market on the Trinity square, a long whitewashed building erected by the Italian architect Tresina; it is roofed with tiles and has arcades, such as are seen in Verona or Padua. We went into the bookshop, the first and only one in Petersburg, which has been opened by order of the Tsar; Basil Evdokimoff, a printer, is the manager. Besides books, Slavonic and translated, there are sold here calendars, decrees, primers, plans of battles, and “royal persons”; that is, portraits, and pictures of triumphant entries. The books sell badly. In the course of two or three years not a single copy of some publications has been sold. Calendars and decrees in relation to bribes sell better than anything else.

The director of the first printing press in Petersburg, a certain Avrámoff, a strange but rather clever man, whom we chanced to meet in the shop, told us how difficult it is to get the foreign books translated into Russian. The Tsar is always in a great hurry, and demands, under threat of severe lashing, that the book should be translated in an impossibly short time, intelligibly and in good style. The translators weepingly complain that it is impossible to hurry with the involved German style, which is incomprehensible, confused and heavy. Sometimes it has happened that despite incredible labour ten lines a day could not be rendered successfully. Boris Wolkoff, the translator to the foreign department, despaired of translating Le Jardinage de Quintiny, and, fearing the Tsar’s wrath, killed himself by opening his veins.

Knowledge does not come easily to Russians.

These translations which cost so much sweat, and even blood, are neither read nor needed by any one. Not long ago a number of books which did not sell, and which were taking up too much room in the shop, were piled up in the shed of the Armoury court. During the flood they were covered with water, and they are now spoilt, partly by damp, partly by hemp oil, which, for some inexplicable reason, has found its way among them, while many are mouse-eaten.

November 14.

We have been to the theatre. The large wooden structure, the “Comedy House,” is not far off the Foundry. The performance begins at six p.m., for which tickets, printed on stout paper, can be obtained in a separate office; the poorest seat costs forty kopecks. The audiences are scanty, and, but for the court, the actors would die of starvation. The felt on the walls does not prevent the building being cold, damp and draughty; the tallow candles smoke; the poor music is always out of tune, and, to crown all, the people in the pit noisily crack their nuts and rail at one another the whole time. The comedy of “Don Juan and Don Pedro” was the piece, a Russian translation from the German, which itself was an adaptation from the French “Don Juan.” After every act the curtain went down, leaving us in utter darkness during the scene shifting. My neighbour, chamberlain Brandenstein, was very much put out by this. He whispered to me: “Welch ein Hund von Komödie ist das?”—“What devil of a comedy is this?” I could hardly restrain my laughter. Don Juan was in the garden talking with the woman he had seduced.

“Come my love, let us recall that pleasant time when undisturbed we enjoyed the delights of spring, the green buds of love. Let our rapture be completed by the sight of these flowers and their delicious smell.”

I liked the song:

He who knows not love

Know not what deceit is.

They call a God, this love

Who torments more than death does.

Each act was followed by an intermezzo which generally ended in a scuffle.

Bibernstein, who had dropped asleep, had a silk handkerchief stolen from his pocket; young Loewenwold a silver snuff-box.

Another piece followed, entitled “Daphne, pursued by the love sick Apollo, is transformed into a Laurel tree.”

Apollo threatens the nymph:

I will force thee to submit,

I really cannot suffer it.

She answers:

You so rudely do behave,

That to love you I don’t crave.

At this moment some drunken grooms began fighting together at the entrance. People hurried to separate them; they were whipped, and the dialogue of the God and the Nymph was drowned amid groans and ribald shouting.

At last the morning star Phosphoros announced: “The play is over, our best thanks to you, ’tis time for bed.”

We were given a manuscript programme announcing a performance in another tent: “For fifty kopecks each person will be entitled to witness the performance of ‘Doctor Faustus’ by Italian Marionettes or Dolls, two yards high, who will walk about the stage, and act almost as adroitly as living actors. The Trained Horse will perform as before.”

I must confess, I never expected to see Faustus in Petersburg, much less in the company of a learned horse!

Not long ago, at this same theatre, Molière’s “Précieuses ridicules” was performed. I procured the translation and read it. The Tsar had ordered one of his fools, the “King of the Samoyeds,” to make the translation; the translator was probably drunk when he did it, for some of the passages were quite unintelligible. Poor Molière! the monstrous galanteries of a Samoyed are as graceful as those of a white dancing bear.

November 23.

A hard frost with a piercing wind, a real ice-storm. The noses and ears of pedestrians are frostbitten before they know it. It is said that in one night 700 working men have been frozen to death between Petersburg and Kronslot.

Wolves have appeared in the streets, even in the centre of the town; a few days ago wolves fell on the sentinel at night near the foundry, which is close to the theatre where “Daphne and Apollo” had been performed. Another soldier came to his rescue, but he too was almost instantly torn to pieces and devoured. A woman and her child have been eaten by wolves in broad daylight, not far from Prince Ménshikoff’s palace on the Basil Island.

Not less terrible than the wolves are the robbers. Sentry huts, barriers, hunting poles, sentinels with large clubs and night watches, “like those in Hamburg,” do not suffice to intimidate the robbers. Every night, either some house is broken into, or some stealthy burglary or murder takes place.

November 30.

A moist wind—and the snow and ice have melted. The mud is impassable. There is a stench of marsh, dung, and rotten fish. Epidemics abound.

December 4.

Again frost—frost without snow. It is so slippery that one runs the risk of breaking one’s neck at every step.

And these changes of temperature continue throughout the winter. Nature seems not only cruel, but positively mad.

An unnatural city! How can art and knowledge flourish? They have a saying here: “No time for luxuries—we can only just manage to live.”

December 10.

Went to an Assembly—a rout at Tolstoi’s:

Mirrors, glass, powder, beauty spots, hoop-petticoats, and curtesies and bows—just as we have in Europe, in Paris and in London.

The host himself is an amiable, learned man. He translates Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the political advice of Niccolo Machiavelli, the noble citizen of Florence. He took me through the minuet, addressing me with compliments from Ovid. He compared me to Galatea, because of my skin, “white as marble,” and my black hair, “the colour of hyacinth”—an entertaining old gentleman! clever, yet a thorough paced knave. I will note down a few sayings of this modern Machiavelli:

“When good luck comes it is not enough to grasp it with both hands, try also to catch hold of it with your teeth and swallow it.”

“To live in high favour is like walking on a glass floor.”

“A lemon which is too much squeezed will give bitterness instead of flavour.”

“To know the human mind and character is the highest philosophy. It is more difficult to understand men than to know many books by heart.”

Listening to Tolstoi’s witty remarks—he spoke to me, now in Russian, now in Italian—to the delicate strains of the French minuet, I looked at the polite gathering of ladies and gentlemen where everything was almost the same as “in Paris or London,” yet I could not forget what I had just seen on my way thither. Before the Senate on the Trinity Square rose those gaunt poles, bearing the same heads as in May at the time of the masquerade. They dried, grew wet, froze, melted, froze again, and still they had not disappeared. A huge moon was rising from behind Trinity Church, and the black heads stood out sharply against the red glow. A crow perched on one of them, cawing and pecking at the skin. This vision was before me all the evening. Asia was casting a shadow over Europe.

The Tsar arrived; he was not in a good humour. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders in such a way as to make every one present tremble. On entering the dancing room he found it too hot, and wanted a window opened. The windows were nailed up on the outside. The Tsar ordered an axe to be brought, and together with two orderlies he set to work upon it. He ran out into the street to see how the window had been nailed up. At last he succeeded in getting the frame out. The window remained open only for a short time, and it was not cold outside; snow was again melting, and a west wind was blowing. Yet, nevertheless, it caused a strong draught in the rooms, and the lightly dressed ladies and shivery old men did not know what to do with themselves. This performance had tired Peter and had made him perspire, but he seemed in better spirits.

“Your Majesty,” said the Austrian Resident Pleyer, a very courteous gentleman, “you have broken a window into Europe.”

The seal which was used for sealing the Tsar’s letters addressed to Russia during his first journey abroad, represented a young carpenter surrounded by a shipwright’s tools and the arms of war, with the inscription:—

“I am a scholar, and what I ask for is teachers.”

Another emblem of the Tsar’s is Prometheus bringing a burning torch to men from the gods.

The Tsar says: “I will create a new race of men.”

The following story was related to me by the “granary rat.” The Tsar desires that oaks should be grown everywhere, and was himself planting some acorns near Petersburg, along the Peterhof road. Noticing that one of the bystanders, a dignitary, was smiling at his work, the Tsar angrily remarked:

“I understand; you think I shall not live to see the full-grown oaks; you are right. Nevertheless you are a fool: I set an example for others to follow, so that our descendants may one day use these trees for building ships. It is not for myself I toil; the welfare of the state comes first.”

Another story from the same source.

A decree of his Majesty commanded that all children of the nobility should matriculate in Moscow at the Soukhareva Tower for the learning of Navigation. The nobility, however, instead, enrolled their children at the Spassky monastery in Moscow to learn Latin. On hearing this the monarch was sorely angered and ordered the Governor of Moscow, Prince Romodanovsky, to take all the children from the monastery and bring them to Petersburg, where they were made to drive in piles along the Moika for the foundation of hemp sheds. The Admiral, Count Fédor Apraksin, Prince Ménshikoff, Prince James Dolgorúki, and other senators, not daring to trouble his Majesty, petitioned his Majesty’s helpmate, the Tsaritsa Catherine, on their knees, with tears in their eyes; yet it was impossible to appease his Majesty’s wrath. Then Admiral Apraksin conceived this plan: he set watchmen to let him know when the Emperor should drive past the working children. Directly they informed him that the Tsar was coming, Apraksin hurried up to the young toiling boys, took off his decoration and kaftan, hung them on a pole, and began to drive in piles with the children. The Tsar noticing the Admiral thus employed stopped and said to him:—

“Fédor Matvievitch! you are an Admiral and a Knight. Why do you drive in piles?”

To which the Admiral replied:—

“My nephews and grandsons are driving in piles, and who am I specially to enjoy the prerogatives of rank? As for the decoration granted to me by your Majesty, it hangs on the post, I have not dishonoured it.”

On hearing this the Tsar continued on his way to the palace, and twenty-four hours later he published a decree liberating the young nobles; yet at the same time he enrolled them to learn divers practical crafts and arts abroad. He was angered; and so even after driving in piles they did not escape technical instruction.

One of the few Russians, who are in sympathy with the new order of things, said to me in reference to the Tsar:—

“Whatever you look at in Russia has been started by him; and anything done in the future will be traced back to this origin. He has renewed all things, has caused Russia to be born anew.”

December 28.

The Tsarevitch has returned as unexpectedly as he went.

January 26, 1715.

We had visitors; Baron Loewenwold, the Austrian Resident Pleyer, the Hanoverian Secretary Weber, and the court physician Blumentrost. After supper, over the wine, conversation turned on the new ways introduced by the Tsar. They spoke freely, being among themselves, with no strangers or Russians present.

“The Muscovites,” said Pleyer, “do everything because they are compelled to do it. Should the Tsar die, farewell to all knowledge. Russia is a country where everything is begun and nothing finished. The Tsar acts upon his people like strong brandy on iron; he drives knowledge into his subjects with the lash and the rod, believing in the Russian proverb: ‘the stick though dumb can teach.’ Puffendorf was right in describing this people as: ‘a servile people who humble themselves like slaves, and love to be kept in obedience by the cruelty of their rulers.’ To them would also apply the words of Aristotle, as to barbarians in general: ‘quod in libertate mali, in servitute boni sunt.’ True enlightenment inspires hatred of slavery. And the Russian Tsar is by the nature of his power a despot; what he needs are slaves. That is why he zealously introduces arithmetic, navigation, fortification, and other elementary and useful knowledge to his people; yet he will never let his subjects gain that true enlightenment which requires freedom. And, after all, he himself neither understands nor likes it; all he seeks in knowledge is utility. He prefers Perpetuum mobile, the absurd invention of Orphireus, to all the philosophy of Leibnitz. Æsop he considers to be the greatest philosopher. He has prohibited the translation of Juvenal, declaring that the composer of a single satire will be liable to the severest torture. Enlightenment stands in the same relation to the power of Russia’s Tsars as sunshine to the snow. When feeble the snow shimmers and dazzles; when strong the snow melts.”

“Who can tell,” remarked Weber with a meaning smile, “the Russians in taking Europe for their pattern may have honoured her above her deserts. Imitation is always dangerous. Vices are more easily imitated than virtues, as a Russian well expressed it. The foreign infectious corruption eats out the ancient health of Russian souls and bodies; roughness of character has lessened, but only flattery and servility have taken its place; we have outlived our old common-sense, but we have not acquired any new sense; we shall all die fools!’”

“The Tsar,” rejoined Baron Loewenwold, “is far from being the humble pupil of Europe for which many take him. One day, when French customs and temperament were highly praised in his presence, he said: ‘It is well to imitate their arts and science—as for the rest, Paris is rotten,’ and then he added with a prophetic air, ‘I am sorry that the inhabitants of that town will perish from its corruption.’ I have not heard it myself, but I was told another saying of his which friends of Russia in Europe would do well to remember, ‘L’Europe nous est nécessaire pour quelques dizaines d’années; après quoi nous lui tournerons le dos.’—‘We need Europe for some few decades, after which we will turn our backs upon her.’”

Count Pepper gave some extracts from a book which had lately been published, “La crise du nord” about the war between Russia and Sweden, in which it was proved that the Russian victory was a sign that the end of the world was drawing nigh, and that the insignificance of Russia was necessary for the welfare of Europe. The Count also recalled the words of Leibnitz which were uttered by the great philosopher before Poltava, while he was still the friend of Sweden: “Muscovy will be a second Turkey and will open the way to new barbarisms, which will annihilate all European civilization!”

Blumentrost reassured us, saying that brandy, together with venereal diseases, which had spread with amazing rapidity during late years from Poland across to the White Sea, would depopulate Russia in less than a century. “Brandy and syphilis are, so to speak, two scourges sent by God’s providence to save Europe from a new invasion of barbarians.”

“Russia,” concluded Pleyer, “is a brazen Colossus on clay feet. It will fall and break, and nothing will remain.”

I profess no great love for the Russians myself, but I did not expect my compatriots to hate Russia so much. To me there seems behind this hatred a secret fear; as if we Germans had a presentiment that one will eventually swallow up the other, either we them, or they us.

January 17.

“Well, Fräulein Juliana, what have you decided about me? Am I fool or a knave?” The Tsarevitch stopped me this morning on the staircase with this question.

At first I could not understand what he meant, and, thinking he was drunk, I tried to pass without answering him. Yet he detained me, and continued, looking me straight in the face:—

“It will be interesting to know which of us will eat up the other, you us, or we you?”

Then only did I perceive that he had read my diary. I had lent it to her Highness for a short time, as she had expressed the desire to read it; the Tsarevitch had, probably, been in her room in her absence and seeing the diary he had read it.

I was so confused, that I was ready to fall through the earth. I blushed up to the very roots of my hair, almost crying like a school-girl trapped in a fault. And he continued to scrutinise me in silence, as if delighting in my confusion. At last, making a desperate effort, I tried to escape, but he caught hold of my hand. My heart sank within me for very fear.

“Well, you have been caught, Fräulein,” he laughed in a merry, kind way. “Be more prudent in the future. It is well that I, and not somebody else, read it. Your Ladyship has a tongue as sharp as a razor, I must say, though all had their share. But, to be candid, there is much truth in what you say about us; there really is. And though you don’t pat us on the back, yet we ought to be grateful for your frankness.”

He stopped laughing, and with a bright smile he warmly squeezed my hand like a comrade, as if he were really thanking me for the truth.

A strange man. These Russians are as a rule strange beings. It is impossible to foretell what they will do or say next.

The more I think over it, the more it seems that there is something in them which we Europeans cannot, and never will be able to understand. To us they are the inhabitants of another planet.

February 2.

When passing along the corridor this evening, the Tsarevitch hearing my footsteps called, and asked me to come into the dining-room; he was alone, sitting before the hearth in the dusk. He made me sit down opposite to him, and began to talk to me, first in German, then in Russian; he spoke affectionately, as if we had been old friends. He told me things of considerable interest, but I will not put all down; it would be dangerous both for him and myself while I am in Russia. Here are just a few stray thoughts.

What amazed me most of all was to find that he is in no wise such a zealous partisan of all that is old, and enemy of all that is new, as he is generally believed to be.

He repeated me a Russian proverb, “Age always commends its own baldness.” Wrong is deep seated in Russia, and unless the old edifice is taken to pieces, and every log carefully scrutinized, it will be impossible to get rid of the ancient rot and decay.

The Tsar’s fault lies in his hurry.

“My father will have everything done quickly; one, two, three, and a ship is built! He won’t see that rapidity does not always mean durability. A blow, a knock, the wheel is made. Take your seat, away we go, how delightful! Suddenly a look behind—the loose spokes are all over the ground!”

February 18.

The Tsarevitch has a note book wherein he copies passages from The Chronicles of Church and State, by Baronius, which he says apply to himself, his father and others in such a way as to illustrate the difference between what used to be and what exists now. He lent me the notes to look at. They reveal a probing and liberal mind. In reference to several legends in which the miraculous is obviously exaggerated (it is true they belonged to the Roman Catholic period) I saw annotations of this kind; “Compare with the Greek.” “Doubtful.” “This is hardly true.”

But I was most interested in those notes, in which he compared historical facts and incidents of ancient Russia and foreign nations with the Russia of to-day.